I've never been a fan of short stories. And until recently I wasn't aware that I share this dislike with a pretty significant amount of people…I've been seeing around Goodreads how common it is for people who read novels not to like short stories. It would be interesting to know if the reasons for that distaste are all similar, at the core.So, I started this book with an open mind. I was excited to read it, knowing after all, that Alice Munro is a Nobel Laureate from 2013 and that her fan base consists of a lot of friends and readers who's opinions I value. I've heard a lot of good things, seen the book fairly often, read good reviews. I was happy to find it at the dollar bookstore and I started it pretty soon after I bought it. The first story is the title story, Runaway, and I actually really liked the first story. It spoke to me. The story was about a young girl caught in a dangerously volatile relationship, with a husband who has consistently been hovering on the brink of a blow up and the neighbor who tries to help her but who is ultimately refused when the girl is in the end unable to take the opportunity to escape her situation. It's the all too familiar situation with the all too familiar issues. A young girl enamored with the rebel. The rebel turned into the inevitable middle aged, unemployable, angry and abusive man. The girl who claims she wants out but is just too afraid yet refuses chance after chance to actually escape. The psychological hold that men sometimes hold over scared women. The oh so typical girl on girl crush, that is dismissed even in the story as something that always happens at some time or another. And then the matter of choosing ignorance. THIS was the part that reached out to me: A person's ability to refrain from acknowledging truths. This issue was especially interesting for me, and so the story became that much more interesting to me. It's always been something that baffles me, something that I've pondered endlessly. One of my random but consistent ruminations. How can somebody choose to ignore something? How can one convince themselves to not know something that they actually know? How can somebody know the truth in their heart of hearts, but yet somehow manage to find a way to block that knowledge? I've never been that sort of person, the opposite actually. And I've always considered those people who do have that ability to pick and choose what they believe and block out what they don't want to believe to have an inordinate amount of self control. And we see this type of willpower and mental compartmentalizing with Carla. She refers to a truth that she's actively blocking out as "It was as if she had a murderous needle somewhere in her lungs, and by breathing carefully she could avoid feeling it. But every once in awhile she had to take a deep breathe, and it was still there." Oh, I loved that quote. Who of us doesn't know exactly what that feels like? Whether that needle be that certain truth you want to deny -the whiff of something that smells oddly like perfume on your husband after a late evening at work, the strange charges on the credit card, the phone calls taken in the other room… or some other potential acknowledgement you're trying to get out of facing-the clues telling you your kid has a problem, the somehow-different-ness that tells you your bf/gf is pulling away, the bill collectors beeping in on phone calls, whatever. Even something like the ex you're trying to forget, the heartbreak you're trying to get over. It's all the same. Just as Munro said, a murderous needle that most of the time you can ignore. But every once in awhile…So I loved Runaway. Mainly for that whole theme, because I can relate. BUT. The best story came first. The others that followed were all better than any other short stories I've ever read, but still not for me. I just don't feel that they are substantial enough. I'm a big character development person, I like it when you can watch a character grow, when you unearth a character layer by layer until they turn from characters in a book intopeople. People that I can love. And short stories never have the depth to do that for me. Or, I should say they rarely can do that for me. Munro is definitely the best short story writer I've come across, and I'll give her props for being as close to a mini novel a short story could be, but except for Runaway, these still didn't do it for me. But I would pick up more stories from Munro. One good thing about short stories is…they're short! Meaning read in one sitting short. Meaning anytime I'm growing weary of some other book I'm reading and I need a lil break, I can pick up a short story and take a lil time out from the other book without investing so much time I can't keep track of both. It's glorious. So for that reason, I like short stories. I certainly wouldn't object to having a couple Munro collections around for just that purpose. If I'm gonna read short stories, may as well be quality ones like Munro's! Nobel Prize quality though? I think not.
