First Impressions

What shocked me the most about the movie was the use of color. I originally anticipated dark, gloomy scenery and setting, yet in the movie everything is a bit more vibrant. The house was decorated and painted in lighter shades and the town did not have as melancholy of a tone as I got from the book. For some reason I expected an almost black and white film or very little color at all. While the setting, clothing, and furniture are not loud or prominent in any way, I still feel like the whole nature of Fingerbone was not nearly as dark as I think it should have been. In general the movie feels a lot warmer than the book. When I read the novel it felt devoid of any true happy feeling, passion, and pleasure. Yet the characters in the movie are kind of lively. Especially Sylvie. Her bright demeanor brings more comfort to Ruthie and Lucille’s life whereas in the book she brought coldness with her instead. 


The movie trailer portrays my point well and depicts the liveliness that I feel the novel didn't have. You can access it here: http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi3953983769/

Parting Ways

           Alex and I were inseparable from the day that we met. Living just around the corner from me, we had play-dates about every day. I would jog over to her house or her to mine. We were born into our relationship. Our parents became friends when my older sister, Amanda, and Alex’s older brother, Taylor, started hanging out. Together, Alex and I created a fantasy world of imagination and wonder. She understood my creative energy, even as a young child. We wrote plays, rolled in the grass, played dress up, house, Barbie’s, and laughed till our sides hurt.

When it came to school though, we were complete strangers. Her shy personality made making friends and keeping up socially very difficult. I, on the other hand, found it quite natural. Gradually we moved into distinctive groups of girls, and away from one another while in school. However, this did not have a huge impact on our close relationship outside of class. Instead of getting upset, we kind of accepted this divergence, not mad or upset that we made other friends. We still shared so much, and our past sealed our bond through this separation. On the weekends, we would eat lunch at each other’s house and horse around just like the old days.

It wasn’t until 5^th grade that everything really began to change. I vividly remember the day that she told me she was going to transfer to a private school in the neighboring district. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. Alex always struggled in school, needing more personal attention and a slower pace. She never seemed too involved in her group friends, always a bit disconnected from the others. Nothing really kept her at the school anymore. We took different courses, hardly saw one another during the school day, and never played together during recess or lunch. Yet I was shocked. Looking back I remember being hurt. It was not so much that I would no longer share a school with her any more, but more so that I had a weird sense everything was changing.

I was right. Slowly, as she settled into her new school life, we began to see one another less and less. Every time we were supposed to meet up, one of us would cancel because of a sudden conflict. Our lives were traveling down individual paths that no longer connected along the way. Once in a while we would chat on the phone, but even that seemed awkward and foreign, like speaking to someone from a completely different planet. While it hurt us both, we let it happen. It was inevitable.

Response to Ending of Housekeeping

        When I read the end of Housekeeping, I felt as if everything finally settled in its place with all of the pieces falling in line.  Throughout the entire book Ruth narrated with a sense of tension and dismay. However, in the final few chapters, her narrating feels completely different. There is a freedom and honesty to it, versus the rest of the story where conflict and suppression dominate the mood. The fact that a freedom and comfort were established for me in the ending of the book is actually kind of ironic because in the end, everything kind of goes awry. Yet maybe that is the reason for the freedom. Near the end, Ruth began to split from Lucille and found herself resonating more and more with Sylvie, the transient. She remains stuck in between Lucille’s reality and Sylvie’s dream world until Lucille leaves them. After that, she finally escapes and fully submits herself to Sylvie’s ways. In the very last chapters, Sylvie and Ruth completely let go and set the house on fire. This seems crazy and terrifying and would usually mean that the characters reached a point of insanity. For Sylvie and Ruth though, it brings closure and comfort. I loved this concept and felt Robinson fully concluded the book, and left the reader satisfied.

         In my opinion, everything clicked in the last few pages. Ruth suddenly comes out and says, “All this is fact. Fact explains nothing.” She realizes that for her, reality is not necessarily what is real for her. For everyone else, the traditional lifestyle fits and works, but for Ruth and Sylvie their life is steady when they are transient. She refers to herself and Sylvie as being, “not travelers.” To anyone else, they were travellers who had no home, and just spent their life wandering with no constant. However, Ruth and Sylvie found constancy and comfort in travelling. For them, it wasn’t even travelling. In their eyes they were living their life. This is what they were supposed to do. The concept was difficult to wrap my mind around at first, but I feel that I have better understanding now. I comprehend that all of the negatives at the end show what is really happening. It is as if what isn’t going on says more about reality than what is. Ruth dug past the surface of life and really found a new approach. I appreciated this, and respected her and Sylvie because they were true to themselves. They easily could have fallen into tradition and lived their lives in agony. But they broke free from what the rest of their relatives never could.