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Title: Housekeeping: A Novel
ISBN: B0013TFBEC
Author:
Marilynne Robinson
Publicate Date: 2004-11-01
Publish: 2004-11-01
List Price: $14.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $9.31
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $5.43
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| Customer Review: |
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1: In the name of the mother, the sister and the aunt
Not many d??but are as assured, poetic and beautiful as Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping". It is a novel about family ties and loneliness and what people do in order to survive the pain of life. Her characters are always in search of some kind of connection with a place or someone else - and they miserably fail. The main character is Sylvie. She is seen through her niece's eyes, Rithie, who is also the narrator. This girl and her sister are left under the cares of their grandmothter, after being abandoned by their mother. When the woman dies, enters Sylvie - who seems to have some emotional issues herself..
Robinson's prose is as poetic as profound and capable of illuminates some dark corners of the human soul. As it happens with her latest novel, the Pulitzer Prize Winner "Gilead", her writing is beautiful and demanding. Therefore, there is an immense payback for the reader. The more you give to "Housekeeping", the more it gives you back.
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2: just okay
This book just didn't do it for me. It was interesting enough to finish and the plot was creative but somehow it didn't come together quite right. I bought it as a bargain book, but I would have been very disappointed had I paid more than a bargain price.
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3: 200 pages of rambling drivel.
Oh, good Lord, thank you baby Jesus this crappy book is over. I tried to read this POS 4 times last summer, and was never able to get halfway through the first chapter. This book reads like a babbling menopausal woman so hormone addled she doesn't know when to shut up.
"As she knelt in the rows she heard the hollyhocks thump against the shed wall."
If lines like that get you off, this is just the thing for you, because the whole damn book is like that. Boring, plodding, tedious, it goes nowhere, and takes forever to get there.
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4: Beautiful, but tedious
I read Gilead a while ago and loved it. Its language was beautiful and haunting, the story tender and heart-breaking. Housekeeping was different. It also has beautiful language, but that is where the similarities end. I have been wracking my brain trying to figure out what I did not like about this novel and the answer finally came to me: it has no plot. It has no substance. It had immense potential to be great, but for me, it fell utterly flat. Let me be clear, the language is BEAUTIFUL. There are passages on practically every page that made me breathless with the beautiful and creative wordplay of Ms. Robinson, but it was not enough to push the narrative forward on its own. I understand the symbolism, the allusions, etc. of the novel, but I also want the plot to move the story along, not the descriptions of a place alone. I want characters that I come to care about to push the story onward, I want a climax, I want to care about what happens to them on the next page, and sadly, I did not.
One could say that the lack of any feeling the reader had for the characters was the author's way of getting the reader to feel the lack of love and caring that the girls experienced in their own family. If so, I get it, but I wanted to made to feel that, even if their own family didn't care about them, I did. But that is not what happened. I simply stopped caring.
It just felt to me that the author used the idea of these two girls and their awkward, off-beat, tragic family as a vehicle for her magnificent use of the English language. And magnificent though it was, the story got bogged down with all of that lavish description, and I wanted more than that. I wanted substance.
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5: Stellar prose, decent story
I really wanted to like this book more than I did. The writing is superb, and the premise is compelling. I only wish I cared more about the characters. The enigmatic Sylvie is well drawn, but I can't figure her out. She doesn't quite behave like a real person. Nor does Lucille, the older sister, behave like anyone I've ever met. Ruth, clearly the author's stand in character, is the closest anyone comes to walking off the page.
And yet, none of the actions these characters take are at all unrealistic. People run away from home all the time. People skip school all the time. I'm sure insurance companies find evidence of people faking all manner of things all the time.
So, why not the full five stars, then? I'm not sure. The novel offers everything most of us want from a novel, and still, I just didn't care enough about the characters' outcomes, which, by the way, most discerning readers can forsee fairly early.
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