Why didn't I like this book?

The writing in this book is rather uneven. At times, I would come across a beautiful and engaging line that would catch my attention. However, for the most part, I found the writing to be quite ordinary, lacking in clarity, and often pretentious or overwrought. There are instances where fancy words are used when a simpler one would have sufficed, making the text seem forced and artificial. Some sentences may sound profound at first glance, but upon closer examination, it's not entirely clear what they really mean.

The story revolves around two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, who respond in completely opposite ways to the various tragedies that befall their family. Their mother commits suicide, their grandmother dies after coming to care for them, and their grandfather is killed in a train crash. The girls then end up living with different relatives, including two great aunts and finally their aunt Sylvie. Society views Sylvie as "flakey," unreliable, and an inappropriate mother figure. The great aunts are also shown to be equally incapable. This background information is presented at the beginning of the book in a rather rushed and unexplained manner.

Lucille desires a secure and ordinary life and eventually goes to live with her home economics teacher. Ruth, on the other hand, settles in with her aunt Sylvie. The central theme of the book seems to be about their relationship and the expectations placed on them by "good society." It also explores what they do to survive in the face of these challenges.

The book compares the way Ruth and Sylvia live to the life chosen by Lucille and the life that society deems as the best. But what is the book really trying to say? Does it suggest that loss and abandonment lead to a transient lifestyle? Perhaps, but Lucille doesn't follow this path, and Sylvie was already flakey and living as a transient even before her sister's suicide. Maybe the message is as simple as the fact that people are different and there is no one correct way of living. However, this message seems rather self-evident.

Lucille's life is portrayed as being narrow and restricted by the opinions of others and society. Sylvie, on the other hand, has heart, compassion, and shows understanding for others, although the life she and Ruth choose is uncertain, difficult, and borders on the improper. Sylvie is shown as having an appreciation for nature and pursuing fleeting dreams, but at least she is molding her life to her own wishes and accepting the hardships that come with it. The problem is that we don't know if Ruth has chosen this path by free will. She was too young to make a real decision when she followed Sylvie, and perhaps she has simply been influenced by her aunt.

The author's intended message leaves me confused. There are images and ideas presented throughout the book that don't seem to fit together coherently, making it difficult to discern a clear and meaningful message.

Ruth is telling the story from the perspective of an adult, but the words she uses are not those of a child. This creates a further incongruity, as there is no explanation as to what has made her so talkative when she never wanted to talk before.

There are also references to religious stories such as Cain and Abel and Noah that I didn't fully understand.

The audiobook is narrated by Becket Royce. The tempo of the narration is uneven, with some parts being too fast. However, the narration is clear enough that you can hear what is being said, so I would give it three stars for the narration.

In conclusion, I don't think this book has anything particularly remarkable to say. If there is a deeper message, it went over my head. The writing didn't leave a lasting impression on me, and I found the overall story to be somewhat disjointed and lacking in clarity.

Marilynne Robinson's name was first heard by me from my friend Ferda Balancar. The novel she mentioned was "Jack" and it hadn't been published yet. There were several novels published by Everest, but I had heard that their translations were bad. There were also some books with fancy covers from a pretentious publisher, but I didn't take them seriously. Then Metis took over and republished the author's first novel, "Housekeeping" (it was called "The House by the Lake" by the pretentious publisher).

The opening sentence of the novel already tells a lot. "My name is Ruth. I grew up under the protection of my sister Lucille, my grandmother Sylvia Foster, and when she died, my grandmothers Lily Foster and Nina Foster, and then their daughter Sylvia Fisher."

The lives of these two girls are filled with losses. A lost grandfather, the cold relationships between his three daughters and his wife, their mothers who left by getting married, the absence of their fathers, their mothers' very tragic act of leaving the girls on the porch of their grandmothers' house in a borrowed car and then throwing herself off the cliff in the same borrowed car, and everything else as described in the first sentence...

The girls' mental states, which begin to change with the arrival of their aunt Sylvie, are actually the essence of the novel. But besides this, I think nature and the town of Fingerbone are also among the main characters. People live in such harsh conditions that sometimes they die, sometimes they migrate, and sometimes they climb the mountains in the middle of winter and then return to their homes. Fingerbone is a place where there is constant water pressure and very few people live.

