Alice Munro Dance Of The Happy Shades Pdf Editor
Alice Munro's territory is the farms and semi-rural towns of south-western Ontario. In these dazzling stories she deals with the self-discovery of adolescence, the joys and pains of love and the despair and guilt of those caught in a narrow existence.
In 1972 she became Writer in Residence at the University of Western Ontario. Her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), won a Governor General's Award, which is Canada's highest literary prize. Her other works include Lives of Girls and Women, The Beggar Maid, The View from Castle Rock, and Too Much. Times entertainment news from Hollywood including event coverage, celebrity gossip and deals. View photo galleries, read TV and movie reviews and more.
And in sensitively exploring the lives of ordinary men and women, she makes us aware of the universal nature of their fears Alice Munro's territory is the farms and semi-rural towns of south-western Ontario. In these dazzling stories she deals with the self-discovery of adolescence, the joys and pains of love and the despair and guilt of those caught in a narrow existence. And in sensitively exploring the lives of ordinary men and women, she makes us aware of the universal nature of their fears, sorrows and aspirations. Intro (this piece inspired the title story): Does anyone remember Steve’s review of Lydia Davis’s when he said “Lydia Davis shits out tiny nuggets of pure golden prose and says 'oh, this old thing’'?”I didn’t exactly agree with him on the, but I would love to steal that quote and use it in reference to Alice Munro. Alice Munro is a master story teller. No, she didn’t twist my brain into knots and exasperate me.
No, she Intro (this piece inspired the title story): Does anyone remember Steve’s review of Lydia Davis’s when he said “Lydia Davis shits out tiny nuggets of pure golden prose and says 'oh, this old thing’'?”I didn’t exactly agree with him on the, but I would love to steal that quote and use it in reference to Alice Munro. Alice Munro is a master story teller. No, she didn’t twist my brain into knots and exasperate me.
No, she didn’t leave me tingling from titillating tales. She didn’t make my soul sink into some dark place. She simply tells great stories. I had been unfamiliar with Alice Munro prior to my Summer of Women read-a-thon. Dance of the Happy Shades is her first collection of short stories (Goodreads, it is NOT her 8th collection) and is the winner of the Governor General’s Award (a big deal up there in Canada). Alice Munro has been touted as the greatest living short story writer.
If not for the words containing a superfluous ‘u’ here and there (colo urful, flavo urful), I would have been convinced Munro was writing about the American south. In fact, her writing reminded me a bit of Flannery O’Connor as she expertly explored the life of the “every (wo)man.” This is such a heartfelt collection and I’m so happy to have stumbled upon it. It was one of those serendipitous moments: days before I saw it in the two dollar bin at the book store, Steve recommended I try some Alice Munro. Don’t you love those happy little coincidences? 'She sat with her legs folded under her looking out at the road where she might walk now in any direction she liked, and the world which lay flat and accessible and full of silence in front of her.'
(from A Trip To the Coast) Outro. Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro I really liked this book. I liked it a LOT. Ok I loved it! I’ve been meaning to read work by Alice Munro for a while so when I found a second hand copy of Dance of the Happy Shades for a few dollars, I picked it up. This book is a Governor General’s Award winning collection of short stories. The following quote by Hugh Garner in the forward to this book, pretty much, in my opinion, describes the quality and essence of Ms.
Munro’s writing. “The second-rate writ Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro I really liked this book. I liked it a LOT. Ok I loved it! I’ve been meaning to read work by Alice Munro for a while so when I found a second hand copy of Dance of the Happy Shades for a few dollars, I picked it up. This book is a Governor General’s Award winning collection of short stories.
The following quote by Hugh Garner in the forward to this book, pretty much, in my opinion, describes the quality and essence of Ms. Munro’s writing. “The second-rate writers, the writers manques, the professional-commerical writers, find it impossible to write about ordinary people in ordinary situations, living ordinary lives, and make the people, their lives and their situations not only plausible and pleasurable but artistically alive. Hence their reliance on the grotesque, the far-out theme, the “different” or snob character, and the exotic or non-existent locale.
