Catching up…

Once again, I find myself re-visiting another classic reading experience that, quite by chance, was donated to my Little Free Library Shed. Now, I am bringing my review to Goodreads.

I am well aware that I am likely to be an outlier here. Generally speaking, I have a great appreciation for this author’s books. Maybe when I first read this particular one, I could see the artistry within it. However, for some reason that eludes me, I just couldn’t connect with it this time. It was simply too dark for my taste. And if this causes you to stop reading my review from this point on, I completely understand. I apologize for the disappointment.

If I were to sum up this book in a single word, I would say “Intense.” Our narrator is a quiet girl named Ruth. She is so accustomed to loss that nothing feels permanent to her. Her father is little more than a memory, preserved only in a photograph. She lives with her sister Lucille and a series of guardians on a mountain lake that has also claimed the lives of her mother and grandfather. Her grandfather died in a train accident, and years later, her mother left her two daughters with her grandmother on the porch and then took her own life.

There doesn’t seem to be much for Ruth to hold onto except memories and dreams. And then Aunt Sylvie comes to take responsibility for the girls. But she is teetering on the edge of madness. Because Ruth is the one narrating, we are never entirely sure what is going on with her. Is she also in a state of fevered madness? “I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say…”

What did I just read/re-visit? This was just too melancholy for me. I may have been in the wrong mood to re-visit this one. Another time, perhaps? I don’t know. For all those 5-star reviews out there, what are your thoughts?

So. Yeah. Literary Fiction.

But listen. I had three criteria which led me to pick up Housekeeping today.

First, I needed something to cut through the masculinity and violence of The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. And it served this end exceedingly well. Can't get much more polaric. I would imagine it might serve equally well in other similar circumstances. Have a copy on hand to this end.

Second, I wanted something short.

Third, I wanted something that lent itself to one of my larger reading objectives. Housekeeping is on McCaffery's 100. "In this haunting, lyrical ode to loss, the eruption of the past into the present and the illusory nature of any attempt at permanence help shape the personality of one of contemporary fiction’s most memorable narrators." Larry and I aren't always of the same mind.

But. Literary Fiction. The prose simply served. Didn't sparkle. I don't know if it's purple or pastel, but, Not my cup of tea. Doris Lessing blurbs: "I found myself reading slowly, then more slowly--this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight." Allow me to disagree. I didn't find anything to slow for. It seemed rather ordinary to me. Maybe I'm just not in the right frame of mind to appreciate it. Or perhaps my expectations were too high. Either way, I can't say that I was overly impressed with Housekeeping.

However, I do recognize that it has its merits. The story is engaging enough, and the characters are well-developed. It just didn't have that certain something that would make it a truly great work of literature in my eyes.

Maybe I'll give it another try someday. But for now, I'm moving on to something else.

Housekeeping is truly one of the rare novels that I not only read but inhabit. I find myself returning to it time and again. It's not just about the captivating story it tells, nor is it solely because of the way it can literally take my breath away. I'm serious when I say that this book makes me forget to breathe at times as I'm engrossed in its pages, such is the perfection of its writing. But it's also the way it makes me feel as if I'm living another life, in another place, while reading it.

There are other books in this category for me, ones that make me feel like I'm living within their worlds rather than simply reading them from the outside. For example, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf, and The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie Jr. Each of these books has the power to transport me to different times and places, allowing me to experience the lives of the characters as if they were my own.

Housekeeping holds a special place in my heart, and I will continue to revisit it, along with these other wonderful novels, for years to come.

**Stand By Me**

Stand By Me

Breathless. Wordless. Without tears or smiles, astonished, I read the last words, the last sentence, and then I read it again, and again, because I want to be sure I understand everything, even the last breath, even the last unspoken word, even the last gaze.

And then I start again from the first page and the first word, because what I desire is to remain still in Fingerbone, in this town that seems a bit like Brigadoon and also a bit like Atlantis, a bit magical and enchanted, a bit charmed, perhaps forgotten in the shadow by destiny, in this house that is an ark, a point of arrival and departure, family and destiny, life and death.

Because home is not only warmth and hearth, but also cold and damp, and water, water that washes and renews, but also water that takes away, that deprives.

And domestic chores, of course, those that grandma, Lily and Nona (the old aunts), Helen and Sylvie - the aunt with the coat, the one who always needs to feel in departure to stay - each know how to dispense, each in their own way: some rigid, some ethereal, some absent, some uncertain, some present but distant.

