Zandbroz Variety
420 Broadway, Fargo, ND 58102
Store Hours
Monday-Saturday
10 a.m - 6.pm
This is the story of Ruth, who grows up with her sister, Lucille, under the care of first her competent grandmother, then of her two comically fumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the transient sister of her dead mother. The family house is in a small town on a glacial lake in the Far West -- a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Fingerbone Lake, which holds the casualties of the spectacular train derailment that took Ruth's grandfather's life, provides a legend for the town and a haunting legacy for Ruth's family.
This book is about the effort to keep house, to keep anything at all, in a landscape and a community where nothing seems to persist except memory. Sylvie undertakes her domestic responsibilities with the best intentions, but her efforts are sporadic and tentative and finally doomed. Lucille, armed with dress patterns, nail polish, and a group of peers, begins to resist her unconventional upbringing in several touchingly humorous episodes. Ruth, on the other hand, grows closer to Sylvie, and at last the two are drawn back into the world of transiency, abandoning the attempt to maintain any human stronghold against "the brisk and ruinous energies of the world."
Marilynne Robinson's unique gifts as a stylist and a storyteller move Housekeeping beyond the conventions of realism, while rendering in memorable detail with ceremonies through which the life of a household is sustained and the forces of nature by which it is eroded.
Zandbroz Variety
Since 1989
About Us
ZANDBROZ VARIETY
Since 1989
In 1988, Jeff and Greg Danz had a dream. They would open a store that they would want to shop. So they bought an empty turn of the century building in the heart of downtown Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The brothers spent a year restoring the building and developing the concept for what would become Zandbroz Variety. When the doors opened in May of 1989, Zandbroz was a bookstore with an eclectic mix of other inventory, an old fashioned soda fountain and coffee bar. The store was a hit and a couple of years later a second location was opened in Fargo, ND. Zandbroz Variety started in a world before Barnes and Noble, Starbucks and internet shopping were part of the landscape. That of course all changed and so too Zandbroz has evolved and changed –THIRTY years later and we are still here!
Store Hours
Monday-Saturday
10 a.m - 6.pm