Scan barcode
spenkevich's review against another edition
5.0
‘The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.’
From short accounts of singular events to the sprawling history of a life or love affair, Alice Munro shows it is the little things that matter most. These ‘things within things’ - the greater truth in the smallest of details, are the hearts and souls of her fiction. Selected Stories is an excellent best-of introduction to the author as it collects 28 stories from three decades of her prestigious career to reveal an incredible scope of emotion and sincerity. In the vein of authors such as [a:William Faulkner|3535|William Faulkner|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1615562983p2/3535.jpg] or [a:Anton Chekhov|5031025|Anton Chekhov|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1650587503p2/5031025.jpg], Munro unlocks the lives of women through her keen eye for acute observation and characterization.
Along with authors such as [a:Margaret Atwood|3472|Margaret Atwood|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1282859073p2/3472.jpg], Munro has been classified as a member of the ‘Southern Ontario Gothic’ ¹. Much like the Southern Gothic to which [a:Flannery O'Connor|22694|Flannery O'Connor|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1469878767p2/22694.jpg] and [a:William Faulkner|3535|William Faulkner|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1615562983p2/3535.jpg] belong (I was recommended Munro due to my obsession with those two authors which characterized my reading selection during my late teens and early twenties), Munro’s fiction builds on the social, political, moral and religious atmosphere of her region as the past is always shaping the present in the lives of her characters. Her characters are play out their dramas on a stage of society, chafing of the relationships with lovers and family or social constructs, instead of on the playing field of plot. The plot is rather secondary, existing primarily as a method of illustrating the passage of time, either in a small, single event such as the boredom of a commonplace formality shattered by a surprising twist of unique characters entering the scene (In Dance of the Happy Shades, for instance, a children’s piano recital is shaken up when another school arrive lates, increasing the awkwardness of the event sevenfold) or the entire lifespan of a woman. Very rarely are the plot mechanics the take-away message of a story. Her efforts to effect a realistic passage of time leads many to compare her to Chekhov as well as the Southern Gothic, such as in Garan Holocombe’s critical analysis of Munro for the British Council of Literature ²:
Time is always escaping us, and many of her stories reflect our desire to makes sense of the time that has slipped through us in order to understand the route we should take through the time that awaits us.
Munro’s focal characters, almost always women, are built through – and in the instance of first-person narration view their personalities through – a conglomeration of events and past actions. A unique side-effect of having a selected stories collection is that the reader is able to witness Munro growing as an author as she ages and see how her own progression down life’s timeline corresponds to her characters and stories. While her earliest stories are typically shorter and play out through a shorter amount of time, her later stories are vast and encompass the whole of ones life. Her characters are often confronting time itself in her later stories, be it a confrontation with their impending end, or to find their place within the greater society or family system as the years fall away. They are caught in a sort of limbo between the person they were and they person they will become with the story often ending just of the fringes of any sort of resolution.
‘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.’
Instead of positioning characters in high-energy situations, Munro constructs her stories around the mundane. Her fiction never strays from a portrait of reality, of life as we all know it, and acted out by everyday individuals. While often nothing striking or particularly plot-point worthy occurs, Munro is able to deliver an emotional and psychological punch through the tiny, ordinary details that make up our day-to-day. Her acute observations exploit the tiniest of details to reveal a startlingly large amount of character and information, be it the way a character dresses, speaks to strangers, or the methods in which they attempt to keep a household. For Munro, the world and people in it are like poetry where she is able to extract the greatest amount from the small ideas.
The criticisms for her work primarily focus on a lack of versatility in plot or voice, though I find this part of why returning to her work is always so comforting. While it is true that a vast majority of her stories have the same formula of ‘woman leaving one position of life, be it a relationship, job, living location, religions conviction, eventual death of oneself or a loved one, etc., and begins to forge a new one by critiquing the mistakes of the former’, Munro is able to still keep each story unique, yet familiar in a sense that makes it seem applicable to any reader in some way, shape or form. The voice is often level from story to story, yet, especially with this selected stories collection, she manages to keep the delivery fresh by attempting different story telling devices. Carried Away, which is quite possibly my favorite of hers, begins with the correspondence of a librarian and a soldier during WWII and then moves to a third-person narrative in the second half, while Wilderness Station has the final third of the story shift to characters two generations down the line from the characters of previous segments and allows the reader to fill in the gaps through hints in dialogue and the interaction of characters to understand how the former plot concluded. While this collection varies in themes, the individual books of hers usually have a common theme for which the stories build upon. She also revisits characters in some books, checking in on them at various stages of their lives, which I felt added to the stories and felt like visiting an old friend as opposed to adding to what is considered by some to be recycling ideas and failing to rise from the same monotone of voice.
