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Lives of Girls and Women by Alice  Munro
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Lives of Girls and Women (original 1971; edition 2005)

by Alice  Munro

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1,825449,220 (4.02)164
Fiction. Literature. Short Stories. HTML:WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013

The only novel from Alice Munro-award-winning author of The Love of a Good Woman??is an insightful, honest book, "autobiographical in form but not in fact," that chronicles a young girl's growing up in rural Ontario in the 1940's.

Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father's fox farm, where her most frequent companions are an eccentric bachelor family friend and her rough younger brother. When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women-her mother, an agnostic, opinionted woman who sells encyclopedias to local farmers; her mother's boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence.

Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All along she remains a wise, wit
… (more)
Member:CarterPJ
Title:Lives of Girls and Women
Authors:Alice  Munro
Info:Publisher Unknown (2005)
Collections:Your library, Favorites
Rating:*****
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Work Information

Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro (1971)

  1. 00
    A Mixture of Frailties by Robertson Davies (betterthanchocolate)
    betterthanchocolate: The young artist, educated. The provincial confines of small town Ontario, negotiated. And great prose.
  2. 00
    Tide Road by Valerie Compton (Anonymous user)
  3. 00
    Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (Jozefus)
    Jozefus: De vergelijking is vaker gemaakt. Beide boeken bestaan uit losse verhalen over een protagonist(e) die opgroeit in een fictief provinciestadje. En in beide gevallen vertoont dat stadje een opvallende gelijkenis met de plaats waar de auteur zelf is opgegroeid.
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» See also 164 mentions

English (38)  Italian (2)  Spanish (1)  Catalan (1)  Hungarian (1)  All languages (43)
Showing 1-5 of 38 (next | show all)
A really interesting story. Very slow, but still memorizing with amazing metaphors and a beautiful poetic writing style. ( )
  Hexenwelt | Sep 6, 2023 |
Alice Munro is known as a master of the short story, but in a note at the beginning of this book she called it a novel, "autobiographical in form but not in fact." Structurally, it consists of what appear to be short stories, roughly in chronologically order, narrated by Del, telling the story of her life, her family, and her town.

Briefly, as follows, the stories are:

THE FLATS ROAD--Del and family are living out of town on a fox farm This story focuses on Uncle Benny's disastrous marriage.
HEIRS OF THE LIVING BODY--Del's mother's failure to be accepted by her father's family: "My mother went along straight lines. Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace wove in and out around her, retreating and disappearing, and coming back...."
PRINCESS IDA--Again the focus is on Del's mother, who becomes an encyclopedia salesperson. "I felt the weight of my mother's eccentricities as something absurd and embarrassing about her--the aunties would just show me a little at a time." Del, her mother, and her brother are now living in town while her father is out at the fox farm.
AGE OF FAITH--Del wants to know if there is a god. "Sometimes I thought of the population of Jubilee as nothing but a large audience for me...."
CHANGES AND CEREMONIES--Del and her friend Naomi are becoming interested in boys and the mysteries of sex. In Jubilee, "reading books was something like chewing gum, a habit to be abandoned when the seriousness and satisfactions of adult life took over. It persisted mostly in unmarried ladies, would have been shameful in a man."
LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN--As a teenager Del is sexually molested by the boyfriend of her mother's boarder.
BAPTIZING--In high school, Del has boyfriends; loses her virginity.
EPILOGUE: THE PHOTOGRAPHER--A story imagined by Del, who has failed her college scholarship exams, but who wants to be a writer. "And no list could hold what I wanted, for what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together--radiant, everlasting."

4 stars ( )
  arubabookwoman | May 29, 2023 |
Alice Munro has been on my TBR list for years so I was pleased when 'Lives of Girls and Women' came up as a bookclub read. There is no doubt the writing is excellent and the author is very observant. The stories are narrated by Del, a young girl, as she transitions from childhood to adulthood. The subjects and Del's POV as she tells the stories, change as she gets older. I love the way the author managed to pull off this very skilled transition. It does make the reader feel as if they are actually growing up with Del. Having said that, I found some of the stories quite long and the pacing quite slow in places. Some characters jumped to life on the page whereas others I didn't care for at all, which is why I gave it 3 stars. While I would read like to more by Alice Munro, I won't be rushing to do so. ( )
  MochaVonBee | Jan 21, 2023 |
I had a hard time getting in to this story. It describes a world I've only read about, rural Canada before I was born. I was also put off by the negativity. The characters generally had negative views of the world. Whenever they could have seen something positive they instead found something negative to focus on. Eventually I was glad I persisted as this is a one of a kind that is worth the time.

We follow a central character, Del Jordan, a young girl growing up in a rural Canadian town. We also see, through Del's eyes, her mother, Ada. Indeed one way of interpreting what happens is Del slowly but surely rejecting Ada. Father and brother are out of town living on a failing fox farm and are much less central to the story. Ada is the town curmudgeon who rejects the religiosity of those around her. Ada's independence is through her work as a traveling encyclopedia sales person. She clearly sees her daughter as her chance to get beyond life in this closeminded society.

