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64
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
60/100Critics
67/100Scholars
Author:
Marilynne Robinson
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date:
March 12, 2024
Marilynne Robinson presents an interpretation of the first book of the Bible.
What The Reviewers Say
A writer’s book, not a scholar’s; it has no footnotes. Its power lies in the particular reading it gives us of one of the world’s foundational texts.
This is the stuff of sermons—the kind I’d willingly sit through. But Robinson is also up to something that should interest her secular readers. She’s working out a poetics. In her deft hands, Genesis becomes a precursor to the novel—the domestic novel, as it happens, which is the kind she writes. Perhaps I’m making her sound self-glorifying. She’s not.
On the face of it, Robinson should be an ideal reader of Genesis.
Her take on the ultimate sacred text in her tradition, the origin of it all, is fervent and expansive yet also remarkably unyielding, even dogmatic.
