Status
Checked out
Genres
Publication
Alfred A. Knopf (2001), Edition: 1st, 323 pages
Description
Fiction. Literature. HTML: WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013 Alice Munro has long been heralded for her penetrating, lyrical prose, and in â??The Bear Came Over the Mountainâ?ť â?? the basis for Sarah Polleyâ??s film Away From Her â?? her prodigious talents are once again on display. As she follows Grant, a retired professor whose wife Fiona begins gradually to lose her memory and drift away from him, we slowly see how a lifetime of intimate details can create a marriage, and how mysterious the bonds of love
User reviews
LibraryThing member StoutHearted
Munro's short stories in this volume often revolve with either an event or a person that changes the protagonist's life. The first story is by far the best, with its honest portrayal of a woman on the cusp of spinsterhood who is the butt of a mean prank by some teen girls, a prank which does not go
A strange staple of Munro's stories is the female protagonists' comfort in a taboo connection with another man. These women are married, yet any life crisis can send them to whichever man happens to be around. Sometimes it's just a kiss, other times an affair, or perhaps just an emotional affair. I feel like Munro too often uses the emotional connection like a crutch in her stories; as if the kiss or affair is all that is needed to make the protagonist accept her situation. In some stories, the taboo connection felt natural, as in the story of the woman who ran into her childhood love, but in some other stories it felt forced. Perhaps this is why the first story shines even after all the other tales have been read. The emotional connection between two characters feels very right, like it ought to happen, and it's interesting how such a fatalistic theme works with no-nonsense prose and such a no-nonsense protagonist.
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as expected. Other stories concern a larger-than-life female family member that appeared so dynamic when the story's protagonist was a child, but lost that appeal when the protagonist entered womanhood. Only the last story, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" uses a male protagonist, but the center of the story is his wife Fiona, who suffers from Alzheimer's. A strange staple of Munro's stories is the female protagonists' comfort in a taboo connection with another man. These women are married, yet any life crisis can send them to whichever man happens to be around. Sometimes it's just a kiss, other times an affair, or perhaps just an emotional affair. I feel like Munro too often uses the emotional connection like a crutch in her stories; as if the kiss or affair is all that is needed to make the protagonist accept her situation. In some stories, the taboo connection felt natural, as in the story of the woman who ran into her childhood love, but in some other stories it felt forced. Perhaps this is why the first story shines even after all the other tales have been read. The emotional connection between two characters feels very right, like it ought to happen, and it's interesting how such a fatalistic theme works with no-nonsense prose and such a no-nonsense protagonist.
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LibraryThing member readingrat
Like any collection of short stories some are good and some are not.
LibraryThing member sonja_de
The first Munro I read, and I'll definitely seek out more of her work. I loved all of the stories. Especially the first one (Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage) gripped me completely and I had to hurry through because I was afraid for the heroine. Have to reread it now that I know
The translation is really good, since I didn't notice it at all - which is a rarity for me. I confess: I only bought this edition because I love the format - small hardcover that fits in any pocket. I'm glad I found this author this way!
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the ending. The translation is really good, since I didn't notice it at all - which is a rarity for me. I confess: I only bought this edition because I love the format - small hardcover that fits in any pocket. I'm glad I found this author this way!
