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Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is, of course, no exception. It is a fairly conservative collection of nine stories, none of which move far beyond Munro's favored settings: the tiny towns and burgeoning cities of southern Ontario and British Columbia. There are glimpses of youth here--in the title story, an epistolary prank by two teenage girls leads to a one-sided cross country elopement and, seemingly, a happy marriage, and in "Nettles," disrupted childhood affection fleetingly returns through a chance meeting--but most of these pieces are stories of aging women and men, confronting the twin travails of death and late love. As is always the case with Munro, their plots are too elegantly elaborate to summarize, and their unsentimental power is a given; baroque praise would be futile. Read these stories--it is the only way to really understand the miracles that Munro so regularly performs. --Jack Illingworth --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nine stories, most displaying the depth of a novel,
This review is from: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories (Hardcover)
Alice Munro is the eminent Canadian award winning author of international fame. It is remarkable to find that Alice Munro is the only living author with a full-time professional career spent in writing short fiction. Her standards and her talent are quite breathtaking. She pours into each of her short stories the feeling of various Canadian regions and their characters, while offering appurtenance to the lives of her readers around the world. This is definitely not provincial writing, but worldly. In addition, she delivers the depth of a novel into many of her short works. Her new collection contains seven stories of roughly the same length,each around thirty pages,with two novellas of around 50 pages each serving as bookends. They are a treat. First off, Marriage, takes place in a small town when trains still joined communities and people wrote letters. It starts with a woman, Johanna, who wants to ship furniture to Saskatchewan. For why? Everyone is curious. Half the town knows the stationmaster personally, and guesswork pours over coffee cups. By end of the story we learn Johanna could have benefited from the advice a Toronto judge recently gave a neophyte lawyer, Don't ever assume anything. Floating Bridge is next. An Ontario woman named Jinny examines the reasons for her petty anger, out of which she comes to terms with her cancer. In a story called Comfort, religious-right creationists edge their way into a school, and begin to make life uncomfortable for a science instructor teaching evolution. What is Remembered, set in Vancouver and Victoria concerns the chance meeting between a bush pilot-doctor and a woman who has just attended the funeral of her husband's friend who may have committed suicide. Here, while telling a slight story, Munro's writing brilliantly captures the unease between the two. Most of the stories appear to occur in the immediate past, when rental cars had no radios, and many people smoked and spoke of ciggie-boos. Yet, they deal with current high-profile issues such as euthanasia, and coping with old age deterioration. Five of these first appeared in the New Yorker. All are of
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
On the run fun.,
This review is from: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories (Hardcover)
What I love about short stories is that they are short. The writer, if good at his/her craft, has to get to it, now. No beating around the proverbial bush. And so it is with Alice Munro's "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories". Heck, the title is almost as long as several of the stories told within. This is the first Alice Munro collection that I have had the pleasure of reading. I'm hooked. Like home cooking. Her folksy dialogues and her excellent characterizations, ie; "Her teeth were crowded to the front of her mouth as if they were ready for an argument.", quickly endeared me to her writing style. Her simple words and discriptions made me feel warm and cozy. This is the kind of book that you can pack around with you. When it comes time for your lunch break at work, you can haul out the book and read a complete story. This is good stuff for someone who is forever on the run, like me! Cammy Diaz, lawyer.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Really enjoyed it,
By A Customer
This review is from: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories (Hardcover)
Alice Munro's short stories don't always impress me -- some seem too sedate, others too offbeat. However, this collection was very enjoyable. The lead story, which shares its title with the book, is wonderfully ironic and very well written, with characters that are drawn quickly and even sketchily, and yet they have such depth that if I were a critic, I would consider this Munro's masterpiece. All the stories in this collection refer to acts of love, but they are realistic. A woman has an affair that lasts a few hours but in her memories is maintained for a lifetime. Old childhood friends meet again as adults with the outcome far more and far less than the woman expected (the man, as usual, expected nothing). Women learn about themselves not just through romantic relationships but through the loving or non-loving family relationships they find. These are good stories, moving at the calm pace of reminiscences. Very well done. I was sorry when I finished the last story. I wanted more.
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