Cornflower Book Group - Housekeeping

    In trying to capture the mood of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping a musical analogy came to mind - the spirit of the book, the feel of it, is much like that of Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel, I felt. They share a stillness, a quietness, and the music's repetitive, measured progression is similar to that of the book.

    This is a novel whose elegant simplicity hides a complex underpinning of ideas and construction. From the opening lines, which reveal the bones of what is to come, to the ending with its sad inevitability, this is such a refined piece of work. I was very taken with the way in which the running thread of housekeeping is used throughout, as a metaphor for holding the family together and as a device for character description, so there's the irony of the use of a copy of Good Housekeeping to beat out the flames when the birthday cake candle sets fire to the curtain (which will never be replaced), Sylvie's eccentricity shown in her hoarding of tin cans and the like: "she considered accumulation to be the essence of housekeeping", the humorous side to the deluge: "And then the library was flooded to a depth of three shelves, creating vast gaps in the Dewey decimal system. The losses in hooked and braided rugs and needlepoint footstools will never be reckoned"; and when Ruth and Sylvie are finally homeless, "now truly we were cast out to wander, and there was an end to housekeeping".

    I loved the book's language - at times almost biblical, as in that last quotation; its theme of water and flow and transience, which gives an elemental depth and scope for writing of beauty and delicacy, and the way in which this wistful, melancholy story about loneliness and self-contained aloneness moves steadily to its conclusion.

    After this impressive introduction to Marilynne Robinson's work I am greatly looking forward to going on to read Gilead and Home, but what did you think of Housekeeping?