Friend of My Youth: Stories

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

Whew! She is so obsessed with death in these stories. And this was published in 1990. I've noticed it in recent volumes, but it's a preoccupation that would be expected at her age.

Anyway, you know what you're getting with Munro: expertly crafted stories about women, unreliable men, extramarital affairs. Usually (too often, really) the women are girls when Munro was (40-50s) and some to a pivotal age as the sexual revolution hit. Almost always here, the stores take place somewhere in Ontario.

But she does end up in Scotland. In that case, a widow is visiting a place where her husband was stationed during WW2 and happens upon the young girlfriend of her husband's youth. In later books, one deduces that Munro herself went back to Scotland show more to trace her own family's emigration.

There is some foreshadowing here of Munro's "historical" stories which dominated (at least in my mind) View from Castle Rock. Notably "Maneseteung", in which the life of a town's late 19th century "poetess" is imagined. (Menseteung being a river.). It's just so easy for me to imagine: in a small town, you know the bare outlines--the dates, the slim volume, maybe the cemetery stone--of some town's claim to fame. And she fills it in: the rhythms of Almeda Roth's life and then this barely there acquaintance with the hardworking Jarvis Poulter--walks to church-- that could have become marriage.

"But he follows. He follows her as far as the back door and into the back hall. He speaks to her in a tone of harsh joviality that she has never before heard from him .. He had not been able to imagine her as a wife. Now that is possible. He is sufficiently stirred by her loosened hair--prematurely gray but thick and soft--her flushed face, her light clothing, which nobody but a husband should see. And by her indiscretion, her agitation, her foolishness, her need?"

Even if the subject matter isn't of much interest, writers must or should read her for mastery of craft. There's the efficient way she sketches a character. I kept noticing how much she moves back and forth in time but it's all so seamless. She often starts with a very vivid childhood memory, often involving a childhood friend or adversary, and then we're way ahead somewhere in adulthood. Oh, she might shift back again but I become so absorbed in the present day, I usually forget how the story started. Yet it's always tightly tied together again. Sure, that childhood incident or the haphazard mother explains something about the way the adult *is* but the dots are never straight.

The story I know I had read before, perhaps long ago in an anthology, was "Differently." It's a familiar Munro situation: the youngish married mother, Georgia, in Vancouver, reacting to the quakes of the early 1970s, has an affair that ultimately ends her marriage. But I had totally forgotten the main details, the centrality of Georgia's friendship with another (philandering) woman. And that Georgia has to leave her husband because she fell so easily into an affair with a man she doesn't care about at all. show less

Alice Munro at this point is a favourite. One of the writers –like Morrison, Baldwin, Proust, Tolstoy, Woolf among others, I can always expect to leave me marvelled, impressed and feeling a sense of loss parting with her work.

This collection of short stories was no different. Ten stories, each exploring the past, showing that the past isn't always some far-off place we can easily look back on, as though it's an antique object we raise and peer at, but also an ever-present and even intrusive part of life.

In the first and eponymous short story, a daughter reconstructs and examines her dead mother's past and the people her mother knew in her earlier years. In this and most of the stories, places the characters lived in/knew of are show more revisited and so are the people they knew in the past. As I read I kept thinking to myself this book is a perfect example of what Munro does with a short story. Expand and stretch narrative in her brilliant way, when you think you know where the story is headed, you are diverted and then brought back as things round up in a wonderful way. Story begetting story within short story, she does it so well to the point she makes it look easy, it's almost annoying how easy she makes it all look.

Most of the characters here are dealing with loss, regret, falling in and out of love. A wonderful book where Munro does with stories the way you'd expect someone with some elastic material like a balloon to, shape it into marvellous forms and graciously present them to you. show less

’Amistad de juventud’ es un colección de diez relatos que bien pueden considerarse pequeñas novelas. Por las páginas de estas diez historias, transitan mujeres que rememoran su pasado y a las que vamos conociendo a través de sus sueños y deseos, así como de las decisiones que las han perfilado en lo que son en la actualidad. Una mujer que sueña con su madre muerta; una maestra que se ha de hospedar por un tiempo en casa de unos cameronianos; la aventura de una mujer casada; el viaje en barco que realizan una mujer al borde de la muerte y su hija; algunos retazos de la vida de una poetisa, etc. Estos son solo algunos de los elementos que componen estos cuentos. Pero en ellos hay mucho más, porque aunque se trate de historias show more cortas, Alice Munro no necesita mucho más de que esas pocas páginas para abordar la complejidad de lo que podemos encontrarnos en una novela.

La mayoría de las mujeres que retrata Munro comparten deseos de libertad y domesticidad, se debaten entre el anhelo por la seguridad de un hogar y su afán de independencia. Y aún cuando siguen los imperativos de su libertad personal, estos personajes, a diferencia de muchos otros de la ficción contemporánea, que son incapaces de reinventarse a sí mismos sin hacer tabula rasa, son capaces de tender lazos con ex amantes, amigos de la infancia o parientes lejanos, reconociendo que el pasado ha dado forma al futuro.

Estamos, por tanto, no ante historias dulces, sino antes historias realistas, escritas (o traducidas) con la minuciosa y excelente prosa que es habitual en Alice Munro. Historias que, si bien no llegan al nivel de otras que he leído anteriormente, siguen siendo igual de recomendables. show less

I don't know why Goodreads has the edition I have selected with its blurb in Chinese. Probably something to do with their disastrous (and apparently partially aborted) update that I abhorred.

It's been a couple of months since I read this and it took me ages to read because I was putting in incredible overtime hours at work. Wish that wasn't the case because it was such a lovely read. Each story was filled with women I liked, women with mothers, sisters, and female friends. Women whose outer lives were often unremarkable, but whose inner lives were described with such authenticity and gentleness that each woman felt like a soulmate.

Powerful, understated characters leave one thinking: Reading stories such as "Differently," about a woman's reminiscences and regret about the people of her past made me reflect that life turns out differently than our original aspirations. It isn't always regret, but it is rarely indifferent. As soon as I finished a story, I immediately wanted to reread it, and understand the character better. These are beautiful, gentle stories about lives that sometimes meander, sometimes change abruptly, but that are always determined by the choices and accidents of living. Munro's love, sometimes curiosity, for her characters is a privilege to experience.

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 show more 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". show less