Although we don't fully understand what kind of person Sylvie is, it is clear that she is not mature enough to take care of the two girls. It is not clear why she didn't see their mother or who her husband is. Since she is a migrant worker, the townspeople also ostracize her, as migration is like a red flag for this religious town.

As Ruth gets closer to Sylvie and Lucille moves further away from home, they gradually reach the breaking point, and the town's attempt to do something for Ruth and its interference with her problems lead to the end of the novel.

But in the novel, the events are really not that important. It has such a poetic and full narrative that we often can't keep up with Ruth's thoughts. The fear that this girl, whose life has been spent losing people, will also lose her aunt makes her question the town, God, her grandfather, religion, science, and most of all, her mother. Calvinist Marilynne Robinson gives a lot of space to stories and quotations from religious books in the novel, but all of them fit the atmosphere very well. In the translation, when it comes to Cain and Abel, Abel is used instead of Cain, and I was curious about this, to be honest.

I love the difficult lives that Americans build in the middle of nature, their becoming a part of nature's life, and their masterful portrayal of this in films and novels. Robinson is not someone I would say is my favorite author, but the novel is read like a poem. Therefore, I hope Metis continues. By the way, I should mention that Birgül Oğuz's translation is also like a poem.

Look at that. And it’s not Versailles. It’s a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.

This simple yet captivating image sets the tone for Marilynne Robinson's unique aesthetic. A summary of her aesthetic in The Paris Review emphasizes the artist's ability to make us view the ordinary with wonder. It's what she does, and it's what her characters experience.

\\n  One evening, in summer, she went to the garden. The earth was light and soft like cinders, pale clay yellow. The trees and plants were ripe, a comfortable green, rustling gently. Above, the sky was the dark blue of ashes. As she knelt, she heard the hollyhocks thump and felt the wind lift her hair. She saw the trees fill with wind and heard their trunks creak. She felt the smooth potatoes in the earth and wondered what she had seen.\\n

I daresay some might be allergic to this writing, finding it dense and over-precious. But those who do will likely have left the book by page 19, seeking something more energetic and exciting. A plot, perhaps?

No. Stay with this one. Take it slow. Savour the magisterial cadences, the movement from earth to sky to wind and back. Notice the new life in the potatoes, smooth as eggs.

Those contours, the boundaries, are essential.

\\n  It was dark, and creatures came close. Lucille threw stones and sang. Sylvie loved the dark, and there was a recurring image of isolation at night. Windows showed only a reflection, while those outside could see in.\\n

Emerson said, \\"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.\\" Sylvie and Ruth achieve this integrity by inhabiting each other, crossing the bridge, becoming one with all. Lucille, however, cannot accept her boundaries being overrun. She battles to assert her individuality.

Integrity: the state of being whole and undivided.

