At the moment, she is planning another volume in her Ames/Gilead sequence. Three more from Marilynne Robinson One week after Ruth tells the story of her family, Fingerbone is overwhelmed by a great flood. The waters eventually reach the Fisher house. For a while, everyone has to take shelter on the second floor of the house. As the relatives remain together in one relatively small place, conflicts begin to occur. However, the most extraordinary thing happens when Sylvie tells a story about a girl whose mother was taken by the court. Naturally, the girls are frightened by the possibility of losing Sylvie. One of the days, Lucille’s rebellion reaches its peak, and she moves to her Home Economics teacher (Miss Royce). The woman is then so moved by the girl’s trouble that she proceeds with her adoption. Needless to say, Ruth does not take it lightly. After all, the only person that was there for her is not with her anymore. After some time, Lucille tells Ruth that she does not need to stay with Sylvie, but Ruth would hear none of it. She values the integrity of the family, saying that “Families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them on mild evenings” (Robinson 186). Lily and Nona Foster – Sylvia Foster's sisters-in-law (i.e., Edmund's sisters), who moved from the Midwest to Spokane, to be closer to their brother. After Sylvia's death, they temporarily move from Spokane to Fingerbone to take care of Ruthie and Lucille. When this becomes too difficult, they summon Sylvie.

If you were the child-welfare officer or sheriff, what would you have done with Ruthie and Lucille? How would you defend your decision? She seemed to dislike the disequilibrium of counterpoising a roomful of light against a worldful of darkness. In 2003, Guardian Unlimited named Housekeeping one of the 100 greatest novels of all time, [1] describing the book as "Haunting, poetic story, drowned in water and light, about three generations of women". Time magazine also included the novel in its Time 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. [2] Plot [ edit ] There are rare films that I like to watch over and over again which has happened increasingly less as time goes on. Of those, three films by Bill Forsyth are prime examples that combine high quality with unmatched enjoyment. They are "Gregory's Girl,""Local Hero" and "Houskeeping" which form an informal trilogy containing characters who feel out of place.DS: Is there significance to the name "Fingerbone"? There is one reference in the novel to a Native-American tribe called the Fingerbone tribe.

The girls begin to walk around the lake just down the path near their house. They play truants for a whole week until they see that Sylvie is talking to some homeless people camping near the lake. The girls meet Sylvie and tell her that they have not been to school for a week, and this is taken note of without any particular interest. Lucille and Ruth then go to school, but they do not have any notes that would explain their absence. However, the girls find out that nobody even noticed that they were absent. Lucille has since abandoned Sylvie and Ruthie to live a "normal" life in town while the other two women ruminate about sorrow: Perhaps this book is too depressing given the current political climate, but perhaps it also explains a mindset of the small towns of the red states that are so terrified of change and their vengeful god that they will cling to anything to maintain a semblance of normalcy- because the alternative of rootlessness represented by Sylvie and Ruthie scares them even more. Mother Country” also helped determine the future of Robinson’s fiction. After the Sellafield lawsuit, she sought solace in historical examples of people whose moral clarity was disregarded by their contemporaries. She read about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany, then turned her attention to the life and work of abolitionists in the United States. The year after “Mother Country” was published, Robinson accepted the job in Iowa, and, once in the Midwest, began exploring a constellation of colleges those abolitionists had built, among them Grinnell, Oberlin, Carleton, and Knox. Many of these institutions were integrated by race or gender or both—an egalitarianism so radical that a century later it took federal courts and the National Guard to enforce it elsewhere—and Robinson wondered what had happened to the visionary impulses behind them. The Second Great Awakening began as a broad movement for social and moral reform and spread across the entire frontier, only to be snuffed out after a single generation and misremembered today as nothing but an outburst of cultish religious enthusiasm.The novel treats the subject of housekeeping, not only in the domestic sense of cleaning, but in the larger sense of keeping a spiritual home for one's self and family in the face of loss, for the girls experience a series of abandonments as they come of age. Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010) ISBN 9780300171471, OCLC 742007978 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. Robinson’s most recent essay, published in The New York Review of Books in June, was titled “What Kind of Country Do We Want?” The title of her most recent collection is “What Are We Doing Here?” For someone not inclined to ask questions, those sharp queries reflect an urgency that Robinson feels more and more. “I am too old to mince words,” she writes in the preface to the book; the author is now the same age John Ames was when he began writing a letter to his son. Robinson fainted last fall in church, but the cause turned out to be a common thyroid condition, easily treated. “Nothing to worry about,” she said, one evening this summer, in the darkening silence at her house in Saratoga Springs. For all her concerns about the world, Robinson is seldom concerned about herself. “I am not an anxious person,” she says, “about death or anything else.”

