Dear Life

Nov 21, 2012 brian rated it 3 of 5 stars

alice munro - great contemporary writer and bigtime oxymoron* - has a new collection coming out nov 13, just 3 days after i'm to be married. which is great as i'm expecting to be all reflective and nostalgic but also forward-looking and hopeful, a mishmash of sentiment and emotion and whatnot; which works out as nobody conjures up all that conflicting crap better than munro.

so, a few days after the wedding, we head down to del mar and, our first night walking the main drag of the tiny seaside t...more

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Dec 11, 2012 Susan Tekulve rated it 5 of 5 stars

As with all of Alice Munro's books, I rushed out to buy this newest collection, and then I rushed home, eager to plunge into it. I am an ardent fan of Alice Munro's work, and I think this collection is good, better than good. The most breathtaking, full and energetic of the short stories in this collection is "Amundsen." It takes place in a TB sanatarium near a remote town in Northern Canada. The story is about a young woman who takes a job teaching the children in the sanatarium and, eventually...more As with all of Alice Munro's books, I rushed out to buy this newest collection, and then I rushed home, eager to plunge into it. I am an ardent fan of Alice Munro's work, and I think this collection is good, better than good. The most breathtaking, full and energetic of the short stories in this collection is "Amundsen." It takes place in a TB sanatarium near a remote town in Northern Canada. The story is about a young woman who takes a job teaching the children in the sanatarium and, eventually, falls in love with the sanatarium's melancholy doctor whose kind, yet oddly cold, intentions toward the young woman remain muddled until the very end. The story has the heft of a Russian novel, and there is, indeed, an allusion to WAR AND PEACE within its pages. However, I felt a feverish pull to keep turning its pages, and there is a good sort of mystery that keeps the story tight and page-turning.

A lot of the other stories are classic Munro, stories that examine "grown-up" themes that so many other best-selling writers, and, more to the point, big-house publishers, typically don't seem to have an interest in publishing these days--unless they are publishing Alice Munro, and maybe a handful of other wonderful literary writer, (like Elizabeth Strout), who maintain a place in today's publishing market. Quite simply, Munro writes about aging, and she does so with bravery, steadiness and stoic grace. One of her characters faces the horrors of the onset of dementia--after she is already in the grips of the disease; another character, a seventy-one-year-old woman, begins to believe that her eighty-three-year-old husband is going to leave her for a visiting cosmetic saleswoman who turns out to be an old flame of his. These stories are sadly beautiful, and they are relatively short, by Munro's standards.

What surprised and delighted me the most were the four final "works" of the book. She prefaces these "works" by saying that they "are not quite stories" because they are "autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, in fact." Munro took a similar approach in THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK, which begins with an account of how she researched her ancestors in Scotland, then moves into pieces of "fictionalized autobiography" based on her Scottish ancestors in the middle. Then, the book ends in the realm of complete fiction. I like Munro's forays into memoir, and even though she doesn't truly commit to writing "the truth," I have to admire the fact that she doesn't pretend that her autobiographical stories are 100% true. By taking this approach, she avoids the trap that a number of fiction writers fall into when they venture completely into memoir. It seems, (at least in my reading of memoirs written by fiction writers), that many fiction writers who make the foray into memoir writing forget that they are still telling a story. They forget that even memoirists must create a dramatic persona of themselves so that they have the distance, (and good narrative sense), that it takes to tell a truthful AND effective story. They have no sense of perspective, and no sense of how they come off as the protagonist of their own stories; they often tell too much, or too little. In short, they forget the basic elements of narrative because they are "telling the truth."

This is not the case with Munro's autobiographical writing. In fact, the autobiographical "works" in this collection feel more immediate and energetic than a number of the fictional stories. Munro's voice in these pieces is stoic. In a piece called "Night," she recalls the time when she was fourteen, and she had a tumor removed at the same time she had her appendix taken out. She muses about how her mother never mentioned whether the tumor was cancerous or benign: "So I did not ask and wasn't told and can only suppose it was benign or was most skillfully got rid of, for here I am today." It's statements like this that reveal her stoicism, but also her warmth and humor. In "The Eye," she writes heartbreakingly about the death of Sadie, the hired girl Munro's mother apparently brought into the home to help with the chores when Munro's younger brother was born. The story hinges upon the moment when Munro's mother takes her to Sadie's wake, with the intentions of showing Alice what death looks like. And Alice, who is quite young when this event happens, imagines that she sees Sadie's eye flutter open while she is lying in the casket. It's a small, almost Gothic moment, and yet it captures perfectly that mystery and strange hope that children feel when they first see death.

