HouseKeeping by Marilynne Robinson
The basic jist of this book is that two sisters living in the small town of Fingerbone in the Far West have become accostomed to loss as almost a routine. Coping with deaths is just a fact of their lives. Their lives are more full of ghosts than the living. It’s a somewhat haunting journey in heavy metaphors that carry you like the river that overlooks a train or the train that derails and falls into the watery depths in the beginning of the book. It’s also about drifting and choosing different paths. The sisters are very different from eachother and their separation seems like a loss unlike a death. I don’t want to say more or I’d ruin the ending.
This is a very lyric sort of prose not unlike some of what Milan Kundera has written. It’s best read on a train like the one it so conjures or a drifting boat. It’s also in some ways a subtle journey into sane madness, if that makes any sense. I think what it does best is this delicate balance of waiting and the control of waiting that is left by the living.
(Now playing: Beth Gibbons bittorrent: live 2003 Berlin)