Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You: 13 Stories

by Alice Munro

Paperback, 2004

Status

Checked out

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Publication

Vintage (2004), Edition: Reprint, 256 pages

Description

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE(R) IN LITERATURE 2013 In the thirteen stories in her remarkable second collection, Alice Munro demonstrates the precise observation, straightforward prose style, and masterful technique that led no less a critic than John Updike to compare her to Chekhov. The sisters, mothers and daughters, aunts, grandmothers, and friends in these stories shimmer with hope and love, anger and reconciliation, as they contend with their histories and their present, and what they can see of the future.

User reviews

LibraryThing member timjones

I'm not a huge fan of realism as a genre, but Alice Munro is such a good writer that I always enjoy her work. She is outstanding at shaping her short stories in such a way that they proceed logically, yet not predictably, from introduction to conclusion. The only slight criticism I have is that the

range of the stories in this book is small: they are about similar women in similar situations. One or two stories with different settings or protagonists would provide the mixture with a little more seasoning.

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LibraryThing member brenzi

If you've never read Alice Munro what are you waiting for? If you like your fiction with a narrative that goes back and forth in time, she does that. If you like your fiction with the travails that every family faces in one way of another, she does that. If you like fiction that dwells on the

wonders of memory, she does that. If you like writing that just glides along and captures you with language and poetic phrases, well, she does that too.

"In the mirror over the dresserEileen could see her sister's face, the downward profile, which was waiting, perhaps embarrassed, now that this offering had been made. Also, her own face, surprising her with its wonderfully appropriate look of tactfulness and concern. She felt cold and tired, she wanted mostly to get away. It was an effort to put her hand out. Acts done without faith may restore faith. She believed, with whatever energy she could summon at the moment, she had to believe and hope that was true."

Like any collection, some stories are stronger than others and this is a very early publication, maybe one of her first (1974) but it is vintage Munro and has all the hallmarks that make her work so wonderful.

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LibraryThing member ritaer

moody and moving

LibraryThing member Cecilturtle

It's odd reading fiction that's 50 years old: it's too young to be considered the classical past, but too old to be seen as truly modern and new. There's a strange quaintness to the stories which must have felt incisive and biting at the time. This does not take away from the sharp portraits that

Munro makes of her heroines, some trapped in tradition, others launched in the newness of a changing world. There are descriptions of Canada that no longer exist but that echo in the memories of generations still alive.
Sometimes poignant, sometimes lively, these stories capture their time beautifully.

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LibraryThing member icolford

In Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, her masterful second collection of short fiction published in 1974 (Lives of Girls and Women is widely considered a novel), Alice Munro’s art takes a significant step forward. Though the subject matter remains much the same as in her first two books

(stories of quotidian lives mainly told from female perspectives), in these stories she is extending her reach and experimenting with voice and form, light and dark. Many of the stories are built around memory and are often filled with expressions of disappointment, grief, regret, sometimes bewilderment, occasionally satisfaction with how things have turned out. In the breathtaking title story, Et is recalling her beautiful, impulsive, temperamental older sister Char. The sisters grow up, a tight-knit pair, in small-town Ontario, Char much more dramatic and worldly than her sister, and the more adventurous when it comes to love. Char’s early beau is Blaikie, whose family owns the local hotel and spends the off-season in California. When Blaikie marries someone else, Char takes poison. It’s Et who saves her. Later Char marries Arthur—a teacher, an unexceptional man—and lives an ordinary life. But the poison episode remains with Et, who one day makes a startling discovery in Char’s kitchen, which leaves her forever wondering what her sister might have been capable of. “How I Met My Husband” is narrated by Edie, who is recalling when she was fifteen and working as housekeeper for the Peebles, Dr. and Mrs., and their two small children. Though not farmers, the Peebles live in farming country, five miles outside of town. One day a small plane lands in the empty field across the road from the Peebles’ house. It turns out the pilot, Chris Watters, is touring his plane from town to town, and for a small fee will take people up to enjoy the view. By happenstance, Edie strikes up a casual friendship with Chris, which quickly becomes physical, and soon Edie’s head is filled with all kinds of romantic notions. When Chris moves on, leaving behind Edie’s broken heart and an empty promise to write to her, Edie’s life takes a turn she never saw coming. And “Executioners” is narrated by Helena, whose father is a drunk and whose inattentive mother nurses her grudges lovingly. Helena is tormented by her peers, ridiculed because of her odd clothing and her father’s dissipation. But Helena is a curious and generous child who, through an act of kindness, comes to the attention of Howard Troy, the shiftless son of the town bootlegger, Stump Troy. Howard starts bullying her, for no better reason than that “he may have seen the glimmer of a novel, interesting, surprising weakness.” The story turns on the family of Robina, Helena’s mother’s housekeeper, whose younger brothers are enemies of Stump Troy. In the story’s principal scene, Helena and Robina stand among the curious onlookers witnessing the fire that one night consumes the Troy family home. The event is tragic, but Helena views the spectacle coolly, reporting it in clinical terms, hinting but never overtly suggesting who might be responsible. Throughout, Munro’s prose is flawless: precise, understated, rarely drawing attention to itself, but shining nonetheless, evoking character and setting in painterly fashion: “Her tall flat body seemed to loosen, to swing like a door on its hinges, controlled, but dangerous if you got in the way.” In Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You people are often mysterious to each other (and sometimes to themselves), their actions troubling, their motives opaque. Munro’s narrators spend a good deal of time and mental effort wondering how and why they do the things they do. Munro seizes on this aspect of daily life and turns it into a major building block of her fiction. The result is a collection of poignant, thoughtful, loosely structured dramas that eloquently explore what it means to be human. Essential, vintage Alice Munro.

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