Customer Reviews

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories (Chivers Sound Library)

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Though some may call this a collection of short stories, when I finished reading each selection, I felt as though I had read a novel in beautiful miniature. Munro's characters are fully drawn; they grow and breathe as you read, and her plots are like quilts-pieced together in compositions that please as a whole and in parts. Love and its fickle, evanescent ways provide Munro's themes. A young woman watches her older sister handle her demanding husband along with other men; an aging man reflects on his love life while worrying about his wife's flirtations in a nursing home. In another writer's hands, these vignettes would fall short of the requirements for literature, but in Munro's experienced hands, these become seeds for enduring, indeed at times breathtaking, art.

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.

Why would I impulsively urge teenagers to resist [other books]and read Alice Munro? Because, I suspect, they'd be lucky to be set anything that good in post-modern high school.

Munro plunged early into her first marriage and child bearing. There was more to her than the "reproductive daze, swamped by maternal juices", to borrow her sarcasm. She was not drowning, but saving ammunition. She published her first book at 37 and is still there at 70.

Language, sex, love, marriage, fate and death - Munro knows all their rhymes. The title for her 11th book comes from an imagined girls' game, along the lines of he loves me-he loves me not.

The leading situations of the stories appear simple, repetitive even.

Johanna, a stolid home-help, is lured onto the cross-Canada train by faked courtship letters. A widow has to settle affairs after her husband's planned suicide. Suffering cancer, a wife savours a single kiss with a cocky youth. One aspiring writer discovers new slants on sin and death, and another rediscovers a now-married childhood sweetheart.

While one young mother realises the smallness of her married life, another discerns the subtle point of a one-day affair. An older woman puzzles over the fate of Queenie, her lost stepsister.

Routinely, Munro stories take 30-40 pages to get from A to B and back through A again. She is a competitive writer in the best sense, almost preferring death to a failure to engage. She is determined to create some reverberations that the dutiful reader cannot help but absorb.

In Munro, I will accommodate habits that are annoying in lesser writers. I don't mind hearing one more time how she found her vocation. No matter if a single story wants to wander wilfully over three generations. Not a problem if the final paragraph charts the future life course of a principal character.

The disposition of restraint that greatly enhances the stories is the author's crystalline, yet charitable, view of human nature. The time-honoured technique that brings her view to life is an unerring ability to recreate regional speech and manners.

Laid out before Munro's eye, a crudely aspiring Southern Ontario dinner table presents fine gradations of behaviour that would do an oriental court proud. "There had to be far too much food, and most of the conversation had to do with the food," recalls her first aspiring writer. "There was a feeling that conversation that passed beyond certain understood limits might be a disruption, a showing-off. My mother's understanding of the limits was not reliable, and she sometimes could not wait out the pauses or honor the aversion to follow-up."

Reduced to an "information machine", Johanna's station agent decides that she lacks country manners, indeed has no manners at all. Not for his eyes are the nuances at Milady's, where Johanna blurts out her marriage plans while choosing a travelling dress. This is how Munro closes off the scene: "She must have felt she owed this person something - that they'd been through the disaster of the green suit and the discovery of the brown dress together and that was a bond. Which was nonsense. The woman was in the business of selling clothes, and she'd succeeded in doing just that."

Stripping the characters of their clothes if not pretences, Munro has always been an incisive reporter of sexual love. Not for her the slightly pornographic thrum of a Vladimir Nabokov, or the sexual tristesse of a Raymond Carver. She is closer to a Frederick Barthelme in directly accessing the torpid shame, dangerous electricity or dizzy elation of sex.

Munro's second aspiring writer no longer believes that "the high enthusiasm of sex fused people's best selves". Still, she aches to seduce the chaste companion of her childhood. The next day, somewhat returned to her senses, she is given this beautiful line: "Lust that had given me shooting pains in the night was all chastened and trimmed back into a tidy pilot flame, attentive, wifely."

Through their sexual encounters, or other peak revelations, the characters may glimpse an intersection between what fate deals us, and what we can do about it. They might hear the precise few words on which a present life turns, or feel an intimation of an alternate life unturned. This one could have been a husband. That one is a weak love, which will fade. The other one, a strong love, is not usable in the circumstances.

And, as ever, there are the tart aphorisms. "After their short, happy marriage," Munro deadpans, "they were sent to separate cemeteries to lie beside their first, more troublesome, partners."

It would take a special kind of honey to clear this mordant line from the back of the throat.

The title piece (Johanna's story) and one or two others compete for best of the litter. Comparing this collection with Open Secrets (1994), or The Progress of Love (1986), Munro seems to be holding her form.

This writer is the antithesis of the tortured artist. Faithful to what she knows, averaging one book every three years, she seems to have achieved much of what was originally within her reach.

(From the Canberra Times,23 March 2002)

This excellent collection came out in 2001 but is timeless in its scope. The characters have strange encounters which deepen them: a courtship between a middle-aged, geographically separated couple begins because of letters intercepted, steamed open, and replied to by teenagers; in "Floating Bridge" a woman cancer patient has an encounter with an adolescent boy who understands her better than anyone else; in "Comfort," a long marriage ends with Lou Gherig's Disease, cremation, and the realization of love. In another story unusable love is described after an occurrence on a golf course between playmates grown to adulthood; in "What is Remembered," a bush doctor flies down to a funeral and has a sexual encounter with the widow; the narrator in "Post and Beam" makes a bargain with herself to go on living after encountering her miserable, suicidal cousin; "Queenie" involves a woman left behind by a coldhearted man; the final story makes a match between the spouses of two Alzheimer's patients.