Robinson based elements of the novel on her own upbringing in Sandpoint, Idaho, including the setting of Fingerbone—an isolated place “chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere.” Its main feature is the lake, which is also the source of the family’s loss—it was into these waters that Ruth and Lucille’s mother sailed in her neighbor’s car and also where their grandfather, decades earlier, plunged to his death in an extraordinary train derailment.Robinson was the keynote speaker for the 75th anniversary celebration of the Iowa Writers' Workshop in June 2011, and she gave the 2012 Annual Buechner Lecture at The Buechner Institute at King University. On February 18, 2013, she was the speaker at the Easter Convocation of the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Literature honoris causa. In 2012, Brown University awarded Robinson the degree of Doctor of Literature honoris causa. [20] The College of the Holy Cross, Notre Dame, Amherst College, Skidmore College, the University of Oxford, and Yale University have also awarded Robinson honorary degrees. She has been elected a fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford. [21] Commendations [ edit ] 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. In the beginning of Chapter 6, Ruthie muses, "Perhaps we all awaited a resurrection." What does she mean by this, and how does this suggest a theme of the novel?

In Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, the natural world is a character in and of itself. From the beautiful but dangerous lake at the center of Fingerbone to the rare and transformative experiences Ruth and Lucille have during their various explorations of the Idaho wilds, nature plays a pivotal role in the text and serves as a kind of litmus test in Ruth and Lucille’s attempts to discover what kind of women they want to be. Though Robinson frames nature as an intimidating and occasionally dangerous force, she ultimately argues that nature has the power not just to destroy but to remake, refract, and in a way christen those who encounter it with an open heart and mind. As a modern classic, Housekeeping can bear any weight of interpretation. Like Fingerbone’s lake water, it has become a mirror in which generations of new readers can find themselves, as if for the first time. A note on the text Molly Foster – the oldest of the three Foster sisters, who leaves Fingerbone to do missionary work as a bookkeeper in "Honan Province" in China. 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”.

Marilynne Robinson's first novel Housekeeping were it a piece of music, would ressemble Sibelius' Violin Sonata in D Minor - slow and foreboding, full of winter's solitude and loneliness. The setting, Fingerbone (most likely in Idaho) is quite reminiscent of Finland actually. There is the small town surrounded by snow-covered mountains with a huge lake not far from which live Ruthie, the narrator and her sister Lucille. They have been surrounded by death and loss: their grandfather died during a railroad accident on the rail bridge across the lake (representing a way out of the life in Fishbone - death or escape), their mother committed suicide by driving herself in a borrowed car off a cliff into the lake, their father walked off never to be heard from again and neither girl had memories of him, and their grandmother dies clutching at life in her sleep. 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…” The flood that invades the city adds up to this feeling of loneliness that both Ruth and Lucille are already experiencing. In the world of Housekeeping, this flood is not just an ordinary one. Rather, it is a metaphor for the forces that prevent the girls from becoming one with the society and their relatives. It becomes progressively hard to cope with a lonely existence that the girls are succumbed to, and both girls find their own ways to deal with this problem. Marilynne Robinson". Grawemeyer.org. Archived from the original on 2014-04-04 . Retrieved 2015-10-29.