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Loading... Home: A Novel (original 2008; edition 2009)by Marilynne Robinson
Work InformationHome by Marilynne Robinson (2008)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. A very well written book that many would rate a five star. The in depth character study of family, faith, and a lost soul of a prodigal son that wants to come home. Excellent writing that I can identify. Still... I was lost at times with the observations and conversations of the characters. Nothing really grasped me with a true interest, so I was left with wanting to finish and move on to the next book. More three stars for me personally, so I leave it as an orphan in between at four stars. After finishing the book I read the reviews in the frontpiece which were so elegantly perceptive that I am certain I can't contribute any deeper analysis. I have been a Robinson fan since reading Housekeeping a very long time ago. Not much happened in that book but it was like reading poetry. The same here. Not much happens, the background is the day to day life of a brother and sister taking care of their failing father over a few weeks, but the prose just blew me away: "The words were bright as a prick of blood" (p320)"...the fierce breath of his grief" (p 298). While I don't relate to the themes and musings on the Bible and Protestantism in this pastor's family, it was nonetheless interesting. It is a sad book, an alternative title could have been 'The Stranger' for Jack always felt apart in his family and beyond. One thing is certain I will read Gilead after this. Despite the sadness a thought proviking and moving experience, thank you M.R. A deeply spiritual, sensitive and touching story, told gently but with breathtaking command. The mystical connection between the secret and the sacred, the predestined and the deserved, the possibility that God can use a man’s children to punish him for his sins, and so much more. Robinson’s work occupies a space of its own.
The glories of Gilead - and of Housekeeping, for that matter - have not quite found their way into Home. One reason for this may be Robinson's decision to write in the third person for the first time, thus suppressing one of her great gifts, which is the mix of wryness, wisdom and self-deprecation with which she infused her first two narrators' voices. But what remains is Gilead's sense of how character, however unkindly, determines one's fate, which in Home arrives silently but powerfully, like a glacier leaving a raw gash in the landscape. Robinson's output may also be glacial, but the force her words leave in her wake is unmistakable. These ugly facts [of small-town racism] complicate the beauty of “Home,” but the way Robinson embeds them in the novel is part of what makes it so beautiful. It is a book unsparing in its acknowledgment of sin and unstinting in its belief in the possibility of grace. It is at once hard and forgiving, bitter and joyful, fanatical and serene. It is a wild, eccentric, radical work of literature that grows out of the broadest, most fertile, most familiar native literary tradition. What a strange old book it is. The Reverend Boughton, is in decline. Glory, the youngest of his eight children, has come home to care for him, and both are grateful and alarmed when Jack, the prodigal son, reappears after an excruciating 20-year absence. Once a charming scoundrel, Jack is now riddled with regrets and despair. As she cares for two broken men struggling toward reconciliation and redemption, Glory is a paragon of patience, a virtue readers also must cultivate as Robinson follows an austere narrative regime, confining the reader to the day-by-day present and the Boughton home. Household chores are infused with metaphysical implications, while what is not said carries more weight than what is spoken. Robinson wrestles with moral dilemmas ordinary and catastrophic, and ponders the mystery of why human beings never feel wholly at home on earth. This is a rigorous, sometimes claustrophobic, yet powerfully spiritual novel of anguish and prayer, wisdom and beauty, penance and hope. Belongs to SeriesGilead (2) Is contained inAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack--the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years--comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain. No library descriptions found. |
LibraryThing Early Reviewers AlumMarilynne Robinson's book Home was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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I enjoyed this book as much as I enjoyed Gilead and I've read Housekeeping. I want to read Lila and Jack. I find the stories good because they're about family not that I think the authors Christian values are perfect because I don't think they are but I also think that would make for good discussions.
This book won the Orange Prize of what is now the Women's Prize. 2009 ( )