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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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
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Ex-Library book-will contain library markings. 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
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Picador
Date Published: 2004-11-01
ISBN-13:9780312424091ISBN:0312424094
Description: New. New-Fast shipping from trusted wholesaler with many exclusive publisher contracts. May have slight edge wear from being on the shelf. May have remainder mark. read more
Description: Very Good. 0312424094 Paperback, Condition: Very Good; this book is in very good condition with light curve to the spine / light reading creases to the covers. read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Bantam
Date Published: 1984
ISBN-13:9780553262384ISBN:0553262386
Description: Fine. 0553262386 Mass market paperback, previously read used book in like new condition, some very minor shelf wear, no rips or tears. _ 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
"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."
"Marilynne Robinson's writing is just lyrical and I fell into the story and couldn't find my way out. A contemplation of family and bonds and loss, it's lovely and sweet and sad - and that with me not being able to relate to the characters. I prefer Gilead, but this was beautiful to read."
"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."
New York Times "HOUSEKEEPING sounds as if the author has been treasuring it up all her life, waiting for it to form itself." -- Anatole Broyard
Hungry Mind Review, Winter 1999 "An often comic novel that has become a certifiable classic. Her name is Ruth and she has the eye and ear of a poet." -- Sam Hamill
Mary Gordon "The richness and variety and the peculiarity of tone Marilynne Robinson sustains are masterful; I found the characters absorbing and disturbing."
Doris Lessing "I found myself reading slowly, then more slowly--this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight."
John Hawkes "[A] quiet, humorous, beautiful book filled with what I can only call the ecstasy of wisdom....It is a work of pure grace."
Walker Percy "[A] haunting dream of a story told in a language as sharp and clear as light and air and water."
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