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Loading... The View from Castle Rock: Storiesby Alice Munro
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Alice Munro is at her best when writing about her past, or so I think. These essays are very rich and enjoyable to read. To use a word my friend Rachel detests, they were very relatable. Munro very often paints herself out of the pictures she presents to us, yet we can still see her there, the way she must have stood out growing up. I do regret buying the book as opposed to borrowing it from a library. I don't think I can re-read these essays. (  ) solicitouslibrarian | Aug 18, 2009 |  books4micks | Jul 13, 2009 | Alice Munro is a wonderful author - once again I felt in very good hands! (  ) wendy65 | Jun 24, 2009 | An excellent mix of fact and fiction. Munro has taken what she knows of her family history and woven it into an imagined version of the past. She explains in the Foreword that in every generation of her family there was someone who “went in for writing long, outspoken, sometimes outrageous letters, and detailed recollections.” The Laidlaws emigrated to Canada from Scotland in 1818 and the first part of the book is about their journey across the Atlantic and their early years as settlers. The title of the book comes from a story about Andrew who when he was ten was taken by his father to see the view from Edinburgh’s Castle Rock. His father, who wanted to emigrate to America, told him that the land they could see in the mist was America. Of course it was not America and Andrew knew that. But it was years later before he realised that he’d been looking at Fife! Story follows story as the years pass spanning several generations of the Laidlaw family moving forward to the present generation - Munro herself. I found the second half of the book even better than the first as she tells of her parents and their hard working lives. Her father bred silver foxes and before she became ill her mother made their pelts into scarves to sell to American tourists. Munro then relates stories based on her own life. These are first person stories based on personal material but as she puts it in an “austere or rigorously factual way. I put myself at the center and wrote about that self as searchingly as I could. But the figures around this self took on their own life and color and did things they had not done in reality. … In fact, some of these characters have moved so far from their beginnings that I cannot remember who they were to start with. These are stories. You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on. And the part of this book that might be called family history has expanded into fiction, but always within the outline of a true narrative." Fact or fiction this is a fascinating book. ( )3  BooksPlease | Jun 14, 2009 | I didn't like this (audio) book at first, but by the time it ended I was feeling much more positive. Partly this was due to the reader's lousy Scottish accent which dominated the first story, but partly it was also due to the fact that the stories followed an historical time line, finishing close to the 'here-and-now'...and that's the time I relate to best. I was, however, impressed by Munro's writing throughout. It's really weird, but I although liked the last story best I find it very difficult to say what the story was all about, let alone say why I liked it so much. I can say that Alice Munro seems to write very well about the subtle aspects of relationships. She obviously perceives the small details of interactions between people and understands what the code of unspoken language really means. (  ) oldblack | May 31, 2009 | 
 Alice Munro's new book, The View from Castle Rock, is a delightful fraud. Whether through failure of imagination on her publisher's part, or a lack of confidence in the reader, or a shrewd authorial gambit, it is offered as a book of "Stories", the author's eleventh. But it is something else, a major achievement, and an exciting revitalisation of a somewhat exhausted genre. Resounding flyleaf rhetoric issues a denial: "So is this a memoir? No." Well, yes. It is. It is a memoir as only Alice Munro could write it.
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(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:10 -0400)
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