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LibraryThing member lamour
Munro is a master of the short story technique. What may seem as a minor event or description in the story line, turns out to be very significant to the plot. This means you must read her stories carefully for they are packed with little moments on which the plot will turn. At the end of each
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story, I felt as if I had just read a novel for there is so much plot in each one that I felt I had known a character for a very long time and not just the 30 pages that these stories are in length. Show Less
LibraryThing member emily_morine
I sometimes get into conversations with people who have a hard time connecting with the short-story format; they say that they hardly have time to muster an emotional involvement in the characters and events, before the story is over. To those readers I might recommend Alice Munro. True, I have
Munro, it should be stressed, is a magnificent craftsman. One of the reasons these stories, at 20 or 30 pages, feel like whole super-condensed novels, is their author's extreme economy of language, her ability to establish whole histories with one or two well-chosen words, which often occur in a paragraph seemingly devoted to another task entirely. In the story "Post and Beam," for example, the graduate student Lionel contemplates the married life of his professor and the professor's wife, a couple he has come to socialize with on occasion:
He came to see them in the evenings, when the children were in bed. The slight intrusions of domestic life—the cry of the baby reaching them through an open window, the scolding Brendan sometimes had to give Lorna about toys left lying on the grass, instead of being put back in the sandbox, the call from the kitchen asking if she had remembered to buy limes for the gin and tonic—all seemed to cause a shiver, a tightening of Lionel's tall, narrow body and intent, distrustful face.
Not only do we get a portrait of a summer evening here, the ambient twilight stimuli as the adults have a drink together, but we also get Lionel's aversion to the everyday accouterments of married life (he comes after the children are in bed, shivers at Lorna and Brendan's everyday interactions). We also get a solid idea of the dynamic between Lorna and Brendan: their marriage follows traditional gender roles in that she is the one expected to take responsibility for cleaning up the children's toys and doing the shopping; if she slips up, Brendan not just allowed but obliged ("had to") to give her a scolding about it. That "had to" might indicate, since we are in his head at the moment, Lionel's point of view, his acceptance of the standard husband/wife hierarchy—although the rest of the story gives the impression that none of these characters would object to the phrase, even as the lack of equality and human understanding in her marriage is making Lorna actively unhappy. Even the addition of "remembered" ("the call from the kitchen asking if she had remembered to buy limes for the gin and tonic") adds to multiple aspects of the marital portrait. On the one hand, it speaks to the familiarity of husband and wife: probably everyone who has shared a household has yelled this type of question at one time or another. On the other hand, combined with Brendan's disconnection from his children and scolding of his wife, his phrasing adds to the picture of his domineering nature. This is not a man who goes to the store to buy limes himself, but tasks his wife with buying them, and then calls from the kitchen to ask if she remembered his request, rather than walking into the other room to ask her or (heaven forbid) looking for the limes himself. One can understand why Lionel might not be jumping on board with the whole marriage proposition, if Lorna and Brendan are his role models.
And in fact, Brendan is largely representative of the male characters in Munro's book. If I have a complaint about the collection, it's this uniformity of male callousness: although we occasionally see a long-married couple who are genuinely caring toward one another (if mutually deeply flawed), or a pair of total strangers who manage to achieve a moment of unfettered connection, for the most part Munro's men are controlling, unfaithful jerks, taking the women around them for granted and generally acting like petulant toddlers. And I don't mean to suggest that Munro does not evoke this character type with great skill and sensitivity, because she absolutely does—and in fact, many of these male characters, in her hands, end up eliciting some degree of sympathy in the reader's mind: quite a feat considering their collective behavior. Munro's analysis of the gender roles in these stories acknowledges that the mainstream culture of the 1950s and 60s set up young men to be the assholes they sometimes turned out, just as those same decades socialized women to be submissive and self-denigrating, simultaneously responsible for raising children and reduced to a child-like state themselves. In the excellent story "What is Remembered," one of the highlights of the collection for me, the narrator writes:
Young husbands were stern, in those days. Just a short time before, they had been suitors, almost figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their sexual agonies. Now, bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving. Off to work every morning, clean-shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days spent in unknown labors, home again at suppertime to take a critical glance at the evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it up between themselves and the muddle of the kitchen, the ailments and emotions, the babies. What a lot they had to learn. How to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives.
So the men don't have a roadmap for how to live, any more than the women do. They, too, are working to conform to certain societal expectations. Yes.
