Gilead
Gilead takes place in 1956 in the small town of Gilead, Iowa. The hero is an aging minister who knows that he will probably die soon. He has a young wife and child whom he loves with the incredulity that such a blessing should come to him at this stage of his life.The hero is an aging minister who knows that he will probably die soon. He has a young wife and child whom he loves with the incredulity that such a blessing should come to him at this stage of his life.
Gilead is written in beautiful prose; not a word is wasted. Robinson's lucid writing makes the anxieties and passions of an old man consequential to the reader.
Robinson teaches at the prestigious Writers' Workshop University of Iowa.
Gilead won the 2005 National Book Critics Award for fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Home, by Marilynne Robinson.
Home tells the story of an old man and two of his children who have escaped bad situations by returning to their childhood home. Gloria, a former high school teacher, is reserved and devout. Bit by bit, she shares the story of why she had to run back home. Jack is the prodigal son who has neither written, telephoned, or visited his father for twenty years. His father finds it difficult to hide the fact that in spite of his badness, or maybe because of it, Jack is his favorite child.
In talking about the 6 children in the family, except for Jack, Gloria thinks
"They were attentive to their father all those years later, in part because they were mindful of his sorrow. And they were very kind to one another, and jovial, and fond of recalling good times and looking through old photographs so that their father would laugh and say, 'Yes, yes, you were quite a handful.' All this might have been truer because of bad conscience, or, if not that, of a grief that felt like guilt. Her good, kind, and jovial siblings were good, kind, and jovial consciously and visibly. Even as children they had been good in fact, but also in order to be seen as good. There was something disturbingly like hypocrisy about it all, thought it was meant only to compensate for Jack, who was so conspicuously not good as to cast a shadow over their household
This family group elucidates universal themes of the ties between people. In spite of its small scope, the reader wants to contemplate every word to appreciate the austere beauty of the prose.
Comments