Marilynne Robinson

2.5 stars

This book is written with the most beautiful and elegant prose and for the first few few pages I really was enjoying the book but sadly the structure of the novel didn't work for me.

Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church-the only available shelter from the rain-and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister and widower, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the days of suffering that preceded her newfound security.

Firstly I listened to this book on audio and while the narrator was excellent I found the writing style very repetitive and laboured. The story is told from different perspectives and I found it difficult to follow and the flow too interrupted. There is a very strong religious theme in this novel and it certainly belonged in the stroy but I found it a little much at times and again I think if I had read the book I would have understood it more and perhaps enjoyed it better. I was going to switch to paper format halfways through the stroy but did not love the subject matter enough to purchase another book. I did finish the novel and was glad I struck with it because
the prose is beautiful and poetic but for me this one just didn't float my boat.

This book has great reviews and I am certainly singing from a different hymn sheet on this one.… (more)

I wasn't sure what to expect here, but in the end I'm pleasantly surprised, or at least not disappointed.
I grew up taking the Bible literally, and have moved far away from that view at least as far as the old testament is concerned. I'm intimately familiar with Genesis, and it's clear Robinson is as well. Through decades of sermons, I've never heard anyone point out the obvious familial parallels in the patriarchs' stories, from sibling rivalries to father's favoritism. It was an angle that brought a little more humanity to the stories that are so familiar.
The last part of this is just Genesis, and I can't recall what translation she uses but I love that every time someone dies it says they "gave up the ghost".
There's no deep reading of the text here, no "the Hebrew or Greek is actually such as such", but themes of grace and mercy and teased from the text in a way that I think any person could accomplish without the scholarly background of some.… (more)

Home, that familiar physical space and whatever it may mean and represent to different people. Comfort, love, salvation, pain, regret, disappointment and most likely more than either one of these things and yet there's no denying in some way that that space we live in and at times share in with others, often does leave a mark on us.

In this story siblings Glory and Jack, middle-aged and mourning their different failures have returned home to their aging father in a small town in Iowa. This is a slow read, nothing abrupt or major in tragic proportions ever happens. Yet how to describe some passages, especially the last pages? Touching cannot be enough.

Reading this made me think about the sentimentality vs sensitivity debates I've come across. Of course in a lot of cases the debates were all a pitiable often sexist façade to dismiss certain works but this book made me think a lot about sensitivity and sentimentality in fiction. The sentimental for the most part is overwrought, the sensitive sufficient. Toni Morrison once spoke about trusting the reader, that there are certain things although unspoken, can be entrusted to the reader to be understood. I think it requires a lot of restraint for the writer, that although they can go on describing and writing they choose not to.

It is difficult to imagine Marilynne Robinson was not thinking about this book when she was writing Gilead. I have heard an interview where she confirms she wasn't but given how seamlessly it accompanies the first book, it is hard to see it that way. The plot runs concurrently with Gilead so that it reads more like a flipped coin than a sequel.… (more)

This book is narrated by Ruth and begins with a short family history, of her eccentric maternal grandfather whose tragic death completely marks the family, and her grandmother who in her own way tries to live with the sorrow and raise her children, and of the three sisters among them, Helen, Ruth's mother. After another tragedy, Ruth and her sister Lucille are raised by their grandmother, growing up semi-isolated from the rest of the small town of Fingerbone and drawn always to the town's lake that is the source of family tragedy. When Ruth's grandmother dies, and after a brief period with their grandfather's relatives, their aunt Sylvie arrives to be their guardian.

Sylvie is one of the most interesting and mysterious characters I have ever read. She's a rare kind of character in literature, a woman who Ruth describes as a transient, who finds pleasure in riding trains and traveling around with no signs of permanence or stability. The two sisters react differently, Lucille works to fight against Sylvie by cleaning and seeking a more ordinary life while Ruth is drawn to her and scared at first of this.

A Doris Lessing blurb on the back page of my copy informs me that "this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight." A brief and accurate statement that perfectly describes this book.

After I was done reading a difficult but good book, I wanted to read something that flowed faster, and one that required less of me and I should have known better than to read Housekeeping with this in mind. As I tried to rush through the book, I was tripped by beautifully crafted sentences and fell right into the richness of the book, disentangling myself and obstinately rising again, I'd be caught and stumble again and again. Until in a way the book forced me to slow down and allow myself make a keener reading of the book. It is a tough read; a book that deals with death, loss, abandonment, family, loneliness and independence, a wonderful read.… (more)