The power that sets time in motion is a maternal force that never disappears. This is why the first event is called a fall, and there is hope that in the end, there will be peace and a return. Such a memory propels us forward, and the prophecies of the prophets are only a brilliant memory; there will be a garden where all of us, in the form of a child, will sleep in the presence of our mother Eve and become wise under the pressure of her thorns.
Housekeeping, contrary to its charming name, is more than a story about a house and a family. It is the account of homelessness and the decline of a family and the confinement of its women. The characters in the story are more or less in a confinement that is partly imposed and partly self-chosen. Ruth, the adult narrator of the story and the only survivor of the third generation of the family, relates her memories of her youth: a little of her grandparents, of a mother who attempts suicide, of a sister who is lost, of an aunt who has disappeared, and of another aunt (Sylvie) who has now taken the place of her mother. The story begins with the construction of a house by the grandfather and ends with its disappearance at the hands of the children, and in between, what happens in this house shapes the story of Housekeeping.
The window, like the wild female nature.
In my opinion, we are dealing with a multi-layered and analytical story. In the key events of the story, the role of the window and water in general seems to have a significant impact. If I say role, I precisely mean the role in the sense of a character. The place of the window in this story is similar to the place of the apartment in Roland Topor's The Tenant. The window blinds the grandfather and drowns the mother years later, and in the middle of the story, the floods and tides of the window - a manifestation of abundance and fertility - affect the house. After these events, the question constantly萦绕 in my mind was what kind of event is the flood and what will the window, which is so powerful, bring upon Ruth, her sister Lucille, and her aunt Sylvie? It seems that the window, like the wild female nature, constantly attracts them towards itself, like a magnet. The reactions of the two sisters to the murmurs of the window are completely different. Lucille has resigned herself to convention and allows her femininity to be bound by an old woman, by rules and regulations. But Ruth, guided by Sylvie, in the hope of seeing wild children on the other side of the water, crosses the window in a boat and in a one-day journey and a testimony, reaches a hidden discovery that completely changes the rest of her story and her life: leaving school, setting the house on fire, and fleeing with Sylvie from the bridge over the window. With these interpretations, it is inevitable to say that we are dealing with the ancient pattern of crossing the water. Water is a manifestation of material life, and crossing the water (baptism) is a sign of death and rebirth - the transition from the old world to a new era. Just as in this story, too, Ruth is no longer the same person after crossing the window, and her life undergoes a fundamental transformation.
A completely female novel.
Housekeeping is a completely female novel for two reasons. The first reason I briefly mentioned above, and the second reason is that the entire story revolves around the relationships of the women in a family, their emotions and female spirit, and the limiting role of the men: the grandmother, the three sisters, and the two nieces. The entry and exit of the three male characters in the story is strange and at the same time indicative of an important meaning: the character of the grandfather is removed from the story at the very beginning with the train incident, the wild man with the beard who appears in the middle of the story when Ruth and Sylvie intend to cross the river and throws stones at them, and finally, the fat sheriff who enters the story for a short time and intends to separate the two by convicting Sylvie and taking custody of Ruth. These characterizations suggest a general pattern in the mind: the struggle of the male force that desires totality against the wild and rebellious female nature. At the end of the story, the two sisters, who have the same origin, are in completely opposite positions: Lucille continues her studies and takes on a defined life but in captivity, and Ruth, homeless, with temporary jobs but free.
I set out on a thousand-mile journey, without any guide. They said that relying on this staff, on one of the nights of the full moon in mid-June, it is intermittent. Because I left the dog on the bank of the river, the sound of the burning wind was strange. Behold, in the year 1684.
Postscript: The entire story is one-sided, and the pleasure of the two final chapters is on the other side. The biblical references in this chapter, such as the fall of Cain after the murder of Abel, the flood of Noah on the waters, and the walking of Christ on the water in the last two chapters, were completely appropriate, beautiful, and in line with the ancient story. It was in this chapter that I was finally able to understand the general meaning of the story.

This is Literature with a capital L, presented in the form of a Doric column soaringly high that one will surely get a crick in the neck while attempting to gaze at its summit. As one reads this novel, there is a genuine sense of becoming a better person, even as one battles the drowsiness that is inherent in each and every sinuous, delectable, palpable, sensuous, and lapidary paragraph. Huh? What? What was that??

The story, if one can even call it that, which really isn't much of a story at all, is about two little sisters who are orphaned. They are then looked after by their grandmamma, who unfortunately passes away. After that, they are cared for by elderly great aunts (they were my personal favorites, but alas, they didn't last long – I suspect they couldn't wait to escape from this book either). Then, they are under the care of their mother's sister, Sylvie, who is like an elegant bag lady drifter. She allows the house to fall into disrepair and couldn't care less if the girls go to school or not.

There is an abundance of aimless wandering in this novel. This is the third novel I've read recently where the protagonist is a teenage girl and sort of narrates the entire thing – I Capture the Castle and We Have Always Lived In the Castle being the other two. Maybe this one should have been titled Castlekeeping. Okay, perhaps not.

When one looks at movies narrated by teenage girls, they seem to possess a lot more zest and hardly any aimless wandering. I'm thinking of Badlands, Clueless, Amelie, Freeway, True Grit, Mean Girls, Easy A, and so on. Girls with some pep in them. In Housekeeping, sisters Ruthie and Lucille mostly trudge around boredly, observing small aspects of nature, such as bees, ripples, and each other's coats. About three-quarters of the way through, Lucille becomes a little fed up with this teenage novocaine Walden experience and decides to leave. The reader looks longingly after her but knows that he must continue trudging on.

Here's how one can tell that this is literature:

Lucille almost ran down the stairs. We heard the slish and moil of her steps in the hall

Yes, the hall is flooded, but slish and moil, huh? Here's another example:

Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy.

That's on the same page as slish and moil. Okay, here's another good one:

She seemed to dislike the disequilibrium of counterpoising a roomful of light against a worldful of darkness.

