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Loading... The View from Castle Rock (Vintage)by Alice Munro
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. 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. ( )BooksPlease | Jun 14, 2009 | 1  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 | The View from Castle Rock is a book of short stories based on Alice Munro's family history research and memoir. The Laidlaw family emigrated to Canada from Scotland in the 1830's. We have fictional reconstructions, family stories, excerpts from diaries and letters. So much of what Alice Munro writes resonates with me, how she can see the ambivalences, tease out the social connections and differences in how people relate to each other. There are paragraphs I read out to my DH, laughing at just how apt they were to our own country life, our own family history, or my mother-in-law's interest in family history research. I loved the chapter about visiting libraries in search of information. ( )merry10 | Jan 12, 2009 | This collection deserves five-star plus, as probably all Alice Munro's books do. She's been inspired to write this series from what she knows about her own family history. Not only were ancestors 19th century immigrants from Scotland to rugged Ontario. She's even been able to find some scraps about the family back in Scotland. There's always been a chronicler somewhere along the line, she says. They're in different styles, though, and from different points of view. I wish I had written down some passages, as I usually do with her. But one story, "Hired Girl," close to our time, particularly resonated with me. If it's taking place when Munro was a teenager, I guess that would be the 1940's or early 1950's. The character is sort of a farm girl; we'd guess from a previous story that her father was a trapper turned fox farmer turned factory watchman. From the country anyway. She gets a summer job helping out in a household on a lake. Rich city people's summer getaway. She's quite isolated, doesn't have any friends or co-workers. Very delicately, Murno conveys how this character learns about class differences. The mother of the house (consciously) and the young daughter (semi-deliberately?) enforce the lines. Class is such a crude word, though. Differences. Our main charater of course is a voracious reader and happens upon a book the robust daddy of the house has been reading, Nine Gothic Tales. The mother shrugs off such a strange book, she wasn't able to get far in it. Father can't articulate what he likes about it. But near the end of the story, he comes to the boathouse, where our character sleeps, to give her the book in private, beyond his wife's eyes. Finally, our heretofore harmless heroine also learns this summer to wield the dagger of cruelty herself--on the matron of the house of course. She's going to be much more adept than that woman could ever be. ( )Periodista | Dec 26, 2008 | 0.142 seconds to build listing
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0771065264, Hardcover)A new collection of stories by Alice Munro is always a major event. This new collection — her most personal to date — is no exception.Alice Munro’s stories are always wonderful and so ingrained with truths about life that readers always want to know where they came from. In this book, Alice Munro tells us. In her Foreword (an unusual feature in itself), she explains how she, born Alice Laidlaw in Ontario, in recent years became interested in the history of her Laidlaw ancestors. Starting in the wilds of the Scottish Borders, she learned a great deal about a famous ancestor, born around 1700, who, as his tombstone records, “for feats of frolic, agility and strength, had no equal in his day.” She traced the family’s history with the help of that man’s nephew, the famous writer James Hogg, finding to her delight that each generation of the family had produced a writer who wanted to record what had befallen them. In this way, she was able to follow the family’s voyage to Canada in 1818, and their hard times as pioneers — once a father dies on the same day that a daughter is born in the same frontier cabin. “I put all this material together over the years,” Alice tells us, “and almost without my noticing what was happening, it began to shape itself, here and there, into something almost like stories. Some of the characters gave themselves to me in their own words, others rose out of their situations.” As the book goes down through the generations, we come to Robert Laidlaw, Alice’s father, and then, at the book’s heart, the stories become first-person stories, set during her lifetime. So is this a memoir? No. She drew on personal experiences, “but then I did anything I wanted to with this material, because the chief thing I was doing was making a story.” The resulting collection of stories range from the title story — where through a haze of whiskey Alice’s ancestors gaze north from Edinburgh Castle at the Fife coast, believing that it is North America — all the way to the final story, where we travel with “Alice Munro” today. In the author’s words, these stories “pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on.” All of them are Alice Munro stories. There could be no higher praise. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:10 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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