Even so, I've known a good number of men from this generation (or slightly older: my grandparents' generation), and most of them were not domineering, not unkind to their wives or dismissive of their wives' opinions. True, I didn't know them when they were young men. Munro's older characters are significantly gentler with each other than her younger ones, albeit sometimes oddly so. To some degree even the younger characters are not being unkind given their social context: they assume it's the simple truth that a husband's role is to dictate and a wife's is to obey. This is a systemic problem more than a fault of individuals. Still. Munro's bone of contention got a bit monotonous at times, as much as I agree with her insights. The sameness of male/female relationships in the collection dulled the impact of stories which, individually or in more varied company, would have all packed the same kind of punch as the first few did.
In addition to said bones, though, this collection offers lots of meat. It will be rewarding to return to individual stories in the future, which I think will be a more palatable way of appreciating Munro than reading a collection of hers cover to cover. And there is plenty here to appreciate: the role of memory throughout these stories, for example, and how we mold our recollections to fill the functions we need them to, forgetting or imagining where it is convenient. Or how Munro so cleanly and expertly handles shifts in time, quietly moving the reader forward and backward in a given history with no unnecessary apparatus and hardly a hiccup in the narrative flow. It's not a Woolfian vision of simultaneity; while the characters often recollect their pasts, the past is not present to them as it is to Clarissa Dalloway or Peter Walsh—but the narrative engine is so weightless and nimble that it can position the reader neatly at any desired perspective point vis-à -vis the action, and whisk them to a different one with no fuss at all, with absolute clarity. (The opening paragraphs of "Family Furnishings" are excellent at this, and the titular story shows a similar character-based flexibility in its use of a roving limited third-person narrator.)
Munro is not comfort reading, in other words, but in small doses I will definitely be returning to her hard, occasionally tender, lying world.
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only experienced one of her collections, but the stories in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage are nothing if not emotionally affecting—or "crushingly tragic," I suppose, if you want to get specific about the thing. Indeed, the understated yet unrelenting tragedy of small unkindnesses built up over decades and lifetimes; of the inevitable disappointments and compromises that result when people do their best and their best is not very good; of the human tendency to feel pride in one's flaws and shame in one's strengths: all this is the lifeblood of Munro's collection, and there's no denying that it's more bitter than sweet. At times, the bitterness becomes overpowering. At other times, Munro strikes a compelling balance between the deep sadness in all her characters (particularly her female characters) and the moments of true connection they manage to glean from the world around them, often at unexpected moments. Munro, it should be stressed, is a magnificent craftsman. One of the reasons these stories, at 20 or 30 pages, feel like whole super-condensed novels, is their author's extreme economy of language, her ability to establish whole histories with one or two well-chosen words, which often occur in a paragraph seemingly devoted to another task entirely. In the story "Post and Beam," for example, the graduate student Lionel contemplates the married life of his professor and the professor's wife, a couple he has come to socialize with on occasion:
He came to see them in the evenings, when the children were in bed. The slight intrusions of domestic life—the cry of the baby reaching them through an open window, the scolding Brendan sometimes had to give Lorna about toys left lying on the grass, instead of being put back in the sandbox, the call from the kitchen asking if she had remembered to buy limes for the gin and tonic—all seemed to cause a shiver, a tightening of Lionel's tall, narrow body and intent, distrustful face.
