Too Much Happiness: Stories

by Alice Munro

Hardcover, 2009

Status

Checked out

Publication

Alfred A. Knopf (2009), Edition: 1st, 304 pages

Description

Nine new short works include the stories of a grieving mother who is aided by a surprising source, a woman's response to a humiliating seduction, and a nineteenth-century Russian émigré's winter journey to the Riviera.

Media reviews

The Germans must have a term for it. Doppel­gedanken, perhaps: the sensation, when reading, that your own mind is giving birth to the words as they appear on the page. Such is the ego that in these rare instances you wonder, “How could the author have known what I was thinking?” Of course,
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what has happened isn’t this at all, though it’s no less astonishing. Rather, you’ve been drawn so deftly into another world that you’re breathing with someone else’s rhythms, seeing someone else’s visions as your own. One of the pleasures of reading Alice Munro derives from her ability to impart this sensation. It’s the sort of gift that requires enormous modesty on the part of the writer, who must shun pyrotechnics for something less flashy: an empathy so pitch-­perfect as to be nearly undetectable. But it’s most arresting in the hands of a writer who isn’t too modest — one possessed of a fearless, at times, fearsome, ambition.
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2 more
Alice Munro knows women. Yes, she’s a genius with words no matter what the subject, evoking lives rich with secret horrors, but it’s her skill at articulating the nuances of the female experience that makes one gasp with the shock of recognition. This collection, set mostly in classic Munro
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territory—out-of-the-way places around Ontario—boasts as many of these illuminating moments as her other books.
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Munro said in her acceptance speech for the Man Booker International Prize, which she was awarded earlier this year, cementing the wide acclaim she now commands, that she is interested not in happy endings but in “meaning… resonance, some strange beauty on the shimmer of the sea”. This
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remarkable collection certainly captures that – and more of a sense of happiness than might at first seem possible.
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User reviews

LibraryThing member Cait86
In "Fiction", the second story in Munro's latest collection of short stories, Too Much Happiness, the narrator finds herself figuring in a book written by someone from her past. About this book she says: "A collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to
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diminish the book's authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside" (49-50). Here, is Alice Munro, recent winner of the Man Booker International Prize, deriding her own craft? Or is this self-deprecating sentence meant merely in jest? Either way, Munro proves her own statement false. Too Much Happiness is just one more example of her skill as an author - and proof that she is not only within the gates of Literature, but actually holds a place of honour.

Munro's stories are not about grand adventures or shocking experiences. They are about normal people - a widow, a farmer, a naive university student. Sure, there is some excitement: a house is broken into by a crazed man, a wife loses her young children in a grisly way. But this is not the focus of Munro's writing. Instead, her stories portray the way in which human beings deal with life - with the general obstacles that the world throws at us. Her grasp on the human mind is incredible; her characters all think in a totally believable way, and yet they all think differently. Place one character in the story of another, and you would have a completely different outcome. Munro's ability to differentiate between an entire cast of characters is outstanding.

I cannot praise this book enough. Each story is a mini masterpiece to be savoured all on its own; together, the stories share enough threads that they become a coherent narrative.

If you think you don't like short stories, try Munro - she is in a class all her own.
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LibraryThing member mikemillertime
Slow and boring, this anthology is the same story of small-town longing and hope amongst heartache told over and over with amateurish verve. Stories by a late-middle-aged woman for other late-middle-aged women, delivered with the skilled panache of a community college workshop.
LibraryThing member joannemepham29
I certainly without a doubt can appreciate the craft, that which is Alice Munro's writing, but felt uninterested in most of these stories. I enjoyed a few, but for me reading is entertainment, and I was bored. With that being said, I feel the power of Alice Munro's words, but that alone did not
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make this a great read for me. I hate that too, since everyone else loved it.
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LibraryThing member spacepotatoes
In the story “Face”, from this most recent collection of Munro’s, she writes

In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and there are all the other places.

Almost every story in the collection is an exploration of the place, or few places, in the
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main character’s lives where something happened, something that shaped who they became and how their lives ultimately turned out. The stories here have a darker and more sinister tone than in any of Munro’s previous collections that I’ve read; the things that happened in these character’s lives include the murder of their children, a weird seduction of a young girl by a creepy old man, a freak accident, a home invasion, and a case of childhood cruelty gone horribly wrong.

Munro has become a master of the twist at the end of a story. Like many of the stories in Runaway (an earlier collection), these also tend to have something at the end that either turns the story completely on its head or that snaps the whole thing into sharp focus. Munro does this really well, often it only takes one simple line, and she guarantees that I will be buying this book at some point to reread all the stories.

