Dear Life in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

Jan 12, 2013 Jeff Scott rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, short-stories

Munro’s stories have a way of burrowing down into your soul. Underneath all of our experience lays a small child trying to understand the world. The journey to adulthood destroys many childhood beliefs becoming basic assumptions. Munro, in a way, seems to have never grown up. She is able to articulate the deepest emotion not by describing it, but making the reader feel it. There is a commonality to all of her characters, people that we have been and those that we are afraid to become. Her abilit Munro’s stories have a way of burrowing down into your soul. Underneath all of our experience lays a small child trying to understand the world. The journey to adulthood destroys many childhood beliefs becoming basic assumptions. Munro, in a way, seems to have never grown up. She is able to articulate the deepest emotion not by describing it, but making the reader feel it. There is a commonality to all of her characters, people that we have been and those that we are afraid to become. Her ability to create this emotion is the real power of her stories. She can take an ordinary situation, most of which take place in rural Canadian towns, and bring a sobering reality that any reader can connect with. It’s certainly an experience I have difficulty to fully express.

These stories are littered with wonderful epiphanies. Small moments emphasize the larger problem unwritten. In To Japan, the party where everyone was not secure in their place creates this freeing effect. It’s as if anything can happen at this party, but also in life. It’s a sharp contrast to Greta’s solid, but boring husband and career. Likewise, when Katy is trapped between the train cars. It’s much like how Greta is trapped. She doesn’t realize she is trapped or that she needs someone to rescue her until that person appears. Amundsen uses the cold environment with the cold treatment of tuberculosis kids and the main characters treatment. These little touches and character epiphanies make magic from mostly small rural post-war Canadian towns. Some stories show joy and escape. Other stories show a retrospective from death’s door without hitting you over the head with sentimentality. The last four stories are autobiographical. In these, Munro is able to demonstrate how she can take the ordinary and make them transcend. Looking into one of her stories looks into ourselves.

Favorite Parts
She thought that when she went with Peter to an engineer’s party, the atmosphere was pleasant though the talk was boring. That was because everybody had their importance fixed and settled at least for the time being. Here nobody was safe. Judgment might be passed behind backs, even on the known and published. An air of cleverness or nerves obtained, no matter who you were. P10

"It was just that whatever happened in places they didn't know or to people they didn't know or in times they didn't know had to be discounted. It got in their way and under their skin. They turned off the radio news every chance they got and tried to get music." p. 28

"There was a quantity of things that men hated or had no use for, as they said. And that was exactly right. They had not use for it, so they hated it. Maybe it was the same way I felt about algebra--I doubted very much that I would ever find any use for it. But I didn't go so far as to want it wiped off the face of the earth for that reason." p. 85

"People with interests. You might sometimes say talent. The sort of talent that had been noticed once, made some kind of living once, though not enough to hang on to all through life." p. 136

"...it was the music itself and her devotion to it. Devotion to anything, if you were female, could make you ridiculous." p. 85

Still, she was gone. In a not entirely unusual or unhopeful way, she was gone. Absurdly, he felt offended. As if she could have shown some inkling, at least, that there was another part of her life. P 99

And I thought then, just living long enough wipes out the problems. Puts you in a select club. No matter what your disabilities may have been, just living till now wipes them out, to a good measure. Everybody’s face will have suffered, never just yours. P. 158

“Yet for a long time when I did think of her, I never questioned what I believed had been shown to me. Long, long afterwards, when I was not at all interested in any unnatural display, I still had it in my mind that such a thing had happened. I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in face remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn’t believe it anymore. P. 308

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Aug 22, 2014 Donna rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Short stories so well done that you wish each was part of a longer work. I wanted to know either what the background of a character was or what happened after a story ended. Really good.

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