The experiences of Munro's characters in this collection are pretty well removed from my own. Most are women in their 50s or so, looking back on young marriages in the 50s, affairs and divorces in the 60s or 70s, visiting old friends or acquaintances after or during deaths of parents. That said, what Munro does without fail in every story of hers I've read is capture the universal feeling of fear and excitement as your life changes and transforms, and the scarier feeling of realizing that there's no way to understand or predict what those changes might really mean in the future. Munro beautifully walks the line between two opposite results of the decisions her characters make - both freedom and entrapment, and has a lot to say about aging along the way. Two quotations that capture this for me: "People make momentous shifts, but not the changes they imagine." "We had power, Anita thought. It's a power of transformation you have, when you're stuffed full of fear and eagerness -- not a thing in your life can escape being momentous. A power you never think of losing because you never know you have it." The second, especially, speaks to the wide open-ness of youth that disappears over time; this is something I've just started glimpsing in the past few years as I approach 30. I was also fascinated by the long quotation below, that expresses very well the way that generations of women can be very similar in their differences. It's a lovely insight that applies, of course, to far more than just sex. "My mother had grown up in a time and in a place where sex was a dark undertaking for women. She knew that you could die of it. So she honored the decency, the prudery, the frigidity, that might protect you. And I grew up in horror of that very protection, the dainty tyranny that seemed to me to extend to all areas of life, to enforce tea parties and white gloves and all other sorts of tinkling inanities. I favored bad words and a breakthrough, I teased myself with the thought of a man's recklessness and domination. The odd thing is that my mother's ideas were in line with some progressive notions of her times, and mine echoed the notions that were favored in my time. This is spite of the fact that we both believed ourselves independent, and lived in backwaters that did not register such changes. It's as if tendencies that seem most deeply rooted in our minds, most private and singular, have come in as spores on the prevailing wind, looking for any likely place to land, any welcome." The more Munro I read, the more thrilled I am by her. Lucky for me, I've just scratched the surface of her work.Themes: short stories, aging, changes, infidelity, marriage, love, friendship, women, being trapped, being free, struggle
I enjoy reading Alice Munro collections from different times of her life, there is a difference in perspective and subject. This collection was published in 1990.The title story, Friend of My Youth, is an example. While Munro's later stories often focus on reminscences of a narrator in her later years, this narrative is based on a story from a the narrator's mother about a year the mother spent teaching n a rural community and boarding with a Cameronian (a Mennonite type of religion that forbade much of the modern world) family the year before she got married. The mother recounted the spartan lives but the unspartan spirit of a daughter who slowly saw her way and life and family slip away from herIn "Five Points" the central character is having an affair as opposed to many of Munro's later stories where the story is based on a memory of an affair and puts the affair in a context of the character's life whole life. Munro describes the furtive logistics of the affair interspersed with stories from both of the lover's lives"Hold Me Fast, Don't Let me Pass" is more of the later Munro-a widow goes back to the England town and Inn where her husband was stationed during the War and learns that the memories of the people who lived there at the time do not jibe with his many stories about that timeMy favorite story, one of my favorite all time stories from any author, was "Differently" This is a story told in the first person by Georgia who visits a former friend's widower in Victoria where she used to live with her ex-husband-and the narrative is broken by flashbacks to their lives 15 years ago when the two couples and another couple were good friends and explains why Maya was a former friend and why Georgia has an ex-husband. Georgia also walks by her old house with Munro writing "Georgia stood outside the gate and felt a most predictable pain. Here Ben had cut the grass, here the children made their paths and hideaways in the bushes, and laid out a graveyard for the birds and snakes killed by the black cat, Domino. She could recall the inside of the house perfectly- the oak floors she and Ben had laboriously sanded, the walls they painted, the room where she had lain in drugged misery after having her wisdom teeth pulled out"The story lays out the events that led to that "most predictable pain" and the choices Georgia and others made along with the consequences viewed from the perspective of 15 years of timeThere are other great stories, this collection does not have a weak one, and I highly recommend it
What do You think about Friend Of My Youth (1991)?
"Not my cup of tea" was perhaps the only opinion I had of this book. It started out so promising with the first two stories that I hoped it would continue in the same spirit. After that however the stories grew more monotonous and repetitive for me. I think it's more a matter of the audience. Being a child of immigrants who wasn't born in Canada either and grew up with a Euro-centric upbringing, I had a hard time with these stories because they began to bleed into each other and cause me to doze off as I read them. There were great ideas scattered here and there, but besides the first two stories I didn't really enjoy any of the others. I've heard great things about Alice Munro. She's highly recommended by many English teachers, especially here in Canada, but I never really considered reading her books because of the subject matter and the approach she takes. If it weren't for the school requirement I never really would've picked this book up. The stories are well-written but superficial when it comes to their audience. These aren't stories I'd consider going back to, ever.
—Margaryta
أحببت أسلوبها، افكار قصصها، شخصياتها (كل القصص تدور حول نساء في فترات مختلفة من العمر وفي علاقات عاطفية مختلفة، الأخت الزوجة العشيقة الام) وترسم علاقات المرأة مع المرأة. تغوص في التفاصيل لملامح المكان والشخصية لكن تقريبا في كل قصة تترك مساحة فارغة لتمتلأ بخيال القاريء.
—Ebtihal Abuali
Coming back to Alice Munro - she speaks to me in an entirely new way, now. Stories of adult daughters and mothers and sickness and grief; infidelities and eccentricities; stories of aging - the "sardonic droop of defeat" (Differently, p. 218). Stories of women's friendships. Stories of how life happens to people, and what they become when it does. All perfectly realized, quiet and wise, perfectly told and told completely. Captured into a form over which Munro exerts complete control, making it all look so easy. Stunning.
—Jennifer (aka EM)
