- Hardcover: 368 pages
- Publisher: Douglas Gibson Books; 1st Edition edition (Sep 19 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0771065264
- ISBN-13: 978-0771065262
- Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 15.7 x 3.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 703 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #159,454 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
The latest from the accomplished and much lauded Alice Munro is a family and personal memoir presented as short stories. Munro begins in rural Scotland searching out her family roots and then moves ever closer to the present time. She covers the lives of her ancestors in Scotland (much of which must have been fictionalized), the journey by sea to Canada, the lives of her grandparents, her parents, and ultimately her own life and her searches into the past. Munro's strength as a writer is her ability to provide insight into the psychological motivations of her characters (and relations, in this case). The long title story, about the sea crossing of her ancestors, is a marvel of concision with fascinating characters conjured from the past: Walter, the young writer; Andrew, the easily embarrassed young husband; Agnes, who bears a child at sea; young Mary with a baby on her hip; and old James, the crotchety, story-telling patriarch. The book opens and closes with visits to country cemeteries, in Scotland and Canada, the former on a dismal rainy day in a rural landscape that feels lonely and depopulated. These are exceedingly quiet stories, as befits their setting in rural locales--farms and farm towns--whose lack of prosperity slows the pace of change. --Mark Frutkin
Review
“Her full range of gifts is on display: indelible characters, deep insights about human behaviour and relationships, vibrant prose, and seductive, suspenseful storytelling.”
– Publishers Weekly
“The View From Castle Rock is meticulously crafted; elegant, stylish, a superb reading not only of life's vicissitudes but of the human need to connect past to present, to make sense of chaos and to find consolation in what can be salvaged from sorrow.”
– London Free Press
“Munro has, as usual, written a lovely book and is serenely well-honed in her craft.”
– Globe and Mail
“In The View from Castle Rock her full range of gifts is on display: indelible characters, deep insights about human behaviour and relationships, vibrant prose, and seductive, suspenseful storytelling. . . . Getting this close to the core of the girl who would become the master is a privilege and a pleasure not to be missed. And reliably as ever when the subject is human experience, Munro’s stories – whatever the proportions of fiction and fact – always bring us the truth.
— Sigrid Nunez, Publishers Weekly
“I found myself transported, enthralled, oblivious to time.”
— Pat Donnelly, Montreal Gazette
Praise for Runaway:
“Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America. . . . Read Munro! Read Munro!”
— Jonathan Franzen, New York Times Book Review
“When reading her work it is difficult to remember why the novel was ever invented.”
— The Times (U.K.)
– Publishers Weekly
“The View From Castle Rock is meticulously crafted; elegant, stylish, a superb reading not only of life's vicissitudes but of the human need to connect past to present, to make sense of chaos and to find consolation in what can be salvaged from sorrow.”
– London Free Press
“Munro has, as usual, written a lovely book and is serenely well-honed in her craft.”
– Globe and Mail
“In The View from Castle Rock her full range of gifts is on display: indelible characters, deep insights about human behaviour and relationships, vibrant prose, and seductive, suspenseful storytelling. . . . Getting this close to the core of the girl who would become the master is a privilege and a pleasure not to be missed. And reliably as ever when the subject is human experience, Munro’s stories – whatever the proportions of fiction and fact – always bring us the truth.
— Sigrid Nunez, Publishers Weekly
“I found myself transported, enthralled, oblivious to time.”
— Pat Donnelly, Montreal Gazette
Praise for Runaway:
“Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America. . . . Read Munro! Read Munro!”
— Jonathan Franzen, New York Times Book Review
“When reading her work it is difficult to remember why the novel was ever invented.”