Marilynne Robinson weaves a plot, paraphrasing Keats, that seems written on the water, suspended over the waters of the Fingerbone Lake: a plot that now sinks and slides down into the darkest lake, the one where the train and Helen disappear, now shows itself in silhouette under the layer of ice of the middle lake, like Sylvie, the one that in winter seems to capture the whole universe, now remains on the surface, light as air, but untouchable, suspended over that layer of ice, so thin, so fragile but resistant, that supports everything, like poetry, on which move Ruthie, the narrating I and Lucille, the younger sister, still left as children in Fingerbone on the threshold of grandma's house.

There is poetry, among the words of Robinson, but hers is a poetry not always consoling, perhaps only in parts, merciless when it sinks and cuts the tenuous links that unite life to life and life to death, but capable of smoothing the pain until making it perfect. Perfect, like the snow, like the ice, like the wind that sweeps away and disarranges dreams and reality.

It is the sense of family that becomes lacerating, of a family that crumbles while being present, that frays and folds in the fire until becoming dust that saturates the air.

“One can never know when it is the last time one sees a person”, says Sylvie, “Families should stay together”, she adds, “It is a terrible thing to break a family. If you understand this, you will understand everything that follows”, Ruth echoes her.

“It had seemed to me that we were there together by pure chance: the wind blows on a tuft of oats and two seeds don't fly away”, but those two tufts of oats are family, and a family should not be broken, and Ruth knows this.

The religious theme, which is central in Gilead (one of the most difficult readings tackled in recent years, but now, on the emotional impulse, I will read Home and then Lila), here is latent, present, but not invasive: I believe one can speak of a sense of diffuse spirituality, perhaps, even more of mysticism, but not of a religion that invades the story, of Marilynne Robinson's ability to bring closer and make communicate with each other the world of the living, here, and that of the dead, there, without this appearing unnatural, without this disturbing or creating clear lines of demarcation. The house becomes an ark of salvation only for those who will want to read it in this key, for those who will succeed in imagining it as a place that saves itself from the floods, being located as it is at the top of the hill and not below like the rest of the dwellings, because somehow destined to be so. And Marilynne Robinson, writer and “a kind of theologian” (“Can I define you as a theologian?”, Barack Obama asks her in the beautiful interview that I share among the links below), here at her literary debut (in 1980) awarded (in 1982) with the Pulitzer, in this she surely comes closer to the Toni Morrison of Beloved, where nothing is completely defined, but almost blurred and difficult to see clearly, than to the Flannery O’Connor to whom she is much more often compared. However, I am not able to make comparisons (always assuming it is necessary to make them), so I limit myself to adding that another name that comes to my mind to associate with hers after reading this novel, and only because in parts some situations have evoked it for me, is that of Truman Capote of In Cold Blood.

Splendid, capable of letting me rummage in my memory drawer always left open like in the last drawer of grandma's dresser, with its “contents thrown in haphazardly, and yet arranged with such order as to make us believe that the collection had an important meaning, like that of a whole”, to discover new things, new unique pieces left there by chance because particularly significant or, as Ruth observes, because they were not.

“Otherwise, why do our thoughts turn to a gesture of the hand, to the fold of a sleeve, to a corner of a room on a particularly anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have now abandoned every other worry? What are these fragments for, if not to be intertwined with each other in the end?”

“In those days, if one turned over the earth with a stick, one would find masses of ice shards, as thin as needles and as pure as spring water. This delicate infrastructure managed to support us, provided we avoided the roads and puddles, until the deterioration of winter was not general. Such delicate expedients end up giving way.”

http://www.minimaetmoralia.it/wp/amer... of Luca Briasco

http://www.internazionale.it/opinione... of Nicola Lagioia

http://www.ilpost.it/2015/10/16/barac... on the interview of Barack Obama ( http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/...-* )

This book is truly one-of-a-kind. I had high expectations, eager to explore something distinct. The prose within it is indeed interesting, and I quite liked the way the story is told in the present tense. However, regrettably, this alone wasn't sufficient to salvage the book.

The main problem I encountered was the significant fact that very little occurred. And when something did happen, it seemed to be quickly glossed over. Some scenes were rather dull, causing me to roll my eyes frequently.

The characters were essentially as thin as paper, and their development got lost amidst the prose. As a result, I felt absolutely no connection to their fates. Is that harsh? I don't think so.

Overall, I believe this book is somewhat overrated. If you're seeking major entertainment, it's definitely not the one to pick up.