But Del has other ideas. As a young girl she explores the different churches and religions of her town. She secretly attends different services and examining the types of people she finds and the practices that each hold dear. She is not looking to join any of them but finds them all in some way comforting. As she gets a little older the experimentation and the rejection get a little more pointed. We witness Del's curiosity about bodies and sensuality and eventually smoking and drinking. This is where we I began to fell like a voyeur as Del explains her thoughts about topics rarely communicated to anyone else and even less described in detail in literature. Del is the smart girl in all her classes and Ada clearly expects her to win a scholarship and be able to move beyond the confines of the town, Del teams up with the top boy in school but eventually is drawn to someone she finds while attending Baptist services. He wins her heart and slowly but surely introduces her to sex. She's a willing partner. She doesn't work hard on the exam needed to get a scholarship and not surprisingly does not win one. Frank wants to marry her but wants her to first to be baptized which is a bridge too far for Del. It's a deal breaker for Frank.

I learned that this novel was really a cycle of short stories. This probably explains something strange. At two different points we are introduced to the same character as if we did not already know about her. At first I dismissed it as poor editing. Maybe it was done to keep each chapter more like a short story.

There's a epilogue where we learn than Del has become a writer. It almost felt like it was a way for Munro to introduce a little noise about who in her real life these characters were based on. It did not feel connected to the rest of the novel. ( )
  Ed_Schneider | Mar 6, 2022 |
A masterful and seminal work of prose fiction, Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women explores the place of women in mid-20th-century society and pivots on the gradual awakening of narrator Del Jorden to the realization that there is more to being female than catering to the needs of men. Resembling a collection of linked stories more so than a standard novel, Munro’s deeply felt, minutely observed narrative describes Del’s pre-teen and teenage years growing up in Jubilee, a small town in rural Ontario, in the years before, during and immediately following World War II. On the surface, Del’s upbringing does not challenge the boundaries of convention. Her father is an unassertive man who supports his family by raising foxes for pelts. Her mother is a housewife who has known hardship. But there is nothing conventional about Del’s approach to life, which is skeptical and outward-looking. Del’s intrepid, tireless curiosity is driven primarily by her vivacious, opinionated mother, who harbours lofty ambitions for her brainy daughter. (Indeed, as presented to the reader, Del’s father is little more than a cipher and plays a minimal role in her childhood.) In the opening story, “The Flats Road,” Del is living with her mother, father and younger brother Owen outside Jubilee on a shabby property where her father keeps his foxes and a few other animals. It is a neighbourhood populated by misfits and eccentrics where everyone is poor. Later on, Del has moved into Jubilee with her mother where they live in a rented house on River Street. Her mother takes in boarders, and, in “Princess Ida,” has embarked on a career selling encyclopedias. For Del on the cusp of womanhood, her mother—who does not attend church and expresses an acute disdain bordering on hostility for organized religion—who loves opera and pushes her daughter to excel at school—is a source of pride, embarrassment and inspiration. The novel chronicles the growth of Del’s complex interior life along with her occasionally reckless forays in the external world, and depicts her sexual awakening, her evolving attitude toward boys and love and the mysterious world beyond Jubilee that, she comes to realize, will nurture her but also try to crush her. The novel shows us Del’s struggles with her maturing body and the triumphs and misadventures that shape her into a self-aware young woman with a loving heart who values knowledge and independence. Lives of Girls and Women is a truthful, candid, supremely intelligent novel. Sometimes shocking, it is elegantly written with humour and irony. This is a novel that confronts human desire and depravity head on. It is not Alice Munro’s style to cushion the blow, to spare her characters suffering. Del Jordan often fails, sometimes in spectacular fashion. Her struggles are universal and sear themselves on the reader’s memory. Del Jordan is one of the most authentically human fictional characters you will ever encounter. Once you’ve read her story you will not forget her. ( )
  icolford | Jun 25, 2021 |
Showing 1-5 of 38 (next | show all)
Geweldige dialogen, psychologische finesse, intensiteit, filosofische diepgang: het zijn de superieure ingrediënten van deze bijzondere collectie.
added by Jozefus | editDe Standaard, Kathy Mathys (Jul 11, 2014)
 
.Munro's women...often find themselves caught on the margins of shifting cultural mores and pulled between conflicting imperatives--between rootedness and escape, domesticity and freedom, between tending to familial responsibilities or following the urgent promptings of their own hearts.
added by KayCliff | editNew York Times (Oct 1, 2013)
 
A very likable book -- a very real book -- virtues not to be underestimated or overlooked.
added by Nickelini | editKirkus Reviews (Jan 1, 1972)
 
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for Jim
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We spent days along the Wawanash River, helping Uncle Benny fish.
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"Nothing that could be said by us would bring us together; words were our enemies....the world I saw with him was something not far from what I thought animals must see, the world without names."
"I opened it up at the want ads, and got a pencil, so I could circle any job that seemed possible. I made myself understand what I was reading, and after some time I felt a mild, sensible gratitude for these printed words, these strange possibilities. "
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Fiction. Literature. Short Stories. HTML:WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013

The only novel from Alice Munro-award-winning author of The Love of a Good Woman??is an insightful, honest book, "autobiographical in form but not in fact," that chronicles a young girl's growing up in rural Ontario in the 1940's.

Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father's fox farm, where her most frequent companions are an eccentric bachelor family friend and her rough younger brother. When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women-her mother, an agnostic, opinionted woman who sells encyclopedias to local farmers; her mother's boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence.

Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All along she remains a wise, wit

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