There are ten stories in the collection, most of which have appeared in magazines in the last couple of years. I don’t think I have a favourite, I liked almost every story in the collection, though “Dimension” was really memorable and both “Free Radicals” and “Child’s Play” kept me up at night, turning them over and over in my head.

The collection ran out of steam a little bit at the end, the last three stories weren’t quite as good as the first seven. “Child’s Play” was great until we find out what actually happened to girl that everyone hated and that turned out to be a disappointment. After so much build-up, Munro just glossed over the actual event, which seemed like a letdown. “Wood” didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the collection, it felt like it never really went anywhere and some things didn’t make sense to me. The last story, “Too Much Happiness” was different in that it was twice as long as the others and was based on the life of an actual person, Russian mathematician Sophia Kovalevsky. It was interesting but felt really disjointed and could have used some proofreading.

Overall: despite the criticisms, it’s still an excellent collection and really, Alice Munro on a bad day is still leagues ahead of her competition. Definitely recommended.
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LibraryThing member RavRita
I guess all good things come to an end and Alice Munro has done an excellent job of reflecting how the narrators of these short stories came to that understanding. She is an excellent writer and can make you feel lost in someone's triumphs and sorrows. I would love to see some of these stories
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expanded but with her, perhaps each was a two hundred-page story and she then just edited out the extra stuff and was left with a short story.

Well worth reading along with anything else she writes.
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LibraryThing member ImpudentAngel
I enjoyed some of the stories, but not all of them. I think I prefer novels to short stories. Too much lacking in the short stories - I want to know what happened next. But that's not to say that they weren't all well written. Just for me, the genre isn't as satisfying.
LibraryThing member bearette24
I've enjoyed Alice Munro's work in the past, but I couldn't finish this one. The stories were dull and depressing.
LibraryThing member debnance
Munro’s new book of short stories is filled with human beings. Just when you think you’ve found a character above reproach, though, Munro says to look again, and you find the ice has melted in your hands. You get the sense that Munro is very, very good at seeing into the hearts of people and
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finding we all come up short. The title is a cruel twist on the stories inside; an objective observer of these lives doesn’t find much happiness at all here. But is that really the case? It’s something---a little glimmer of happiness, maybe, perhaps some small happiness that comes from making it through troubles---that keeps these people moving along through their difficult lives.
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LibraryThing member danibrecher
Don’t be misled by the title of Alice Munro’s new collection of short stories, Too Much Happiness: These stories are anything but cheerful. In fact, they’re downright depressing, full of marital infidelities, drawn-out deaths, and traumatic childhoods. And yet, the stories are intensely
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lovely.

Munro, who recently won the Booker Prize for this volume, has perfected the lyrical gut-wrencher. As in her previous collections of short stories, Munro places her characters in beautiful, rural Canadian settings before tearing their lives apart with shocking spasms of violence, both physical and emotional. It’s a formula that consistently forces the reader into a profound sympathy with her characters, but for all its emotional clout, the narrative blueprint becomes monotonous after 300-plus pages.

Nine out of the 10 stories in Too Much Happiness are set in Canada’s recent past, with most taking place in Munro’s native Ontario. The descriptions of the Canadian landscape highlight Munro’s talent for spotting the crucial details that bring a story to life. The weeds in an abandoned garden, the composition of a rock formation, and the carved name of a long-shuttered bank are all closely observed, creating a strong sense of place and beauty.

Inside this sepia-colored world, women from the whole spectrum of Canadian society give up their senses of self for the men in their lives. In the first story of the collection, a young woman struggles to forgive her husband for a violent act of madness. Another story focuses on a girl who goes to extremes to look like the severely birth-marked boy next door. Munro’s women all discover, in one way or another, that “the great happiness…of one person can come out of the great unhappiness of another.” The tragedy is that the women in these stories all fall in the latter half of that equation.

Munro comes closest to doing something innovative in the book’s last story, which lends its name to the title of the whole collection. Taking place in the metropolises of 19th-century Europe, this story imagines the final days of Sophia Kovalevsky, the Russian mathematician and novelist. As she travels on a train across Europe, Kovalevsky reflects on her past and on her lovers. A mysterious doctor jolts her from her reverie, changing the course of her not-very-long life. On her deathbed, Kovalevsky’s last words are, “Too much happiness.” This leaves the reader with the question of whether this last woman is the only one to achieve happiness, or if she is deluded by her illness and is, at last, as miserable as the others.

By the end of the collection, the reader is left to wonder what Munro might accomplish if she were to try her hand at writing stories about women who suffer less. Would her lyricism be lost?