Not, who has read more Alice Munro that I have, wants to know why she doesn't write novels. Her uncharitable hypothesis is that Munro is too lazy to do the necessary work; she'd rather just scribble down each idea in short story form and then move on to the next one. Other people criticize her for being "cerebral" or "contrived". I don't agree with any of this, but I can see where the accusations are coming from. After some thought, I find a metaphor which sums up my own feelings. It's true that a Munro story can seem just a little too perfect. Everything fits together so elegantly; there is nothing wasted. A non-chessplayer might compare it to a chess game. But for someone who does play chess, the image doesn't work. A normal chess game is like a novel. It's a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, where things often go in unexpected directions and painfully have to be put back on track. Novelists can never quite control their characters (Proust somehow ended up putting in a couple more books than he had originally intended), and chessplayers have an even harder time controlling their pieces. There is a small group of people in the chess world, however, who do something which feels more rewarding to them than playing games; they compose endgame studies. A study is a chess idea expressed in its purest form. Every piece is necessary, and there is only one sequence of moves that achieves the desired result, given best defence. If White's task is to win, then he has only one way to win, and if it is to draw, then he only has one way to draw. The composer has a key position in mind, which possesses some unusual or beautiful property. At first, the arrangement of the pieces appears pointless; but finally the solver realizes that in just this case a knight is worth more than a queen, or the king finds itself miraculously stalemated in the middle of the board, and they see what the composer is doing.A Munro story feels to me rather like a study. There is a small group of people and a set of relationships between them. Nothing seems out of the ordinary. But somehow, as the story unfolds, a logical but completely unexpected scene arises. A woman with psychic powers, baking little dough mice in an institution; or a child, with a winter coat over her pyjamas, standing shivering in a snowdrift and helping scatter ashes. You suddenly understand that this is what the story was about.Very few chessplayers are able to create worthwhile studies. I think Munro's gift is similar, and just as rare.
خوندن داستانا خیلی حال داد. پر از جزئیاتی بود دربارهی زندگی تو روستا یا شهر کوچیک و توصیف خونهها و مناظر، آدمها و عادتهاشون. خیلی باحوصله و دستودلباز. از داستان اول که اسمش فرار بود خیلی خیلی خوشم اومد.
—Marzieh rasouli
Alice Munro, I’m in love. It started with The Beggar Maid, and now Runaway:Stories. I think it's difficult reading short story collections (not to mention rating and reviewing them) because more often than not their content oscillates between the simultaneously glorious and frustrating extremes of oh-god-this-touched-my-soul and what-was-the-point-there-was-no-pay-off. One story could be brilliant, and the next could have you dumbfounded and soured, wondering if the good ones are just a fluke thing. And it seems impossible after getting through an entire collection not to rank each story. The short story's stand-alone quality provokes a hierarchical evaluation, not always a holistic one. That saying "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" rarely seems to apply to short story collections, and I'm not sure whether this is unfair and to the detriment of the form or simply how it is. Nevertheless, I found about 80% of Runaway:Stories charmingly delectable. Runaway’s narratives amble along, tiptoeing around crumbling relationships and strained interactions, all the while digging cavernous emotional ditches that readers fall into and don’t often realize the depth of until they’re clawing their way to the end.The collection is not stylistically “innovative”; Munro is a straightforward storyteller who doesn't really toy with point of view or plot structure. Yes, her protagonists are almost always aged females, looking back on lives that are riddled with loss, loneliness and a whole host of other quiet sorrows, but Munro stacks layer upon layer, managing to richly characterize both people and place within the confines of the short form. It’s for this reason I think readers new to reading short stories should start with a Munro collection. She writes as though she were writing a novel, commanding the form to adapt to her often long-winded, introspective style. The undisputed queen of short fiction, then, is no slave to the form; her stories push against short fiction’s rigid walls, accomplishing so much in so few pages.“Few,” however, is a relative term. There are 8 stories in Runaway and each are 40+ pages. So if you don’t feel up to the task of reading them all - for fear of the aforementioned highs and lows - know that the lows aren't that low, and these are my favorites: “Runaway” was the highlight for me, the single, 45-page reason to even pick up this collection, if all you’re looking for is one reason. It’s about a woman who feels trapped in her marriage. Straightforward but beautifully portrayed through metaphor. I noticed a previous reviewer described her metaphors as "tired." While I definitely don't disagree with that (again, not stylistically innovative), the lack of freshness does little to diminish how well Munro crafts them. The three stories that follow, “Chance,” “Soon” and “Silence” are a set, each representing cherry-picked points in one woman’s life. “Chance” is a first-time-we-met love story, while “Soon” and “Silence” focus more on family relationships, particularly mother/daughter. "Soon" and “Silence” aren't the most compelling in the collection, they seem to meander more than others, but I did become invested in the characters and was curious how their lives evolved. I give a big thumbs up to “Passion," about a woman who spends Thanksgiving with her boyfriend’s alcoholic brother. And finally I liked “Tricks,” another sort-of romance piece, that in the end definitely lives up to its name.
—Vicki
