I feel like every review of Alice Munro books, except for maybe her most recent book Dear Life, would be exactly the same. Dear Life is different because that book contains long sections of memoir stories that change the tenor of the over all collection.
So if you like Alice Munro, you’ll like this one. She’s one of the most consistent writers I’ve ever read. I read her collected stories, which is about 650 pages of 35 years worth of her best stories, and then I’ve also read three more recent collections. This gives me a basic sense of her early best and more recent collections, a balance of the selected stories and the collections that come out fairly regularly.
So: here’s something that I found very strong with these stories. They are not blended together in some kind of frame to make the book have a kind of thematic connection. They are simply nine good, fairly lengthy contemporary short stories. There’s little artifice in the language or the set up or the conceits. There’s brief descriptions of character, situation, and setting. And the playing around happens with structure and time.
For example, in the title story, there’s a brilliant kind of time setting. She begins by saying something to the effect that “In the time when trains were more regular” and well, that opens up a lot of possibility. And then she describes a situation, a woman moving herself and her bedroom furniture across Canada by train, which would be interpreted differently depending on when exactly the story is happening. So as I worked to better understand when this was happening, I was realizing more and more about the constancy of human feeling and experience within the characters. We are eventually made known that this is happening not nearly as long ago as it might have been.
Another story begins with a older wife finding her husband dead from suicide, and her reaction is something to the effect of, why the hurry. We come to understand that he was ill and this was part of continuing conversation. But we also go back in time to understand more about his life. And who he was in this stage of his life versus who he was in other stages. It’s a reminder of the brilliant quality of storytelling to capture a life, while failing (on purpose here) to account for the various people we are throughout.
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