(Not a world full of darkness, a worldful of darkness. An important difference.)

This actually means that the aunt preferred to eat her evening meal in the dark and not turn on the light.

Here's another one:

Lucille would say I fell asleep, but I did not. I simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones. Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings.

This is some rather fancy and highfalutin talk coming from such a young and inexperienced girl. And it never ceases. Here she is thinking about her mother and her aunt (thinking about the mother and the aunt makes up approximately 88% of Ruthie's thoughts, with another 12% dedicated to her sister. She's the only teenage girl who has never once thought about pop music):

They were both long and narrow women like me, and nerves like theirs walk my legs and gesture my hands.

Eventually, the profound musings become like a form of transcendental muzak:

Thoughts bear the same relation, in mass and weight, to the darkness they rise from, as reflections do to the water they ride upon, and in the same way they are arbitrary, or merely given.

Did I think this was any good? Well, you know, some people like Albert Ayler, some people like Jeff Koons, and some people even claim to like the films of Eric Rohmer. What is Art? Rock Hudson said Art is a boy's name.

Maybe we could rephrase that question then. Did I like it?

No.

Speed Dating with a Book, Kindle 2021 edition – my most successful encounter so far. There was love, if not at first sight, maybe after 50 pages or so.

It has been an awfully long time since I finished the novel, and I don't have the luxury of time to write a proper review. However, I will attempt to make sense in a few words as to why I love this book. The synopsis didn't attract me at all, and I bought it in 2016, probably due to a deal. It was on my TBR because it was listed in a Yale literature course. I also read several reviews that said the novel was very descriptive, which made me dread reading it even more. Thanks to my project of getting rid of some of the books I own, I finally gave it a chance. Oh, wow! The writing, the atmosphere of the book, its ethereality, the strange characters, the wilderness of the places and the people, everything was simply beautiful. Marilynne Robinson's writing is out of this world. Yes, it is descriptive, but it didn't bore me for a single second. It was enchanting, and I wanted more.

"Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." The above-mentioned town is where the slim novel is set. It is the story of an unconventional family plagued by loss and abandonment. It is the story of Ruth and Lucille, who are abandoned by their mother when she chooses to plunge into the surrounding lake. The children are raised by a succession of relatives and finally settle with their aunt Sylvie, a former vagrant who moves back to town. The two girls, who are very different from each other, develop a strange relationship with their aunt, the environment, their home, and other people. The deep lake close to the town is an important character in the story. It is both a source of death and renewal.

I truly believed that this book was charming for what it presented: a story of sisters who grew up in relative isolation in a small town. They had very few friends and were passed around among elderly family members who eventually passed away, leaving them in the care of their aunt who... was not quite right.

The writing in this book is truly remarkable. It is both evocative and clear, painting a vivid picture in the reader's mind. However, like many traditional literary works of this kind, it often progresses at a slow and thoughtful pace. Not much seems to happen, aside from the quiet life filled with a sense of quiet, slow desperation.

I must admit that I had expected to feel the idyllic country life seeping into my soul. But instead, what I really felt was Sylvie's transience, her almost ghostly presence, and her inability to fully commit to taking care of her two nieces. She always seemed to have one foot out the door, as if she was constantly on the verge of leaving.

To be honest, I really felt extremely anxious while reading this book. It was a sad story, yet it still managed to draw me in and hold my attention.

**"LA RAGAZZA DEL LAGO" - A Captivating Exploration**

LA RAGAZZA DEL LAGO



The image from the title sequence of the series Les revenants, set and filmed in Savoy around Annecy. But this lake is in Italy, in Capestrano, Abruzzo.



Although with a radically different atmosphere, this novel often made me think of Les Revenants. I imagine it's due to the strong presence of the lake, an important element of the narration, just as in the film and the TV series derived from it. A place that assumes the role of a character.



The lake in these pages, the Fingerbone, Idaho lake, is a living being: it breathes, pulses, nourishes, generates, is full of people and things, even an entire train. It hides, conserves, extends, and contracts, flooding the town once a year. It has taken away both Ruth's grandfather, the narrator, and her own mother.