The literary artist, on the other hand, uses people we all know, situations which are familiar to us and places we know or remember.” In this collection, Alice Munro does an amazing job of telling stories of ordinary people in ordinary situations who seem very real and often remind you of someone you know - family, friends, even yourself. Many of the stories are sad, some make you angry, others will have you nodding your head, “yup I know someone like that”. What they all have in common is beautifully detailed descriptions that paint visual images in your mind. In The Shining Houses a new subdivision is being built in an old area of town creating a divide between the old and the new. New homes filled with young families and perfect lawns sit across the road from very old, original farmhouses, dilapidated yet still occupied. I see this situation a lot where I live because home construction is booming and spreading to the countryside.
These young, upscale suburbanites do not appreciate the view from their front windows and agree to try enforcing laws to have the old farmhouses bulldozed by the town. In The Office a married woman with children rents office space above a store where she can write her novel in peace and quiet, away from the normal bustle of her home. Unfortunately, the landlord constantly pesters her creating more frustration and annoyance than she would have experienced at home. An Ounce of Cure is a story about a young babysitter who is left in charge of sleeping children while the parents and their friends go out for the night. Helen is from a family which doesn’t drink alcohol so when she sees bottles sitting on the counter, she becomes curious and experiments with mixing drinks. Disaster results. The time of Death is a very, very sad story.
A poor family loses their youngest child due to an unfortunate accident. There is kindness shown by friends and neighbours towards the mother while the reaction of the eldest daughter, who was responsible for the incident, is strangely inappropriate. Dance of the Happy Shades is my favourite story. The piano teacher reminds me exactly of my husband’s piano teacher. She is quite elderly and continues to teach and hold recitals that nobody really wants to attend. But she is a wonderful lady who is kind to everyone.
Parents of children she teaches, sadly, don’t see her that way and are frustrated having to attend the recitals. When developmentally challenged children attend the latest recital, mothers in attendance are shocked that she would invite these kids to play. Play they do very beautifully, leaving those in attendance mesmerized by the music.
Alice Munroe had this book published in 1968 and continues to write today. I look forward to reading more of her stories. Many words far better than the ones which I can put together into a sentence have been said about Alice Munro’s extraordinary talent. Many of those words have been directed at this book, her first collection of stories, and how remarkable it is for being a first collection of stories. Having read it one wonders why there haven’t been more words devoted to it or its author, why she, unfortunately, remains hidden away from most readers for no reason other than her chosen form. Alice Munro is a won Many words far better than the ones which I can put together into a sentence have been said about Alice Munro’s extraordinary talent. Many of those words have been directed at this book, her first collection of stories, and how remarkable it is for being a first collection of stories.
Having read it one wonders why there haven’t been more words devoted to it or its author, why she, unfortunately, remains hidden away from most readers for no reason other than her chosen form. Alice Munro is a wonder, a treasure, the best living writer in the English language. I read her books slowly, as I do with most short story collections, picking up stories and then putting the book down for a week or maybe longer at a time, and so I often spend four or five or six months reading the same collection.
With other authors this doesn’t work, it seems, breathing so much between the stories, but with Munro it is the only way I can steal away enough determination to make it through her work. One doesn’t steal away determination for Munro because they are unpleasurable - in fact, I often want to read many of her stories back to back and force myself to put her work down, because you don’t rush your way through Munro anymore than you would rush your way through Beckett - but because they require attention. Not an inordinate amount, the magic of Munro being that the stuff happens and develops without the reader knowing it, but enough that you can’t half-ass your way through her stories. But everything you give to Munro she gives back to you many times over. I read several of the stories in this collection many times, and with each reading I acquired a new and deeper understanding of her art, her characters, the fine, precise shaping of their humanity and surroundings.
I would start stories, put them down feeling I couldn’t handle the tension, pick them up and in the first paragraphs discover some new sorcery, and both the first reading and the second would be startled by the end result of the story. And I would be quite unexpectedly weakened by that end results at times. The Office, for example, left me wandering the streets of Colombia for a few days with some inexplicable weariness, almost crying for a moment or two without realizing that I was almost crying for a moment or two. The Peace of Urtecht made me wonder at the borders of independence of servitude in family life.