Lyrical. Beautiful. Haunting.

There were an abundance of scenes within this book that faintly reminded me of my own childhood or made me long to have experienced them in that bygone era. However, there was an underlying sadness that seemed to have no end.

Still, the idea of taking a boat, spending the night in the woods, and then hopping a train to return home was truly neat. Of course, the boat was stolen. And the description of ice skating by Marilynne Robinson was like nothing I had ever read before, so beautiful and enchanting. Then there was the way their mother had sung "What'll I Do?", which was also a favorite of my own dear mother, who used to sing it as well.

There was just so much depth and wonder in this book, and yet it was still a relatively short read. It should have been made into a movie much earlier. Eventually, they did make a movie out of it. I purchased it on Amazon, and it was truly excellent, capturing the essence of the book in a remarkable way.

Until recently, I firmly believed that one day I would love to live in a hotel. However, it wasn't just any hotel. Not those cheap, seedy ones where the stench of stale cigarette smoke lingers and people go for affairs. Nor was it those ultra-sleek and modern trendy boutique hotels that sell "sensual massage kits" along with the minibar items. Instead, I had in mind those classically glamorous places, like the Waldorf Astoria or the Carlyle in New York, with a piano bar, the kind of places where one's grandparents would stay. (Also, the fact that I've never found drug paraphernalia on the window sill at the Waldorf is definitely a plus.)

But after spending a significant amount of time in hotels over the past few years, I've come to realize that they start to have an effect on me after a while. They are undeniably beautiful, but there's a coldness, emptiness, and impersonality about them. No matter how hard I try to keep the room neat by adding my personal belongings, their presence seems foreign and out of place. When contrasted with the plush surroundings, seeing my stuff in such perfect environs makes the room seem almost squalid.

I found that this book emulated the experience of staying in a hotel for too long. "Housekeeping" is about a doomed family. After the death of their grandmother, a pair of sisters is left in the care of their mentally unstable, transient aunt, who has an unfortunate habit of hopping on freight trains and falling asleep on park benches. Generally speaking, the plot wasn't really that important to me. My focus was usually on the point source - the means used to convey a feeling or some sort of meaning. There was nothing about the conveyance of Robinson's words that really drew me in. I guess the emotional blankness of the writing was supposed to be a simulacrum of the remoteness of the main characters. (Duh, the book is told in the first person.) But it was so easy to forget that the book was a first-person narrative. There was so little insight into Ruthie's internal life that she became a complete non-entity. And maybe that was the point, but the intensity of her aloofness (and by her, I mean both Ruthie and Robinson) failed to inspire any enthusiasm in me.

The prose was often beautiful, even poetic, but it left me cold. Sometimes there was so much literary showboating that it often felt like I was reading an MFA thesis project. For example, "So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passed on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves and then drop them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on." At other times, I felt as if this novel was perhaps written with the aid of one of those magnetic poetry kits, like "So Fingerbone, or such relics of it as showed above the mirroring waters, seemed fragments of the quotidian held up to our wondering attention, offered somehow as proof of their own significance." This felt like words that were strung together just because they "sounded pretty" or seemed "deep," but for me, they failed to evoke any emotion or impression of profundity.

At some point while I was reading this, I thought "OK, this might be a three-star book." Despite my complaints, the book does have some positive attributes, chiefly the aesthetics of the prose. But then I stopped caring. And then I didn't feel like reading it anymore. And then I just wanted to finish it, just so it would be over. And then I started to hate it. So, the process of writing this review, along with the resentment I built up towards the second half when I no longer wanted to read it, has convinced me to rate it a two, which is in line with my tendency to be stingy with my affection.

"Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number, and all the same."

This profound statement seems to encapsulate the essence of this beautiful, soft, and yet deeply sad classic novel. It is truly a song of sorrow, lacking a real sense of redemption or a happy ending. Initially, I found it quite difficult to immerse myself in the story. It started off very slowly and ploddingly, even for my taste. However, as I delved deeper, her language began to truly sing. Robinson has an amazing ability to not only sing but also philosophize and vividly render human behavior in minimalist yet highly eloquent prose.

I also had a particular admiration for how the setting in the novel was almost like the main character. But at the same time, this aspect was almost a bit of a drawback. I couldn't help but desire more interactions between the characters and less narrative exposition. The prose, while beautiful, at times felt like a barrier that prevented me from fully experiencing the deep emotions of the story.