Not only do we get a portrait of a summer evening here, the ambient twilight stimuli as the adults have a drink together, but we also get Lionel's aversion to the everyday accouterments of married life (he comes after the children are in bed, shivers at Lorna and Brendan's everyday interactions). We also get a solid idea of the dynamic between Lorna and Brendan: their marriage follows traditional gender roles in that she is the one expected to take responsibility for cleaning up the children's toys and doing the shopping; if she slips up, Brendan not just allowed but obliged ("had to") to give her a scolding about it. That "had to" might indicate, since we are in his head at the moment, Lionel's point of view, his acceptance of the standard husband/wife hierarchy—although the rest of the story gives the impression that none of these characters would object to the phrase, even as the lack of equality and human understanding in her marriage is making Lorna actively unhappy. Even the addition of "remembered" ("the call from the kitchen asking if she had remembered to buy limes for the gin and tonic") adds to multiple aspects of the marital portrait. On the one hand, it speaks to the familiarity of husband and wife: probably everyone who has shared a household has yelled this type of question at one time or another. On the other hand, combined with Brendan's disconnection from his children and scolding of his wife, his phrasing adds to the picture of his domineering nature. This is not a man who goes to the store to buy limes himself, but tasks his wife with buying them, and then calls from the kitchen to ask if she remembered his request, rather than walking into the other room to ask her or (heaven forbid) looking for the limes himself. One can understand why Lionel might not be jumping on board with the whole marriage proposition, if Lorna and Brendan are his role models.
And in fact, Brendan is largely representative of the male characters in Munro's book. If I have a complaint about the collection, it's this uniformity of male callousness: although we occasionally see a long-married couple who are genuinely caring toward one another (if mutually deeply flawed), or a pair of total strangers who manage to achieve a moment of unfettered connection, for the most part Munro's men are controlling, unfaithful jerks, taking the women around them for granted and generally acting like petulant toddlers. And I don't mean to suggest that Munro does not evoke this character type with great skill and sensitivity, because she absolutely does—and in fact, many of these male characters, in her hands, end up eliciting some degree of sympathy in the reader's mind: quite a feat considering their collective behavior. Munro's analysis of the gender roles in these stories acknowledges that the mainstream culture of the 1950s and 60s set up young men to be the assholes they sometimes turned out, just as those same decades socialized women to be submissive and self-denigrating, simultaneously responsible for raising children and reduced to a child-like state themselves. In the excellent story "What is Remembered," one of the highlights of the collection for me, the narrator writes:
Young husbands were stern, in those days. Just a short time before, they had been suitors, almost figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their sexual agonies. Now, bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving. Off to work every morning, clean-shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days spent in unknown labors, home again at suppertime to take a critical glance at the evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it up between themselves and the muddle of the kitchen, the ailments and emotions, the babies. What a lot they had to learn. How to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives.
So the men don't have a roadmap for how to live, any more than the women do. They, too, are working to conform to certain societal expectations. Yes.
Even so, I've known a good number of men from this generation (or slightly older: my grandparents' generation), and most of them were not domineering, not unkind to their wives or dismissive of their wives' opinions. True, I didn't know them when they were young men. Munro's older characters are significantly gentler with each other than her younger ones, albeit sometimes oddly so. To some degree even the younger characters are not being unkind given their social context: they assume it's the simple truth that a husband's role is to dictate and a wife's is to obey. This is a systemic problem more than a fault of individuals. Still. Munro's bone of contention got a bit monotonous at times, as much as I agree with her insights. The sameness of male/female relationships in the collection dulled the impact of stories which, individually or in more varied company, would have all packed the same kind of punch as the first few did.
In addition to said bones, though, this collection offers lots of meat. It will be rewarding to return to individual stories in the future, which I think will be a more palatable way of appreciating Munro than reading a collection of hers cover to cover. And there is plenty here to appreciate: the role of memory throughout these stories, for example, and how we mold our recollections to fill the functions we need them to, forgetting or imagining where it is convenient. Or how Munro so cleanly and expertly handles shifts in time, quietly moving the reader forward and backward in a given history with no unnecessary apparatus and hardly a hiccup in the narrative flow. It's not a Woolfian vision of simultaneity; while the characters often recollect their pasts, the past is not present to them as it is to Clarissa Dalloway or Peter Walsh—but the narrative engine is so weightless and nimble that it can position the reader neatly at any desired perspective point vis-à -vis the action, and whisk them to a different one with no fuss at all, with absolute clarity. (The opening paragraphs of "Family Furnishings" are excellent at this, and the titular story shows a similar character-based flexibility in its use of a roving limited third-person narrator.)