Ultimately, this is a collection that amazes me, partly because Munro continues to write innovative stories at a time in her life when she has every reason to rest on her laurels. It amazes me because she confronts subjects that a lot of people turn away from, such as aging quietly, and dying quietly, of devastatingly unromantic old-age ailments. If you already like Alice Munro, you will like the fictional stories because they have all the classic Munro traits--hardscrabble settings, stoic characters, dark humor. If you are an ardent fan, such as myself, you'll love the "fictionalized nonfiction" pieces too because they offer a glimpse into the life and mind of this beloved writer.(less)

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Dec 29, 2012 Jan Priddy rated it 5 of 5 stars

I am a great fan of Munro and wrote my critical essay in grad school mostly about one of her stories. She breaks rules, I believe intentionally and intelligently, and to a purpose. Her earliest stories are simply good, but then over time, as her reputation grew, she could do whatever she liked. And she did. I admire what writers do once they can afford to entirely please themselves. "The final four works in this book are not quite stories . . . things I have to say about my own life" including t...more

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Apr 07, 2013 Mitch Duckworth rated it 5 of 5 stars

By way of disclosure, I am a devoted fan of Alice Munro . . . My critical thinking is dubious at best when attempting analysis of her work, nearly half of the fourteen stories in Dear Life are minor masterpieces, and of those, perhaps half—conservatively, three or four stories—may rival the best work she’s ever done. Not excelling in the fine art of literary criticism, I cannot even pretend to know. The only thing of importance to me is how I feel when I turn the last page. It’s something like s...more By way of disclosure, I am a devoted fan of Alice Munro . . . My critical thinking is dubious at best when attempting analysis of her work, nearly half of the fourteen stories in Dear Life are minor masterpieces, and of those, perhaps half—conservatively, three or four stories—may rival the best work she’s ever done. Not excelling in the fine art of literary criticism, I cannot even pretend to know. The only thing of importance to me is how I feel when I turn the last page. It’s something like saying goodbye to an old friend, and realizing you may never see her again. Young people exist in these tales, but they don’t stay young. They don’t want to, but as humans do, they grow old and they look back to remember a different time, when they were first coming to grips with the vagaries of life. Because a woman watches through the window of her coach as a young returning soldier greets his family, and the train pulls ahead—its smooth advance providing a last opportunity to jump down onto the platform—but, she stays on a train. She did not marry the young soldier, when surely, she might have, had she detrained with him that day, long ago. Years later, again on a rail excursion, but this time heading in the opposite direction, she sees him in the same small town—glimpses his life, and sees that it is good—with children and family. She thinks of her own life. Similar. Married. Children. Happy. Enough. And yet, she imagines the road not taken. Her stories are filled with poignant moments in the cold clear memories of times, places, and people long gone, but that’s just the beginning; these human tales of life and love and loss and treasures safeguarded in private vaults speak to the recesses of our own soul’s longing and contentment. We read Alice Munro and meet ourselves in the reading. Dear Life is one to cherish . . . But aren’t they all?

Stories especially noteworthy (IMHO) include:

Leaving Maverly-*****
Pride-*****
Corrie-*****
Train-*****
Dolly-*****(less)

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Dec 19, 2012 Gwendolyn rated it 4 of 5 stars

I can't believe it, but I finally read an Alice Munro story collection. I'm not sure what took me so long, but now I've done it, and I understand all the hype. Munro has a way of capturing a mood or emotional state in just a few brief words. Her characters are normal people, but she tells the stories so as to reveal the deeper meanings and struggles in everyday lives. I was particularly surprised by how many of these stories feel like epics. They cover decades of time in just a few pages without...more

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Apr 19, 2013 ·Karen· marked it as to-read

Shelves: short-stories, canada

Prezzie from R. She knows me so well.

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Mar 07, 2013 Jessie rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: the-road-to-tob-13

So, short stories: generally not a fan. I have all sorts of insecurities about this, like my dislike of poetry - I feel like there's always something I'm not QUITE getting (Ethan Canin's The Palace Thief, as I have said a gazillion times, is the one book of short stories I really liked - and they're not really that short).

But Alice Munro is an important writer, and because of a class on international political systems I took in college, as well as a book I once read about Celine Dion, I have a l...more

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Feb 25, 2013 Sarah Ryburn rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-story

these stories are, simply put, vintage munro. more of the magic for which i adore this writer. she's really one of the two reasons (alistair macleod's the other) i've realized a deep and abiding love of the short story genre, and for this i feel a deep and abiding gratitude. i read two yesterday, "corrie" and "dolly," about two such different women which nonetheless evoked this singular, profound regard for munro's craft and wisdom as a writer. such skill.

one of my favorite stories in this colle...more

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Dec 19, 2012 Jennifer rated it 4 of 5 stars

Always a tad resistant to taking on a volume of short stories, I really enjoyed the variety in this collection of stories by master-writer Munro. Stories that are most often sad, sometimes disturbing, are elegantly and gracefully told. The underlying message seems to be that life is complicated.

Three of the first 5 stories were already familiar from The New Yorker, and reading them a second time both made the effect and weight of these stories increase and made the collection feel familiar. Whi...more

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Feb 01, 2013 Robert rated it 3 of 5 stars

I'm sometimes asked about my favorite writers and answer citing too many to make much of an impression--either about my taste or the writers themselves. One writer who always makes my lists, however, is Alice Munro. If that sparks any interest, and I'm asked what I like about her, I say that she writes short stories with the qualities of novels, possesses an almost perfect, meditative narrative style, and surfaces the weird from the mundane without ever losing her dignity or judgment

Quite a mout...more I'm sometimes asked about my favorite writers and answer citing too many to make much of an impression--either about my taste or the writers themselves. One writer who always makes my lists, however, is Alice Munro. If that sparks any interest, and I'm asked what I like about her, I say that she writes short stories with the qualities of novels, possesses an almost perfect, meditative narrative style, and surfaces the weird from the mundane without ever losing her dignity or judgment

Quite a mouthful. Alice Munro has long been, in other words, an accomplished writer of somewhat unique gifts.

