Gilead

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Gilead

Marilynne Robinson

Literature

Jul 31, 2018

Marilynne Robinson writes slow novels. Her first, the highly acclaimed Housekeeping, was published in 1981; Gilead, her second, did not appear until nearly a quarter century later. But the slowness that characterizes her fiction is not of the calendar but on the page: It is so carefully composed, in precise language resplendent with illuminations of beauty, impermanence, domesticity, happiness, and spiritual apprehension, that one can imaginatively inhabit paragraphs for hours and never feel the weight of time. In its ruminative examination of a family’s disappearing past and an old man’s diminishing future, Gilead unfolds with the inexorable, quiet majesty of daybreak, filled with the ever-present mysteries of light and grace and goodness.

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Miceal O Coileain

Dec 4, 2018

One of the most beautiful and subtle studies of a small relationship you can ever read ... the first of a trilogy that tells the same ambiguous story from three different perspectives. A compelling and intellectual writer making careful use of words to convey the beauty of the small life.

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