Dear Life

I've always loved Alice Munro - from the time we read "Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You" in school, through university, and well into my adulthood. This collection was no exception. I found it beautiful and sad by turns. I like that, though. Sometimes I think there is more beauty in sadness than the joys we share with one another, or rather, I prefer the writing of such things. What I've loved, have always loved, about Munro is how she used the short story form to take us on a journey that leaves us in places that we not only do not expect, but where we are required to finish the journey alone. I know that some prefer to have their stories wrapped up neatly with a bow on the ending, so that they can walk away with some show more satisfaction of knowing exactly what happened. For me, though? I like feeling like I've been invited to participate in the story. Here, she seems to say, here are the bare bones of the things. Now go.. go imagine..

Go imagine. show less

I could have read this one in about half the time, but I had to take a pause between each story and just let it soak in. I'm a short story fan in general, but Munro takes the genre to another level. A collection of very odd love stories, missed opportunities, solitude that isn't loneliness, perfectly pitched dialogue, train rides filled with meaning, and so so so much wonderful Canada. The collection ends with a set of stories that Munro notes are about as autobiographical as she is going to get. If you like good writing, you will like this one.

Almost any story you choose to read by Alice Munro will better than almost any other story you might have read, even those by Alice Munro. There is something lulling in the cadence of her sentences, her observational choices, her sudden turns that are not turns at all. Something that makes you think, as you read one of her stories, that this is it, this is what real life, a certain life at least lived in a certain place and time is like. Honesty might be a word for it, if fiction can be honest. I hear the voice of my mother, or an aunt, or one of my grandmothers in these stories and I think, even if I disagree with what they are saying, that’s the way they see it.

Of the stories in this collection, I would single out “Amundsen” for show more its clash of naïveté and self-serving motives, “Haven” for the unflattering portrayal of familial relations, and “Train” for the way it treats a life as iterations in a quest for solidity and peace. But I might just as easily have chosen any of the other stories.

The final four pieces in the collection are grouped together under the title “Finale”. These are, Munro says, “autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact.” In them, Munro looks at a few incidents of her childhood that cast her, momentarily, in an unfavourable light. They are, some of them, shameful thoughts or actions that she may be excising. In “Night”, her father reassures her. “People have those kinds of thoughts sometimes.” And it is precisely what she needs to hear in order to overcome her anxiety driven insomnia. Other regrets, such as not attending her mother’s final illness, death, and funeral are not assuaged by the calm comfort of a wise father. “We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time.”

Highly recommended. show less

Alice Munro’s characters always remind me of wading into the ocean. We float along following the lead of gentle ups and downs of the waves and are lulled as we learn to keep up with the rhythm – until a huge surge crashes, smacks us from behind and washes over us. After the initial shock, we get up and swim on.

Munro’s characters in this (her final?) collection of beautiful short stories, are people who have been floating along accepting life’s rhythm even when it’s not exactly what they had imagined. They don’t seem to have big plans (although they often have ambitions). They are then confronted with large or small disappointments that they ultimately overcome with the same sense of quiet acceptance that they have shown with show more all the events in their lives. They continue on. There is a yielding to events in life and to fate, even when the characters themselves make the decisions themselves. Toward the end of Amundsen, one of the most perfect stories in the book, a character who long ago had been abruptly dropped by a lover, meets that lover many years later.

"Going in opposite directions. .. He called out, ‘How are you?’ and I answered ‘Fine.’ Then added for good measure, ‘Happy.’"

Characters move on, life throws out disappointment and they soldier on. Happiness is basically an afterthought.
Munro’s incisive prose is quiet and compact but manage, in a brief space to create an entire world. Most of the stories are incredibly and powerfully wise, some are just perfection. show less

La gran autora canadiense nos sorprende de nuevo con una colección de relatos que nos muestra a unos personajes obligados a traficar con la vida sin más recursos que su humanidad. Comienzos, finales, virajes del destino… Munro dota sus relatos de una trascendencia que atraviesa su aparente cotidianidad y emociona al lector, siempre atento y expectante ante lo que se esconde tras un aparente fluir manso y sin sobresaltos de los acontecimientos.

El paso del tiempo y el amor son temas recurrentes en la obra de Munro, que aparecen de nuevo en Mi vida querida. Amores furtivos, amores no correspondidos, amores culminados pero malditos, que regresan desde el pasado para reclamar una resolución urgente que ya no es posible. A eso se añade show more una parte que la autora dedica a su propia vida, unas páginas espléndidas donde lo personal se funde con la ficción.

