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. ( )

Alice Munro is a wonderful author - once again I felt in very good hands! ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

The View From Castle Rock is an interesting combination of fiction and truth - Alice Munro delves into her family background, digging up her ancestors and her childhood to create a series of linked stories which explore family connections, poverty, adversity and understanding of ordinary lives as part of a bigger history.

The collection begins deep in the Ettrick Valley, just south of Edinburgh Scotland. Munro visits a cemetery on a cold, rainy day and locates the headstones of her relatives. In this first story, the reader is introduced posthumously to the characters who will make up future stories in the collection.

Each new story moves the reader further into the present. In the title story: ‘The View From Castle Rock‘…Munro gives the reader a glimpse into what prompted the emmigration of her family from Scotland to Canada. A young boy follows his intoxicated father up the steep, uneven stone steps of an ancient castle and onto a roofless tower.

'The sun was out now, shining on the stone heap of houses and streets below them, and the churches whose spires did not reach to this height, and some little trees and fields, then a wide silvery stretch of water. And beyond that a pale green and grayish-blue land, part in the sunlight and part in the shadow, a land as light as mist, sucked into the sky.

“So did I not tell you?” Andrew’s father said. “America. It is only a little bit of it, though, only the shore. There is where every man is sitting in the midst of his own properties, and even the beggars is riding around in carriages.” -From The View From Castle Rock, page 30-'

Munro’s strength in these early stories is her ability to set place and time for the reader. She writes lush descriptions and peoples her prose with complex characters. When Walter, a young boy aboard a ship bound for America, writes in his journal ‘And this night in the year 1818 we lost sight of Scotland‘ the reader feels the anticipation as well as the sadness of saying good-bye to one’s homeland in search of a better life. Munro uses real documents (such as Walter’s journal) to help piece together the history of her family and there are times when it is difficult to ascertain what is fact and what is fiction.

Munro completes part I of her collection with the story ‘Working For A Living‘ which recollects of her father’s boyhood in the town of Blyth. Part II introduces Munro herself to the collection in the story ‘Fathers‘ - a painful look at the fine line between discipline and abuse and a girl’s relationship with her father.

‘Lying Under the Apple Tree‘ is about the coming of age of a young girl…the innocence of youth vanquished. The ideas of God, church values (morality) and sin weave themselves through this story. Munro also skillfully introduces nature into her theme of growing up and the recognition of one’s sexuality. Her use of dirt as a symbol is effective in introducing the concept of sex vs. a girl’s fantasies vs. the realities of love.

In ‘Hired Girl‘ Munro continues to explore the idea of a young woman on the cusp of adulthood. In addition she builds on the idea of place - physical place vs. one’s place in society. This concept of there being barriers between classes, is one of the main themes of Munro’s collection and in ‘Hired Girl‘ she emphasizes this idea.

The final stories of Munro’s collection are dedicated to her early marriage (’The Ticket‘), and her maturation into a woman who is capable of looking at her history and life in the harsh light of reality (’Home‘ and ‘What Do You Want to Know For?‘). Munro’s recollections of her father in his later years and the home where she grew up being modernized, are touching exposes on what it means to finally be an adult and no longer be protected by the innocence of childhood. Munro writes:
'The past needs to be approached from a distance. -From The View From Castle Rock, page 332-'

The View From Castle Rock does that - in exploring her roots, Munro has succeeded in creating a unique blend of stories which look at one family’s history in the context of a bigger picture of what it means to live on the edge of poverty, connect to family, and create a life with meaning and understanding.

Recommended. ( )

I loved this book. Because she is 'from around here' Alice Munro's stories have always been very special to me. I especially liked the penultimate story "What Do You Want To Know For" where she describes her visit to the Regional Reference room at the university near her. (pp. 325-6). ( )

