*Gilead
Gilead -Marilynne Robinson
Gilead is like a circus tent that never opens its flaps. To enjoy the show you have to join the troupe. Robinson has eased her way into a language that doesn’t succeed in any translation or abridgement. You must join her circus, you must know how to juggle, or swallow fire, or funambulate to enter into this novel. You must move to the town of Gilead to understand what she is saying. You must listen to her like a mother.
Her best passages are not quotable.
To quote from this novel is to conjure.
She has built a house without a foundation and the result is more solid and skyscraping than any series of I-beams or cement crews could muster.
The tendentious motives of many great writers is to work within a book so that they may succeed in erupting out of the book, into the “real” world. The great writers want to achieve pertinence outside of their books. They want to matter, to tell us something about us. Robinson does not do that. This novel is self-contained. It matters only to itself, yet still resonates of the most pointed parable. Only in the middle, when Robinson shifts to blatant (though sensitive) theology, are we reminded that she falters, and then, and sadly, are there a few moments of redundancy, but so simple, and dry, they remind me more of annoyingly hot summer days than bad fiction.
There is a spark in Iowa.
Gilead is like a circus tent that never opens its flaps. To enjoy the show you have to join the troupe. Robinson has eased her way into a language that doesn’t succeed in any translation or abridgement. You must join her circus, you must know how to juggle, or swallow fire, or funambulate to enter into this novel. You must move to the town of Gilead to understand what she is saying. You must listen to her like a mother.
Her best passages are not quotable.
To quote from this novel is to conjure.
She has built a house without a foundation and the result is more solid and skyscraping than any series of I-beams or cement crews could muster.
The tendentious motives of many great writers is to work within a book so that they may succeed in erupting out of the book, into the “real” world. The great writers want to achieve pertinence outside of their books. They want to matter, to tell us something about us. Robinson does not do that. This novel is self-contained. It matters only to itself, yet still resonates of the most pointed parable. Only in the middle, when Robinson shifts to blatant (though sensitive) theology, are we reminded that she falters, and then, and sadly, are there a few moments of redundancy, but so simple, and dry, they remind me more of annoyingly hot summer days than bad fiction.
There is a spark in Iowa.
posted by JohnWashington at 2:22 PM
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