Hedonist Review

Review by Jean Goldsmith

Marilynne Robinson, author of "Housekeeping", "Gilead" and "Home"

I just finished the book  “Housekeeping”. I loved this book so much first off for her use of language, vocabulary, just the way she puts words together and describes things. She writes in a way that is understandable intellectually, but also in a way where you can actually FEEL. It’s almost like a surreal use of language, which creates a feeling in the reader that goes beyond reason.

Robinson’s use of metaphors and similes is like poetry; she has unique ways of describing things. Like on page 53: “…that she smelled dully clean, like chalk, or like a sun-warmed cat.”

The story itself was so interesting and amazing in that Ruthie and Lucille did not have a “normal” life, due to so many sad circumstances, starting with the death of their grandfather, then the older ladies coming to try to raise them, and the suicide of their mother, and finally with their Aunt Sylvie and her strange behavior and lifestyle, which was strange but not strange; it was just the way she was. There was this thread of commonality between the family members, almost like the way mental illness can be common in a family, but this “thing” seemed to be “passed on” among them by their experiences with losing family members. The amazing thing about the story was that the losses of family were never dealt with as grieving, or sorrow. It was never described as such. It was just life.

This is almost summed up for me on pg. 152 in my edition: “To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole.”

Continue reading "Housekeeping" by Marilynne Robinson