Housekeeping

Definitely Not For the Average Joe!

The work that it took to get through this novel was SERIOUS!!! Another reviewer stated that it's like each sentence is a poem within itself. However, it's not a poem...it's a novel and reading pages after pages of paragraphs full of that style of writing can be too much for the average joe. At times I actually read some of the sentences outloud to my friends and when finished, they looked back at me with shocked faces. The story gets more interesting as it goes along but the amount of work it took to get there isn't worth it. I do not recommend this book to anyone who does not have 2 hours to read one page.

7 out of 9 people found this review helpful.

More Interesting than You'd Think!

I just finished reading one of the only novels I had started and not finished. I was supposed to read it for a Philosophy of Literature course I took during my undergraduate studies and during this failed effort I found this to be the most boring book in the world and couldn't get past the first 20 pages (of only 219 pages!) At the time I confessed to this in class and found that I wasn't alone. However, the interesting thing was that it was all the males in the room that found it so boring and all the females who found it so intriguing. Now, let me immediately say I don't think this has anything to do with the fact that it is titled housekeeping. However, at the time we talked in class a great deal about the difference between a novel with such a feminine perspective and voice and the more numerous novels with a decidedly masculine voice and tone, regardless of the author's gender. I think the most distinctive difference between this novel and most novels I've read is the pace. It is very, very slow and methodical. The cover heralds the praise it received from the New York Times Book Review: 'so precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn't want to miss any pleasure that it might yield.' I would agree. What I mistook in my first stalled out attempt to read this novel as clunky, boring details were in fact the careful groundwork of great storytelling. Nearly every dislike I had for this book was disproved during my second read. This book accomplishes an integral task of a successful novel, which is that the form of the storytelling reflects the world of the characters and causes the reader to experience the character's world in the same way. Years ago I criticized the book for doling out details in a stutter-stop fashion, but as I reread it now I realized that this is exactly how the characters matured and learned about these same things. Another gripe I had initially was of the pace, but this I think in reality just drives home how dull and slow the narrator's childhood and path into adulthood was. The act of housekeeping has so many meanings throughout the text that I don't want to spoil any of them, but I found it to be a useful touchstone as I followed the young sisters through adolescence in a small, boring, little town years ago. Overall, the story is very compelling and chapter after chapter the plight of the women whose lives this novel revolves around delve ever deeper into sadness and loneliness. However, it is in this complete isolation that the protagonist finds some semblance of happiness and peace. I would definitely suggest this book to anyone who has an open mind and enjoys a well-crafted novel.

4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

A reviewer

Having read Gilead prior, I was acquainted with Robinson's prose, immense and intricate and bearing the force of many oceans through the perfect interweaving of words. However, nothing could have prepared me for the impact of this story. As while reading Gilead, there were many moments during Housekeeping when I felt I would collapse under it. Few writers of any era can hold up to a comparison with Robinson's gentle ability to weave everything important into one perfectly crafted sentence and to together weave every perfectly crafted sentence into a tapestry of shimmering beauty and stark sorrow and dark, soothing uncertainty. Housekeeping evokes from the reader's heart and mind the deepest archetypes of love and family and companionship and abandonment of fear and desolation and the beauty beneath them of coming of age and realizing the unique solitude in which we all exist together, yet as separately as water and air. Time and place, physical topography and elemental composition merge to create the spirits of the characters, and ultimately, the inexorable permanence of all life is joined with the knowledge of transience the result is a masterpiece for which no prize, no title, will ever be good enough.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Lovely writing

Robinson's style of writing makes for a slower read, like Jane Austen's books(don't care for). The wording of the story was lovely at times. I found the story a bit slow but it has stayed with me after reading it several months ago.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

flawless but vacuous

This novel was flawlessly written, but unfortunately I mean that in an ambiguous or even a negative way. The author's prose style is impeccable, there is not a sentence out of place, and there are moments of great lyrical beauty, as in the description of the narrator's and her aunt's night spent out by the lake. But the author's storytelling is devoted to a story of emotional emptiness. There is little psychology or analysis of motive here, and while this is probably the author's aim, the novel as a whole falls short of the sum of its parts. Still, it cannot be faulted for anything in particular, and the prose is reasonably good. Many readers will like it, but there will be some people here and there who find it vacuous, too. I am reminded of Thomas Carlyle's comment on Tennyson's Idylls, 'the lollipops are so superlative,' and that holds here as well.

2 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

The most beautiful novel I have ever read

I picked this book up several years ago for a class and never actually finished it that year--after reading it cover to cover last year, I realized that I had only just then emotionally grown into it, before having been incapable of fully recognizing the absolute beauty of 'Housekeeping.' Robinson speaks so directly to the loss and displacement within every human being that I find myself opening it again and again to look at any random page to more fully understand the complexity of human character that she so artfully conveys through her prose. The repetition of loss generationally echoes in the motion of the novel's town, its people, and even the lake which embodies the very inconstancy of life itself. Reading this book was a profoundly deep experience from a non-spritual standpoint, and yet is capable of affecting the spiritual as well, the coincidence of which few books seem to be capable. I reccommend this book to anyone who has ever felt inexplicable loss and the desire to somehow explain or justify it without necessarily applying meaning to its occurrence.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

World Book Night U.S.

This book was given to me free in hopes of sparking an interest in reading of a different genre. I hope to start next week and post soon thereafter. There are 30 books for 2012....check it out!

This is how literary fiction should be done.

Housekeeping may be my favorite book of all time. At least it's right up there with the best of Hemingway and Twain and Irving.

Robinson captures the story of these girls, young and old, with so much perception and detail, it's hard to believe they aren't real people she's known for years and talked to often and deeply. I actually read Housekeeping several years ago, but Ruthie and her cohorts are still engrained in my thoughts. I love books that capture society within the story without venturing out and grabbing it to yank it in here and there so it looks like the author is attempting "place" instead of being in the place. These characters are "in" their place, they are both affected by it and effect it. They are one with it, as we all are and as most authors don't quite portray well enough.

Beyond the normal and abnormal struggles of the lives of young girls turning women being described so beautifully, Robinson has the lovliest prose I've ever read. It's descriptive and yet not overdone. It's elegant but not hard to read. Any literary author would do well to read and reread any of ther novels, starting with this one. This is how literary fiction should be done.

One of the most beautiful books I have ever read.

I first read it years ago, and then recently again. It is a beautifully written book, deep with imagery and character development. It is a treasure.

The film with Christine Lahti does every page justice. You can watch it on iTunes.

Eye Opening--must read.

If you don't want your understanding of the world or of literature to change, I don't advise reading past the first page. However, if you are ready to be shaken, read Robinson--and read her slowly. In this novel, she does things with the English language that have rarely, if ever, been done before. During my encounter with Ruth, I was struck by wisdom and prose so acute that I felt physically ill during parts. Robinson's awareness of what it means to be human, and what it means to be alive, is jolting. I have not read an author with such revolutionary powers of observation (and an ability to translate them to paper) since Woolf.

depressing

beautiful language. story wierd and depressing. wasted my money

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Good Read

I felt the book was very interesting and you really feel for the main characters.

Loved it

It's funny, diverse, very entertaining and hard to put down

I liked it.

This story was ok. I have read better. I had to read it for school, and i found it diffiucult to answer the required questions on this book. On the other hand, it was peaceful and i liked that.

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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