The way she achieves those novelistic qualities in short stories isn't too hard to figure out. First, she starts on one subject or character, then she moves to another subject or character, then years often pass (lots of them) and the seemingly unrelated first and second beginnings of her stories are woven into their endings.

A word for this is discursive. A little of this, a little of that, some magic and coincidence and long-lingering passion and life, which seldom makes even fleeting sense, blossoms in a beautiful concluding sentence or two.

When I say "almost perfect, meditative narrative style," I'm referring both to her discursiveness and her relatively straightforward language, adorned here and there by a startling image (something out of keeping with her characters' pretensions but absolutely lined up with their dark memories and fears.) Munro doesn't follow the threadbare prescription: show, don't tell. She tells a lot. This is the sin of exposition, which didn't used to be a sin.

Is she speaking in her own voice or a made-up voice drawn from a principal character? Usually it's the latter. Usually that's what gives the story heft and credibility. But at the same time, her narrators purl along smoothly, sluicing this way and that around the rocks in the streambed.

Finally, "the weird from the mundane," what's that mean? It means life caught up with itself in an unexpected way. It means Munro doesn't spell this out so much as build it into her story without explanation. It means the reader gets it without having to be told: life is full of panic attacks, surrenders, inconvenient encounters, and the like.

In her new story collection, Dear Life, all of what I describe above is present, and there's a little more: a few autobiographical sketches at the end that read like "Goodbye." I've heard she's said this is it, no more, she's eighty, enough. I don't know whether that's true or not, but going to the source of some of her qualities and sharing them with us does suggest she may mean it: here's where I came from, this is what I and my family were like, you can guess why I've always been caught imaging country life when I'm in the city, city life when I'm in the country, Toronto when I'm in Vancouver, Vancouver when I'm in Toronto.

I think I've read all of Alice Munro's stories, and I'm not one to suggest that a writer necessarily loses it when she grows older or that Dear Life isn't a good book, but I wouldn't say it's the best she's written. One or two stories could have been left out. "In Sight of the Lake," about an older woman either losing her mind or having an anxious dream, is just another tale about the elderly getting everything wrong. "Dolly," about the reemergence of an old flame who temporarily incinerates an aging couple's "On Golden Pond" experience is a little bit shaky. I'm not sure whether we're really seeing the couple undertake a suicide pact at the beginning (before the old flame shows up) or why the old flame's appearance is so devastating to the female partner.

Stories like "To Reach Japan" and "Leaving Maverly" have a certain bite to them that I like. The autobiographical pieces, let's say "Voices," wherein Munro realizes her mother swept her away from a dance because a gaudy prostitute had shown up, also reach home. Perhaps for the first time, Munro writes the word fuck. I could be wrong about that, but it catches your attention and makes you realize that they did that back in the 1930s, too…or wanted to.

In one of her books, Munro writes about how she has always written: full of dissatisfaction, always disconcerted by where the next sentence is leading her, wondering if she'll ever get an actual story out of the scenes and characters and sudden incidents she imagines. Probably the fitful quality of her approach to composition lends itself to the delightful wandering nature of her work; probably it also helps her render her prose so simple, so direct, with lots of short paragraphs, and--tsk,tsk--incomplete sentences (no verbs!)

We can be sure that Munro, for all that she has published, has written a great deal that has never seen the light of day. What we have to hope is that no ill-advised scholar ever gets her hands on these remnants. The nature of true talent is that it's idiosyncratic down to the last beat, the last syllable, the last unexplained narrative leap. It takes Alice Munro to be Alice Munro, in other words. My criticisms notwithstanding, Dear Life is still Alice Munro.(less)

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Apr 24, 2013 Linda rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

I feel as if my experience, or perhaps understanding of ordinary life has been deepened and added to after reading these stories. Not that anything was exceptionally profound or startling, but that I read these stories at a kind of deliciously slow pace that allowed me the time to travel to thoughts and memories and back into the story almost seamlessly. The characters lives and where they live have really nothing in common with my own experiences, but after finishing some of these stories I fel...more

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Apr 19, 2013 Lianne added it

Alice Munro is one of Canada's national treasures and one of the living writers whose latest title I always feel compelled to read. (Her countrywoman Margaret Atwood is another.) Munro is acclaimed for her mastery of the short story. In this collection she returns to childhood territory in the small towns around Lake Huron. The stories range from the times of the depression, through World War II and post war periods as well as a few more recent setting in cities. The reader is drawn into an emot...more

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Apr 14, 2013 Ty rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: quit-before-finished

I'm a writer myself, and within the last two years or so have began to concentrate a bit more on writing short fiction.

To write is to read, as they say, and I have made an effort to read more short fiction. Many people, from members of my writing group, to lecturers I've listened to, to writers of articles on the subject I have read have advised the same thing; read Alice Munro.

"Perfect. Masterful. Genius. Epitome of what a short story should be today." All of these are accolades heaped upon Mun...more I'm a writer myself, and within the last two years or so have began to concentrate a bit more on writing short fiction.

To write is to read, as they say, and I have made an effort to read more short fiction. Many people, from members of my writing group, to lecturers I've listened to, to writers of articles on the subject I have read have advised the same thing; read Alice Munro.