And then there's the final sentence. I'm completely stumped grammatically. I'm reading the 40th Anniversary Edition, and it was really tough to reach the crescendo of the story only to be completely unable to follow her sentence. So, I give this novel a 4. But I'm definitely going to read Gilead, as it seems to be more widely liked.

I'm really hoping someone can help me understand that final sentence: "..and always for me and Sylvie." What does it attach to? I'm really looking forward to clarifying this confusion and perhaps having a deeper appreciation for this novel.

I believe that by exploring other works by Robinson, such as Gilead, I may gain a better understanding of her writing style and be able to fully embrace the beauty and complexity of her stories.

Overall, this novel has left me with a mix of emotions and a desire for more. I'm excited to see what else Robinson has in store for readers.

Maybe with a second reading or a different perspective, I'll be able to overcome the challenges I faced with this novel and truly fall in love with it.

For now, I'll continue my literary journey and look forward to the next great read.

Who knows what other hidden gems I'll discover along the way?

I can't wait to find out.

Stay tuned for more book reviews and literary adventures.

Until then, happy reading!

A lachrymose and mournful atmosphere pervades the town of Fingerbone in which 'Housekeeping' is set. Fingerbone is a town of foggy, opalescent mornings, where the hazy pink sunsets paint the sky. The pale moonlight reflects on the glacial lake, creating a town of ethereal beauty. In this town, the lives of two sisters, Ruthie and Lucille, and their eccentric aunt Sylvie play out. Their lives, in many ways, are reflective of Fingerbone itself. Insignificant and seemingly irrelevant on the surface, yet teeming with a hidden life and beauty.

The quiescent, and at times ironical style of the narrator, Ruthie, builds a lethargic cadence to the book's style. As the reader becomes lulled into the dreamy atmosphere which Ruthie weaves around the novel. There are countless elegiacal and poetic descriptions of the lake and the forest surrounding Fingerbone. For example, "The sky above Fingerbone was a floral yellow. A few spindles clouds moulded and glowed a most unfiery pink. And then the sun flung a long shaft over the mountain, and another, like a long-legged insect bracing itself out if it's chrysalis, and then it showed above the black crest, bristly, red and improbable. In an hour it would be an ordinary sun, spreading modest and impersonal light on an ordinary world, and that thought relieved me."

Ruthie and Lucille are abandoned by their mother, who then commits suicide, at their grandmother's house. Initially inseparable, their paths gradually diverge. Lucille becomes embroiled in the human world with its seemingly petty and trivial concerns such as money, clothes, and status. Whereas Ruthie, partially under the influence of her Aunt Sylvie, partially due to her own innate personality, and partially due to fate and circumstance stemming from being abandoned by her mother, becomes increasingly removed from humanity and reverts to a detached outlook on the world. Her introversion makes it difficult for her to grasp or describe human behavior. Instead, the existence of most characters outside of her family members is peripheral to the elegiacal description of Fingerbone and the surrounding area, from the faery inhabited abandoned cabin to the frozen lake and the endless series of lazy, somnolent days. There is a short monologue towards the end of the novel where Ruthie reflects on the fickle nature of memory, how it captures only the superficial aspects of existence. Whilst this is true to a point to Housekeeping, Robinson's brilliant and sensitive style is able to raise the endless stream of seemingly irrelevant descriptions and images into a truly unique and beautiful work of art.

A realist take on those romanticized tales where orphans are cared for by a series of intriguingly eccentric relatives - or on the town of Lakeside in Neil Gaiman's American Gods.

Published in 1980, this was likely written in the late 1970s. It seems set in the 50s: despite attempts at timelessness with few references to technology or world events, occasional mentions of fashion and the 1954 bestselling novel Not As a Stranger provide clues. It dramatizes a tug-of-war and deep ambivalence between the counterculture ethos prominent in the 70s (already emerging decades earlier with the Beats) and all things, positive and negative, associated with the 1950s, small-town America, and the Midwest (even if set a bit further west, in the Mountain West).

For much of the book, it's more positive about these three aspects than the material I'm accustomed to reading: it's cozy and calm, almost a love letter to a time and place. If you never quite understood why people could be happy there, you might during the early part of this book. But for some, the pressure to conform eventually becomes suffocating, and things that might not be a big deal in parts of New York or San Francisco are cause for alarm, as in the small-town Midwest of the 50s, where a nice girl's main occupation is embroidering towels for her hope chest, it's harder for someone to get away with being a bit strange, especially if they are responsible for kids.