But as I said, the atmosphere is very different from Les Revenants: here we are rather in the realm of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his romantic conception of the vegetal world, of his feeling of a mystical union with nature. The words that follow are his, and in my opinion, they also explain well the poetics of Marilynne Robinson: Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The transparent eye absorbs more than it reflects, welcomes all that nature has to offer, and is the instrument for merging with nature, which protects us if we blend with the energy and beauty that God has dispersed in the world (that is, in nature). Emerson considered this theory a scientific position as structured as the Bible.



The same house where Ruth lives with her younger sister, Lucille, seems part of nature. It is not a closed entity but participates in the vegetal world that surrounds it: it shares vegetation, dust, spiderwebs. The windows lack glass, and it is regulated by the principle of accumulation (of cans, old newspapers...). The cats bring in dead birds, and mice and spiders are welcomed, more with resignation than with true enthusiasm.



The life in the hearts of all creatures, human, animal, and vegetal, perhaps beats slowly, but it beats equally for all, with the certainty that the day will be as always.



The "housekeeping" of the title is not domestic economy, not domestic chores in the strict sense, but in the broader sense: in the face of loss, maintaining a spiritual refuge for oneself and the family, for the girls who, in their growth process, experience a series of abandonments.



It's all a disappearing act: the grandfather in the lake, the mother, the grandmother, the more or less unknown father, the aunts...



Aunt Sylvie, the mother's younger sister, who comes home to take care (not very domestically) of the girls, behaves like a sister, older only in terms of age, but certainly not fulfilling the maternal function. She is a woman who, as she herself says, "has lost sight" of her husband for a long time, has lived for a long time like a hobo, a vagabond, hopping onto freight trains to move from one place to another, without a destination, without a plan. She brings with her an eccentric and especially wild lifestyle, with few lax rules and no impositions, the negation of the concept of authority that children are said to need. Even in the house, she sleeps dressed, lying on the bed without taking off her shoes, ready to leave, go, return, and leave again.



The novel is set in the 1950s, but apart from a few references (cars, electricity...), it could also be the previous century. There is no echo of the world war or other historical events. It seems to me that the only way to date it with some certainty is from the title of a book that Ruth reads, Nessuno resta solo (Not As a Stranger) by Morton Thompson, which was a bestseller in 1954 and from which a film with Olivia de Havilland and Robert Mitchum, directed by Stanley Kramer, was made.



There are some moments (scenes?) that stand out for their beauty: the incident of the train that falls into the lake, the divers' searches; the games with the dogs and the walks on the frozen lake; the duets of the aunts (hilarious, it seems as if you can hear them! And see them. If there were also a hint of ferocity, it would seem like reading the Grand Duchess, Ivy Compton-Burnett! It's a pity the two women disappear quickly, their absence is felt); the lighting of the light in the darkness of the kitchen during a dinner; the conversations of the aunt with the women of the town who come to visit bringing nutritious food, welcomed in a living room invaded by piles of old newspapers...



We are in the presence of a brilliant debut that immediately announces a writer of talent (who, after this first novel, let twenty-four years pass before producing the second). A writer who looks back and chooses as sources of inspiration the greats of the 19th century.



I find this article by Nicola Lagioia, which tells of his interview with Marilynne Robinson and declares his unconditional love for her writing, special. http://www.internazionale.it/opinione...



The admiration among artists, when it is not flattery, is contagious. As in this other case, simply wonderful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ7qK...

An interesting story indeed, with a certain poetic feel to its writing. It was quite enjoyable to read, yet it failed to be truly enthralling. The best way to describe it is that I had the urge to finish it just to find out what would happen next, but I wasn't overly excited to come back to it.

One of the key characteristics of this story was its oddness. It was so strange that I had a really hard time trying to figure out precisely what was going on. And just when I thought I finally understood, a new chapter would begin, and it would become odd all over again.

This made the reading experience a bit of a rollercoaster. On one hand, the oddness piqued my curiosity and kept me reading. On the other hand, the lack of a truly captivating element made it difficult for me to become fully immersed in the story.

Overall, it was an interesting read, but it didn't quite reach the level of being a page-turner that would have me eagerly anticipating each new chapter.

The tetralogy that begins with Gilead was so appealing to me that it seemed impossible that the author's best novel was still waiting for me.

As the quote goes, “Todo lo que se presenta ante el ojo es una aparición, un telón que baja sobre los verdaderos sucesos del mundo.”