"Perfect. Masterful. Genius. Epitome of what a short story should be today." All of these are accolades heaped upon Munro and her work. So when I was at the library two weeks ago I figured it was time to sample her work. It almost seemed like my duty as a writer to partake in some of her fiction.

Perhaps it was a mistake to start with her latest collection, published just last year, but My conclusion about her thus far is that she has been oversold to me.

The writing in this collection is solid, intelligent writing, I will say. That is actually part of the problem. I got the impression it was written by an author that has a reputation, and was trying to uphold it. A reputation that, as I said, I am not sure is deserved based on these stories.

Any writer who has been flummoxed by constant advice to "show and not tell" should take comfort; 90% of what Munro does in these stories is tell. In flashback, in digression, in speculation. Pages upon pages of, "The character went through this and this and when younger saw this, and met X and did why. It was discussed at some point that she should do thus and so, and though she desired so and thus, thus and so won out. And this made her depressed. So depressed that she had taken uyp the habit of drinking..."

Eventually, in some cases, that sort of telling led to something relevant in the "present" of the story. (Though tense and time frame were fluid to a distracting degree sometimes.) Her brand is simplicity, and perhaps she does write in a simple way...but one can take forever to get somewhere, even if the forever is written in simple language, and I found myself saying, "what is the point?"

Naturally, literature is more about language than about character or plot, many will say. Let's stipulate that. That being the case, the language itself needs to either inspire sweeping visuals or move the reader in some transcendent way. The prose here does neither.

Perhaps one reason it doesn't do so is the depressing nature of the stories. I figured when I started there was one or two in every collection. But too many of the stories are about depressing things happening to unsatisfied and unlikable people in nondescript settings. (Most of which were very much Canadian...so much so it almost seems one needs to have grown up in Canada to catch on to any of the nuance presented.) I understand it isn't the job of a writer to always make people happy, but the writing is so distance, the characters so cold, I just didn't care what happened to them at all.

That lack of vibrancy in either plot or language, made these shorter length stories a bit of a slog at times. I finished most in one sitting, as one is expected to do with short fiction, but by the time I got through about half of them (I didn't read them in order), it became clear that "Dear Life:Stores" would have been more appropriately titles "Downer: Stories."

I won't give up on Munro totally. not yet. That almost seems like treason in the writing world. But I have given up on this collection.(less)

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Apr 07, 2013 Dan rated it 4 of 5 stars

This latest work by Alice Munro, now 81, is drenched in illness and death. It seems as if every story has someone dying or seriously ill. Apparently Munro has her own medical problems, so the focus on failing health can hardly be a surprise
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I feel churlish for saying not nice things about this collection. Alice Munro is a living institution. She is one of the best writers alive today. According to Wikipedia, she had originally said she wouldn’t write any more two collections ago, and we’re all...more This latest work by Alice Munro, now 81, is drenched in illness and death. It seems as if every story has someone dying or seriously ill. Apparently Munro has her own medical problems, so the focus on failing health can hardly be a surprise
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I feel churlish for saying not nice things about this collection. Alice Munro is a living institution. She is one of the best writers alive today. According to Wikipedia, she had originally said she wouldn’t write any more two collections ago, and we’re all the better for her having changed her mind. And yet, this is not her best work. I only heard about Munro about ten years ago, and I’ve only read the last six of her collections. Of those, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, and The View From Castle Rock stand out. Even so, like old-fashioned music albums, it’s the songs, not the records themselves that stand out. It seems that there are always a couple of stand-out stories, and the rest are throwaways. Of course, Munro’s throwaways are better than most authors’ greatest works.

In every story she is uniformly dedicated to rich description, well-defined characters, and an honest, non-cheating sensibility about what the characters think or do. What distinguishes her great work from the merely good is often a sense of danger or recklessness that takes the reader’s breath away. I’m thinking of “Wenlock Edge” in the earlier collection Too Much Happiness, where the young female narrator is invited to a dinner with a friend’s sort-of-boyfriend and is asked to take off all her clothes by the maid. (If you’re not familiar with Munro – trust me – 50 shades of anything she ain’t.)
Most of the stories in Dear Life have a certain dryness, a Canadian stoicism that exists in her earlier work, but is better hidden. Characters sometimes do get emotional, but not very often. In the first story, “To Reach Japan,” the narrator freaks out when she thinks she loses her daughter. But before that happens, she hooks up with a random actor on a train, but does so with as much passion as someone waiting for their laundry to dry.
I’ve always felt that Munro’s Achilles heel has been the inability of her characters to fully voice their feelings when they’re cheating on someone. She’s marvelous before and after, but in the actual doing, that moment when they decide to betray, she’s noticeably silent. She seems to say it’s inevitable, it can’t be helped, that’s life, oh well. I know it’s impolite to look at an author’s personal life and draw conclusions, but I can’t help wondering if this reflects her inability to come to terms with regard to how her first marriage ended and her second marriage began.
There are two stories I really liked in Dear Life. “Haven” deals with an overbearing small-town doctor and his inability to come to terms with his sister, a successful concert violinist who left the small town to thrive in the big city. Munro does a wonderful job of characterizing the doctor and his dutiful, put-upon wife. There’s even a symbolic ending that is much more symbolic and obvious than Munro usually lets on. I get the sense that the story captures Munro’s resentment of how small towns treat people who move on to greater things. Having grown up in a small town, I can see her point of view, but I can also see how Munro over-sells the close-mindedness in the story. Munro does an interesting thing by having the narrator, an archetypical Munro nerdy teenage girl observer, express her ambivalence as well.
“Dolly,” the last story before the autobiographical sketches, deals with an old married couple (he in his eighties, she in her seventies), and the introduction of an old flame of the husbands. The wife’s anguished reaction is true, and the story is more effective than most of the others because the emotion is real. Munro might be done trying to conjure up young love, but she’s still mighty interested in old love.
The last four sketches are touted as autobiographical. She doesn’t swear to their veracity, but I think that’s just her integrity giving the caveat that some of the facts might have been turned around due to faulty memory or harmless expediency. None of these sketches are truly compelling, but I found them interesting because Munro’s age and rural background is somewhat similar to my mother’s. I think her approach to biography, short sketches, is more interesting than the run-of-the-mill biography that creates an artificial story that resembles an episode on the Biography channel.

