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A review by pantsuitparty
The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
4.0
I don’t know what some of these other reviews are talking about when they say this is a “dull” book. I couldn’t disagree more.
Castle Rock is fascinating on many levels; each story serves the broader whole of the collection exploring ideas of placehood, history and one’s personal attachment to people and things. The revelations in this book are quiet but profound; like listening to the railroad not for the sound of the train approaching, but for evidence of its just having passed, which also happens to be the train that you arrived on.
The epic undertakings of the earlier stories give way to intimate personal stories detailed by a landscape, society and customs that shape Munro’s own upbringing and personality. Stoic decisions of the past reverberate to create the ‘small world’ of Huron County, that, upon further inspection, has a depth of physical, and biological strata that have changed and constituted its place in the here and now.
Castle Rock is fascinating on many levels; each story serves the broader whole of the collection exploring ideas of placehood, history and one’s personal attachment to people and things. The revelations in this book are quiet but profound; like listening to the railroad not for the sound of the train approaching, but for evidence of its just having passed, which also happens to be the train that you arrived on.
The epic undertakings of the earlier stories give way to intimate personal stories detailed by a landscape, society and customs that shape Munro’s own upbringing and personality. Stoic decisions of the past reverberate to create the ‘small world’ of Huron County, that, upon further inspection, has a depth of physical, and biological strata that have changed and constituted its place in the here and now.