Housekeeping

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson has been on my "want to read" list for a long time. Making an appearance on the NY Times Best Fiction in the last 25 years list just added to my desire. Since, I got to choose bookclub choice, I finally read this stark book.

Set in the frigid Fingerbone, the story is about a family and all their losses. Two sisters make the center of the story. Their grandfather died in a freak train derailment into the town's freezing lake. Their mother drove a car into the lake taking her own life. They are raised by grandmother, great aunts, and finally Sylvie, their mother's sister.

I can't say that I liked the book or recommend it. I appreciated the language of the book. There were echoing beautiful sentences, you wanted to read over and over. Unlike Stegner, whose sentences move me to feel, Robinson's power of language moved me away from understanding her characters. I never liked them which makes it hard for me to like the book. I understand that may be a juvenille approach to reading - but so be it.

The whole of the book is contained in this quote about family: "For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?"

This books knits up simple, stark scenes to create the story of two sisters growing up and the housekeeping that surrounds them.