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Mar 20, 2013 Sara rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book of short stories, both fictional and biographical, requires a special kind of rating for its individual story development and the composite. If you are looking for vibrance and lots of show, these stories will likely leave you wanting more. If at a glance you were to review each piece on its own, you'd find yourself wondering where the stories are really going. But, as each story (unrelated but much the same in themes of disappointment, dissatisfaction, and reluctance) unfolds, you see...more

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Mar 15, 2013 RJ rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: canada-fiction, kobo, literature

It's hard to rate Munro only 3 out of 5. I had already read two of her collections, Friendship, Love.. and Runaway which were both excellent. Maybe I felt a drop off in quality here, although there are powerful moments all over the place. "Amundsen" for one stuck with me, the teacher going to Northern Ontario where she drifts into a tentative relationship with her taciturn superior. Other stories drifted somewhat vaguely, didn't quite capture me. I'm not quite the target audience necessarily so...more

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Feb 22, 2013 David Williams rated it 5 of 5 stars

Canadian writer Alice Munro is the undisputed queen of the short story format and this collection, which the author (approaching 82) hints may be her last, may also be her best.

The stories are all set in familiar Munro territory around Lake Huron and all of them revolve around small incidents in generally modest, some would say ordinary, lives. That is not their limitation but their strength. There are no extra trappings to distract from the sensibilities of the (generally female) central charac...more

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Feb 10, 2013 Andy Miller rated it 4 of 5 stars

Most of the short stories in this collection are a narrator's remininsces of an event in the past; many,but not all, are based or inspired on Munro's life of growing up in rural Canada. Munro does an excellent job in those, balancing a fond nostalgia of simpler times with acknowledgment of the effect of hypocritical moral codes and small town conformity.

"To Reach Japan" may have been my favorite, the narrator recalling being limited by gender bias and conformity as a young mother and her tempora...more

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Feb 01, 2013 Marcos rated it 5 of 5 stars

I usually finish reading texts for pleasure within a week or so, but life as a teacher often gets in the way of pleasure reading. My favorite writers are McCullers, Bolano, Morrison, Ondjaante, Wharton, and Alice Munro; the mistress of short-stories, and perhaps our greatest living writer. No kidding. Each time I read a story written by this fearless writer, I feel a sense of calm and urgency at the same time- begging me to read quickly, yet slowly savor her language and clear prose; exposition...more I usually finish reading texts for pleasure within a week or so, but life as a teacher often gets in the way of pleasure reading. My favorite writers are McCullers, Bolano, Morrison, Ondjaante, Wharton, and Alice Munro; the mistress of short-stories, and perhaps our greatest living writer. No kidding. Each time I read a story written by this fearless writer, I feel a sense of calm and urgency at the same time- begging me to read quickly, yet slowly savor her language and clear prose; exposition that at once makes you wonder what will happen next, yet twisty things occur- betrayals, decisions, and feelings portrayed by you and me tend to happen.

“Dear Life” is a masterpiece. Though it took me a while to finish, the perseverance paid off. “Amundsen” is a cruel story of a teacher who allows her headmaster to seduce her, only to discard her at a train station; “Haven” a passive doctor’s wife act of rebellion against her passive aggressive husband of inviting his estranged musician sister over for dessert, only to have her die within a few days is a stony marvel of cruelty and compassion; “Pride” is about a man who falls for a local woman, builds up a life together in her head then rejects her as she declares her affection for him- and “Train” is the same situation, a soldier who impulsively moves in with a spinster, rejects his own family duties on the way home from War, only to leave after she tells him a devastating secret; and “Gravel” is about a young girl, desperate to get her mother’s attention from a horrible suitor ends up drowning herself and her pet dog at a canal on a winter day. Also “Dolly” is about an elderly couple’s discovery that the muse of her poet husband is still alive, and resentment and aggression ensue. I could go on and on about the plot of these stories; each brimming with suspense, heartache, and open ends.