Images and Walker Brothers Cowboy made me wonder at the unknown and unknowable aspects of the world around us. Boy and Girls, have you read Boy and Girls?, because Boys and Girls is perhaps the greatest short story I have ever read about a young person confronting reality - which is, I suppose her central theme, the human spirit confronting and contorting their self to the demands of a unrelenting and unforgiving reality. There are some astonishing classics here, as there are in any book by Munro, but here, as they often are with Munro, the stories are relentless in their consistent quality, hence why I needed space between them to recuperate and breathe.
Red Dress-1946, Postcard, Sunday Afternoon, Dance of the Happy Shades, The Shining Houses. You could name nearly every single story in this collection and recommend it as a stellar example in the art of crafting and shaping literature. Unfortunately, Munro has retired from writing, and so I don’t anticipate receiving any more of her wisdom in the coming years, and I wonder if she will allow her family to release the unreleased after she passes. Fortunately, I have enough books by her to keep me thrilled to read for years to come. Damn near too many, perhaps. I float in a sea of riches, or I drown in them; either way I am, with Munro, in a rare state of admiration and euphoria.
Read this book, or any of her books, especially if you don’t like short stories, and especially if you like short stories. Like the children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after-like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word. (Images) Thankfully Munro stores up those childhood secrets and works them with a strange alchemy into gold. Thi Like the children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after-like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word. (Images) Thankfully Munro stores up those childhood secrets and works them with a strange alchemy into gold. This was her first collection of stories, written over a period of fifteen years or so and published in 1968 when she was in her mid thirties.
They draw much on her childhood and youth, growing up in a hard-scrabble kind of poverty in rural Ontario, in rooms with a square of linoleum and views of sun-blasted fields outside the window. She seems to have arrived in the world as a fully-fledged writer: it is the deceptive simplicity of her writing that betrays an incomparable talent. It's the kind of writing that seems effortless, and can only appear so by much hard work.
She has an amazing way of getting a character up and running with a few pertinent lines of description, or revealing a whole mood in one image. In Sunday Afternoon Alva is working as a maid for the Gannetts for the summer.
She is free after she's done the lunch dishes, but what is she to do? 'Her room was over the garage, and very hot. Sitting on the bed rumpled her uniform, and she did not have another ironed. She could take it off and sit in her slip, but Mrs Gannett might call her, and want her at once.' Sunday afternoon encapsulated. Free and yet not free, cold and gentle, bizarre and domestic: Munro is fond of the apparently paradoxical pairing. These stories are, perhaps, a little straighter, a little less subtle than her later work, but her flinty wisdom transforms the mundane world of knives and forks, and turns the everyday into the wonder of a moment of revelation, and the soaring power that can come with understanding.
Find all my book reviews, plus fascinating author interviews, exclusive guest posts and book extracts, on my blog: This is the second collection of short stories by Alice Munro I’ve read. The first, Runaway, I described as ‘bleak’. But having read this collection, which was actually the first she ever published, I think I was too harsh. Instead, I think I should have said ‘unflinching in her observation’.
I’m going to pick out three stories that I think il Find all my book reviews, plus fascinating author interviews, exclusive guest posts and book extracts, on my blog: This is the second collection of short stories by Alice Munro I’ve read. The first, Runaway, I described as ‘bleak’. But having read this collection, which was actually the first she ever published, I think I was too harsh. Instead, I think I should have said ‘unflinching in her observation’. I’m going to pick out three stories that I think illustrate both Munro’s gift for observation and her ability to reveal the petty snobberies of small town life.
In ‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’, Munro brilliantly conjures up the atmosphere of the small town where the narrator lives. ‘Then my father and I walk gradually down a long shabby, sort of street, with Silverwoods Ice Cream signs standing on the sidewalk, outside tiny, lighted storesThe street is shaded, in some places, by maple trees whose roots have cracked and heaved the sidewalk and spread out like crocodiles into the bare yards. People are sitting out, men in shirt-sleeves and undershirts and women in aprons – not people we know but if anybody looks ready to nod and say, “Warm night”, my father will nod too and say something the same.’ In ‘Shining Houses’, the residents of a new estate of ‘new, white and shining houses’ unite against the occupant of an old house who they believe is bringing down the value of their homes. Munro describes how the male residents of the new houses work on their properties at the weekends. ‘They worked with competitive violence and energy, all this being new to them; they were not men who made their livings by physical work. All day Saturday and Sunday they worked like this, so that in a year or two there should be green terraces, rock walls, shapely flower beds and ornamental shrubs.’ Don’t you just love that phrase ‘competitive violence’ to describe the sort of one-upmanship of neighbours?
