Alice MunroDear Life: Stories (Vintage International)

This is the 7th volume of short stories of Alice Munro that I've read (and reviewed). It is like coming home to an old friend; one who knows all too well the stories of the lives of the people one grew up with. How did so-and-so turn out? She knows, and she can explain the twists and turns of their lives in wonderful incisive prose. Never too much, just the essence of the story, a novel's worth of character development distilled into 20 or 30 pages. Faulkner famously knew the many stories of the people who inhabited the area around Oxford Mississippi that he called Yoknapatawpha County. Munro's characters will range over much of Canada, but they are centered on small town life in Huron County, western Ontario. Both have been awarded, rightly, the Nobel Prize for Literature. And, for what it is worth, I've given each of Munro's six collections of short stories that I have previously read a "6-star" rating at Amazon, as I have this current collection.Love, and un-love, its "anti-matter" complement are woven into most of her stories. So too is the impact of the Great Depression as well as World War II on rural Canadian life. Her stories weave back and forth across time, and a character's motivation is often explained in words that ring so true, and you have to wonder how Munro would know them. For example, one of the longest stories is entitled "Train." A soldier is coming home from World War II, and inexplicable hops off the train before it arrives at his destination. He stops at a farm house, and takes up with the woman who is living there alone. He proves himself handy, performing those essential functions that some women seek, often described as "taking out the garbage." In this story, as in some others, there is the chance meeting of someone from your youth, that you had not seen for 40 years. And then there is the motivational insight, summed up in a pithy observation of a woman in far-off Southhampton, England: "That's enough, sonny boy, you're down and out."In this collection the last four stories are directly drawn from Munro's life, or, as she says: "I believe they are the first and last - and the closest - things I have to say about my own life." As with so many stories, they strongly resonated, and stirred up memories of my own childhood I had never truly reflected on. Like, for example, how one's childhood home was orientated, and the distance it was from the town, and how that might have impacted one's development. There was an older "caregiver," as we call them today, how she suddenly disappeared, and how that was explained. It has been decades since I thought about the first time I was in the hospital, age 6, to have my tonsils removed, and the crazy hallucinations that ether can induce. One of Munro's stories about her own first operation - her only one - stirred up those memories. As did the last story, whose title was used for this collection, and is a specific phrase that has numerous usages: "Dear Life." It was a reminder that in those seemingly more innocent times of one's youth that there were "crazy people" out there that could have brought your life to an early end, save for that all important element of chance.The power of the Nobel. Munro is now read much more today. Currently this book has 586 reviews, and I am confident that number will soon surpass a thousand. When I posted my reviews of her other collections, many had only 10-20 reviews, and in some cases, that is still true, for example  The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose , Friend of My Youth: Stories  and  The Progress of Love . I would strongly encourage consideration being given to each of those collections also, as they are of the same quality of this one: 6-stars.

These are not stories with a plot, but rather almost all are first person reminiscenses, observations, reactions. The characters are very introspective. Story endings often come without warning - the ending could have come several pages before or after. It seems to depend on when the author seemed ready to stop rather than at a particular moment in the character's life. The language is excellent and the stories are good literature. In many cases, you just have to be ready to drift along without knowing where the story is going and focus on the identifications you can make with the descriptions of life circumstances the characters encounter. You also enjoy insights into the Canada of small communities where the characters dwell. There is a melancholy that runs through many of the stories. Characters are complex, interesting, and varied.