I couldn’t help but feel that this collection is reminiscent that of Edith Wharton’s stories, particularly right now I am re-reading “The Age of Innocence” for my honors English class that I am teaching: Of heartache, regret, and people’s inability to “go with the flow” always is a haunting and sad afterthought and how it can affect life’s decisions for happiness.
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Jan 26, 2013 David Hallman rated it 5 of 5 stars

Alice Munro’s Asceticism

I’ve just finished reading Alice Munro’s new collection of short stories “Dear Life” and am, once again, in awe of her prodigious skills in the short story genre.

Already in writing this first sentence of my review/reflection, I inadvertently betray how much I have to learn from Munro. It’s unlikely that she would use an adjective like “prodigious,” at least not in one of her compellingly spare stories. Munro writes with a stylistic asceticism that eschews almost all adorn...more

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Dec 18, 2012 Jim Coughenour rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Munro, I read somewhere, is frequently compared to Chekhov – and for the set of stories in Dear Life the comparison makes sense. Many of these stories are set in rural Ontario, sometime around World War II. Each displays Munro's careful concentration on small lives, small events in the lives of her characters. I enjoy her writing; I drop effortlessly into each story and am always touched by the sadness at its core. But they don't blow me away the way the short fiction of Gina Berriault does – a...more

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Dec 13, 2012 Everyday eBook rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Everyday by: Courtney Allison

In the final, somewhat autobiographical story in Alice Munro’s new collection, Dear Life, the author writes about the novels she read growing up. One was The Magic Mountain, which she describes as “containing a great argument between what on one side seemed to be a genial and progressive notion of life and, on the other, a dark and somehow thrilling despair.”

The same could be said for almost any Munro story. Her stories somehow exist on two sides of a road: on one side, there’s light and beauty...more In the final, somewhat autobiographical story in Alice Munro’s new collection, Dear Life, the author writes about the novels she read growing up. One was The Magic Mountain, which she describes as “containing a great argument between what on one side seemed to be a genial and progressive notion of life and, on the other, a dark and somehow thrilling despair.”

The same could be said for almost any Munro story. Her stories somehow exist on two sides of a road: on one side, there’s light and beauty in simple things; and on the other, darkness is waiting for you just around the bend. They are deceptively simple, yet contain so much in each line. I’ve never read a story of Munro’s that didn’t audibly catch my breath – whether it was at something I didn’t see coming (always, in her stories) or a particularly beautiful turn of phrase.

Munro’s stories often unfold in the small towns of her native Ontario and are full of subtle, yet stunning revelations. Readers are often being told of something that happened long ago, from the vantage point of the present. But memories are often faulty, or unreliable. They don’t even have the benefit of hindsight as characters struggle still with some knowledge or unwanted discovery. We discover things as the narrator does, and it’s often a shock – whether a decades-long deception by a lover, a betrayal of the mind, or a grown woman trying to come to terms with the childhood death of a sibling (and her possible culpability in it). One woman still feels the heartache after a chance encounter with a former lover who had abandoned her decades earlier: “For me, it was the same as when I left Amundsen, the train dragging me still dazed and full of disbelief.

“Nothing changes really about love.”

Things have a way of coming into sharp focus when you least expect it and Munro delivers most twists with an unexpected, quiet force. The big reveals are usually halfway down a paragraph, or the final word in a sentence, so you barely see it coming. Things will seemingly be going one way and then suddenly veer in another, more dangerous direction. Small abandonments build to catastrophe. While the characters are built solidly, they don’t feel safe.

The final four stories, which are autobiographical, are quite bleak – a house servant’s death, a child’s mad fantasy of killing her little sister – but it’s all familiar terrain. Children aren’t safe, and neither is anyone else, for that matter, from the cold harshness of life and other people. Some are capable of thoughtlessly inflicting hurt, as with the character who retracts a proposal of marriage without warning. The stories often sit on a fence somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, as people (and readers, too) realize things they’d rather not know. Though it’s never easy in a Munro story, it’s not all darkness. For every difficulty or misstep, there is almost always a strong shard of humanity or light, or some unexpected mercy.

Munro’s talent leaps off the pages and will leave any reader satisfied (or, as satisfied as you can be while longing for more from this beautiful writer).

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Nov 15, 2012 Bonnie Brody rated it 5 of 5 stars

Fans of Alice Munro will be very happy with her new collection of short stories. Those that are new to her writing would be better served by starting out with one of her earlier books as these stories are not all that typical of her writing and there is an autobiographical section in the back of the book.

Ms. Munro has published twelve collections of short stories and one novel. She is a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Booker Award and the Lannan Literary Award. Her books ha...more Fans of Alice Munro will be very happy with her new collection of short stories. Those that are new to her writing would be better served by starting out with one of her earlier books as these stories are not all that typical of her writing and there is an autobiographical section in the back of the book.

Ms. Munro has published twelve collections of short stories and one novel. She is a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Booker Award and the Lannan Literary Award. Her books have been translated into thirteen languages.

In the autobiographical section, there are tender remembrances of her past and her time with her familiy. 'Dear Life', the title story is about her growing up. Her father started a business raising foxes and minks for their pelts. Eventually the business failed and her father went to work in a forgery. Her mother developed Parkinson's Disease when she was in her forties. The family did not realize that it was progressive and incurable. In 'The Eye', she writes about Sadie who helps out in their house. Alice and she develop a close bond. Sadie gets run over by a car on the way back from a dance when she was not yet twenty years old. This story explores the quality of their relationship.

