The Moons of Jupiter

The stories in Alice Munro's The moons of Jupiter typically focus on some psychological moment in characters' lives--a realisation, a change, some crystallisation of experience. The catalyst can be some event or just a word. If there is drama, it tends to happen off stage or even long in the past--what's in the picture is one's present mind. What's amazing is how familiar she makes what all these characters are going through. A great writer in the most classic sense of the word.

Many times, I will dip into a short story collection, read a few, and set it aside. I read straight through this one. Munro is brilliant at capturing the fleeting emotion; the thoughts percolating under everyday life; the growth, quirks, and fall of relationships...I am tempted to quote some brilliant lines from the stories, but they are so much better within the stories themselves as you are pulled into the world of whatever characters she is following. A Nobel Prize well-deserved. (Brett Easton Ellis WISHES he could bring this kind of wisdom to life in a story.) I am glad that I have many more collections of Munro's stories to read. This is what I wish I could write.

This particular set of short stories by Alice Munro coheres to some extent thematically in their focus on women of all ages and their romantic entanglements with men. Many of the men appear to be jerks but love is blind and irrational so that hardly matters. Munro paints the usual vivid exterior landscapes of rural and urban Canada from coast to coast in times that vary from that of her childhood before and after World War Two straight up through the present (for this collection late 70s to early 80s). Here, she also excels at the more subtle and intricate interior psychological landscape of the heart, mind, and soul. And some stories had sexual explicitness that I had heretofore not been aware of. Munro is not a prude. In each of the show more stories you do feel like you get a good feel for the types of people in them, whether the central character (always a woman, sometimes young, sometimes middle-aged, often a parent, frequently divorced, in and out of relationships) or a love interest. Sometimes you can clearly say, "this story seems to be about X." Other times, like any great piece of art (Munro won the Noble Prize in literature in 2013), you may scratch your head unsure exactly what the piece is about but glad you went along for the ride. show less

Beautifully written short stories. I like that they’re in Canada not the US, although I think there isn’t that much difference in the stories. I very much like Munro’s perspective in time, she writes a lot about youngish people but she brings the perspective of someone approaching maturity. I think she was in her 50’s when she wrote these.

What I love about Munro and the stories in this collection is how she transports me so easily into the rich mental landscape of her characters. Something about her work seems qualitatively head and shoulders above other fiction I've read. Each story feeds my brain as if it were an exquisitely prepared meal.

This is an earlyish collection, her fifth to be published, from 1982. The themes of the stories seem to be fairly representative of the sort of thing Munro is known for: the central characters tend to be middle-aged women, mostly coming to terms with their small-town/farm backgrounds and/or starting or ending new relationships after the breakup of their first marriages. The characters are - at least on the surface - very ordinary, and not a lot happens in terms of plot. There are no "surprise endings" or twists in the tale: Munro generally sets up a situation and then destabilises our view of it either by using a discordant detail or by bringing in an alternative interpretation of events. Very subtle, and usually extremely effective.

Aunque Las lunas de Júpiter no es el libro más reciente de Munro y refleja, según parece, una etapa de su obra que la autora canadiense ya superó, muestra un talento y una atención al detalle enormes. Todos los personajes de los cuentos están perfectamente bien construidos y resultan interesantes incluso en las narraciones más flojas. La construcción de sus cuentos parece calculada y bien trabajada. Excelente autora, bien merecedora a mi parecer de los galardones que se le han otorgado. Mis cuentos favoritos del volumen fueron: "Prue", "Accidente", "La señora Cross y la Señora Kidd" y "Las lunas de Júpiter".