Very interesting, enjoyable. This collection of short stories is fiction, but based on Munro's research into her own family history, and her own life. The stories are arranged in chronological order, from the Scottish ancestors who dreamed of emigrating to Canada, those who made the harrowing sea voyage, pioneers in southern Ontario, and on to Munro's own family. The specifics appeal to me, but the emotional content and family relationships are universal. Alice Munro's writing is conversational, accessible, and beautifully descriptive. The stories are snapshots of different people at different times in history, and some people appear in only one story, making me want to know more about them and what happened next. Some people are only dimly known, while others are more completely portrayed. Some, I suspect, are portraits of real people, with a few names and details changed to avoid lawsuits! I enjoyed the connections with my own family history - Scottish immigrants in the 1800s, first land-owners clearing farms in Ontario, the education, dating and marriage of a young woman in the 1930s to 1950s Ontario (the same age as my parents), one story where Munro was the maid at a cottage on Georgian Bay. Later stories portray the different generations of her family, caring for her parents, becoming elderly, a breast cancer scare, a first and second marriage, her father remarrying after his first wife died from Parkinson's. This is a very good book, and I know I will re-read it every few years. I will also give a copy to my mother, and recommend it to other family members in Ontario. ( )

Some stories were great for me but others very boring so it took me a long time to read; I was often not engaged. ( )

Very engaging and often amusing. As always, Munro's storytelling rocks! ( )

Munro says with emphasis, ‘These are stories.’ But, this collection is the closest one could imagine short stories come to a memoir. Sure, Munro can’t help herself and adds some unusual events to spice her narration up and to make the mundane and anticlimactic more dramatic. She does it in the same way she made her boring summer job as a maid much more dramatic than it really was in her letter to a friend in her short story, ‘Hired Girl’, and she calls everything short stories. The story of her family’s immigration from Scotland to Canada and their settlement is necessarily fictionalization, even though she had three generations of writers to fall back on as well. There was always at least one writer, or chronicler per generation in her family. Even her father wrote not only his memoir, but tried his hand at novel writing as well. When we come to more contemporary times what the stories reflect is probably a fairly accurate rendering of some episodes of her own life plus an electrocution here and a gun shot in the barn somewhere else. But, aren’t all memoirs like that? Don’t people spice things up to make them more interesting? Even when they think they are accurate and true to the facts, they still present their own version of them. She put the tales she wanted to tell in a short story format, since it is the form she feels most comfortable with, but this is what it is: a memoir with some added flesh on the bones.
I didn’t fall in love with this collection right away. Apart from the introduction, the initial stories were interesting, but not at all as gripping as the stories by Munro in general are for me. They were not exploratory in a psychological sense; they were much more ventures into the family history realms. As I progressed through it though, and got to the times more contemporary to mine, I found more of the Munro I know with her elegant sentences and suave and insightful observations.

The image of Scottish immigrants was an interesting one for me. It showed the way of life influenced by their Presbyterian variety of the Christian faith: industrious, stern, modest, concentrated on not falling out of line, not standing out. My Catholic country experience is different- people in the country where I grew up were much more bawdy, flamboyant, liked to drink (too much most of the time) and to dance, and had no problem showing off whatever best they had in church on Sunday. Interestingly, Munro’s father’s second wife, who is Irish, glaringly stands out with her openness, desire for the unusual and the gossip, and her bawdiness.

I also found quite a bit of the history and images of rural and small town Southern Ontario- not exactly my place, but landscapes I know very well and travel through- that is rendered well. What drew my attention was the number of cemeteries in the book. I tried to find some of them, and what startled me when I was looking through the webpages of some old local ones was that some of them are on tiny plots smack in the middle of the town I live in surrounded by houses, plazas, roads and new subdivisions. There is actually one very close to where I live sandwiched between a road on one side and an Indian restaurant and Blockbuster on the other. Somebody’s ancestors.
Munro conveys the feeling of a river of time and the insignificance of individual experience and how individual life becomes history and part of a bigger whole somehow through them.

She is thinking of death, looking at her roots, getting rooted herself as well, and it’s her farewell too. By the end of the book she puts it into such an observation,
‘We are beguiled. It happens mostly in our old age, when our personal futures close down and we cannot imagine- sometimes cannot believe in- the future of our children’s children. We cannot resist this rifling around in the past, sifting the untrustworthy evidence, linking stray names and questionable dates and anecdotes together, hanging on to threads, insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore to life.”
It’s apparent throughout the collection, and to add to it, in the interviews to promote this collection she said she didn’t think she wasn’t going to publish any more collections. She is not very old yet at all- she is only 76. ( )

Magnificent. There's more substance to a Munro short story than there is in most novels. The opening story sequence, about her ancestors emigration to Canada from Scotland, is profound and deeply moving. ( )

This collection of short stories by one of Canada’s most prominent writers reads more like autobiographical snippets, personal histories laden with genealogical research details. ( )