[.ca] As for Me and My House (ISBN 0771099975)

Amazon.ca:
In "wind-swept, sun-burned little Horizon," Sinclair Ross sets As for Me and My House and his big, human themes of isolation, alienation and unrealized ambition. Our narrator, Mrs. Bentley, uses a diary to detail life with her husband Philip, the artist who puts aside his painting to become a small-town preacher. "What he is and what he nearly was. The failure, the compromise, the going on." Mrs. Bentley too had aspirations but gave them up to marry Philip. Her writing reveals just how brittle their relationship has become: "For hypocrisy wears hard on a man who at heart really isn't that way. As far back as I can remember, it's always been there, darkening, draining him, but with Horizon now it seems to be gathering for a crisis." Even with disaster looming, the uneventful chronicling of a clergyman and his wife struggling through the Depression in Saskatchewan might sound dull. That is, until the reader realizes how absorbing Mrs. Bentley's ambiguous and layered diary entries can be. Ross leaves it to us to decide whether our narrator is sincere or deceptive, shrewdly aware or deep in denial, as she chronicles her interactions with her husband, the townspeople, and the false fronts which surround them. It's this complexity that makes Mrs. Bentley one of the most engaging characters in Canadian fiction and draws generations of readers back to tiny Horizon, Sask. --Carolyn Leitch

Amazon.ca Canadian Essential:
Largely ignored when it appeared in 1941 (the Governor General's Award that year went to Alan Sullivan's since-forgotten Three Came to Ville Marie), Sinclair Ross's first novel, As for Me and My House, has since become recognized as the great Anglo-Canadian novel of the Depression era. Ross's story of a married woman chafing against the strictures of small-town Prairie society, reminiscent of the masterpiece of another Sinclair--Main Street--gains a layered complexity from the growing unreliability of the narrator's perspective.

An excellent--but not great--Canadian novel:
Whether As For Me and My House can be considered one of the "great Canadian novels" is somewhat questionable, but there is no denying that it is a profound, complex and evocative work of literature. Set during the Great Depression, the story revolves around the domestic life of the Bentleys, who have come to a small, isolated Saskatchewan farm-community of Horizon, where Philip Bentley has taken on role of being the town's new minister. Ministering is something that Philip, in fact has little desire to do, and is instead obsessed with painting, to the point where his wife--through whose perspective the story is told--is neglected. There relationship is essentially broken, but the reasons for this are not simple, and this essentially is the focus of the story. Throughout the novel, Mrs. Bentley--who is never named because the work is written in the form of journal entries--continuously explores their history, their personalities and the effect of their confined lifestyle upon themselves and one another. Over the course of their residence in Horizon she comes to realize that the break-down of their relationship, is not so much the fault of Philip's conduct, as we are first led to believe, but fact that both have allowed themsleves to become victims of circumstance. As For Me and My House is definitely a work worth studying, but like I initially stated, I question whether it can really be considered one of the great Canadian novels.

Candidate for the most boring book ever written:
While I understand the views of other reviewers, and might concede that Ross' treatment is a vivid exploration of the bleakness of the life of the main protagonists, I would also suggest that in this novel, were "eliciting boredom" an Olympic sport, Ross could have bored for his country. Even the part of the book dealing with the husband's extramarital affair was tedious. Anyone with an interest in developing themes of boredom and indifference in their own writing would do well to read this novel.

Canadian Literature at its' best!:
Through the journal entries of Mrs. Bentley, we are given a beautiful and complex novel of great importance in Canadian Literature. As a story of life during the depression, this book perfectly captures the trials of prairie life during this era. As Mrs. Bentley describes events in her journal entries, we are given a chance to not only accept the text at face value, but to read between the lines. Mrs. Bentley tends to say more by what she doesn't write than what she does. All in all, an incredible book and one which everyone should read.

Brilliant:
The tone achieved in this novel is nothing short of brilliant. I found this book to be incredibly compelling and am thankful that I came across it while studying English Literature at college.