Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
Alice Munro
Chatto & Windus 2009
One thing you will certainly not complain about when reading these short stories is a surfeit of happiness. There’s a woman whose children have been murdered, another whose husband deserts her for a younger model, and another who is dying of cancer. A young boy whose face is disfigured by a birthmark loses his best friend, and a child’s efforts to be accepted by her neighbour ends in tragedy. However, whilst this collection is scarcely cheering, most of it is rewarding. If anything binds it together it is the way that incidents - some big, some small - can still have on a person’s life many years later: the time when, as Munro writes, “What’s been all over and done with [is] sprouting up fresh, wanting attention, even wanting you to do something about it, though it is plain there is not on this earth a thing to be done” . The stories are elegantly crafted, beautifully (and clearly) written, and utterly convincing. My favourites are Dimensions, which builds a disturbing picture of a controlling husband and a dominated wife who, eventually and too late, turns, and Child’s Play, which effortlessly recreates the vicious and heedless cruelty of childhood. The only one I couldn’t really get on with was the last, long, story which gives the collection its name. Here Munro leaves her native Canada, her usual setting, and goes to late nineteenth century Europe to tell the story of Sophia Kovalevsky, Russian émigré, writer and mathematician. I was soon lost in a forest of Russian names and confusing flashbacks, and wished that Munro had stayed at home. The fault here was, however, undoubtedly mine.
16 May 2010
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Munro
See also: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
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