Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories

This excellent collection came out in 2001 but is timeless in its scope. The characters have strange encounters which deepen them: a courtship between a middle-aged, geographically separated couple begins because of letters intercepted, steamed open, and replied to by teenagers; in "Floating Bridge" a woman cancer patient has an encounter with an adolescent boy who understands her better than anyone else; in "Comfort," a long marriage ends with Lou Gherig's Disease, cremation, and the realization of love. In another story unusable love is described after an occurrence on a golf course between playmates grown to adulthood; in "What is Remembered," a bush doctor flies down to a funeral and has a sexual encounter with the widow; the narrator in "Post and Beam" makes a bargain with herself to go on living after encountering her miserable, suicidal cousin; "Queenie" involves a woman left behind by a coldhearted man; the final story makes a match between the spouses of two Alzheimer's patients. Munro is a born phrase-maker. "Her teeth were crowded to the front of her mouth as if they were ready for an argument." "High heels, thin ankles, girdle so tight her nylons rasped." A smart aleck holds up the wall of a drugstore. "The house was full of callous desertion, of deceit." "...the well-mannered gentleman, his mind on other times..." In a shoe repair shop, "the emery stone on a tool's edge sang high like a mechanical insect and the sewing machine punched the leather in an earnest industrial rhythm. These are not examples of fine writing, they're observations from real life. And how wonderful are her endings! "Floating Bridge" concludes with the cancer patient thinking "What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given." Most of the stories are set in the past, from the 40s through the 60s. One story mentions John L. Lewis, the famous self-taught Welshman who headed the United Mine Workers for years and developed a penchant for flowery speech. Attacking President Truman, he began "It ill behooves one who has supped at Labor's table...." Munro would enjoy that. As the poet of the emotions, Munro has no equal. "The cries of the crowd came to me like big heartbeats, full of sorrows. Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation. This is what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be." And after the scattering of the ashes in "Comfort" the last line is, "A sickening shock at first, then amazement that you were still moving, lifted up on a stream of steely devotion--calm above the surface of your life, surviving, though the pain of the cold continued to wash into your body." They don't make stories any better than that.

I'm not normally a big fan of short stories, since many become simple ramblings and can come off as without much plot or character development. However, Alice Munro is a master short story teller and she certainly deserves all the literary prizes that she's been awarded during her writing career, including the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature. Her stories are tightly and masterfully constructed to entertain and challenge the places in our hearts that we often try to keep to ourselves.Using extremely skillful and varied literary techniques, Alice Munro shares with us the realities of ordinary lives and what it means to be human. Even though her settings are mostly centered on small town Canada, and over several decades, her characters are widely varied and depict the lives that surround the readers' own lives. Anyone can easily relate to Alice Munro's tales and enjoy her gift for storytellling, at its highest level.Typically, Ms. Munro's stories depict Everywoman and Everyman, especially the former. Many of Alice Munro's story lines taunt the reader to go down into potentially maudlin and darker places of the human heart, as the reader begins to empathize with the characters' life crises, successes and challenges. Many characters' travails and/or triumphs can sometimes bring the reader to tears, near to laughter and often relief. The stories' small town settings are fraught with the usual array of background characters and everyday life events. As the story lines march along, the conflicts among characters, or within the characters themselves, reshape their hopes and dreams. Typically, Ms. Munro suddenly and dramatically alters her characters' lives, when life decisions and situations threaten to crush the characters' spirits and rip apart their potentially happy and secure futures.However, as her stories prepare to conclude, Ms. Munro skillfully brings her main characters' courage into play, so that their altered lives can redeem their pasts, as they reach out to others, thus changing themselves and setting the tempo for a more mature, informed and hopeful future. One could not go wrong with a few hours spent within the life and times of Alice Munro's Everyman and Everywoman. She's a true master of the short story.For those who enjoy Alice Munro's stories, the novelists Barbara Kingsolver and Anne Tyler are also excellent authors whose characters' also meander along everyday paths. Their main characters' existence also amble along into the same fulfillment and redemption of ordinary lives that Ms. Munro wishes to depict..

When Alice Munro won the Nobel prize for literature this year I knew I'd have to give her a try. Although she may have written a novel or two, her real forte is the short story. At first I thought I'd get a broad compilation of her work but after researching a bit I realized I needed to read one of her collections based on a theme. I'm glad this is the book I first reached for.She tells a series of nine stories about relationships between men and women, married or not. In the first story, from which the book takes its name, a woman enters into a correspondence with another man - or at least she thinks she does; in actuality the young girl whom she takes care of and the girl's friend have been intercepting the letters and forging love letters in return. As a result of the letters, the protagonist leaves the house she is working in to live with the man she thought she had been corresponding with. Yeah; imagine that for a moment.Many of the men in the stories are hard bitten, small, mean, and abusive - either physically or emotionally. The women either make adjustments or break clean.One of my favorite literature courses in college was Southern Short Stories; if you've never read "Why I Live at the P.O." by Eudora Welty, stop what your are doing and read it now. Pacing and details are much different from novels. Short stories start in medias res (in the midst of things) whereas novels are "ab ovo" (from the egg). These are long form short stories so we don't start smack down in the middle of everything but you do you have to spend some effort to pull pieces together. I'm so used to the novel form, that it took some getting used to. But It was definitely worth it.I highly recommend Alice Munro - and this seems a great place to start.

I have never been a fan of short stories are used to enjoy short science-fiction stories many years ago but since then I have never found any short stories that I enjoyedI can’t remember why I bought this book as it was a few years ago because I was waiting a long time for the book which I was eagerly awaiting I ran out of booksThis was the best book of short stories I have ever read and indeed one of the best books I have ever read the last story was possibly the best short story I have ever read I will now become a regular Alice Munro reader

Big disappointment and waste of money. Boring and dull. Firstly my mistake not noticing this was a book of short stories. Didn't want that however I started the first two stories but they are so dull, boring and long winded in descriptions of no interest whatsoever....binned it

Best to say at the outset that I am not a Munro fan. Yes, she picks up and describes small details in a country community but in a way that fails to move me. I can appreciate her technique but in an essentially cerebral way. I can't identify with her characrers in any way and I get no emotional kick from her Writing. So this book is ok but not exciting. Try Penelope Lively if you want better value for money!

The author was recommended by a writer on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs as one of the authors to take with her on her deserted island ( collected works of Alice Munro) and it did not disappoint. Well worth checking out.

I really struggled through the first half-dozen stories and then gave up. Couldn't find anything really to engage with in any of the characters and each story left me with that awful "so what" feeling. I don't have enough life left to waste on stuff that doesn't grip me and pull me in, and this didn't.