Perhaps it was favored in the comparison because it was the last novel I read, although surprisingly it was the first one the author wrote, or maybe because with it she exhausted her fictional works. I don't know. The fact is that I found it more beautiful, dazzling, sad, and profound than her other novels, all of which are worthy of such qualifications. Maybe I expected a kind of prequel to those, and I was surprised by its irony. Even the title is ironic (also in its not easily translatable original title, “Housekeeping”), and its poetry, especially in that special and somewhat dreamy way the narrator has of experiencing life, the things and people around her, and, above all, the absent things and people. And the religiosity, so essential in her tetralogy, here is no more than a veil through which we look without the veil itself taking on an express protagonist role.

Fingerbone is a small lost town in the American Midwest with an inhospitable climate where the houses suffered frequent floods and their roofs were threatened every year by the copious snowfalls. The people used to boast of their hardships because there wasn't much else to talk about. Everything ordinary, people and events, everything that deviated from “the precise replication of one day after another” was regarded with suspicion, and the generalized Christian gestures and attitudes of its people were no more than a second skin acquired from what was learned so deeply in the first years of life.

Ruth, the narrator of this story, and her younger sister Lucille were left by their mother on the porch of the house their grandmother had in Fingerbone where they had to wait for her to return. Then, she got in the car and plunged into the same lake where many years ago the train on which her father, the girls' grandfather, was traveling had fallen.

As Ruth said, “No puedo beber un vaso de agua sin recordar que el ojo del lago es el de mi abuelo, y que las aguas densas, ciegas y abrumadoras del lago moldearon las extremidades de mi madre, volvieron pesadas sus ropas, detuvieron su respiración y su vista.”

That abandonment by their mother, which triggered the useless wait for “an arrival, an explanation, an apology,” shaped Ruth's character, made her different, peculiar, and “instilled in her the habit of waiting and expectation that makes any present moment important only for what it still does not contain.” The arrival of her aunt Sylvie, who looked very much like her mother, seemed like an answer to that wait.

As the quote goes, “Anhelar y tener son tan similares como la cosa y su sombra... anhelar una mano sobre el cabello es casi sentirla… Así que, sea lo que sea lo que perdamos, el anhelo nos lo devuelve.”

After one winter morning when the grandmother “avoided waking up” and a brief period with their scared and comical aunts Lily and Nona, the girls were left in the care of their aunt Sylvie. Sylvie had left, like her two sisters, the family home at a very young age and, after a brief marriage, dedicated herself to wandering aimlessly (“all the stories she told had to do with a train or a bus station”). A life that gave her eccentric habits, the kind that scare the people of Fingerbone and make them doubt her ability to take care of the girls. Lucille also distrusted, and something essential broke between the sisters, who, who knows, perhaps represent the two opposing poles in the author's own soul.

As Lucille said, “Lucille se empeñaría siempre… en darme un aspecto más decoroso y hacerme cruzar las amplias fronteras que nos separaban de es otro mundo, al que yo creía por entonces que nunca querría ir. Porque me parecía que nada de lo que ya había perdido, o pudiera perder todavía, podría encontrarse allí… me parecía que algo de lo que había perdido podía encontrarse en la casa de Sylvie… Sylvie, yo lo sabía, percibía la vida de lo que había perecido.”

It's wonderful.

