Munro, Alice "Runaway"

2004

Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read



A brilliant collection of very interesting short stories that grip you from the first page. However, and it is a big however, I am not a big fan of short stories and this has shown me again why not. I love long novels, books that slowly move into the story, that give you enough background information so that you can get to know the characters and live with them for a while. Short stories just don't do that. I had to go back to the titles when I finished the book to see what they were about. I hadn't forgotten about Juliet but that was mainly because three stories focused on her ("Chance", "Soon" and "Silence")

But I couldn't remember Carla from "Runaway" as I hadn't really felt much about her, felt for her at all, I still have no idea why she had run away.  "Passion", again, I couldn't find a connection with the characters, not enough time to get to know them "Trespasses" was so weird, even during the story I didn't find a connection, almost like in "Runaway" and "Powers" seemed a haphazard short story of many short stories. Not my thing.

"Tricks" was probably my favourite, simply because it had a great twist at the end, because I could relate to the heroine, Robin, could truly feel the pain and longing with her. As to the rest, the same as with many short stories, they will forever remain acquaintances, never become friends.

I would love to read a novel by Alice Munro, one that has at least 500 pages. I'm sure it would be a great one! And I already said that about her novel "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" that all her stories would have enough background to write a large one.

Titles of the short stories:
Runaway
Chance
Soon
Silence
Passion
Trespasses
Tricks
Powers

From the back cover:

"The matchless Munro makes art out of everyday lives in this dazzling new collection. Here are men and women of wildly different times and circumstances, their lives made vividly palpable by the nuance and empathy of Munro's writing. Runaway is about the power and betrayals of love, about lost children, lost chances. There is pain and desolation beneath the surface, like a needle in the heart, which makes these stories more powerful and compelling than anything she has written."

Alice Munro received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 for being the "master of the contemporary short story".

Alice Munro received the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 for her lifetime body of work.


Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.  

Original Post on "Let's Read".

Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You by Alice Munro

Alice Munro received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Long awaited by some critics. She got the Prize for being "master of the contemporary short story". Many of the Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature feels like a heavy read and not so accessible. However, lately, I have read a couple of books by Laureates that has been really outstanding. I am thinking of Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann and L'Herbe des nuits (The Black Notebook) by Patrick Modiano.  I can add another name to the list; Alice Munro

One of her books has been on my shelves for some time, and, finally, I got around to read it. Alice Munro writes short stories, which is not really my cup of tea, although I read them from time to time. This is a time when it was really worth it.

From the back of the cover the Observer notes: "Read not more than one of her stories a day, and allow them to work their spell: they are made to last". I can agree to that, although I read half the book before I left for holiday and half of it when I came back. Her stories are about life, often middle aged people or older people. They all have something to tell about life. Inner thoughts, the world changing around them, problems to keep up or events from the past still lingering on their minds and affecting their whole life.

This is the first lines of a story called "Walking on Water". One of my favourites.

"This was a part of town where a lot of old people still lived, though many had moved to high-rises across the park. Mr Lougheed had a number of friends, or perhaps it would be better to say acquaintances, whom he met every day or so on the way downtown, at the bus stop, or on the walks overlooking the sea. Occasionally he played cards with them in their rooms or apartments. He belonged to a lawn-bowling club and to a club which brought in travel films and showed them, in a downtown hall, during the winter. He had joined these clubs not out of a real desire to be sociable but as a precaution against his natural tendencies, which might lead him, he thought, into becoming a sort of hermit."

The stories are engaging, real and the characters she creates on only a few pages are incredible. You are right into them from the first line of each story. The manage to engage you and make you think about life, what it is and how we live it. Worth reading and reflecting. These stories are some of her earlier ones and was published in 1974 for the first time. I am sure this is not the last time I read Alice Munro, and it would be interesting to read some of her later stories.

Dear Life by Alice Munro

Reviewed by Edith LaGraziana

In my opinion it is a necessary characteristic of good fiction that it deals with life and explores human nature in its many facets instead of simply recounting a series of events. To look deep into the souls of their heroes and heroines some writers fill huge tomes, while others need just a few pages to show the emotional ups and downs of a protagonist struggling with the vicissitudes of life. The book that I chose for today’s review is a good example for a short story collection bursting with characters who feel so human and real that it wouldn’t be much of a surprise to meet them in flesh and blood someday although only a limited part of their self is actually revealed. The focus of Dear Life by Alice Munro is on moments in life that have a lasting impact for one reason or another. 

Alice Munro, maiden name Alice Ann Laidlaw, was  born in Wingham, Ontario, Canada, in July 1931. After high school a two-year scholarship allowed her to study at the University of Western Ontario majoring in journalism, later English. In 1950 her first short story appeared in the university’s undergraduate literary magazine, but although she continued writing and publishing stories the following eighteen years were dedicated above all to the family and as from 1963 to her husband’s bookshop in Victoria, British Columbia. Only in 1968 the author’s first short story collection titled Dance of the Happy Shades came out and won the Governor’s General Award right away. Heaps of individual short stories printed in important literary journals and thirteen original collections, all of them highly successful, followed until 2013 when Alice Munro received the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her mastery as a short story writer”. The most notable of her works probably are Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Who Do You Think You Are? (1978; published under the title The Beggar Maid outside Canada), Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001; also reprinted as Away From Her), The View from Castle Rock (2006), and Dear Life (2012). Alice Munro lives in Clinton, Ontario, Canada.