In ‘Time of Death’, a tragic accident causes the other women of the community to rally round to support, Leona, the grieving mother. ‘Leona drew up her knees under the quilt and rocked herself back and forth as she wept, and threw her head down and then back (showing, as some of them noticed with a feeling of shame, the dirty lines on her neck).’ That detail of the woman’s dirty neck is what I meant by the unflinching nature of Munro’s observation. And, there is a further sting in the tail because it becomes clear their support is only temporary for a woman they consider of a lower class. ‘In the dark overheated kitchen the women felt the dignity of this sorrow in their maternal flesh, they were humble before this unwashed, unliked and desolate Leona.’ I really enjoyed these stories with their acute observation, dark humour and brilliant evocation of time and place.
I hope if I’d read them when they were first published I’d have been adept enough to recognise Alice Munro as the huge literary talent she has since become. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, أليس مونرو الكاتبة الكندية التي لم يسبق لي قراءة مجموعاتها القصصية و أعتقد الترشيح الذي جاء من قبل ' عصبة القراءة ' كان موفقاً في معرفة أليس مونرو ومعرفة نوع ماتكتبه. ' رقصة الظلال السعيدة ' المجموعة القصصية التي جاءت بسلاسة اللغة وعمقها في المضمون مخترقة النفس البشرية بتفاصيل بسيطة وبالغة في الأثر. مستقطعة جزءاً من شريط الذاكرة لدينا بحكايات ومواقف قد تكون حدثت لدينا ومروية بلسان الآخرين. أكثر القصص التي أحببتها ( المكتب ) و ( العلاج ) و ( وقت الموت ). I chose this book for an independent reading project in my high school fiction class.
My teacher suggested Munro because he though I could identify with her particular writing style. This collection kept me enraptured with plot, characters, and the numerous nuggets of unexpected beauty dispersed throughout. Alice Munro is a brilliant writer, a fact I believe can be affirmed by the end of the titular story, Dance of the Happy Shades.
Her stories and the characters within them have the uncanny abi I chose this book for an independent reading project in my high school fiction class. My teacher suggested Munro because he though I could identify with her particular writing style. This collection kept me enraptured with plot, characters, and the numerous nuggets of unexpected beauty dispersed throughout. Alice Munro is a brilliant writer, a fact I believe can be affirmed by the end of the titular story, Dance of the Happy Shades.
Her stories and the characters within them have the uncanny ability to demand and hold your attention. I found (most prominently with the last story) that these stories are capable of manipulating one's consciousness as a reader; I think Munro, aside from her superb style, knows the mind of the reader inside-out--and she capitalizes expertly on that understanding. I felt a certain shame as a Canadian reader having never read any of Alice Munro's stories. I don't know how I made it this far without it, but the Canadian Lit classes I took in university decided to try to kill off any affection I had for our native writers through sheer boredom (I'm looking at you Sinclair Ross). Fortunately there's work like 'Dance of the Happy Shades', a book that by all means should be boring but is captivating due to Munro's incredible ability to transform the mundane Can I felt a certain shame as a Canadian reader having never read any of Alice Munro's stories.
I don't know how I made it this far without it, but the Canadian Lit classes I took in university decided to try to kill off any affection I had for our native writers through sheer boredom (I'm looking at you Sinclair Ross). Fortunately there's work like 'Dance of the Happy Shades', a book that by all means should be boring but is captivating due to Munro's incredible ability to transform the mundane Canadian countryside into a beautiful portrait.
I always feel short stories are best when they can fully create a world in a short period of time. The stories here are no exception, and they are all given life through Munro's attention to detail, and the minor actions and feelings characters exhibit that might be lost to other writers. I fell hopelessly in love with Alice Munro!
Frontech Tv Tuner Driver For Windows 8. I find it hard to review short stories because they are some you love and adore that you can read over and over again but also some you dislike. (Not in this case though!) Our subject in the English lesson this year was Canada.
