About this title: A modern classic, Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother. The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Bantam Books
Date Published: 1984
ISBN-13:9780553262384ISBN:0553262386
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Typical wear; good reading copy. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. 35/9 read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date Published: 1997
ISBN-13:9780374525187ISBN:0374525188
Description: Good. Moderate cover wear with scuffing to edges and creasing on spine. Previous owner's name on first page. Age toning. GoodwillnyBooks is committed to providing each customer with the highest standard of customer service. You may return new items within 30 days of delivery for a full refund. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Picador
Date Published: 2004
ISBN-13:9780312424091ISBN:0312424094
Description: Good. Cover wear with scuffing to edges. Curl to cover and front pages. Creases to cover. GoodwillnyBooks is committed to providing each customer with the highest standard of customer service. You may return new items within 30 days of delivery for a full refund. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN-13:9780374525187ISBN:0374525188
Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Bantam
Date Published: 1984
ISBN-13:9780553278729ISBN:055327872X
Description: Good. Standard used condition. May have light reading or storage wear. All orders processed within 2 business days. Ships from Foxboro MA. read more
"This is the author of "Gilhead." Exquisite if you don't mind slowing down enough to appreciate her writing. For instance: "Lucille would tell this story differently. She would say I fell asleep, but I did not. I simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my bowels and bones. Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's workings" (p. 116). This passage offers a method to help us read her book: like the protagonist who allows the sky to be coextensive with her most inner self, we have to let her words become part of us. Thinking of it, isn't it true of any act of love? Loving a spouse and allowing yourself to be part of this being in a (scary) vulnerable way. Loving your children, and opening your heart to them in a way that you'll have to suffer along with them. Loving your neighbors and taking the chance they might turn on you. Loving God, and accepting you can't make it on your own and have to trust yourself in his hands. Also, the "sheet" in this passage is a new take on the Cave of Plato (with the back of the cave as a screen). The fact the sheet is "dropped" makes it more immediate. Amazing how you can tell the same idea over and over, and yet the way it is expressed makes it shine with a new layer of meaning."
"I had no idea what was being withheld from me by not reading Marilynne Robinson - this is a lovely, haunting, water-and-earth-filled book. Robinson's prose is lucid and at the same time as distracted and lilting and absorbed as her characters are. I will go on to read Gilead, but I think that it simply can't be this perfect. And since "Housekeeping" is set in the Idaho/Washington backwaters, I am more easily able to believe the gloom and sense of weird weightlessness this story conveys."
"Housekeeping has a distancing voice--brittle, isolationist and isolating--and the book is steeped in both death and its premonition, life seen as an unforgiving and unforgiveable thing tolerable only in ritualization or complete letting go.
Somehow, though, it remains also one of most humane and often even humorous books I know, still gentle in its ironies, humane and sympathetic in its treatment of the women and girls who make up the whole of the book, all of them suicides or suicides waiting to happen, all of them alone and adrift (sometimes literally).
The prose is as dense as anything I've read, not because difficult to read but because unflinching in its concision, with as much meaning packed into a sentence as in one of Proust's, is lyrically rich and a near-constant smack to the sinuses. While reading it I sometimes had to get up and pace around the room because it filled me full of so much I had to shake some of it out before sitting back down to read.
Few authors are canonized in the minds of writers, especially, quite as readily as has been Marilynne robinson. She's only on her third novel in thirty years, but it makes sense that writing like this would cook slow, the meat tender under the lid."
"Two things you should know about my thoughts on Housekeeping:
1) I think Housekeeping is a great book. 2) Finishing Housekeeping gave me a palpable sense of relief.
Housekeeping is darker and more intense than the author's better-known Gilead . The former is also a tougher read; even the most careful reader would, I imagine, find herself returning to some passages a few times in an attempt to follow the beautiful but difficult language. So while I don't regret reading a tough and rewarding novel, by any stretch, there were moments when I felt like I was reading the damn book because it was good for me but not very much fun. And even though I marked and will later photocopy some passages, and I would gladly recommend Housekeeping to anyone up for a caliginous and meticulous exploration of loss, depth, and identity, I'd sure as hell point out the ride wasn't going to be easy.
Not a resounding recommendation, eh? Well, I'm giving the book four stars, more than I give most books, and I might read the book again someday. Housekeeping seems like the type of book I'd want to read again. And although the psychological and metaphorical (I'm deathly afraid of drowning, thank you very much, and underwater metaphors lurk on just about every page) explorations are intense, the book will haunt me in ways that I can appreciate for the foreseeable future. Check it out. You are warned."
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