Robert Knox's Blog - Posts Tagged "universal-themes"
Alice Munro's Universal Stories
Family Furnishings by Alice_Munro:
Alice Munro is a Nobel Prize winner (move over, Bob Dylan), but I'd only read her stories occasionally in The New Yorker. A year ago I was recovering from surgery and needed a long book. This collection of stories fit the bill. And if it were twice as long I might still be reading it. All her stories, or almost all of them, feature a young woman brought up somewhere in rural Canada, who knows she's different from the most of the people in her world, and won't be happy unless she tries to do something in a larger world. Characters run through Toronto a lot. Sometimes they go home again, with a baby, or a husband, or an attitude. But you can't go home again. Your parents have changed. Your father, a teacher when you were growing up is now selling vegetables, and is obsessed with a young woman who's 'handy' around the farm. Your mother is halfway to Alsheimer's. They're not what they used to be. Nothing is. Some of the stories begin well before World War II. A man who does not want to be a farmer like everybody else finds he has the knack for raising minks for the fur market and makes a life of it. But his wife turns to be the better marketer. When their daughter returns home, decades later, he's working in a factory instead. Where are all the animals, Dad? You used to be your own boss.... But things don't turn out the way you expect. Sometimes, the stories change up and begin with a young man. He's riding a train (Canada is all about trains) home to a small town after the war. He gets off the train early on a whim, discovers a decaying old farmstead that needs work, agrees to stay a few days to patch a roof, or fix something else for the woman who lives by herself. There's always something else to do, and in the end he never does make it home. A married couple -- she's naive and vulnerable, he's manipulative and difficult -- run a riding stable in the country, but the weather is bad, and the husband is picking fights with his business associates. Unhappy young wife conspires with a well-off older neighbor to run away to the city (Toronto), but she loses her nerve when she cannot imagine how she will manage alone when she gets off the bus and goes back to the controlling husband.
One way or another, nobody gets actually what they want, or not what they think they want. But they all learn something along the way, and so does the reader. This may seem a restricted canvas -- nobody here lives in New York or California or London or the Third World -- but readers will recognize themselves and the people they know in these characters, their situations, and their relationships with others. Munro's theme is universal. It's how we live with ourselves.
View all my reviews
Alice Munro is a Nobel Prize winner (move over, Bob Dylan), but I'd only read her stories occasionally in The New Yorker. A year ago I was recovering from surgery and needed a long book. This collection of stories fit the bill. And if it were twice as long I might still be reading it. All her stories, or almost all of them, feature a young woman brought up somewhere in rural Canada, who knows she's different from the most of the people in her world, and won't be happy unless she tries to do something in a larger world. Characters run through Toronto a lot. Sometimes they go home again, with a baby, or a husband, or an attitude. But you can't go home again. Your parents have changed. Your father, a teacher when you were growing up is now selling vegetables, and is obsessed with a young woman who's 'handy' around the farm. Your mother is halfway to Alsheimer's. They're not what they used to be. Nothing is. Some of the stories begin well before World War II. A man who does not want to be a farmer like everybody else finds he has the knack for raising minks for the fur market and makes a life of it. But his wife turns to be the better marketer. When their daughter returns home, decades later, he's working in a factory instead. Where are all the animals, Dad? You used to be your own boss.... But things don't turn out the way you expect. Sometimes, the stories change up and begin with a young man. He's riding a train (Canada is all about trains) home to a small town after the war. He gets off the train early on a whim, discovers a decaying old farmstead that needs work, agrees to stay a few days to patch a roof, or fix something else for the woman who lives by herself. There's always something else to do, and in the end he never does make it home. A married couple -- she's naive and vulnerable, he's manipulative and difficult -- run a riding stable in the country, but the weather is bad, and the husband is picking fights with his business associates. Unhappy young wife conspires with a well-off older neighbor to run away to the city (Toronto), but she loses her nerve when she cannot imagine how she will manage alone when she gets off the bus and goes back to the controlling husband.
One way or another, nobody gets actually what they want, or not what they think they want. But they all learn something along the way, and so does the reader. This may seem a restricted canvas -- nobody here lives in New York or California or London or the Third World -- but readers will recognize themselves and the people they know in these characters, their situations, and their relationships with others. Munro's theme is universal. It's how we live with ourselves.
View all my reviews
