Dear Life by Alice Munro
CBC Books | Posted: March 2, 2017 4:22 PM | Last Updated: May 14
A vivid short story collection about how strange and extraordinary the ordinary life can be
The fourteen stories in this brilliant collection show Alice Munro coming home to southwestern Ontario, with Toronto looming on the horizon. Even "To Reach Japan," where a Vancouver mother takes her young daughter across the country by train, ends in Toronto. On that journey, different kinds of passion produce surprises, both on the journey and at its end.
The range of storytellers is astonishing, as we hear the young voices of women recalling their teenage years and the equally convincing voice of an old woman fighting Alzheimer's. Margaret Atwood once shrewdly noted that "pushing the sexual boundaries is distinctly thrilling for many a Munro woman," and very few of these stories deal with men and women in sedate, conventional domestic settings.
Munro admirers will see that these stories are shorter than many in her recent collections, but they have all the sharpness, accessibility, and power of her earlier work, and they are—as always—full of "real" people. The final four works ("not quite stories") bring the author home, literally. She writes: "I believe they are the first and last—and the closest—things I have to say about my own life."
(From Penguin Canada)
Literary legend Alice Munro died on May 13, 2024 at the age of 92. The Canadian writer is revered worldwide as a master of the short story, with 14 acclaimed collections and a Nobel Prize — the 13th woman and second Canadian, after Saul Bellows, to ever receive that honour.
Munro's work has won two Scotiabank Giller Prizes, three Governor General's Literary Awards and the Man Booker International Prize. Her first book, Dance of the Happy Shades, was released in 1968, and she continued to write stories, often contributing to The New Yorker, until retiring in 2013. In books like Lives of Girls and Women, The Love of a Good Woman and Runaway, Munro captured the inner lives of men and women in rural Canada. Her work is inspired by her own upbringing in Wingham, Ont.
From the book
With the glass between them, and Katy never allowing the waving to slow down, they indulged in looks of comic or indeed insane goodwill. She thought how nice-looking he was, and how he seemed to be so unaware of it. He wore a brush cut, in the style of the time — particularly if you were anything like an engineer — and his light-colored skin was never flushed like hers, never blotchy from the sun, but evenly tanned whatever the season.
His opinions were something like his complexion. When they went to see a movie, he never wanted to talk about it afterwards. He would say that it was good, or pretty good, or okay. He didn't see the point in going further. He watched television, he read a book in somewhat the same way. He had patience with such things. The people who put them together were probably doing the best they could. Greta used to argue, rashly asking whether he would say the same thing about a bridge. The people who did it did their best but their best was not good enough so it fell down.
Instead of arguing, he just laughed.
It was not the same thing, he said.
No?
No.
From Dear Life by Alice Munro ©2012. Published by McClelland & Stewart.