Summer tales for the soul

[Photo provided to China Daily]

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

US writer Marilynne Robinson published her first novel Housekeeping almost four decades ago, but the Chinese version did not arrive until recently.

Her second novel, Gilead, which won her the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, had already been published in Chinese.

Housekeeping is not about housekeeping per se. It is about the transience of life, love, friendship and family. The novel involves a family living in a remote Idaho town called Fingerbone.

The town boasts a huge, picturesque lake, with a bridge for trains passing through.

A girl named Ruth and her sister Lucille live together with their grandmother Sylvia Foster, whose husband Edmund died in a train accident. He plunged into the lake with the train and was never found. Sylvia's three, quiet daughters had all left the town within a year.

Sylvia's second daughter, Helen, eloped with a man who later left her. Helen had to look after her own daughters, Ruth and Lucille, on her own. At the suggestion of a friend, Helen drove her two girls to visit Sylvia, but left them at their grandmother's house before she killed herself by driving into the lake.

Sylvia dies several years later and her two sisters-in-law arrive to look after the two girls. But they also move away after a cold winter, leaving the girls with Sylvia's youngest daughter, Sylvie. Ruth and Lucille worry that Sylvie, a drifter, might leave them at any time, since she always sleeps with her clothes and shoes on.

In the end, Lucille moves out and Ruth joins Sylvie to drift around the world.

The novel was shortlisted for the Pulitzer for fiction and listed as one of the best 100 English novels by both The Guardian and The Times newspapers.

The New York Times listed it as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, saying that Robinson "knocks off the false elevation, the pretentiousness of our current fiction. Though her ambition is tall, she remains down-to-earth, where the best novels happen".