Prizes and Awards:
Giller
Prize Shortlist 2004
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Product Details
|
Product Description
From Amazon
Alice Munro has been accused of telling the same story over and over, and to a certain extent the characterization is true. Her subject matter is inevitably the vagaries of love between middle-aged people in some rural Canadian setting, trapped there by the combination of their desires and weaknesses. Or, if not love, then at least the mysteries of relationships as characters struggle to understand each other and themselves. But this thematic single-mindedness can hardly be considered a criticism considering Munro tells stories better than anybody else and with a level of precision matched by few. It would be like criticizing Shakespeare for writing about politics.
Munro's latest collection of stories, Runaway, is no exception. The stories take place throughout Canada--northern Ontario, the Prairies, the West Coast, Stratford--and feature women and men drifting in and out of each other's orbits, pulled by forces they don't understand. In "Runaway," a woman considers leaving her husband with the help of a neighbour, but the husband has other plans. In "Chance," a woman leaves her life behind in a quest for a man she met on a train crossing the country. Their intertwined lives play out through two more stories, "Soon" and "Silence," but the path they follow is as unpredictable to the reader as it is to them. In "Trespasses," a small town's women dream of escaping their lives only to find themselves in lives they never imagined.
What really marks the stories is Munro's sense of mood. There's a sense of hidden menace or even violence everywhere in Runaway. It occasionally erupts, but always in surprising and unexpected ways, and with unintended consequences. Munro may be an old-fashioned storyteller, but she understands chaos theory well enough. The same story? Sure. But it's a damn good one. --Peter Darbyshire
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Nothing is new in Munro's latest collection, which is to say that the author continues to perfect her virtuosic formula in these eight short stories, several of which previously appeared in the New Yorker. While her style typifies the traditionally realistic, often domestic genre of that magazine, Munro's stories are also global, bighearted and warm. In the title story, a housekeeper tries to leave her emotionally abusive husband, entangling her employer in the process. Three interconnected stories—"Chance," "Soon" and "Silence"—follow a schoolteacher as she falls for an older man, returns as a young mother to visit her ailing parents on their farm and much later tries to "rescue" her daughter from a religious cult. In "Tricks," a lonely nurse on a day trip encounters a man from Montenegro and vows to return to his clock shop one year later to resume their affair. In deliberate prose, Munro captures their fleeting moment of passion on a train platform: "This talk felt more and more like an agreed-upon subterfuge, like a conventional screen for what was becoming more inevitable all the time, more necessary, between them." Munro's characters are hopeful and proud as they face both the betrayals and gestures of kindness that animate their relationships. One never knows quite where a Munro story will end, only that it will leave an incandescent trail of psychological insight.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Runaway Hit,
This review is from: Runaway (Hardcover)
You either love story collections or you hate them. So it goes with the writing of author Alice Munro. She has found her niche and sticks to it. She has themes and topics that are present in most of her books. You either like it or you don't. I happen to think her writing is fantastic just the way it is. I would be distraught if I opened a Munro book and found her trying to be someone she is not. I know what I can count on her to produce, and that's why I love her story collections. She is a highly dependable and entertaining writer. RUNAWAY is written in the same style as Munro's previous efforts and will be a welcome delight to those already familiar with such titles as HATESHIP, FRIENDSHIP, COURTSHIP, LOVESHIP, MARRIAGE and THE LOVE OF A GOOD WOMAN. There will also be strong appeal to those familiar with A COMPLICATED KINDNESS by Miriam Toews, THE CHILDREN'S CORNER by Jackson Tippet McCrae, and MY FRACTURED LIFE by Rikki Lee Travotla.
5.0 out of 5 stars
I love Canada, too,
This review is from: Runaway (Hardcover)
"Chance" is the first of a trilogy for the character Juliet, who takes a chance on the surviving chap (Eric) that she has met previously on the train. Look at the ironic shades of contradictory feeling that Munro quickly achieves upon their reunion: "He advances on her and she feels herself ransacked from top to bottom, flooded with relief, assaulted by happiness. How astonishing this is. How close to dismay." The only other collection of short stories that comes close to this (and it actually surpasses Runaway, is the collection by Jackson T. McCrae titled The Children's Corner, which is a rich and complex yet very satisfying foray into so many dimensions that it's impossible to go into all of them here. But the Munro is really great also and should be read. In the second story of the trilogy, where Juliet gains a daughter and misplaces Eric, Munro fleetingly appears to be channeling Flannery O'Connor, a writer she resembles not all that much. I mean, they both make effective fictional use of the halt and the lame, but Munro is untroubled by O'Connor's abiding obsession with the Holy Trinity.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sorry, I have not read the book...,
By
This review is from: Runaway (Hardcover)
... but I'm wondering why, in the previous posting, Randy States wrote: "Munro is a Canadian, and one might suspect she would be somewhat limited in her material." Why would she be "somewhat limited" by being Canadian? Unless I'm not reading this right, this appears to me like a very condescending statement. I'm glad Ms Munro's writing proved him wrong, in this case, at least...
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Want to see more reviews on this item?
|
Most recent customer reviews |
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
