Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping

In Marilynne Robinson’s haunting first work, each line is carefully crafted and ice-sharp. Through Ruth’s narration we learn more about the impermanence of things – people, places, home – and watch her struggle to adulthood with the awareness that nothing stays in place. Ruth’s Aunt Sylvie tries to guide her, but Sylvie cannot break the habits of transience: crackers in her pocket, coat always worn inside, shoes under her pillow. Ultimately the home they share welcomes the outdoors – leaves rattle in the corners, birds nest in the cupboards. There is a freedom found here – and this book reveals profound possibilities in a spare world. Robinson’s gift is to expand our ideas about the deepest moorings of our being.

Below we offer some of the feedback from one of our Paris Salons, followed by words from the book itself. It is a magical read.

“I have been meditating for years to loosen those boundaries we mentioned last night between real and imagined, (maybe to transubstantiate ????) and this was the first time all of it seemed to come up in a book.  I so appreciated the flow and the resonance of our discussion, that we all knew what we were talking about and had yet another point of view on the same scene.”

“What a rollercoaster ride! Sometimes I felt as if Robinson took us so far under (or upside down) that we wouldn’t be able to come up for air. But Toby was there with her rubber ducks and rescue buoys.”

“First a thousand thanks for the reading of that extraordinary book and for such a deep, wide ranging and enriching discussion on Saturday! I did want us read out aloud the following, which I felt was one of the most extraordinary  – in every sense of the word – and highly significant passages in the book. But somehow there was so much being said there didn’t seem to be time to put this forward!” 

From Chapter 4 of Housekeeping (page 73, Faber edition), during the scene of the flood of Fingerbone:

“During those days Fingerbone was strangely transformed. If one should be shown odd fragments arranged on a silver tray and be told, ’That is a splinter from the True Cross, and that is a nail paring dropped by Barabbas, and that is a bit of lint from under the bed where Pilate’s wife dreamed her dream,’ the very ordinariness of the things would recommend them. Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy. So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves, and then drop them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on. So Fingerbone, or such relics of it as showed above the mirroring waters, seemed fragments of the quotidian held up to our wondering attention, offered somehow as proof of their own significance.”

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

SALON DETAILS:

• Facilitated by Toby Brothers 
• Four-meeting virtual study
• Thursday 7, 14, 28 September and 12 October 2023, 5.00-7.00 pm (UK time)
• Cost £130 (includes notes and critical resources)
• Recommended edition: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, Faber & Faber, ISBN-13 : ‎ 978-0571230082