Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories

I'm not normally a big fan of short stories, since many become simple ramblings and can come off as without much plot or character development. However, Alice Munro is a master short story teller and she certainly deserves all the literary prizes that she's been awarded during her writing career, including the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature. Her stories are tightly and masterfully constructed to entertain and challenge the places in our hearts that we often try to keep to ourselves. Using extremely skillful and varied literary techniques, Alice Munro shares with us the realities of ordinary lives and what it means to be human. Even though her settings are mostly centered on small town Canada, and over several decades, her characters are widely varied and depict the lives that surround the readers' own lives. Anyone can easily relate to Alice Munro's tales and enjoy her gift for storytellling, at its highest level. Typically, Ms. Munro's stories depict Everywoman and Everyman, especially the former. Many of Alice Munro's story lines taunt the reader to go down into potentially maudlin and darker places of the human heart, as the reader begins to empathize with the characters' life crises, successes and challenges. Many characters' travails and/or triumphs can sometimes bring the reader to tears, near to laughter and often relief. The stories' small town settings are fraught with the usual array of background characters and everyday life events. As the story lines march along, the conflicts among characters, or within the characters themselves, reshape their hopes and dreams. Typically, Ms. Munro suddenly and dramatically alters her characters' lives, when life decisions and situations threaten to crush the characters' spirits and rip apart their potentially happy and secure futures. However, as her stories prepare to conclude, Ms. Munro skillfully brings her main characters' courage into play, so that their altered lives can redeem their pasts, as they reach out to others, thus changing themselves and setting the tempo for a more mature, informed and hopeful future. One could not go wrong with a few hours spent within the life and times of Alice Munro's Everyman and Everywoman. She's a true master of the short story. For those who enjoy Alice Munro's stories, the novelists Barbara Kingsolver and Anne Tyler are also excellent authors whose characters' also meander along everyday paths. Their main characters' existence also amble along into the same fulfillment and redemption of ordinary lives that Ms. Munro wishes to depict. .

When Alice Munro won the Nobel prize for literature this year I knew I'd have to give her a try. Although she may have written a novel or two, her real forte is the short story. At first I thought I'd get a broad compilation of her work but after researching a bit I realized I needed to read one of her collections based on a theme. I'm glad this is the book I first reached for. She tells a series of nine stories about relationships between men and women, married or not. In the first story, from which the book takes its name, a woman enters into a correspondence with another man - or at least she thinks she does; in actuality the young girl whom she takes care of and the girl's friend have been intercepting the letters and forging love letters in return. As a result of the letters, the protagonist leaves the house she is working in to live with the man she thought she had been corresponding with. Yeah; imagine that for a moment. Many of the men in the stories are hard bitten, small, mean, and abusive - either physically or emotionally. The women either make adjustments or break clean. One of my favorite literature courses in college was Southern Short Stories; if you've never read "Why I Live at the P.O." by Eudora Welty, stop what your are doing and read it now. Pacing and details are much different from novels. Short stories start in medias res (in the midst of things) whereas novels are "ab ovo" (from the egg). These are long form short stories so we don't start smack down in the middle of everything but you do you have to spend some effort to pull pieces together. I'm so used to the novel form, that it took some getting used to. But It was definitely worth it. I highly recommend Alice Munro - and this seems a great place to start.

This excellent collection came out in 2001 but is timeless in its scope. The characters have strange encounters which deepen them: a courtship between a middle-aged, geographically separated couple begins because of letters intercepted, steamed open, and replied to by teenagers; in "Floating Bridge" a woman cancer patient has an encounter with an adolescent boy who understands her better than anyone else; in "Comfort," a long marriage ends with Lou Gherig's Disease, cremation, and the realization of love. In another story unusable love is described after an occurrence on a golf course between playmates grown to adulthood; in "What is Remembered," a bush doctor flies down to a funeral and has a sexual encounter with the widow; the narrator in "Post and Beam" makes a bargain with herself to go on living after encountering her miserable, suicidal cousin; "Queenie" involves a woman left behind by a coldhearted man; the final story makes a match between the spouses of two Alzheimer's patients. Munro is a born phrase-maker. "Her teeth were crowded to the front of her mouth as if they were ready for an argument." "High heels, thin ankles, girdle so tight her nylons rasped." A smart aleck holds up the wall of a drugstore. "The house was full of callous desertion, of deceit." "...the well-mannered gentleman, his mind on other times..." In a shoe repair shop, "the emery stone on a tool's edge sang high like a mechanical insect and the sewing machine punched the leather in an earnest industrial rhythm. These are not examples of fine writing, they're observations from real life. And how wonderful are her endings! "Floating Bridge" concludes with the cancer patient thinking "What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given." Most of the stories are set in the past, from the 40s through the 60s. One story mentions John L. Lewis, the famous self-taught Welshman who headed the United Mine Workers for years and developed a penchant for flowery speech. Attacking President Truman, he began "It ill behooves one who has supped at Labor's table...." Munro would enjoy that. As the poet of the emotions, Munro has no equal. "The cries of the crowd came to me like big heartbeats, full of sorrows. Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation. This is what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be." And after the scattering of the ashes in "Comfort" the last line is, "A sickening shock at first, then amazement that you were still moving, lifted up on a stream of steely devotion--calm above the surface of your life, surviving, though the pain of the cold continued to wash into your body." They don't make stories any better than that.