The fourteen stories of Dear Life show a kaleidoscope of ordinary women, men and children as they peopled small town neighbourhoods in Canada, above all around Lake Huron up to Toronto, between the years of World War II and the 2010s. They all deal best they can with the great themes of life, namely love, sex, illness, old age and death. There are the detached ones like the ex-soldier in Train who has just returned from overseas after World War II and lets himself drift through life avoiding to tie himself down, or the harelipped accountant of Pride who rather sells his house than to allow his sisterly friend to move in with him when they are getting old. Others like the poetry-writing house-wife and mother Greta in To Reach Japan and the teacher Mary just out of training college in Amundsen unexpectedly experience what sexual liberation means, while the narrator’s Aunt Dawn in Haven gets tired of putting her husband’s needs and happiness first after years of marriage. The protagonists of Leaving Maverley and Gravel have to come to terms with the actual loss of loved ones, whereas the seventy-one-year old narrator of Dolly just imagines that her eighty-three-year old partner could leave her for the flame of his youth whom fate has blown into their house as a door-to-door seller of cosmetics. Wealthy Corrie and her married lover, on the other hand, find that the death of the woman who blackmailed them for decades doesn’t change anything between them. In the Sight of the Lake is the story of an elderly woman with a seemingly clear mind who in fact turns out to be drifting in her memory because she suffers from dementia, maybe Alzheimer’s Disease. And in the grand Finale comprising The Eye, Night, Voices, and the title-giving story Dear Life the author herself makes an appearance sharing some childhood memories with her readers.

As the title of Dear Life suggests, the underlying theme of this short story collection is nothing more and nothing less than everyday life as it oscillates between joy and disappointment, happiness and grief, birth and death. And it is about the choices that people make all the time, be it consciously or instinctively. Several stories also show how the living conditions of women and their role models have changed since the end of World War II when the author herself was coming of age and how growing old inevitably affects our relations as well as our ways of life. The style which Alice Munro employs to tell her stories is pleasantly modest and unpretentious for the work of a contemporary writer, moreover a very popular one who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Their tone is quiet, gentle and to a certain degree contemplative, no matter if they are written in first or third person, no matter if they are fictitious or overtly autobiographical like the final four. Descriptions of scenery are vivid and rich in images to the point of being poetic although the author’s language remains simple and concise even in such passages. The stories are easy to read, but they certainly are much deeper than they may seem to a superficial reader.

I enjoyed all stories of Dear Life by Alice Munro very much although it is true that some of them are rather sad or even depressing. Reading the book I often felt like listening to a grandmother from the old times talking melancholically about the long life that she has already lived. According to the author, only the final four stories are in fact autobiographical, and yet, all of them have the aura of personal experience about them. Before this collection I read only one other work of the author, namely The Bear Came Over the Mountain which Sarah Polley made into the film Away from Her (»»» read my review). The stories of Dear Life are in the same line and I gladly recommend them.

Original post on Edith's Miscellany:

http://edith-lagraziana.blogspot.com/2015/06/dear-life-by-alice-munro.html

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

2001

Reviewed by Marianne from "Let's Read"

A collection of short stories. Not really my type of thing, I like long novels, I like to get to know the characters, be part of their lives, not just a visitor for an hour or so.

Alice Munro has a good writing style and I would have loved to read all nine of these stories as a book, wouldn't have minded reading 500+ pages on every single one of them. Alas, it was not to be, short stories she set out to write and short stories she wrote. Granted, good ones, and if you enjoy short stories, you should read these.

Now I have to ask myself this question: Should I be proud that I know the new recipient and have read something by her or should I be sad that I didn't find a new great author this way as I usually do? I think I am a little of both.

The titles of the short stories in this collection are:

• "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage"
• "Floating Bridge"
• "Family Furnishings"
• "Comfort"
• "Nettles"
• "Post and Beam"
• "What is Remembered"
• "Queenie"
• "The Bear Came Over the Mountain"

From the back cover: "In these stories lives come into focus through single events or sudden memories which bring the past bubbling to the surface. The past, as Alice Munro's characters discover, is made up not only of what is remembered, but also what isn't. The past is there, just out of the picture, but if memories haven't been savoured, recalled in the mind and boxed away, it's as if they have never been - until a moment when the pieces of the jigsaw re-form suddenly, sometimes pleasurably but more often painfully. Women look back at their young selves, at first marriages made when they were naive and trusting, at husbands and their difficult, demanding little ways.

There is in this new collection an underlying heartbreak, a sense of regret in her characters for what might have been, for a fork in the road not taken, a memory suppressed in an act of prudent emotional housekeeping. But at the same time there is hope, there are second chances - here are people who reinvent themselves, seize life by the throat, who have moved on and can dare to conjure up the hidden memories, daring to go beyond what is remembered."

Alice Munro received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 for being the "master of the contemporary short story".

Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.