by Cathryn_Conroy: This beautifully written and accomplished collection of 14 short stories by Alice Munro is truly extraordinary. Every story—every single one!—is excellent.
Some are touching. Some are surprising. Some are quite imaginative. Some are very true to life. And some are deeply sad.
My favorites (and it was really hard to choose!): • “Amundsen”: A young woman gets a job at the “San,” short for sanitarium where she teaches children of all ages who have tuberculosis. And then the strangest thing happens: She finds love in this most unlikely place. But will it last?
• “Haven”: After her parents go to Ghana for a year to teach, a young girl is sent to live with her aunt and uncle. Her parents’ home is a disorderly, confused mess. Her aunt and uncle’s home is a haven with meals served on time at the table and grace said before eating. She carefully watches the household and soon realizes the sacrifices her aunt makes to create this haven for her demanding and obstreperous uncle. One night, the aunt defies convention in a most ordinary, but also for her extraordinary, way and everything changes.
• “Train”: Jackson is returning to his Canadian home by train after serving in World War II, but for mysterious reasons he jumps off the train before he gets there. A kind older woman offers to feed him breakfast. He never leaves. Years later when he takes the woman, named Belle, to a hospital in Toronto for breast cancer surgery, we find out the secret he has been harboring all this time. This is a powerful and haunting story about erasing the past in an attempt to become someone new.
• “In Sight of the Lake”: This story starts out one way—at least from the reader’s perspective—and then suddenly it’s clear what is really happening. While this story is creative and a master class in writing, it’s sad. Very sad.
The last four stories in the collection are quite different from the others and are preceded with a note from the author saying, “They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last—and the closest—things I have to say about my own life.”
The stories are filled with wisdom and insight about the human condition and the myriad and typically subtle ways we try to reinvent our quotidian lives into something a bit more exciting, and sometimes all it takes is a chance encounter or a strange twist of fate.