The potentially claustrophobic setting is perhaps always expressed in the grandfather's original dugout home, half underground - a device that likely got this novel onto countless school and college syllabi. However, as I was once very happy in a basement flat (and also remember with fond curiosity the different visual perspective on the world the windows of such a place give you), I never saw it that way.

It's a story about quiet people who disliked newspapers and were chagrined that anything to do with themselves or their family might appear in them.

If we imagine that Noah’s wife, when she was old, found somewhere a remnant of the Deluge, she might have walked into it till her widow’s dress floated above her head and the water loosened her plaited hair. And she would have left it to her sons to tell the tedious tale of generations. She was a nameless woman, and so at home among all those who were never found and never missed, who were uncommemorated, whose deaths were not remarked, nor their begettings.

It seems like the Foster clan would prefer to be that way.

Even the fear of abandonment, often a noisy emotion, is related rather calmly. Perceptively, Robinson communicates it through the children's behavior and through conversations that express curiosity about people no longer present, rather than through overt expressions of missing them, especially the rather different versions of their mother that the two girls imagine. Narrator Ruthie - who by this time has already lost three sets of primary caregivers - whenever her aunt Sylvie is quiet or goes out, starts looking for her. It's not analyzed, it just happens, as it would with a kid.

This book is excellent at evoking feeling and atmosphere and is full of little observations characteristic of people, especially teenagers, who quietly don't entirely fit in:

- that sharp loneliness she had felt every long evening since she was a child. It was the kind of loneliness that made clocks seem slow and loud and made voices sound like voices across water.

- “I suppose I don’t know what I think.”...
I wanted to ask her if she knew what she thought, and if so, what the experience of that sort of knowledge was like

(I used to feel that way in my late teens, had conversations like that, though I find it as hard to imagine now as might anybody used to my output of opinions on here.)

- a superego constructed of the projected opinions of classmates (before there was social media for that): …imagine what some of the sleek and well-tended girls at school, whom she knew only by name and whom no possible combination of circumstances could make privy to such details of our lives, would think if they saw…

- those enviable, unreal people (in this case the sister) with the \\"ability to look the way one was supposed to look\\"

There are also beautiful turns of phrase on other subjects. The description of the aftermath of a flood. Gathering berries and fish outdoors are \\"rituals of predation\\", evoking the prehistoric and wildness. So simple, but flapping magazines outdoors \\"page themselves\\". I'd wondered in the past how to describe that movement, and here it felt like Robinson had shown me what I was always thinking and said 'yes, you can actually put that into words'.

When the story becomes more unsettling, it's also in a quiet way (though with occasional stark words like 'violated' as the tension builds). It's about the power of enforced conformity, like The Stepford Wives (1972), but realist, absolutely not SF with the getout clause of 'that doesn't really happen, not the way the story says', and shows how social conformity is often expected by and of women and policed by women, with men merely rubberstamping this in official roles at a time when they still overwhelmingly held them.

I'm not sure I'll ever hear Bjork's There's More to Life Than This, one of my favorite songs of hers, the same way again. There's an episode in this novel that reads like a rejoinder to the song's whimsical line \\"I could nick a boat\\"; it's done in the same quirky way, with no intention to harm or steal permanently, but in this book, reality and consequences catch up with picturesque little adventures of the sort that might happen in books and films.

The judgment of the town (its name, Fingerbone, shifts from a mere curiosity to an accusatory finger pointed) seems to hang over Ruthie permanently, another thing she keeps from that place. (And perhaps there is a silent legacy lurking, the mystery of why Helen and Sylvie were as they were; did something bad happen, as it would have in a more recent novel, or is it simply temperament and the vagaries of less headline-grabbing forms of gene-environment interaction.) There's a sense of resigned fatedness, though those words are heavier than the tone here, which is more like the quietness I hear in'melancholy'. One wonders if Ruthie has watched herself become a type she once observed and judged as other; if she is telling her story suspecting she sounds like one of these:

people in bus stations … they will tell you that they were abandoned, disappointed, or betrayed—that they should not be alone, that only remarkable events, of the kind one reads in books, could have made their condition so extreme. And that is why, even if the things they say are true, they have the quick eyes and active hands and the passion for meticulous elaboration of people who know they are lying.

(If you know about discourse analysis in psychology, this sounds like a way of describing the conversational markers of unresolved trauma and certain insecure attachment styles; Ruthie's narrative in the novel is far more organized and graceful than that.)