Originally published in the Chicago Maroon.
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LibraryThing member novelcommentary
I don’t read too many books of short stories, but this was a Christmas gift. So after finishing my last novel, I decided to pick this up instead of heading out to Barnes and Noble. The first story was intriguing; a young mother goes to visit her husband in an institution despite the terrible
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violence of his past. From there I continued with tales, mostly about women in Canada. My favorites were Fiction, about a woman who finds herself in a short story written by the daughter of her ex husband’s lover; and Child’s Play about a murder that happened during a child’s camping trip. I also enjoyed the intelligence of the women in Free Radicals. These are not typical short stories, at least not what I think of as the slice of life, the glimpse of a scene that is usually honed down to the barest of information. These are more like 30 page novels, often depicting the entire life of the character involved, and they are not without plot. Rather they are about murder, lost children, robbery, self mutilation, --more plot than many novels. The last story is different, a longer novella about Sophia Kovalevsky, the rather famous Russian Mathematician who become the first women professor in Sweden, a country that would at least recognize her genius. This story depicted her as she left her lover to go back to Sweden and during this train ride reflects back on her past life. All the stories were well written and thoughtful. The jacket cover nicely summarizes that Munro, “render complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.” That says it pretty well.
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LibraryThing member msf59
This is my introduction to Munro’s work and what a wonderful place to start. Yes, these ten stories are draped in loss and melancholy, but in Munro’s capable hands, they are also about hope and survival. These are well-developed characters and her prose is crisp and assured. Here is a
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description of a crabby old lady: “Certain suggestions, or notions, would make the muscles of her lean spotty face quiver, her eyes go sharp and black, and her mouth work as if there was a despicable taste in it. She could stop you in your tracks then, like a savage thorn bush.”
Her writing is also inventive, daring and startling at times and wherever she takes me, I will follow. I feel this is just the beginning of a long enduring affair.
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LibraryThing member silva_44
Having heard Munro's name bandied about, I was anxious to read some of her work, and was not disappointed. I was intrigued by her style as much or more than I was with her stories themselves. Her portrayal of time is fascinating; I don't think that one of the stories in this collection was told in
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a linear fashion. Her main characters are also interesting, because in many of the stories, they end up being more subordinate than anything else. There is always something hidden, a gem to be discovered. I enjoyed this collection, and look forward to reading more.
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LibraryThing member bethcanz
These stories are very bleak - have read five or six of them so far. All seem to be accounts of a particularly life altering event in the life of the main character when viewed from a distance. Nothing uplifting about these stories. The only other Alice Munro I've read is Runaway, which I remember
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as a very powerful collection. Her stories always shock with something unexpected and sometimes awful. I think Ms. Munro is amazing!
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LibraryThing member brianinbuffalo
With apologies to Ms. Munro, an extremely capable writer, my subtitle for "Too Much Happiness" is "Too Much Tedium." I stopped reading half the entries midway through their boring narratives. One reviewer described this book as "dull and depressing." I don't mind depressing. I just don't have much
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patience for dull. Still, I must say "Faces" was an intriguing tale.
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LibraryThing member vivwong
Alice Munro is my new favorite female writer.
LibraryThing member DianeBickers
I've always admired the author's ability to play with nonlinear timelines, reveal characters in a simple gesture, capture those moments in life that have the power to change destiny.

The title story is a dip into historical fiction. It contains this great line: "She was learning, quite late, what
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many people around her appeared to have known since childhood - that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements." (p. 283)
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LibraryThing member Menagerie
I am normally a fan of Munro's work but this collection just didn't work for me. It felt too deliberate, as if the mechanics of the stories were more important than the stories themselves. I found the prose heavy and awkward in many places and the characters were similarly turbid.
LibraryThing member tandah
Someone else has written that Alice Munro's short stories are as complete as a novel - which was particularly the case in the collection's namesake. This is my first experience reading Alice Munro and I found her stories sinister, surprising, real, shocking, human - some I had to put down and
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regroup before I finished, others I had to read twice because I raced through the initial reading. I've discovered a wonderful writer, and I will seek more of her work.
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LibraryThing member EllenH
Munro writes very well about difficult people, lives and emotions. Such depth in characters and story, but so dark or disturbing. I can't decide what I think. I kept reading because the stories were very interesting and well done, but now I'm ready for something abit lighter!
LibraryThing member queencersei
Too Much Happiness is a collection of short stories. Included are ‘Dimensions’ which tells the story of Doree, the wife of a controlling husband Lloyd, who in a fit of rage at her one tiny bit of defiance snaps in one of the most horrible way possible Doree floats through life after her
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personal tragedy. But another unrelated misfortune somehow seems to help pull her together.
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LibraryThing member janiereader
Too much happiness : stories is a collection of nine new stories by Alice Munro. Good stories, with fair narration, (except for Kimberly Farr who is terrific as ever!) but a disappointment after the richness of her other works. I would recommend this collection only to those who are true Munro fans.
LibraryThing member tap_aparecium
I’m impressed with this woman’s ability to make the impossible and misunderstood decisions of her characters seem almost relatable. Details changed or not we all tend to make similar decisions in our lives that seem like madness to those on the outside. Alice Munro has a propensity for diving
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into the seedy underbelly of the human condition with her writing; exploring our addictions to love, to abuse, to our own insecurities and to other various parts of life that seem unimportant to those around us. This was my first foray into reading collections of short stories and with only one story in the collection that I genuinely disliked I was not disappointed. I plan on checking out more of her work in the future.
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LibraryThing member Davidgnp
Alice Munro is my favourite living short story writer, and this collection does not disappoint except, strangely for the long title story. Unlike the other contemporary pieces, this one is set in the nineteenth century and centres on the real-life Sophia Kovalevsky, a Russian mathematician and
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novelist. The story simply did not come to life for me, and it seems out of place among the rest of the collection, though Munro clearly wants to draw attention to it through the title. Other readers may be entirely captivated by the romantic complications Sophia faces; I am perfectly ready to accept that the fault is my own, but all criticism is subjective.

