Housekeeping

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As with all Robinson’s work, the main attraction is the prose itself. Robinson examines humanity from above. She conveys the quotidian and the visceral through language that has been described as ‘transcendent’, ‘almost Biblical’. This book makes your problems feel at once significant and small.

In interviews, Robinson has spoken about how Housekeeping was born from a series of metaphors inspired by the voice and language of 19th-century American writers, and as in Emerson or Thoreau, the book is suffused with a sense of awe that springs primarily from the natural world. “Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me,” she said in the Paris Review. “There is a visionary quality to all experience.” Robinson says that when writing Housekeeping, water was on her mind as "a very good metaphor for consciousness, for the artificial accidental surface of consciousness and then everything behind and beyond it." How does this apply to the novel, especially with respect to Sylvie?

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Simmons among nine honorary degree recipients". Brown University. 16 May 2012 . Retrieved 28 May 2014. Memory might be something like water in the way it rises and recedes. But the memory of loss is particular in its ability to flood, to warp.

marilynne robinson's 'housekeeping', like all great literature, is a revelation. it's a revelation of lonliness in particular, and of transience (two subjects often, if stupidly, associated with male psyches and literary tastes). it resonates less, in my opinion, as a girl-comes-of-age story or as a tale of sisterly bonds than it does as just the story of a person trying to make it in a family trying to make it in a town trying to make it in this world. about the survival strategies of each. about how things just keep going, keep trying to make it (or stop trying), and why. Sandra Hutchison (15 February 2015). "Marilynne Robinson". Sandra Hutchison . Retrieved 2019-01-03. Once she completed her dissertation on Shakespeare, she was ready to begin work on Housekeeping, her first novel. She wrote much of it while teaching in France and, after that, in Massachusetts. She gave a draft of the novel to her friend and fellow writer John Clayton, who passed it on to an agent without her knowledge. "If he hadn't done that," said Robinson, "I'm not at all sure that I would ever have submitted it for publication." It was published in 1980 to widespread critical acclaim, winning the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel. Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010) ISBN 9780300171471, OCLC 742007978 A few months later, Robinson and Obama met for a public conversation at the Iowa State Library, in Des Moines. Although she taught for more than thirty years, Robinson does not have much of an interrogative mode; she learns by reading and observation, in both cases through sustained acts of attention rather than overt inquisition. And so their planned conversation turned into the President interviewing the novelist; the questioner-in-chief listened as Robinson spoke about fear, faith, public education, and what she regards as the necessary features of a functioning democracy and a good life. In return, she almost willfully refused to ask him anything—trusting, as she always does, that if someone, even the President, has anything to say he will say it.

How does the town of Fingerbone shape the novel's characters? How does the house itself affect Ruthie and Lucille? Consider the influence of your own hometown and childhood home on the person you've become. In the decades that followed, Marilynne Robinson would become one of the most significant contributors to contemporary American letters, receiving a National Humanities Medal awarded by President Obama in 2012 for “her grace and intelligence in writing.” In the words of an early New York Times review, this novel is “about people who have not managed to connect with a place, a purpose, a routine or another person. It’s about the immensely resourceful sadness of a certain kind of American, someone who has fallen out of history and is trying to invent a life without assistance of any kind, without even recognising that there are precedents. It is about a woman who is so far from everyone else that it would be presumptuous to put a name to her frame of mind”. The experiment abroad was so successful that the family did it again in 1983, when both parents taught at the University of Kent. By then, “Housekeeping” had been out in the world for two years; another twenty-one would pass before Robinson published her second novel. But she never stopped writing, and it was while living in Canterbury that she found the subject for her next book—an exposé inspired by daily news coverage of nuclear pollution from a plant on the northwest coast of England called Sellafield. Poor and set in their ways, Sylvia's two elderly sisters-in-law move from Spokane to Fingerbone to take care of Ruthie and Lucille after Sylvia's death. As their nerves and habits don't lend themselves to foster-mothering, they are delighted when a note from Sylvie arrives from Montana.

Housekeeping is a 1980 novel by Marilynne Robinson. The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel. By positioning the threatening, lush natural world of Fingerbone in direct opposition to the town’s genteel interiors—the houses full of furniture adorned with doilies, the soda shops teeming with girls poring over dress patterns in magazines, the schoolhouse full of children in neat rows—Robinson establishes the strange duality of her fictional town. As the novel progresses, Ruth and Lucille’s encounters with nature both nourish and frighten them, and Robinson explores both girls’ entry into womanhood through their very different relationships with the natural world. Ruth and Lucille are, at the start of the novel, both haunted by and drawn to nature. They arrive in Fingerbone knowing already that the vast lake at its center once claimed their grandfather Edmund’s life, only to have their mother Helen allow the lake to claim hers, too. Nevertheless, the girls soon begin skipping school frequently to ice-skate along the lake’s surface, fish down at the lake’s shore, and explore the woods around it. The girls are unintimidated by nature and coexist with it almost without a second thought. After a night spent out in the woods, though, the girls’ relationships to nature begins to change. While Ruth finds herself increasingly drawn to the dense forests of Fingerbone, the orchard behind her own house, and the magnetic, dangerous lake, Lucille begins to eschew the natural world and focus more and more intensely on beauty, grooming, and socializing. She becomes obsessed with making a dress for herself, starts hanging around with other, more “normal” girls from school, and even crushes some old pressed flowers Ruth finds in a dictionary to demonstrate how little nature has come to mean to her. There is so little to remember of anyone—an anecdote, a conversation at a table,” writes Robinson. “But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanders will find a way home…” At the moment, she is planning another volume in her Ames/Gilead sequence. Three more from Marilynne Robinson

Madelaine Lucas Explores the Tensions Between Creative Work and Domestic Life

This is the dream at the very heart of Housekeeping—that need will “blossom into all the compensation it requires” and that what we’ve lost might be returned to us by force of sheer longing alone.