Review Summaries

• Readers often praise the controlled prose and the way it digs sharply into emotion hidden inside everyday life. Many also value the book's open spaces and ambiguity.

Reviews

• 女に生まれれば良かった

  女性を中心に据えた８編の小説からなっています。取り扱っている内容は、殺人事件（なのかどうか）、ヒッピーがいた時代の回想、老年期の淋しさ、、不倫、お気軽な娘時代からの卒業、母親と赤ん坊の鬩ぎ合いなど、多岐にわたっています。 女性作家でなければ書けない作品群であることは間違いのないところで、最後に収められているMy Mother's Dreamなど、筆(ペンでしょうが)の達者さに思わず舌を巻きます。女性読者ならば、作品世界に登場する女性の微妙な心理変化のリアリティに関して実感を持って評価ができるのでしょうが、男性読者としてはやや掻靴痛痒のところが残るのが残念に思えます。 単語も文章も難しくありません。

• Five Stars

  perfect

• Love of a good book

  I don’t know where to start with this book so I'm just going to dive in. Alice Munro is a very very good writer, the sort of talent who makes me think of Anne Rice's quip that Renoir sold his soul: it doesn't figure that a person can craft such luminously wonderful art without divine or diabolical help! One of the things she does magnificently is write about children from their perspective in a way that is as delightful and frustrating and surprising as actually being with children. Once you've marvelled at this feat for a while you realise she is somehow doing the same thing with everyone, letting them speak and think and astonish and reveal, as if they live behind the scenes. She is so gentle though, so respectful. She doesn't make that error that Katherine Mansfield stamped on in DH Lawrence of invading bodies and psyches as if we could ever understand others by magical omniscience rather than by empathy. The boys in the title story keep their fierce dignity, their sacred privacy. Even when Munro describes horrible traumatic episodes, she manages, with great sensitivity and care, to maintain a distance that keeps the reader safe from visceral response. You might want to call that shying away, but personally I'm kneeling in gratitude when an author can achieve this balance. I want to hear about trauma without being triggered where possible. Loving Munro is also easy because her ethics of care and compassion for others are embodied by these stories, for example by Enid, the protagonist of the title story. Yet Munro refuses to paint an icon for worship: Enid can live as she does only because of her enabling circumstances, she experiences poisoned fantasies, and her goodwill is not unconditional. The same is true for other characters: each person in the book is carefully drawn as an individual shaped by histories, enmeshed in social structures that influence, constrain, oppress, enable, direct, oppose and support them in interconnected ways. They are at least partly responsible for their fortunes and failings, but Munro never victim-blames or hero-worships. There are vile abusers and detestable bigots. These are villains that propel drama. Mrs Gorrie is a particularly realistic monster, but Munro skilfully uses her to unpick attitudes to disability, poverty and gender roles that are surprisingly mainstream. Sometimes no villain is required; misunderstandings and failures of empathy, the stuff of all our lives, are sufficient to push characters far enough out of their comfort zones to experience transcendence and hand it on to us. The gift Munro has is of keeping each life she fashions open, stretching past the fringes of her telling. There is no answer given, no resolution is final. We go on living.

• Compassion is contagious

  Alice Munro cares about the people she has created, even those who at first seem despicable, and after a few pages I care about them as well. These stories have the depth and texture of novels. And I've now caught the rhythm of her prose so it reads more quickly, with greater clarity. I enjoy reading several books by the same author one after the other, like binge-watching a TV series. SPOILER ALERT -- The first story in this collection, with the same title as the book, is extraordinary in its depth of character and the range of narrative possibilities suggested. I flipped this way and that in my speculations about the death of the doctor. Then seemingly unrelated details from the opening pages came echoing back, making it probable that the dying lady was delusional and the narrator was right to trust and perhaps love the man who might have been a murderer. It all hinged on the cse with the doctor's tools. If it was in the care when he drowned, what the woman said couldn't be true. But up until the last page I expected the narrator to find it in the house. Memorable passages: "What does it mean?" Enid said, "What does what mean?" "What does it mean 'God bless'?" p. 53 "Lies of that nature could be waiting around int he corners of a person's mind, hanging like bats in the corners, waiting to take advantage of any kind of darkness. You can never say, Nobody could make that up. Look how elaborate dreams are, layer over layer in them, so that the part you can remember and put into words is just the bit you can scratch off the top." p. 74 "But once in a while came a moment when everything seemed to have something to say to you. The rocking bushes, the bleaching light. All in a flash, in a rush, when you couldn't concentrate." p. 115

• Un bonheur à lire en Anglais (pas si difficile !)

  Beaucoup de psychologie , de finesse et de complexité ,qui rendent bien la nature humaine ,plus une élégance de style remarquable. J'ai découvert un grand auteur ,maître dans l'art de la nouvelle . N'hésitez pas à la lire .

• Outstanding and Original.

  I've read many of Munro's stories and they always amaze and surprise me. Her view of the world of family, relationships, people is so unique that I ask myself where am I? Life is strange and unexpected but we always try to make some sense out of it. Not Alice Munro, she takes it raw, pristine, as it comes.

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