— The Times (U.K.)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.4 out of 5 stars (9 customer reviews)
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Alice Munro tells great short stories, Jan 12 2008
By Armchair Interviews - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The View from Castle Rock (Vintage) (Paperback)
Alice Munro is a wonderful Canadian writer. She has won numerous awards for her work in Canada, the United States and in the United Kingdom. The View from Castle Rock is her eleventh book of short stories-and it is terrific.Castle Rock is a high rocky outcropping in Scotland, not too far north of the Hadrian Wall that divides England and Scotland. From that vantage point one of Munro's ancestors was said to have looked out and thought he saw America and inspired his young son to later emigrate to Ontario, Canada. Obviously, he didn't really see America, but the family story persisted. From this story and others told by family members, Munro has created a delightful cast of characters who live, work, and die on their piece of Huron County, Ontario.
While the book is a group of stories, they are attached to one another so that the book reads almost like a novel or memoir. Each connecting story adds a layer to the fictionalized family history that she is creating. While inspired by actual family members, the book is not a recitation of fact. She finds a name, a place, and a date of birth and/or death and creates a life.
Munro starts her book in Scotland with the story about the rock. Another story tells of the ocean journey that ends in Ontario. Another tells of the building of a farm. Another set of stories comes from letters written by the narrator's father. She tells of the life of a young girl going to school in a remote part of Ontario where she is considered an oddity because she likes to read. Munro's characters are full of life - sometimes pathos, sometimes humor, but always feeling as though they could be real people.
I really enjoyed reading Alice Munro again and would agree with her publicist, that this "is one of her most essential works."
Armchair Interviews agrees.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Where she was from, Nov 18 2010
By E. Kutinsky "ekutinsky" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The View from Castle Rock (Vintage) (Paperback)
Be warned getting into The View From Castle Rock - it's a stretch to call this a book of short stories. As a long time fan of Munro's work, I had an entirely different experience with this book as I had with my beloved copies of The Love Of A Good Woman or Hateship, Loveship, Courtship, Friendship, Marriage. Munro admits as much in her prologue here - expressing this is a strange fusion of autobiography and short story. Munro begins long long ago, with a view in Scotland of a mythical life in America. The title story here has a sort of fascination, but it's hardly the fascination of the title stories of Hateship of Love of a Good Woman - here, the fascination is Munro's ability to impute personalities on a wide variety of people whose lives and life philosophies are long dead, it's not on telling a compellingly moving "story." In that story, Munro's voice comes in like a quick wind saying save for some letters crossing the ocean, everything has been a product of her imagination. Moving forward in her timeline, Munro's voice becomes more and more the focus of what she wants to explore, and so she does. She tracks her ancestor's journey from Illinois to Canada as a strange exploration of one boy's lost sense of isolation. She explores her mother and father's career with a historian and sociologist's gaze. She moves forward with fascination to her own first kiss, and something lost in herself - the ability of those around her to sense her unease with getting married. She finishes with a trip back to a homeland long lost to her, but realizes her connection to the long dead is a connection to life now, which turns out to be a bit of a deconstruction of why she wrote this book as she did here. I found that point to bring together a great collection of ideas lost, the idea of holding on to less tangible ideas of feelings, justifications, outlooks, and interpretations. For Munro, the intangible is reflected in the world around her and it too changes with the landscape. In the great moments of The View From Castle Rock, you look for clues of what people have seen and interpreted in neutral landscapes with a fascination, with a lifetime of lost ideas continuing to float around in our world.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
beautiful and unusual family saga, Jun 1 2010
By reader - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The View from Castle Rock (Vintage) (Paperback)
This is a family saga, but unusually structured - instead of the characters being carried along by the sweep of history, Alice Munro presents fictionalized vignettes from her family tree in chronological order. Major events - births, deaths, marriages - set the backdrop and are casually alluded to in passing, historical events mentioned almost none at all. The focus is in illuminating interior spaces - hope, loss, resentment, struggle, defeat. The final story - the author's first brush with her own mortality - identifies the connection between the vignettes in the description of how Ontario's landscape was shaped by ancient glaciers moving over the earth. This movement formed a variety of unique, particular, but identifiable formations, separate from each other but connected in their origin by the moving ice, as individuals recognize each other through time.
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