Customer Reviews

Carried Away: A Selection of Stories (Everyman's Library)

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4 star:		(1)
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I have come to the fiction of Alice Munro late. She has been producing extraordinary short stories set in Ontario, Cananda mostly for decades. And she captures a working-class world for me that speaks to my own roots. The stories are about people first and I expect place secondly, but her sense of the culture and social stratification are so accurate they make me remember and realize. Her sense of detail and dialogue are also accurate and winning. I give this big compendium 5 stars, and recommend her to all.

These stories were purportedly selected by Alice Munro herself. Well, I guess Alice needs to make a living, too, as well as writing masterpiece after masterpiece. However, every story in the selection draws meaning and resonance from its original context in the suite of stories from which it was extracted. If you've never read Munro, I'd suggest getting the early collection Moons of Jupiter. If you're not blown away by that book, you wouldn't be "carried away" by the Everyman's Library selection either. On the other hand, if you are astonished by the emotional subtlety of the Moons, then you'll want to buy and read the other ten story-books as well!

Using spare sentences and stark settings, Alice Munro covers in one short story a novel's worth of human experience. Each word is pregnant with nuance and meaning, as if she spent all of her time paring down her work until only the most esstential and core words remained. Even though the themes of her stories are permutations, read each story one at a time, appreciating it like the gem that it is. I will definitely read more of her work.

Alice Munro is one of the foremost writers of our time, but she is not well-known in the US, probably because she writes primarily short stories, a genre not particularly well sold here. But if one only gives her a chance, they will find her short stories are of such depth and detail and emotion and pain and regret and every other part of humanity, that they are just as satisfying as the best novels we could read.

Carried Away is a collection of her best stories up to 2004's Runaway. For those who haven't read her, this is a great place to start. The selection starts with the best from her 1978 collection, Who Do You Think You Are?, and samples her best work throughout the 80's and 90's. Munro herself is from southwest Ontario, Canada, and most of her stories are set here. They are almost an anthropological study of the people there in their precise detail. In fact, Munro is often compared to Chekhov for that detail, the omniscient narrator she often employs, and the placing of moments of epiphany over plot in her hierarchy of literary priorities. She also likes to shift around in time, as well as perspectives, to give the reader a well-rounded view of the story. I especially like this Rashomon-type technique, as it allows the reader to come to the truth despite the subjectivity and biases of the individual characters.

All of the stories collected here are excellent, but the two that close the collection are my favorites. `Runaway' is about an unhappy woman who considers leaving her husband. In this story, all of Munro's techniques are on display to paint a heartbreaking portrait of a woman trying to come to terms with her husband and her life. There are the multiple POVs, the stark and detailed narrative, and the use of letters to reveal a truth. The collection ends with `The Bear Came Over the Mountain', a touching story of an elderly woman with dementia and her husband. In it, we learn to what lengths someone will go to maintain the dignity of those they love, while also caring for their own needs.

For anyone interested in fiction, Alice Munro is an author you must become acquainted with. Carried Away is a great place to start.

Alice Munroe's book of short stories, "Caried Away," further asserts her power as a "humanistic" writer. She takes the reader into the living rooms and kitchens of most ordinary people and draws out their characters one thought and one action at a time until the reader can see deeper than the characters themselves ever could. She writes with a sharp observation and wit and with a beating heart.

These are really just amazing--an all-star collection from arguably the best ever in this genre.
History will be very kind to her.
As serially awarded as Alice Munro is she is still massively underrecognized and underacknowledged.
You could do no better for yourself than to buy this collection for yourself or a friend for the Christmas/New Year.
This is uncannily great writing--every word is sculpted, wise and witty; sometimes a little wistful but that IS life.
I love her writing.

Munro is one of the best short story writers around and this volume has a lot of her best work.

To read an Alice Munro short story is to allow yourself to be totally transported to an elevated awareness of human nature and go "I know how that feels". The amazing thing about Munro is her ability to put into words (that are both precise and concise) emotions and demeanours that we are familiar with, but which we have not been able to articulate (at least for this reader).

Because of its compact nature, I find myself thrown headlong into a Munro story from the very first sentence and there's no letting go till the very last word. But the story doesn't just end there; it continues to resonate in your consciousness and you have to take a breather before you plunge into the next story.

This collection is a broad overview of a career that has spanned more than 40 years, and arranged chronologically. So it's interesting to see how she progressed from the viewpoint of a young girl in 'Royal Beatings' to that of an elderly couple in the last story 'The Bear Came Over the Mountain' (made into the movie 'Away from Her')from the 2001 collection 'Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage'.

In that titular story, a seemingly conventional schoolgirl prank of fake love letters lead to an unusually happy ending for the misguided couple, while the conspiratorial guilty parties fall apart. The story of a small bookshop owner with an unhappy past is interspersed with the story of an American traveller who is taken captive and then adopted by a tribe, which is overlaid by the bookshop owner's own relationship with a hippie couple in 'The Albanian Virgin'.

Each story is richly interwoven with layers, and there are moments of real tension and fear that the reader feels for the characters in stories like 'Carried Away' and 'Wilderness Station' when they are faced with malevolent situations that unfold as suddenly as any real life situation would. There is also much pathos in the description of the degeneration of a spouse in 'The Bear Came Over the Mountain' coupled with the startling realisation that there are other unanticipated issues when one checks into a convalescent home.

Alice Munro succeeds at her craft again and again because she never loses a writer's empathy for all her characters and all the failings that make them completely and wonderfully human.