We talked about environmental problems, multiculturalism and even read a few examples of Canadian 'literature'. Which my teacher picked out really, really bad I think and my opinion on this strengthened after I read this short sto I fell hopelessly in love with Alice Munro! Apollo 13 Mkv Rapidshare Downloader on this page. I find it hard to review short stories because they are some you love and adore that you can read over and over again but also some you dislike. (Not in this case though!) Our subject in the English lesson this year was Canada. We talked about environmental problems, multiculturalism and even read a few examples of Canadian 'literature'. Which my teacher picked out really, really bad I think and my opinion on this strengthened after I read this short stories.
I thought: 'Why didn't we read Alice Munro if she's a Canadian nobel prize winner?' So I started reading it on my own. And I still think: 'Why didn't we read Alice Munro if she's a Canadian nobel prize winner?' Her stories are all set in Canada, landscapes and houses are always described, and you get a glimpse of the Canadian life style. I really loved the setting of the book.
Every place she described felt so realistic and real, I thought I could just reach through the pages and words and simply touch the places. Every story gave a small insight into the life of a character and I have enjoyed the mosaic of figures and personal constellations. (But this is what I love about short stories all the time, the small cutting out of a person's life that you get). Moreover, I liked the subject of growing-up. A subject which concerns me as I go through the same thing now.
I found her approach relatable and interesting. So why 'only' 4 stars? I don't even dare to write this because her writing is so extraordinary and superior compared to others, BUT I need to feel something while reading. Really feel something and I think this is my main problem with short stories. They are always written in a manner which makes me so neutral and dull that I never feel a thing. It was the same with Munro's stories.
I could not connect deeply with her characters (this doesn't mean they weren't deeply and greatly developed characters!) and I was always left without any feeling at all. And feelings always teach me something and give me a life-lesson. This didn't happen here. At least for me. Munro is a master of the words.
It is incomprehensible to me how somebody can write so lovely and control the art of writing so much. Her style has recognition value and has really impressed me. My whole picture of short stories was completely turned upside down once again by her stories. Several of these stories were amazing. The last two, which I read early on, 'The Peace of Utrecht' and 'The Dance of the Happy Shades' were so subtle and strange in a very realistic, possible way.
I loved them. I don't think I've ever really learned to be satisfied with short stories, or maybe I haven't learned how to read them.
I'm always left wanting more, left wanting a novel. A short story can be beautifully crafted and the characters and their lives may be vividly brought to life within twe Several of these stories were amazing. The last two, which I read early on, 'The Peace of Utrecht' and 'The Dance of the Happy Shades' were so subtle and strange in a very realistic, possible way. I loved them.
I don't think I've ever really learned to be satisfied with short stories, or maybe I haven't learned how to read them. I'm always left wanting more, left wanting a novel. A short story can be beautifully crafted and the characters and their lives may be vividly brought to life within twenty or thirty pages, but I move on to another story, and perhaps because I haven't lived long enough with the characters and their stories, I simply forget.
Not that I don't forget a novel, it's just that I've forgotten almost every short story I've ever read. Maybe short stories beg to be read over and over.
Does anyone else have this problem? Are there readers out there who understand what I may not be bringing to the reading? [rating = A-] Alice Munro is the best short story writer because she can take the most basic of lives and expose the subtle and underlying factors of it, making it interesting and at once realistic.
I love how she hints at or furthers another short story in the collection, yet at the same time keeping it individual and independent. She surprises you with the delicacy of her psychology and human behavior; she dazzles with the unexpected mundane; and she discovers her characters as she writes the s [rating = A-] Alice Munro is the best short story writer because she can take the most basic of lives and expose the subtle and underlying factors of it, making it interesting and at once realistic.
I love how she hints at or furthers another short story in the collection, yet at the same time keeping it individual and independent. She surprises you with the delicacy of her psychology and human behavior; she dazzles with the unexpected mundane; and she discovers her characters as she writes the story, not just revealing them to the reader but awakening them to their own fictional existence. Although Runaway is my favorite collection, The Dance of the Happy Shades showcases her early prowess at writing, and she is even adventurous in her narrative style and technique, which is a treat, for her latter work is usually told in the same format. A great collection of hate and power, love and injustice, guilt and ignorance, aging and living. Simply fantastic.