Munro is not comfort reading, in other words, but in small doses I will definitely be returning to her hard, occasionally tender, lying world.
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LibraryThing member Niecierpek
I love it and am a bit ambivalent at the same time. Munro’s stories are so close to real life, and so undisguised, and about such difficult subjects, that reading her is like going to the therapist. She is an absolute master of the structure, the intrigue and the style. Once I start reading, I
She is excellent though, and this collection of short stories is the best thing I have read so far this year.
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cannot stop. I just get immersed in her, and can’t even stop thinking about what she writes when I am not reading. I guess she is just too intense for me. She reaches somewhere in my psyche, and exposes truths and issues I am unwilling to explore on my own. Or, she shows scenarios that may happen, and if they happened, they would be painful. To use an analogy: reading Munro for me is a bit like passing by an accident and having that irresistible urge to slow down and look, no matter how gory it is. She is excellent though, and this collection of short stories is the best thing I have read so far this year.
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LibraryThing member leslie.98
Though well written, I didn't really like these short stories. The characters didn't engage me & I was often left with a feeling that the story didn't have any purpose.
LibraryThing member suedonym
Munro consistently delivers stories and characters that will linger in your mind. One of my favorites again delights.
LibraryThing member sometimeunderwater
Wonderful, as always with Munro. Each story has a unique melancholy beauty, and they grow with their proximity to one another, so it's hard to pick a favourite. The title story and the closer (The Bear Came Over the Mountain) are perhaps the most obviously brilliant. Also highlight: 'Comfort',
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'Family Furnishings', and 'Post and Beam'. Show Less
LibraryThing member MsOlivia
Many of these stories really "hit the nail on the head" as they say. Wonderful writing!
LibraryThing member marciliogq
This is a wonderful short story by Alice Munro, which was transformed in a movie. Both of them are really great. Munro's narrative style is deep and full of details. Her characters are intense. The narrative is about a woman with Alzheimer who goes to a clinic to treat her problem. There, she has
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contact to another man and they perhaps fall in love. The problem is that she is married and her husband has to fight to her disease to catch her heart again. Impossible not to get moved by this story. Highly reccomendable. Show Less
LibraryThing member nivramkoorb
A great book. This is my 3rd collection of Munro short stores. I have just begun to read short stories in addition to novels and I think Alice Munro is the best. Her view into the human condition is illuminating. I hope to be able to read everything she has written. She is a testimony about what is
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so great about good literature. It really makes you glad that books are like the stars in the sky. They go on forever. Show Less
LibraryThing member SweetbriarPoet
These stories were easy to read- the language flows wonderfully and the settings are both beautiful and stark. I am not usually a fan of stories that were obviously written in the nineties- there are usually distinct themes which were modern then and seemed a bit played out now such as living with
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terminal illnesses, love affairs that end in both love and hatred, etc. But Munro is definitely a testament to good short story writing. She has a particular style which is easy to read and creates beautiful imagery. I will continue to explore her other stories and find themes that agree with my personal preferences more. Show Less
LibraryThing member porch_reader
This was my first collection of Alice Munro's short stories. She'd been on my "to read" list for a long time, and after she won the Nobel Prize in Literature this year, I picked up this collection of short stories at Prairie Lights. Munro is a master of her craft. Her short stories contain more
"Years ago, before the trains stopped running on so many of the branch lines, a woman with a high, freckled forehead and a frizz of reddish hair came into the railway station and inquired about shipping furniture."
As we figure out who this woman is, why she is shipping furniture, and what might become of her, Munro zooms in on a day or a moment, and then back out to cover a life. The stories themselves were often a bit dark, as real life can be, but the gift that she gives is a careful consideration of each moment, each life.
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depth, more feeling, more real life than most novels. Her stories often begin in the middle of a situation and allow us to stumble around for a bit, making sense of the landscape. For example, the first story begins: "Years ago, before the trains stopped running on so many of the branch lines, a woman with a high, freckled forehead and a frizz of reddish hair came into the railway station and inquired about shipping furniture."
