[Housekeeping is] written with infinite care. It could easily be made to sound precious, and at times the fine style does become claustrophobic: 'For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it?' All the same, it is an exceptional, strange, alluring novel….

The family life is finely done, from the grandmother's quiet ordinariness to Sylvie's abstracted love of air and darkness, her sad stories, her hoarding of useless things, her transient's habits. But all this depends on and is interwoven with the setting. The 'sharp watery smell' of the ploughed land, the depths in which the dead lie hidden under the busy water-life at the surface, the 'delicate infrastructure' of ice below the earth, the mysterious geography of mountains, shores, lake and bridge, are beautifully felt.

Gradually a satisfying analogy emerges between the house and the lake, the...