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Title details for Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson - Available

Housekeeping

A Novel

by Marilynne Robinson
Becket Royce
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 1 copy available

An unabridged audio edition of Marilynne Robinson's classic work Housekeeping, on the 25th anniversary of its first publication.
Winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award
A modern classic, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother.
The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere."
Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transcience.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    May 18, 2006

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781593978419
      • File size: 159364 KB
      • Duration: 05:32:00

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Considered a modern classic, Robinson's novel enjoys a sustained popularity. The story of Ruth and her sister, Lucille, HOUSEKEEPING speaks eloquently of displacement, loss, and longing. Becket Royce has a friendly, inviting voice well-suited to Ruth's long and thoughtful narrations of the story, though she's equally good at creating the voices of Sylvie and Lucille, as well as incidental characters. Robinson's use of language is often challenging and always beautiful; some sentences brim with meaning and metaphoric potential. As an audio production, her prose can challenge listeners' ability to absorb it all, occasionally sending them to the pause button. But the rewards of listening slowly or re-reading provocative passages are worth it. J.C.G. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 3, 2005
      Their lives spun off the tilting world like thread off a spindle," says Ruthie, the novel's narrator. The same may be said of Becket Royce's subtle, low-keyed reading. The interwoven themes of loss and love, longing and loneliness—"the wanting never subsided"—require a cool, almost impersonal touch. Royce narrates natural and manmade catastrophe and ruin as the author offers them: with a sort of watery vagueness engulfing extraordinary events. Occasionally this leads Royce to sound sleepy or to glide over humor. But she expresses Ruthie's story without any irksome effort to sound childlike, and she avoids the pitfall of dramatizing other characters, such as the awkward sheriff, the whispery insubstantiality of Aunt Sylvie or the ladies bearing casseroles to lure Ruthie away from Aunt Sylvie and into their concept of normality. Originally published in 1980 and filmed in 1987, Housekeeping
      is finally on audio because of Robinson's new Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Gilead
      . The novel holds up remarkably and painfully well, and the language remains searching and sonorous. Anatole Broyard wrote back then: "Here is a first novel that sounds as if the author has been treasuring it up all her life...." And because the author's rhythms, images and diction are so original and dense, this audio is a treasure for listeners who have or haven't read the book. Based on the Picador paperback.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Narrator Therese Plummer tackles this contemporary classic with a shrewd approach and a piercing tone. Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, are orphaned and raised, first, by their loving grandmother, then, by two bungling, lovable aunts, and, ultimately, by Sylvie, the eccentric and distant sister of their late mother. Plummer's delivery sparkles during dialogue between the sisters, which is characterized by vitality and tenderness. Fingerbone, the mysterious, out-of-the-way town on a glacial lake in the West, is also a fully realized presence, with its extreme weather and a vast landscape captured in Plummer's performance. Ruth and Lucille's struggle to grow from girls to women reveals the costs of loss and survival. Plummer's talented performance is both illuminating and poignant. R.O. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 1, 2003
      A reissue of the contemporary feminist classic.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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