Alice Munro is one of my favorite authors. Over her entire career she has deftly written about the lives of ordinary girls and women - their experiences, their challenges, their dreams.
She is so worthy of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which she won in 2013. This is Munro's first published book, and like most of the others, it is a book of short stories. It is just as beautifully written as her later ones, and shows her early power of storytelling. In this volume, which won the Canadian Governo Alice Munro is one of my favorite authors.
Over her entire career she has deftly written about the lives of ordinary girls and women - their experiences, their challenges, their dreams. She is so worthy of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which she won in 2013. This is Munro's first published book, and like most of the others, it is a book of short stories. It is just as beautifully written as her later ones, and shows her early power of storytelling. In this volume, which won the Canadian Governor General's Prize in 1968, each story is a gem.
Some are about growing up in small-town Ontario - the mysteries of adults, the trials and worries of coming-of-age - of sex, love and work. Others are told with grown-up eyes, looking back at times gone.
There is a feeing of nostalgia in all of them, to be sure. Yet there are also universal truths at the heart. I read Munro's first book one and a half years ago and I thought she was the best short story writer I've ever encountered.
'Dance of the Happy Shades' is her fourth book I've read, and I stood corrected. One sign of a great writer is if you can literally read anything written by her and think it's awesome. It is what I feel with Munro.
Her works are humble. Different from other (usually male) writers with grandiose vocabularies and exhibitionist tendencies, Munro chose to deliver in colloquial w I read Munro's first book one and a half years ago and I thought she was the best short story writer I've ever encountered. 'Dance of the Happy Shades' is her fourth book I've read, and I stood corrected.
One sign of a great writer is if you can literally read anything written by her and think it's awesome. It is what I feel with Munro. Her works are humble.
Different from other (usually male) writers with grandiose vocabularies and exhibitionist tendencies, Munro chose to deliver in colloquial words. But, her magic lies in the concoction of the sentences - strings of simple words together that produce visceral response. These sentences aren't ubiquitous, rather, they are put strategically in between pages and shock you out of the blue. And this combination of laid back, introverted sentences interspersed with jolting emotional outbursts is what makes her works stand out. Munro is patient, and she asks you to dance to her tune.
You can be a type A neurotic reader and just want to get it over with, but her stories have a charm that slows you down, asking you to follow her pace. It is a rather effortless attempt. She is not a feminist writer, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it an underpinning theme of some stories in 'Dance of the Happy Shades.'
'The Office,' for instance, is the best short story I've read this year, not to mention 'Boys and Girls' that beautifully portrays a young woman's confusion and outrage surrounding the word 'girl' that, according to her, is derogatory. The denouement of it all is the 'Dance of the Happy Shades' story, narrating the life of two spinsters in a suburb area (Munro coined the term 'sophisticated prudery' in this story and I've never identified with a term more - lol). With Munro, it is always about subtle morose and demure emotions, the somewhat pastel-toned darkness that leaves a mark in us.
The little I’ve read of Munro shows a steady attentiveness to the particular, as opposed to the general, nature of the studied life. While a good deal of her later fiction makes thematic and consistent her concentration on the clarified lives of older women, this collection tends to recall and collect stories of children and childhood for the sake of their own peculiar awakenings, even where these are opened before and examined in a harshly retrospective gaze. Stories like The Shining Houses and The little I’ve read of Munro shows a steady attentiveness to the particular, as opposed to the general, nature of the studied life. While a good deal of her later fiction makes thematic and consistent her concentration on the clarified lives of older women, this collection tends to recall and collect stories of children and childhood for the sake of their own peculiar awakenings, even where these are opened before and examined in a harshly retrospective gaze. Stories like The Shining Houses and Red Dress-1946 are fine examples of Munro’s subversion of public concerns for the putting forth of private reactions.