The saddest and most surprising thing was, towards the end, the absence of the pride and jaunty joy found in songs like King of the Road. I couldn't help imagining it there. (It can't have been impossible for all women living a similar life, even if it was for some.) It would make sense; it felt necessary.

This is the longest piece of fiction I've listened to so far on audio, though it was only five and a half hours and I listened to most of it in one day. It turned out to be ideally suited and helped me understand what works for me as fiction audio. It probably needs to be one essentially linear narrative (in contrast to the family history memoir Maybe Esther, which felt like a series of disjointed dreams when I listened), and to be a story where feeling and atmosphere are more important than the minutiae of events or intricate wordplay. That kind of lyrical prose so characteristic of literary fiction, of which Robinson's has become a classic example.

(January 2021)

The two best reviews of Housekeeping I've read on Goodreads:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Whew.. Every sentence, every phrase is so carefully, thoughtfully, and lovingly crafted out of fine silk and recycled crystal. This book demands to be read slowly, with a searching and repeating of every paragraph.

A rare story, complete in every way - where all choice, desire, and dream is defined, decided, limited, and directed by the whims of steel, by the female members of one family. The buffoon Sheriff, who appears for just a short scene or two - is the only non-ghost male in this book.

A matriarch sets everything in motion, a grandmother who loved her Edmund (the ghost) most because he, too, was really alone, as she had never wanted to marry at all. Edmond would pick up eggshells and birds’ wings and ashy bits. “He would peer at them as if he could read them, and pocket them as if he could own them....it was then when she loved him best, as a soul all unaccompanied, like her own.”

This family is defined by the touch, the caress, the memory of women, the caretaker, the one who loved me the best in the sorry and extraordinary way she could.

Instead of mourning her invisibility, Ruthie, our narrator, found freedom in it, in her insignificance. Loosed from the burden found in the confusion of imagined importance, of her imagined volume in the universe. “The immense water thunked and thudded beneath my head, and I felt that our survival was owed to our slightness, that we danced through ruinous currents as dry leaves do, and were not capsized because the ruin we rode upon was meant for greater things.”

There are many tales of loss - but loss so carefully held - examined from every angle - transformed. Eventually almost valued. Looked at with light, and without. Perhaps creating a trove of precious memory.

And as memories of her mother, who drove into the lake, are few, and perhaps over-embroidered, what might have been? “We would have left her finally. We would have laughed together with bitterness and satisfaction at our strangely solitary childhood, in light of which our failings would seem inevitable, and all our attainments miraculous.” “....we would have...felt abandoned and aggrieved, never knowing that she had gone all the way to the edge of the lake to rest her head and close her eyes, and had come back again for our sakes. She would have remained untransfigured.”

There is so much wonderful writing that I want to quote the entire book. There is a scene towards the end when a surprising action takes place, that elicits not a shrug, not a raised eyebrow; then it begins to make sense, then, yes, it seems necessary. Not in my world. But in this one. Maybe that’s what I loved best: that no one could challenge or deny them their reality, as so often happens to girls and women. And if they try - disappear! Smoke and water.

“ ‘After seven years they can’t get you for anything,’ Sylvie said, and seven years passed, but we both knew they could always get you for increasingly erratic behavior…”

This one was truly quite strange.

There were moments when I thought the writing was so unique that it was worthy of the description of a modern classic. However, there were also times when I felt the prose was overly convoluted and cumbersome for the plot, making it difficult to comprehend.

“Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water–-peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires.”

This is Robinson's first book. It won several awards in its day and was also a finalist for the Pulitzer. (Originally published in 1980, it won the Pen/Hemingway prize for best first novel.)

The story is about two sisters who are raised by several different relatives after their mother leaves them at her mother's house. The sisters grow and diverge, finding ways to deal with their loss and constantly changing circumstances. This is a character-driven story with a very light plot that accumulates and arrives in an unexpected place for this reader. The pacing is slow, so be aware of that going into it. Fortunately, it is also fairly short and manages its message well within that length (216 pages in paperback). The narrator, Becket Royce, was well done.

P.S. I've been thinking often about this novel in the days since I finished it. My thoughts are along the lines of: What was the author hoping to convey in this story? And what did I, the reader, find? Were the two worlds apart (my answer was yes), and why? It is the sort of novel that will make you think about what kind of reader you are, what you look for in a good novel - character or plot, and of course, for me - great writing.