"Dance of the Happy Shades," one of Alice Munro's earliest published stories (1961), shows even then that she had mastered the short story form: "`She lost her powers of speech, you know. Her powers of control generally, she lost." comes the answer to a perfunctory question about a bedridden parent. Then the youthful narrator describes how her parent received the reply. "My mother is warned by a certain luxurious lowering of the voice that more lengthy and intimate details may follow and she says quickly that it is too bad."Fifty-one years on, Alice Munro continues to impress. Take this excerpt from "Haven", the fifth story in "Dear life". "Aunt Dawn wore a dress that was modestly cut, made of flesh-colored crepe. It was the sort of dress an older woman might have worn and made look proper in a fussy way, but my aunt could not help looking as if she were taking part in a slightly risqué celebration." Alice Munro turns every sentence to advantage, loading it with telling observations about the character or action she's describing. You never leave a Munro story with any doubt about what makes her characters tick. You come away convinced that you are in the hands of an author whose people are so well realized that nothing more need be said for us to know them better than they know themselves."Train," the longest story, has more than enough to it to occupy your book reading group for a good hour if not longer, a conversation likely to continue over coffee. The story begins as Canada's World War II soldiers make their way home after mustering out. At the last minute, Jackson, the protagonist, jumps from the train that had but a few miles to go to reach his home town and the woman waiting there for him. Not wanting to face her, he turns and heads the other way along the tracks: "You looked forward to emptiness. And, instead, what did you get? An immediate flock of new surroundings, asking for your attention in a way they never did when you were sitting on the train and just looking out the window . . . . Life around coming to some conclusions about you from vantage points you couldn't see." The collection also includes a "Finale" -- four pieces ending with "Dear Life", works which, the author says, "are not quite stories. . . . autobiographical in feeling . . . . they are the first and last -- and the closest - things I have to say about my own life." The title for my review comes from the first of these pieces, "The Eye". Munro reflects on how it was, at an early age, "I began to accept that my mother's notions about me might differ from my own." Munro was already thinking "about what was true and what wasn't." As a title, "Dear Life" also works for the collection as a whole. Time and again you find Munro's people holding on for dear life, a trait that goes all the way back to the woman with the bed-ridden parent in "Dance of the Happy Shades" and continues right up to the wife who feels threatened by the reawakening of her husband's romantic interest in "Dolly," the last story before the "Finale". And the children's school teacher at the tuberculosis hospital in "Amundsen" comes quite undone by the love her and leave her treatment she receives at the hands of the center's head doctor. Munro knows as much if not more about what life holds for us as any of the great writers of our time. That "Dear Life" wasn't selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the year's five best works of fiction disappoints, but should not deter you from putting it on your Christmas list. Just don't give it away until you read it.End note. Charles McGrath, who edited many of Munro's early stories for The New Yorker, reviewed "Dear Life" for The New York Times Book Review (November 18, 2012). If you didn't read it at the time, track it down. It offers a great many insights about Munro's stories from the vantage point of one who has followed her work from very close to the beginning.

Why I like it: The stories are interesting and varied, the writing style is very enjoyable, I can read one short story and close the book without losing any sleep .Why I couldn't give it more stars: I don't find many of the stories satisfying in any way, too many of the stories are just melancholy, I didn't find any characters endearing and none of the stories are very memorable.Sorry Alice, this was my first book of yours so maybe if I tried one of your earlier works I might enjoy it more than this one, and hey you won a Nobel prize so I might just take a chance on one more!

Alice Monroe is unique. She knows how to captivate her audience even if you are not a follower of her work. You're easily hooked after reading one of her novels. That's the sign of a brilliant writer.

This is my first Alice Munro and I loved it. Before this I'd just read a collection of short stories by Ester David called Mumbai Brides, which was bad. It's only when you pick up a collection by someone like Alice Munro that you realise what great writing really is. I'm afraid it's spoilt me for anything else!

Presenta historias que son, más bien, trozos de la vida de alguien, que hacen pensar y plantearse lo que significa confiar o creer en los demás, en el amor, la entrega....

Dear Life is een verzameling boeiende verhalen over mensen die op het Canadese platte land leefden vlak na se Tweede Wereldoorlog. Het geeft een mooi tijdsbeeld van een enigszins bekrompen maatschappij, waar gelijke rechten voor meisjes en vrouwen nog niet vanzelfsprekend waren.

Great reading. Her art of description is outstanding. The topic is simple everyday life. We went to the NAC production of this story with the addition of music to her story. It was well done and now when I read the story by Alice Munro, I will connect it also to the music I heard. The book was well packaged and in good condition when it arrived.