The former is a quietly modern demonstration of a plain thesis, whereas the latter threatens playfully to fall out of introspection into political activism before the author sabotages such a reading with the kind of realising moment broadly characteristic of her writing career. Other stories like Images and Boys and Girls are more familiar and make concrete the picture of Munro’s literary identity as a strange universalist whose devotion to particular natures and circumstance allow her stories to succeed generally. It is, however, in the final story (eponym for the collection) that animals ranging across the plains of her fiction collect in a small stable: in the context of the preceding environments and the allotments of land to each kind, this final story must be a human being. Alice Munro lures you into the seasonal rhythms of pastoral settings with seamless ease. She can lead you down bucolic winter paths or walk you down glaring, hot, and dusty summer streets. Then she turns around and drops a devastatingly hilarious observation on the reader like turning over an ace in a card game. The characters are effortless complex, human, and recognizable.
Her endings burst with revelations and epiphanies that are derived from a long collection of illuminating moments, where a Alice Munro lures you into the seasonal rhythms of pastoral settings with seamless ease. She can lead you down bucolic winter paths or walk you down glaring, hot, and dusty summer streets. Then she turns around and drops a devastatingly hilarious observation on the reader like turning over an ace in a card game.
The characters are effortless complex, human, and recognizable. Her endings burst with revelations and epiphanies that are derived from a long collection of illuminating moments, where almost every last line in all 15 stories are like mic drops. Without any reluctance I can admit judging her the best short story writer ever, which says a lot when almost every main character is a female, living in Canada, in the country. But her keen eye and abundance of wit spill over into universal truths that all humans can identify with. I was particularly struck by The Peace of Utrecht, as she describes the decline and death of (what surely was based on her own) [an] aging parent, which is a situation my sister and I are dealing with now. It gave me clarity, and reminded me of how common an experience it is, but still made it heart rending and shared experience that left me in tears. Highly recommended.
“At high school I was never comfortable for a minute. I did not know about Lonnie. Before an exam, she got icy hands and palpitations, but I was close to despair at all times. When I was asked a question in class, any simple little question at all, my voice was apt to come out squeaky, or else hoarse and trembling.
When I had to go to the blackboard I was sure—even at a time of the month when this could not be true—that I had blood on my skirt. My hands became slippery with sweat when they were required to work the blackboard compass.
I could not hit the ball in volleyball; being called upon to perform an action in front of others made all my reflexes come undone. I hated Business Practice because you had to rule pages for an account book, using a straight pen, and when the teacher looked over my shoulder all the delicate lines wobbled and ran together.
I hated Science; we perched on stools under harsh lights behind tables of unfamiliar, fragile equipment, and were taught by the principal of the school, a man with a cold, self-relishing voice—he read the Scriptures every morning—and a great talent for inflicting humiliation. I hated English because the boys played bingo at the back of the room while the teacher, a stout, gentle girl, slightly cross-eyed, read Wordsworth at the front. She threatened them, she begged them, her face red and her voice as unreliable as mine. They offered burlesqued apologies and when she started to read again they took up rapt postures, made swooning faces, crossed their eyes, flung their hands over their hearts. Sometimes she would burst into tears, there was no help for it, she had to run out into the hall. Then the boys made loud mooing noises; our hungry laughter—oh, mine too—pursued her.
There was a carnival atmosphere of brutality in the room at such times, scaring weak and suspect people like me.” —. “He tells me how the Great Lakes came to be. All where Lake Huron is now, he says, used to be flat land, a wide flat plain. Then came the ice, creeping down from the north, pushing deep into the low places. Like that—and he shows me his hand with his spread fingers pressing the rock-hard ground where we are sitting.
His fingers make hardly any impression at all and he says, “Well, the old ice cap had a lot more power behind it than this hand has.” And then the ice went back, shrank back towards the North Pole where it came from, and left its fingers of ice in the deep places it had gouged, and ice turned to lakes and there they were today. They were new, as time went.
I try to see that plain before me, dinosaurs walking on it, but I am not able even to imagine the shore of the Lake when the Indians were there, before Tuppertown. The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity. Even my father, who sometimes seems to me to have been at home in the world as long as it has lasted, has really lived on this earth only a little longer than I have, in terms of all the time there has been to live in.
He has not known a time, any more than I, when automobiles and electric lights did not at least exist. He was not alive when this century started. I will be barely alive—old, old—when it ends. I do not like to think of it. I wish the Lake to be always just a lake, with the safe-swimming floats marking it, and the breakwater and the lights of Tuppertown.” —.