Dell’esser vagabondi
After reading the last lines of "Housekeeping", I was met with silence. What else could a writer have to say after baring herself so completely? After precisely indicating the thread of her thoughts, emotions, and shames? After reaching such levels of intimacy with herself and knowledge of her soul? What remains? Yet, Marilynne Robinson (1943), after this 1980 novel, went on to write "Gilead" in 2008, "Home" in 2011, and "Lila" in 2015. And considering the awards she has received, these are surely remarkable works as well.
The reading of this book leaves one speechless. There is a sense of deeply knowing Ruthie and Lucille, the two young sisters left alone, but also Sylvie - the aunt - and Helen - the mother -, all united by a thread. United by that feeling of being vagabonds in the world. And are the "housekeeping" of the title those kinds of cares that only the grandmother was able to bestow? The starch of the lace and doilies placed on the couches, the fragrance of the sheets hung out to dry, the billowing of the curtains in the wind are only hers - with unexpected results, I would say, for "she polished shoes, braided our hair, fried chicken and made beds, then suddenly she would be startled by the memory that the daughters had disappeared, all of them, heaven knew how" -; or those of Helen - the mother - for whom home was only an apartment with balconies where she allowed the daughters to lean out tied to a string so they wouldn't be afraid and where they were watched over by a solicitous but inappropriate neighbor -? And what does Ruth mean by "cures", what are "housekeeping" for her when the house little by little becomes what it is for the aunt - being a completely mystical place amalgamated with the surrounding natural world - that is, a point of observation of the outside, the only way to still belong to civil society, but populated by insects, dry leaves, air currents, open windows even at night? Or does it mean that will, that desire to remain united and contribute to the good, growth, and perpetuation of the family, each according to their own inclinations? That creation of rituals, habits, and affections that will be remembered over time?
The protagonist of this writing is the natural world, its absolute autonomy from the affairs of man, its strength and indifference towards human works. Darkness and light are the two great actors, water and air, cold, wind, frost, mud and slime, flowers, plants and forests, snow and floods that overshadow the human consortium whose activity is only translated by the final appearance of the visiting women and the sheriff, the only male figure in the novel if we except that of the grandfather who is thus described: "Or it happened that for days on end he would wander around the house singing to himself in a thread of a voice, and speaking to her and the daughters as an extremely polite man would speak to strangers". The first part is very beautiful, the presentation of the two cousins Lily and Nona who only liked the old habits and familiar things and for this reason were unsuited to living in that country at the mercy of the elements, where even the hurricane nets were so inadequate that they seemed "to be put there to catch paper bags and puddles of candy carried by the wind", so well described - the cousins - that they seem to be the main supporting characters of the novel, but then they are forgotten. The long part regarding the care of the nieces by the aunt is very beautiful, idle, completely disinterested in practical matters, solitary - as the rest of the family had also been - without malice, innocent, childlike, completely unreliable and incapable of taking on responsibilities. The mechanisms and motives for the departure of the two sisters, their differences, are also well described. But then that passage between strong extravagance and madness makes it so that the feeling shared until then is lost, one begins to want to assign blame, one begins to judge. One begins to feel the difference. And the ending manages to surprise.
The writing is impeccable, at times poetic, warm to the ears.

This is the captivating story of sisters Ruth and Lucille. They were raised in Idaho by a series of female relatives. First, they were looked after by their maternal grandmother, then their great aunt, and their mother's sister. The girls lived in the old lakeside house built by their long-deceased grandfather. Their existence was unique, perhaps even solitary. It was a household dominated by women, as there were no men to speak of. The grandfather who brought the family to this remote part of Idaho died when his train plunged into the lake. The girls' father was just a name.

Ruth adapted better to the strange eccentricities of the various parental figures. Lucille, on the other hand, was more of a conformist, eager to fit in with her peers. Although their welfare was never seriously affected, the unconventional style, especially that of fey Aunt Sylvie (a hoarder and almost oblivious to convention), brought the censure of the conservative township closer. Eventually, Lucille left. Ruth and Sylvie fled across the long rail bridge over the lake, after setting their home on fire and watching the flames from a distance.

"Housekeeping" is beautifully written. The characters, both major and minor, are skillfully drawn, so they resonate even though there is little action and event. After reading many of the earlier reviews, I can comment on a couple of aspects of the tale that I find intriguing. I have the distinct feeling that Fingerbone is a cold and sparsely populated place, not necessarily inhospitable but certainly austere and introspective. People seem to have pent-up anger, as seen in the reaction of the row boat owner when Sylvie and Ruth "borrow" it.

The other thing that struck me was the sense of time. Given the publication date (1980) and the chronology of the tale, I assume the sisters grew up in the 1960s. However, I had such a strong sense of an earlier time, even as far back as the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, that I was often surprised by contemporary references. It might be the way their simple lives are portrayed: at home, in the lake environs, and at school.

This book cries out for symbolic analysis. Water is central: the family lives next to it, two significant characters die in it, and Sylvie and Ruth cross it to escape (after creating a fiery conflagration behind them - my favorite moment). In essence, the family arrived, lived for several generations, and then left, with no one behind - as they started. Not a trace was left behind.

Maybe it is about transience, exemplified by Sylvie and Ruth's final state of being - on the move. It is also noteworthy that Fingerbone stands in for Marilynne Robinson's hometown of Sandpoint, Idaho, and the events depicted reflect her own outdoorsy, somewhat isolated, but not necessarily unhappy, childhood.

Minor edits 3 February 2021, review originally posted in 2014.