Modern Classic

A fine collection of stories from this year's Nobel prize winner. Many of these deal with women who came of age in the '50s discovering themselves in the '70s, and they are simply brilliant. Frequently I found myself at the end of a story, having been totally absorbed all along, wondering "how exactly did she get me here?". I re-read a couple of them, just for the pleasure of watching it all unfold when I knew how it would come out. The stories catch you up the way a novel does, and even if the characters fail to find full satisfaction, I was not disappointed once.
Reviewed in 2013 ( )

her writing combines the obvious, clear human relationships and emotions that are written well with insight and are easy to identify with and the obscure allusion or metaphor or description which brings up obscure feelings. it lingers. the stories are full of a resigned melancholy.

edit: you know what through the first few stories i loved it and each one made me feel a strong sense of melancholy but as they've gone on I've started hating them. I can't explain why I've changed my mind so much - maybe I'm tired of her style even though I've spaced them out and read something else in between. I don't know. I got near the end of the penultimate story and realised it was yet another story about woman having an affair for no obvious reason. In this one she deliberately tells the guy about her friend as a suggestion to have sex with her and when he does she gets really mad and cuts them both off. Well, OK. Fair enough. I just feel like at best this is stuff so far beyond my experience and comprehension it doesn't make sense to me. I accept that it's like 99% going to be my fault. I don't know. The sort of ambiguous, mysterious air surrounding every action wore on me I guess. I dunno, I think I'm just bad at reading fiction

2nd edit on finishing: i think i was just being too grouchy. the last story is great again. her writing is generally brilliant just goes over the same themes a lot and as someone who hasn't had the experiences involved I'm probably bad at properly understanding and appreciating the stories. but she's definitely a great writer and some of the stories are brilliant. i just wasn't in the right mood for all of it i think ( )

Ten Alice Munro stories from the eighties, all of them written for either the Atlantic or the New Yorker. That's probably all you need to say to make it clear that this is a book we should all read...

As you would expect, the stories are mostly about people - mainly middle-aged women from the more provincial parts of Canada - whose businesses, houses, lovers, husbands, children (and often also their own bodies) have not performed as they would have hoped. But they also often seem to be stories about the processes through which life turns into story, and where we learn about the narrator or viewpoint character through a story they are telling or trying to uncover. Not to mention guest appearances by the Border ballad "Tam Lin" and a chunk of Walter Savage Landor...

There's also lots of nice rural/small town Canadian atmosphere, much of it apparently from the forties and fifties, and typically we are in a world of small shopkeepers, schoolteachers, farmers and nurses, only rarely moving into the "professional classes". ( )

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http://www.hindawi.org/kalimat/books/86173728/