One of the more powerful stories in the collection is 'Amundsen'. A teacher in a rural sanitarium for children with tuberculosis becomes engaged to a doctor who works there. Things don't progress as she hoped they would. 'Leaving Maverly' was my favorite story. Each night, a police officer drives a young woman of a very fundamentalist religious denomination home. One night she skips town. His own wife is very ill with serious heart disease and he ends up taking her to Toronto for care. The story is about hope turning to loss with no way of finding your way back. 'In Sight of The Lake' is about a woman looking fora doctor because of her memory loss. She finds that the world is a different place than she thought it was.

Late in the book, Ms. Munro states that "We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do - we do it all the time". This is a recurrent theme in her stories. We do things we hate, we end up hating ourselves but there is forgiveness eventually.

Many of the stories take place in earlier times. Few are contemporary. This is likely because Ms. Munro herself grew up in an earlier age than now.

She is the grande dame of short story writing and there is no one who can write a story as she can. We read, we get sucked in, and then we end up wondering, even at the end, what will happen next.(less)

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May 01, 2013 Andrea rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-stories

Oh, Alice Munro. Will you let me sit next to you on your Canadian porch and teach me to see the world through your poet eyes?

Alice Munro has long been one of my favorite authors. I love her storytelling, which feels like it should be read on a clear winter morning in close proximity to pine trees. She writes resolutely about what she knows, and often avoids modernity entirely. Something about her brings to mind my Midwestern upbringing. She tiptoes almost apologetically past catastrophic events...more

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Dec 23, 2012 Kristin Shafel Omiccioli rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: giveaway-wins, historical-fiction, interpersonal-relationships, romance, short-stories-and-essays

I won my copy of Dear Life by Alice Munro from the Goodreads Giveaway program. My personal rating is 3 stars only because "it's not you, it's me" with this book. The writing quality and depth of the stories gets 5 stars, easily.

While the book is beautifully written, Dear Life unfortunately didn't leave me breathless enough to love love love it. I admit I am somewhat apprehensive about short stories, and do not have a lot of experience reading them in general. I was probably too busy the week I r...more

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Mar 02, 2013 Ed rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2-and-a-half-stars, 2013, read-on-kindle, short-stories, tournament-of-books-2013

Having read her last two short story collections, Too Much Happiness and now here with Dear Life, I hate to admit that I feel a bit underwhelmed with the legendary Alice Munro. Sure there is quality writing and storytelling here, but there seemed to be a repetitive nature to it -- the quiet life-changing moment -- that I grew a bit fatigued with over the course of the 14 stories in 6 reading days. In my first experience with Munro and despite being someone who does not demand closure in his lite...more

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Dec 01, 2012 Jill rated it 5 of 5 stars

Every time I think that Alice Munro simply can’t get any better, her next short story collection comes out and she astounds me all over again.

This is a writer who possesses “the gift”…the gift to make each of her characters pulsate with life. There are only two kinds of short stories here: the extremely good ones and the excellent ones.

Most of these are set in Munro’s native home in Ontario and are filled with perceptive young women who are at the cusp of a life’s transition. One of the best, fo...more Every time I think that Alice Munro simply can’t get any better, her next short story collection comes out and she astounds me all over again.

This is a writer who possesses “the gift”…the gift to make each of her characters pulsate with life. There are only two kinds of short stories here: the extremely good ones and the excellent ones.

Most of these are set in Munro’s native home in Ontario and are filled with perceptive young women who are at the cusp of a life’s transition. One of the best, for my money, is Admundsen. A young teacher named Vivien is hired to teach children with tuberculosis in a residential home; while there, she catches the fancy of the head doctor, Dr. Fox. Although hints to his cold character and selfishness are given in abundance, Vivien believes that marriage is in the offering until the inevitable betrayal occurs.

Haven is another one I particularly liked. A growing girl is forced to stay with her aunt and uncle while her parents perform missionary work in Africa. Her aunt lives for her uncle; he, on the other hand, is self-contained and distant. Eventually, his irrational hatred for his musically-inclined estranged sister brings realizations to a head.

Or take this one: Dolly. An elderly man – aged 83 – and his 71 year old wife contemplate a double suicide to be “gone when the going is good.” Yet when a woman from his distant past appears unexpectedly, all perspectives start to shift. “I had forgotten how old we were, forgotten everything. Thinking there was all the time in the world to suffer and complain,” the wife reflects.

The stories start with younger characters and segue into the lives of older characters and then at the end, everything changes. Ms. Munro writes, “The final our works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, equally so in fact. I believe they are the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life.”

