My first attraction to read Alice Munro was the Nobel Prize conferred on her last year. She is not so well known in India and her books were not easy to get or so very expensive. However, the award did the trick and I was able to grab this collection of short stories at a discount from the India Book Fair at Pragati Maindan, New Delhi.So what's so special about the writings of Alice Munro that she has won both a Man Booker and the Nobel?To read Alice Munro is to jump into an ocean and be immersed from all sides, top and bottom. Her short stories so rich in detail of both physical surroundings and feelings that each story fills the reader like a complete novel. The setting is Canada in the 40's and 50's. I could especially relate to the place as I lived for over eight years in Toronto. In fact, most of the stories rest on the social and physical topography of Toronto and small towns nearby. I was especially elated at relating to specific roads and places.Since I spent a lot of my childhood close by in New York in the 60s I could relate a lot to the social setting a little while earlier to the 40s and 50s in Canada. The descriptions and social dynamics are very authentic and gives a reach feel, warmth, flavour, fragrance of the times. Riding on top are real characters, each one with one particular fault that binds them to the story. There are no hero's and heroics, only the predictable lives of ordinary people. Munro's tales revolve around 'thwarted passion' of its players, many who take it to the end of their lives while still living the ordinary lives in between. The plot of the stories is really not so important and is for the most part predictable. There is no twist to the end which many readers might expect and yet one doesn't feel let down.The stories are all similar and unfold very laboriously in detail. I can well imagine for many who look for action packed treatises or plots or intricate games in our lives, these stories may be heavy and they may not be able to go through the complete 23 short stories that are presented here. Some of Munro's observations are simply unforgettable: pg.126'Poverty was not just wretchedness, as Dr Henshaw seemed to think, it was not just deprivation. It meant having those ugly tube lights and being proud of them. It meant continual talk of money and malicious talk about new things people had bought and whether they were paid for. It meant pride and jealousy flaring over something like the new pair of plastic curtains, imitating lace, that Flo had bought for the front window. That as well as hanging your clothes on nails behind the door and being able to hear every sound from the bathroom. It meant decorating your walls with a number of admonitions, pious and cheerful and cheerful and mildly bawdy.'Many will want to get more and more of Alice Munro and be all the better for it. For others, at least one read of one book is a must - their propitiation to literary excellence!
The stories in this book were written over a period of about 30 years. Almost all of them are set in Ms. Munro's native Canada, and mostly concern the lives of ordinary people. I haven't spent much time in Canada, but it seems to me that Ms. Munro has an uncanny facility to present the lives, psyches, and living environments of her characters. They are somewhat like Americans, but....well, they're not. Even to an alien like me, they're clearly Canadian. To me, though, Ms. Munro's greatest strength is her ability to drill down to the bedrock of what people actually think. I'm not sure I can do justice to this, but I'll try. Many authors--good ones, too--tell the reader what a character is thinking in straightforward fashion, but Ms. Munro goes a step beyond simple explication to a whole deeper level. Somehow, she leaves me saying, "Yes, that's it exactly. She nailed it. That's just what that person would have seen, thought, said and done." This skill makes her otherwise quiet stories really come alive. I also like the fact a number of her stories are interlinked by inclusion of some of the same characters; there are several different sets of this. The linkage is unobtrusive, and each story stands on its own. Still, I'm sure Ms. Munro not only had fun doing this, but had a plan as well. One marvels at the imagination required to make so many interesting stories out of material which is never sensational, and rarely violent (although it did seem to me that her later stories run more to violence and abuse than did the earlier ones). A number of the main female characters in various stories do have similar life histories, and there seems little doubt Ms. Munro has mined her own life experience and that of others near to her for character and perhaps story lines as well. Of course, she's not the first to do so and there's nothing surprising about that, but few authors I've read have ever done it so consistently well. Even if this is a selected group of Ms. Munro's stories, it's surprising to be able to say that out of the whole group, there's not one that disappoints. Highly recommended.
What do You think about Selected Stories, 1968-1994 (1997)?
This is a huge collection of stories, and they're a bit dry, so I'll admit that it felt more like an assignment than a pleasant decision to crack this book. And I'll also admit that it took me a while to warm up to Munro's style, which is pretty spare - some of these really drag. Having said that, I did warm up to it, and enjoyed the collection more and more as I progressed through it.Lots of independent, middle-aged Canadian women on display here, most of whom are divorced (several because of marriage-wrecking affairs they had with other men), but we're never given to pity these characters. They're a comfortable bunch who have reconciled the decisions they made, and seem bemused and a little indifferent when they think about their lives and their younger selves. Munro is a great observer of life, and uses her collection of protagonists to share her accumulated wisdom. I cycled through the stories here gradually, reading other novels in between, and would recommend that approach to anyone interested in reading Munro, who most critics seem to agree is one of the foremost short story writers of the 20th Century.
—Brian Grover
This was our latest book club pick, and it was selected because many in the literary community think that Alice Munro should win the Pulitzer Prize; it’s reputed that the only reason she hasn’t is that no author who exclusively writes short stories has ever won (oh, literary politics). Munro’s writing style is clean, even sparse at times, but she has an ability to pack a mean emotional punch. I’ve heard it said that her stories illuminate the extraordinary in the ordinary lives of people, and it’s a fair depiction of her style. The stories in this collection range in era from the 1930s to the 1970s, and they primarily focus on the lives of rural or isolated people in Canada. I must say that throughout the earlier stories, the phrase “leading lives of quiet desperation” constantly came to mind. So did the music of Neko Case, for that matter (“Fox Confessor Brings the Flood” would be the perfect audio barbiturate for a reading session). One thing that sets Munro apart for me is her decision to write several short stories about the same protagonist. Each story highlights the character at different points in her life – almost as if an omniscient being were to look in on a selection of moments in your life (sort of like Rip Torn in “Defending Your Life”). You saw the emotional points the character was at – age 20 and in college, divorced at 43, etc. It made it easier to stay engrossed in the collection, because you really felt like you were starting to get under the skin of a character.There is a distinctly melancholy feel to Munro’s stories – not tragic, but many of the characters were dealing with unhappy points in their life and trying to work their way through them. Whether it was the humiliation of a parent in front of their children in Depression-era Ontario, or dealing with loneliness after a one-night stand that the protagonist hadn’t thought would be a one-night stand, the mood was a somber, reflective, a little sad. Beautifully broken, if you will.
—Kristen
I was intrigued by the blurbs on the back of this edition--had heard a lot about her but never read anything, seeing as most of her work has been published in anthologies and magazines. I'm not one for short stories or short fiction, but the narrative voices here are truly distinct. In her stories about her native Canada, Munro delivers with a consistent, pragmatic and low-key narration that draws one in with details and insights not with the "unerhoerte Begebenheit" or "seminal moment" introduced in most modern short story writing. I feel almost that these stories aspire to teach one about life rather than entertain.
—Kam