Los relatos de Mi vida querida son como un mensaje en una botella lanzada al mar con la esperanza de que llegue a su destino, pero una vez más el lector tendrá el privilegio de leerlos antes de que su rastro se pierda en la larga travesía. show less

Munro egy olyan távoli északnyugatra visz el minket, ami már csaknem kelet. Ezen a tájon a tér tágasabb, mint máshol – már-már tolsztoji érzéseket kelt az emberben. És nem csak a tér tágas – Munro az időt is máshogy kezeli, mint a novellisták derékhada, nem sűríti, hanem elereszti, hagyja, hogy akár évtizedek teljenek el egy húszoldalas írásban. Tartok tőle, ettől érzik néhányan súlytalannak a szöveget, langyos utazózenének az autósmagnóból, miközben valami kopár fennsíkon süvítünk. De azért érdemes kapaszkodni, és főleg érdemes figyelni – mert ha Munro szereplői puhán esnek is, de ritkán puhára.

Ennyi andalgás után bevallhatom: az első novella nem tetszett. Túl sűrűnek, show more túl koordinálatlannak éreztem. De a végén az a négy történet igazán fontos: Munro beenged minket abba a világba, ahonnét a történetei jöttek. Ahol megtanulta, hogy mindig van idő – megérteni, elengedni, feldolgozni. Túlélni ezt a drága életet, bármit tett velünk. „Bizonyos dolgokra azt mondjuk, megbocsáthatatlanok, vagy hogy soha nem fogjuk megbocsátani magunknak. De megbocsátjuk – mást se teszünk." Némi fenntartással ezt akár egy életmű mottójának is tekinthetjük. show less

Dear Ms Munro,
We often visited Nana and Grandpa’s in Kincardine while we were growing up in London in the early 70s. They had a rich supply of Readers Digest, crossword puzzle books, and National Geographics. I’d catch up on all that new reading, then retreat to my own books that I’d brought along. I was quite happy to sit on the couch for hours and read, while absorbing the family reunion vibe around me. They would gently tease me every time, “There she is with her nose in a book again.” They humoured me my strange passion, with a sort of loving condescension that was masking just the slightest edge of impatience. That was the beginning of a lifelong defiant anxiety felt when questioned directly about my ‘hobbies’.

“I show more like to read.”
“Oh. ———“
That’s a conversation stopper in southwestern Ontario, I tell you.
But when you wrote about that same sort of attitude, brought it out of the shadows and into the light, I almost felt legitimized.

Every time I read another one of your books, I feel a thrill of recognition, kind of like when you see someone you know on tv. It’s so familiar and yet you can’t believe they’re really on tv. Where everyone can see them.

Your descriptions and stories of SW Ontario are eerily familiar. My father and several generations back were from the same area in southwestern Ontario as you, and you are only a bit older than my own father. It is as if you have been a distant cousin writing about the same kinds of people I heard about from my own grandparents over many years. It’s not just the stories, it’s that you have captured the times, and the characters. I keep seeing my world, or the world I heard about, reflected in your stories but with that slightly altered, or maybe additional, point of view. And somehow it has helped me see my own families’ lives in a larger context.

There is a tumble of coincidences I keep bumping into. Back in the 30s or 40s, my grandpa tried and failed at running a mink farm, just like your father. It was just outside of Kincardine, not far from where you lived. I wonder if they shared tips or commiserations. My father escaped by joining the Air Force in the 50s,and his training base was in Clinton, where you live now. He started his own family, and we ended up out West too, in Comox, within two blocks of where you used to live.

Then life pushed us back to SW Ontario, which seemed an area of pursed lips and hypocrisy. But we always loved visiting “”Kinkerdeen” as children and teenagers. “Don’t get lost now”, our grandparents would lovingly tease every time we stepped out. Every meal, Grandpa (occasionally Nana or even our very elderly Great Aunt Pearl) would say grace: “Lord, bless this food to our use, and bless us to thy service, amen.” My brother and I obediently bowed our heads, but would sneak peeks at each other and barely stifle our giggles at the piousness of the rest of the family. We would mimic perfectly the cadence and drawling words of the prayer. And this was all enjoyed hugely by everyone — no offense given or taken.

So after all these years of reading and loving your books, Ms Munro, it was that single line in your story “Haven”, of Uncle Jasper saying “Lord bless this food to our use and us to thy service,” that flung me back to those wonderful years visiting my grandparents in Kincardine. They are long dead but you startlingly, somehow, made them alive again.

This letter is to say thank you, for all of that. show less