And what does the normally reticent Ms. Munro have to say about that life? “We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do – we do it all the time.” The reader is treated to insights on identities in the making, lives that become recreated or reinvigorated only later in life, and the growing into a sense of who we’ve been all along. Hopefully, Alice Munro – who is now an octogenarian – will have much to add to her own story and those of the wonderful characters that continue to live on.
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Jan 26, 2013 Veronica rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

I'm giving this four stars only because this isn't Alice Munro's best collection (The Moons Of Jupiter still holds that crown). But even not at her best, Alice Munro is streets ahead of any other living short story writer. I read a review in the NY Times that said that these stories are less psychologically complex than what I suppose we must now call her "middle period":

With the exception of four revealing semi-autobiographical pieces that close the volume, most of the stories here pivot around

...more I'm giving this four stars only because this isn't Alice Munro's best collection (The Moons Of Jupiter still holds that crown). But even not at her best, Alice Munro is streets ahead of any other living short story writer. I read a review in the NY Times that said that these stories are less psychologically complex than what I suppose we must now call her "middle period":

With the exception of four revealing semi-autobiographical pieces that close the volume, most of the stories here pivot around a melodramatic event, and many have ironic, O. Henry-esque conclusions that can feel overly stage-managed ... Ms. Munro, now 81, seems to have increasingly turned toward stories with more tightly plotted narratives, more closure and more Aesop-like morals

I felt this was true of the weakest story here (In Sight of the Lake), but some of the stories still have that depth and complexity of real life that is characteristic of her work (Leaving Maverley and Train especially). And others have the emotional impact of a pivotal event that characterises many of her stories too - To Reach Japan (the first story, and a stunner) and Gravel for example. As always, at the end of the stories you picture the characters somehow going on with their lives: they exist beyond the page.

The four final autobiographical fragments are quite different from her normal stories -- where those cover whole lifetimes, these recount just a few days or even hours in her childhood. Of course it's not quite true that these are her "first and last" things she has to say about her own life -- any Munro fan knows that the mother with Parkinson's and the father with the fox farm who appear so often in her stories, and the house not quite in the town but not out of it either, are based on her own memories.

Her short introduction to these pieces has a valedictory note -- as do the fictional stories,dealing with death, ageing, regret, dementia. People do bad things to each other -- betrayals, lies, abandonment -- but life goes on, and perhaps the overarching moral is in the much-quoted very last line of the eponymous last story: "We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do — we do it all the time."

I hope she isn't going to stop writing quite yet. But I seem to remember she said the same about The View from Castle Rock, and that didn't stop her. Even if she does, we still have the treasure of fourteen volumes of stories, all of which can stand re-reading (over and over in some cases).

Hmm, this review is much longer than I intended! You can read an interview with Munro here, in which she says:

For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel. Then I found that they were all I could do, and so I faced that.

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Jan 17, 2013 (Lonestarlibrarian) Keddy Ann Outlaw rated it 4 of 5 stars

The last four pieces in this book are not short stories but short reminiscences of the author's childhood and I think that was the draw for me. I liked her earlier short stories much better than those in this collection, though there are awesome moments in many of the stories where you are aware the writing is top notch. One of the short storiesshook me up with its visceral take on what it's like to have a memory disorder.

Because I have enjoyed Munro's stories for so many years, I was curious t...more

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Mar 17, 2013 Elaine rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013

Many years ago, when I was in college, Alice Munro came to campus to do what was called a Master's Tea, a talk to a very small audience with an opportunity for conversation and questions after. I was in a phase where I was going to a lot of talks, and even though I hadn't read a word she'd written, I signed up. I was somewhat disappointed when she proceeded to read a short story (no memories of which one), and then talk gently and encouragingly about the craft of writing short fiction. I was at...more Many years ago, when I was in college, Alice Munro came to campus to do what was called a Master's Tea, a talk to a very small audience with an opportunity for conversation and questions after. I was in a phase where I was going to a lot of talks, and even though I hadn't read a word she'd written, I signed up. I was somewhat disappointed when she proceeded to read a short story (no memories of which one), and then talk gently and encouragingly about the craft of writing short fiction. I was at an age when the novel was all, and short stories were the unsatisfying stuff of high school assignments given by teachers too burnt out or lazy to try to make us read whole books. Anyway, just another example of youth (and youthful opportunity) being wasted on the young! I would now give a lot for a time machine that allowed me to be part of an intimate conversation with Alice Munro about reading and writing.

Is there a better short-story writer writing today? I'm not sure, I can't think of one. At 82, Munro would seem to be at the height of her craft. She tells women's (and to a lesser extent men's) lives cleanly and deftly. Her settings in this book, usually a small town Canada of one or two generations ago, and her gentleness and clarity of tone all seem to invoke something vaguely old-fashioned. There's a limpid straightforwardness and lack of showy artifice that doesn't quite feel modern -- in the best way. It is then something of a shock when Munro treats her themes of love, and particularly, the ways we lose (or almost lose) love, with a frankness that is anything but old-ladyish. To Reach Japan, Corrie, Gravel, Amundsen...these stories will grip you and stay with you.

The NYT criticized Munro from being too plot driven in this volume -- these are stories where things happen, where endings can be revelatory (mocked as "O-Henry" like by the New York Times). I like that about these stories. My tastes may be more liberal than they were at 18 -- I do read and enjoy short stories now -- but I have never liked the enigmatic opaque kind of short story that leaves you wondering what you read and why it was written. These stories are mini-novels, they have setting, characters and plot, and I enjoyed immersing myself in them.

I see Munro is in frail health, according to the press, and I wonder if this may be her last collection. It would be sad - I felt that the autobiographical pieces at the end of the book were intriguing but unfinished (one reason I didn't give the book a 5) -- and it would be wonderful to hear more from her in this vein. But even the inclusion of those fragments has a valedictory feel, and I wonder if this isn't it. It will be a big loss for the literary world, but for those of us who came to appreciate the short story relatively late in life, at least there is a large body of her prior work to go back and savor

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