I was a bit disappointed after I finished reading this book, because of the reviews I had read about Munro’s work had created so much expectation. These are all stories in which everyday women of different ages are the protagonists. They all face some vicissitude that makes them vulnerable or puts them in disadvantage, at the mercy of chance or at risk of suffering, but they all manage, somehow, to be heroes without getting out of the normality of life. A nice touch is that all stories see the characters as entities who age and evolve with time. This is a book that feminists will love, since it honors the conspicuous and vibrant presence of women’s views in our contemporary world. I was disappointed by the form. I expected fireworks from a Nobel laureate. The style feels monotonous and the dynamics a bit repetitive. The characters are very similar from story to story and the text reads at times as a scientific paper. There is an anthropological approach to her writting. I guess she also writes with the nostalgia, and stoich and bitter resignation that comes with age. This is a bit distracting. She is still entertaining and ends up offering a progressive and optimistic, but maybe utopian recount.

I make time to read this (I usually am too busy with my kids to read as much as I'd like.) Each sentence she writes is a masterpiece, it's amazing! The amount of detail that she weaves into her stories is spellbinding. She takes the reader on a journey that consistently goes places you wouldn't expect and starts and ends her stories where you have a sense there was so much more before and after just what she puts down in print. The stories have a real life of their own and they meander through these languid twists and turns that make describing her stories impossible. I have more than once tried to explain what I'm reading and find I really can't express what the story is about without repeating all of these crazy details that tie the whole thing together. There's so much going on in each short story that I feel like I'm exercising areas in my mind that I don't normally use. Brilliant writing. Very enjoyable. I totally recommend this book!

I am in awe of Alice Mumro's craft as a short story writer and have read much of her work over the years. I was happy to find this on Kindle. It is a difficult genre and she is a master

Alice Munro's gifts are understated; she is so good at what she does that her work is nearly artless. Munro's stories are unsentimental, but at the same time they seem very personal. She revisits themes over and over in this collection -- marriage, illness and caretaking, a relative's visit -- but always has something new to say about them, and each story feels as true as memoir or memory. My favorite piece in this collection was Queenie, a story unusually (for Munro) grounded in a particular time. Narrated by her step-sister, it's about Queenie's escape from home, and then her escape from that escape. I also liked the tender but funny title story, in which an idle prank engineered by a teenage girl alters the lives of two unhappy adults in a way she didn't intend, and The Floating Bridge, which depicts a very sick woman's reacquaintance with joy in the form of a careless, confident young man. I found the final story, The Bear Came Over The Mountain, sad and disturbing, but this might have been the author's intent.

This collection of short stories is mind-blowingly good. Other reviewers have already offered descriptions of the content so I will just use this opportunity to RAVE about Alice Munro. She is pitch perfect on every level. Actually, she is beyond pitch perfect. Multiple times, I stopped and re-read sentences and passages to savor her beautiful writing, observations, turns of phrase, etc. I plan to go on to read all of her works, then re-read them (something I never do), and I am so looking forward to basking in the brilliance that is Alice Munro. I read a lot (I have a daily hour and a half train commute and am in a book club) and it's only every couple of years that I come across a writer as good as Alice Munro. One word of advice -- read each story in its entirety, then stop, and wait until the next day to read the next story. Each story is as tightly crafted and as rich as a good novel, and you will benefit from the time taken to contemplate them on your own.

Aliced Munro: Hateship Friendship Courtship Love Thoughtful and slow-paced, her stories are elegant and wistful. Her style is admirable. Not a moment of boredom in her works. Adi Wimmer

Such a great

Runaway is a book that I couldn't put down. We absorb through it lives of so many people you probably know somehow. Thus, I found my perspective about the world outside me, the people I encountered, somehow shift, and I just loved the life perspectives Ms. Munro offered. In fact, reading each story, I got that same feeling I get watching a really good movie, Well, that's not surprising because obviously she is a masterful writer. Yes, this book is one of those books in my life I'm really glad I read. Oh, and don't forget to think a little of how each story is about a runaway; it may not always be obvious, but that's the point, I think.

Alice Munro est capable en quelques pages de tisser la trame d'une vie, dont la banalité même devient souvent exceptionnelle. A travers les souffrances de ces femmes, confrontées à des rêves brisés, à des enfances sans issue ou encore à des amours obscurcis par on ne sait quelle fatalité, elle décrit l'univers contemporain des campagnes du Canada britannique, qui, comme ailleurs, enferment de curieux destins de personnages aux abois. J'en retiens ces étonnants portraits de femmes qui semblent s'initier à une réalité diffuse où personne ou presque ne communique, où les sentiments meurent aussi vite qu'ils ont éclot, au coeur d'une nature souvent hostile, entre deux emplois, deux naissances , trois ou quatre rencontres plus ou moins futiles. Ces nouvelles sont vraiment remarquables, et il faut, si possible les lire en anglais, dans une langue ciselée et elliptique, qui plonge profondément dans la trame de vies bouleversantes.

I have never been a fan of short stories are used to enjoy short science-fiction stories many years ago but since then I have never found any short stories that I enjoyed I can’t remember why I bought this book as it was a few years ago because I was waiting a long time for the book which I was eagerly awaiting I ran out of books This was the best book of short stories I have ever read and indeed one of the best books I have ever read the last story was possibly the best short story I have ever read I will now become a regular Alice Munro reader