‘ She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood, that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.’
I have been picking through Munro’s Selected Stories for several years now, slowly savoring every story. Each time I dive back in, I am always glad to discover that Munro still satisfies and meets my ever-changing tastes in literature. From tales of love, loss and alienation, Alice Munro proves herself again and again to be a powerful voice in not only women’s literature, but in the wide scope of literature and story telling. Her stories are moving, insightful, witty, and always leave you feeling as if you had just spent time in the company of a friend.
5/5
¹ ‘Alice Munro and the Southern Ontario Gothic genre’
² Garan Holocombe ‘s criticism for the British Council of Literature
‘Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.’
From short accounts of singular events to the sprawling history of a life or love affair, Alice Munro shows it is the little things that matter most. These ‘things within things’ - the greater truth in the smallest of details, are the hearts and souls of her fiction. Selected Stories is an excellent best-of introduction to the author as it collects 28 stories from three decades of her prestigious career to reveal an incredible scope of emotion and sincerity. In the vein of authors such as [a:William Faulkner|3535|William Faulkner|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1615562983p2/3535.jpg] or [a:Anton Chekhov|5031025|Anton Chekhov|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1650587503p2/5031025.jpg], Munro unlocks the lives of women through her keen eye for acute observation and characterization.
Along with authors such as [a:Margaret Atwood|3472|Margaret Atwood|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1282859073p2/3472.jpg], Munro has been classified as a member of the ‘Southern Ontario Gothic’ ¹. Much like the Southern Gothic to which [a:Flannery O'Connor|22694|Flannery O'Connor|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1469878767p2/22694.jpg] and [a:William Faulkner|3535|William Faulkner|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1615562983p2/3535.jpg] belong (I was recommended Munro due to my obsession with those two authors which characterized my reading selection during my late teens and early twenties), Munro’s fiction builds on the social, political, moral and religious atmosphere of her region as the past is always shaping the present in the lives of her characters. Her characters are play out their dramas on a stage of society, chafing of the relationships with lovers and family or social constructs, instead of on the playing field of plot. The plot is rather secondary, existing primarily as a method of illustrating the passage of time, either in a small, single event such as the boredom of a commonplace formality shattered by a surprising twist of unique characters entering the scene (In Dance of the Happy Shades, for instance, a children’s piano recital is shaken up when another school arrive lates, increasing the awkwardness of the event sevenfold) or the entire lifespan of a woman. Very rarely are the plot mechanics the take-away message of a story. Her efforts to effect a realistic passage of time leads many to compare her to Chekhov as well as the Southern Gothic, such as in Garan Holocombe’s critical analysis of Munro for the British Council of Literature ²:
’Alice Munro is routinely spoken of in the same breath as Anton Chekov. She resembles the Russian master in a number of ways. She is fascinated with the failings of love and work and has an obsession with time. There is the same penetrating psychological insight; the events played out in a minor key; the small town settings. In Munro’s fictional universe, as in Chekhov’s, plot is of secondary importance: all is based on the epiphanic moment, the sudden enlightenment, the concise, subtle, revelatory detail. Another significant feature of Munro’s is the (typically Canadian) connection to the land, to what Margaret Atwood has called a ‘harsh and vast geography.’ Munro is attuned to the shifts and colours of the natural world, to life lived with the wilderness. Her skill at describing the constituency of the environment is equal to her ability to get below the surface of the lives of her characters.’
Time is always escaping us, and many of her stories reflect our desire to makes sense of the time that has slipped through us in order to understand the route we should take through the time that awaits us.