As we figure out who this woman is, why she is shipping furniture, and what might become of her, Munro zooms in on a day or a moment, and then back out to cover a life. The stories themselves were often a bit dark, as real life can be, but the gift that she gives is a careful consideration of each moment, each life.
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LibraryThing member viviennestrauss
First off, I can't believe this is my first Alice Munro book, unless I've read one long ago and forgotten it. I was slow to warm up to her but I mainly blame that on having just finished several phenomenally great novels. By the end though, I can't help but give this 5 stars.
LibraryThing member m.belljackson
Mostly gentle renderings of unusual and often melancholy tales revealed through intriguing dialogue and unexpected personality changes.
"Nettles" unfortunately delivers a gruesome horse slaughtering which is completely irrelevant to the plot and will stop me from reading
any more Alice Munro for fear
"Nettles" unfortunately delivers a gruesome horse slaughtering which is completely irrelevant to the plot and will stop me from reading
any more Alice Munro for fear
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of more hidden animal cruelty. Show Less
LibraryThing member SeriousGrace
Munro has a way with words, as everyone knows. Here are four words I never thought I would see stitched together, "bug-eyed pickle ass". Go figure.
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is a collection of short stories with a common theme: relationships:
Hateship, Friendship,
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is a collection of short stories with a common theme: relationships:
Hateship, Friendship,
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Courtship, Loveship, Marriage - a childish prank backfires.Floating Bridge - a woman deals with positive news concerning her cancer.Family Furnishings - a college student learns about a secret her aunt was keeping.Comfort - the suicide of a husband. Nettles - childhood taunts.Post and Beam - when a house is more than a house.What Is Remembered - the memory of an affair with a pilot lingers long after the romance has died.Queenie - A sister's abandonment.The Bear Came Over the Mountain - An adultery gets his comeuppance. Show Less
LibraryThing member phyllis.shepherd
Alice Munro is one of my favorite authors. She has a wonderful talent for seeing into the hearts and minds of people in ways to which we can all relate. This is an excellent collection. The final story, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," was adapted into the 2006 film "Away from Her."
LibraryThing member stravinsky
stories that are short and feature covetous relationships and other life slices
LibraryThing member Venarain
Poignant and compelling, Alice paints a sometimes sweet, sometime bitter picture of coupled life.
LibraryThing member sriddell
I love Alice Munro's short stories.
I always have a hard time summarizing short story collections, since (obviously) there are multiple story lines/plots/characters.
But like many of her collections, this one left me feeling like I'd met people at a crossroads in their lives, that I was able to
I always have a hard time summarizing short story collections, since (obviously) there are multiple story lines/plots/characters.
But like many of her collections, this one left me feeling like I'd met people at a crossroads in their lives, that I was able to
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share in the significant moments or the one moment that changed the course of their entire life. Show Less
LibraryThing member leslie.98
Though well written, I didn't really like these short stories. The characters didn't engage me & I was often left with a feeling that the story didn't have any purpose.
LibraryThing member beentsy
Just gorgeous.
LibraryThing member nancyjean19
Each story is a mini novel, centering usually on a character looking back on her life and the way a particular person, usually someone more on the fringe than the character, impacted the course of her life. I love the way her characters represent their younger selves -- I love when authors are
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simultaneously able to convey two voices for the same character. No need for me to say it, but Alice Munro is a true master. Show Less
LibraryThing member Trippy
The best collection of short stories I have. I want to write like Alice Munro!
Subjects
Awards
LA Times Book Prize (Finalist — Fiction — 2001)
National Book Critics Circle Award (Finalist — Fiction — 2001)
Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Winner — 2002)
Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize (Shortlist — 2001)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
2001
Physical description
323 p.; 5.92 inches
ISBN
0375413006 / 9780375413001