The other stories are set in familiar Munro territory - in and around Ontario, focusing on small lives - but nothing is ever quite familiar with this writer, who has the unerring ability to unsettle us, often by examining the brittleness of relationships, sometimes by the placing of quirky incidents in seemingly ordinary circumstancess, as here in the story 'Wenlock Edge' where a student takes her friend's usual place as a solitary guest in a wealthy man's home and is invited, quite coolly and charmingly, to dine with him completely naked. Equally oddly, she complies, without knowing why, and nothing happens - the man continues conversational and correct throughout the meal. The perverse strangeness of it reminded me of Pip's visits to Miss Havisham in 'Great Expectations'.

I believe Miss Munro has said this will be her last book. She is 75, but I do hope there's more to come from her yet. As readers of her work, we can't have too much happiness.
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LibraryThing member Periodista
"It is not physical harm that is feared--or that I feared in Verna's case--so much as some spell, or dark intention. It is a feeling you can have when you are very young even about certain house faces, or tree trunks, or very much about moldy cellars or deep closets."

With Munro, you're always in
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for a smooth, expert ride. I think this collection may have been better titled Evil Children or Bad Seeds, however. Munro isn't really a diehard cynic; she just acknowledges that we all have some nasty impulses inside--even, or especially, children, pretty young things and sweet old ladies.

There seems to be an emphasis here on the very old (looking back, mulling over a youthful error) or the very young. Not her usual preoccupations with youthful lust, adulteries or marriage gone out of whack.

Child's Play is a good example of the twin emphases: a woman named Marlene, perhaps of late middle-age, called (too late) to the deathbed of a childhood friend who she hasn't seen in decades. Which brings us back, eventually, to the two of them at camp when the narrator' s Marlene's nemesis, a disturbed or retarded girl called Verna, shows up.

How Munro gets back to Verna's first appearance, how she grated on Marlene, sets up the era (1940s) and the familial circumstances ... it's classic Munro roundabout method but, you know, you don't even notice because your so absorbed in the sketching of the lives at the forefront.

This collection is also notable for two stories that don't take place in Canada. "Dimensions," the opening story, could be present day, takes place in England. The evil seed in this case is the jealous, emotionally abusive husband married to a young girl; they have three very little children when ...

Then there's the final story, :Too Much Happiness," about the last days of Sophia Kovlesky, a real, late 19th-century Russian mathematician. (Thanks goodness there's nonfiction book about her.) She was allowed by her family to study in Germany by getting married--a so-called White Marriage at first because her parents wouldn't have allowed her to go as an unmarried girl.. She also wrote a novel, had a daughter and led a frivolous life for a while in Russia, but with her husband's suicide and economic straits, she took up studying math again. Her fatherly German mentor secured a professorial position for her in Sweden--incredible at the time and then she won an important prize (which may be why there is a crater on the moon named after her.)

In these last cold winter days, suffering from the first signs of pneumonia, she meets her Russian lover (an exiled Liberal, professor) in Genoa and Nice and they decide to marry; visits the husband of her dazzling dead sister in Paris, an impoverished veteran of the Commune, and then on to the home of her mentor in Berlin. Maybe it's the ferry boat journey on the way to Stockholm that was the final toll. You could write a book about it.
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LibraryThing member CarltonC
Beautifully written, finely crafted and emotionally engaging short stories - nine of which are about modern day Canada, but the last, title story, is about the last days of a Russian mathematician, with her story told in flash back. I particularly enjoyed "Wood".

Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

2009

Physical description

304 p.; 5.85 inches

ISBN

0307269760 / 9780307269768
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