Munro’s focal characters, almost always women, are built through – and in the instance of first-person narration view their personalities through – a conglomeration of events and past actions. A unique side-effect of having a selected stories collection is that the reader is able to witness Munro growing as an author as she ages and see how her own progression down life’s timeline corresponds to her characters and stories. While her earliest stories are typically shorter and play out through a shorter amount of time, her later stories are vast and encompass the whole of ones life. Her characters are often confronting time itself in her later stories, be it a confrontation with their impending end, or to find their place within the greater society or family system as the years fall away. They are caught in a sort of limbo between the person they were and they person they will become with the story often ending just of the fringes of any sort of resolution.
‘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.’
Instead of positioning characters in high-energy situations, Munro constructs her stories around the mundane. Her fiction never strays from a portrait of reality, of life as we all know it, and acted out by everyday individuals. While often nothing striking or particularly plot-point worthy occurs, Munro is able to deliver an emotional and psychological punch through the tiny, ordinary details that make up our day-to-day. Her acute observations exploit the tiniest of details to reveal a startlingly large amount of character and information, be it the way a character dresses, speaks to strangers, or the methods in which they attempt to keep a household. For Munro, the world and people in it are like poetry where she is able to extract the greatest amount from the small ideas.
The criticisms for her work primarily focus on a lack of versatility in plot or voice, though I find this part of why returning to her work is always so comforting. While it is true that a vast majority of her stories have the same formula of ‘woman leaving one position of life, be it a relationship, job, living location, religions conviction, eventual death of oneself or a loved one, etc., and begins to forge a new one by critiquing the mistakes of the former’, Munro is able to still keep each story unique, yet familiar in a sense that makes it seem applicable to any reader in some way, shape or form. The voice is often level from story to story, yet, especially with this selected stories collection, she manages to keep the delivery fresh by attempting different story telling devices. Carried Away, which is quite possibly my favorite of hers, begins with the correspondence of a librarian and a soldier during WWII and then moves to a third-person narrative in the second half, while Wilderness Station has the final third of the story shift to characters two generations down the line from the characters of previous segments and allows the reader to fill in the gaps through hints in dialogue and the interaction of characters to understand how the former plot concluded. While this collection varies in themes, the individual books of hers usually have a common theme for which the stories build upon. She also revisits characters in some books, checking in on them at various stages of their lives, which I felt added to the stories and felt like visiting an old friend as opposed to adding to what is considered by some to be recycling ideas and failing to rise from the same monotone of voice.
‘ She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood, that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.’
I have been picking through Munro’s Selected Stories for several years now, slowly savoring every story. Each time I dive back in, I am always glad to discover that Munro still satisfies and meets my ever-changing tastes in literature. From tales of love, loss and alienation, Alice Munro proves herself again and again to be a powerful voice in not only women’s literature, but in the wide scope of literature and story telling. Her stories are moving, insightful, witty, and always leave you feeling as if you had just spent time in the company of a friend.
5/5
¹ ‘Alice Munro and the Southern Ontario Gothic genre’
² Garan Holocombe ‘s criticism for the British Council of Literature
‘Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.’
hxcpanda's review
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.75
colleeneliza47's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
toffrede's review against another edition
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
4.75
dukegregory's review against another edition
5.0
Wild to think I've been reading this on and off for about a bit less than half a year. It feels as if I've enjoyed Munro for a significantly longer period, as if I had, at some primordial point, perused her quiet Ottawas and Vancouvers and felt the resonance of her mundanities, the ways in which her nonlinear narratives move from the inane to the extraordinary entirely out of my sight, magically eluding my usual observance. She is truly special, and she was truly special from the beginning of her career. Walker Brothers Cowboy is a triumph of tone, theme, character, narrative, every aspect of storytelling, and yet its solitude seems effortless. Its ending is stifling. And that was but the beginning. I'm thankful that this collection only holds twenty-eight of her stories, because it just means that I continue to have so much more to read before having to rely on rereading to experience whatever you can call the experience of reading a Munro short story.
cl_critchett's review against another edition
emotional
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
erikars's review against another edition
DNF. 4 stories into the collection, and none of them caught my interest yet.
lizawall's review
5.0
Not to say she's not perfect, because she is, but what is up with the severed heads?
samstern's review
challenging
mysterious
relaxing
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
5.0