Munro is a born phrase-maker. "Her teeth were crowded to the front of her mouth as if they were ready for an argument." "High heels, thin ankles, girdle so tight her nylons rasped." A smart aleck holds up the wall of a drugstore. "The house was full of callous desertion, of deceit." "...the well-mannered gentleman, his mind on other times..." In a shoe repair shop, "the emery stone on a tool's edge sang high like a mechanical insect and the sewing machine punched the leather in an earnest industrial rhythm. These are not examples of fine writing, they're observations from real life. And how wonderful are her endings! "Floating Bridge" concludes with the cancer patient thinking "What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given."

Most of the stories are set in the past, from the 40s through the 60s. One story mentions John L. Lewis, the famous self-taught Welshman who headed the United Mine Workers for years and developed a penchant for flowery speech. Attacking President Truman, he began "It ill behooves one who has supped at Labor's table...." Munro would enjoy that.

As the poet of the emotions, Munro has no equal. "The cries of the crowd came to me like big heartbeats, full of sorrows. Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation. This is what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be." And after the scattering of the ashes in "Comfort" the last line is, "A sickening shock at first, then amazement that you were still moving, lifted up on a stream of steely devotion--calm above the surface of your life, surviving, though the pain of the cold continued to wash into your body."

They don't make stories any better than that.

Alice Munro is my favorite living writer. Everyone else pales in comparison. My favorite stories in this collection were "Queenie" and "The Bear Came Over the Mountain." Although some other reviewers praised the title story, it was probably my least favorite in the book. (It seemed a little implausible.) I will say that her writing is an acquired taste--one cannot fully appreciate her stories on the first read. It takes me two or three times reading a story to catch all of her references, themes, and symbols. I like reading Munro because of her subtlety. Unlike some other writers of today (e.g. Toni Morrison) who beat you over the head with their heavy-handed symbolism and ideology, Munro focuses on telling a story in which emotions and meaning brew beneath the surface. I have read my favorite Munro story, "Royal Beatings," which is in her "Selected Stories" collection, 8 or 10 times and I never get tired of it. I think some readers are too quick to dismiss her stories as mundane because they revolve around everyday events in the lives of ordinary people. But that is what makes her writing so awe-inspiring--her ability to give profound meaning to the struggles of average characters who are all too human, who are very much like you or me.

Alice Munro astonishes me with her supple imagination, her direct and suprising language, the unconventional structure of many of her narratives, and always the brilliant, uncanny sense of emotional detail. As her career has progressed, her stories have become generally longer and also, I think, richer with subtle revelations of character and a sense of the complexity of human personality. No one aside from Chekhov satisfies me in the short story form as Munro so regularly does. Her writing shows a deep respect for the mystery of human motivation, and so often articulates a feeling that I've never seen put into words so effectively. She will sometimes change what I thought was at stake for a character and the result will be both inevitable and surprising. The impact of the endings of her stories comes over me with a goose flesh chill, not always immediately, but always eventually, and the effect resonates profoundly and intricately. My mind feels more alive and my imagination, more observant, after reading Alice Munro. She is one of the best practitioners of the short story, ever.

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
consistent high quality.

When you have Alice Munro's short stories, the first question that pops up is who needs a novel? This writer is able to concentrate the whole world in a couple of pages with beauty, sincerity and talent -- doing more than many writers attempt to do in hundreds of pages (and many fails) in only a couple. Her collection "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" is one of the best examples of fulfillment, because she manages to create stories that are complete and leave a lot of room for discussion and imagination -- just like the best texts are supposed to be.

The universe that she brings to her stories is populated with human beings dealing with critical situations. Someone who lost a beloved one, another person who is losing her mind, some else who's lost his/her dignity and so on. In other words, these are characters that are somehow living on the edge of a change.

And because they make them so believable, the reader can easily identify him/herself with those people. Moreover, the situation exploited in the plot -- that might read unreal in someone else's hands -- is very plausible. Munro is interested as much as in the inner life of her characters as in the outside life they lead. In this fashion, she is able to fully develop portrays of the human beings that sometimes may seem to want something but are heading to something else -- the eternal paradox of being.

In one of the best stories of this collection, "The Bear that Came Over the Mountain", we have a man dealing with his wife's mental health. But the writer uses this device as a starter, because what she is talking about in this story is faith. The faith we have in other people, the faith we assume we are the one in control. As the narrative progresses, the man is forced to deal with his woman `infidelity'. He himself was unfaithful to her a long time ago, and now it is the other way round. But since she is sick, the whole plot goes to another path beyond the trivial.

In the story that gives the title to be book, a woman is forced to leave her town and move to a place where she'll be the nanny of a girl who lost her mother, and whose father is sick. The woman is a strange element that will alter the life of the whole city -- and more specifically of the girl. Again, Munro is dealing with the situations we can't control. Tired of that woman, the girl will plot something to get rid of her, but, things never get the way we expect.

Her keen eye for detail and for the importance of ordinary events in our everyday lives -- that in the long run aren't that ordinary -- makes Munro a natural heiress to Chekhov's style and interests. Pick one of her collections, any one, and you'll be able to find a new world of humanism and technical quality. Do yourself this favor.

With many short story collections, the author gives us a quick, and sometimes fleeting glimpse of the inner workings of the stories' characters and lives. Perhaps because they are "short" stories, they somehow lack the emotional power of a fully developed novel. Not so with the stories in this collection. All nine stories in this collection are powerful and intense and give you the full picture. Munro has the ability to let you see somehow beyond the story because each story has tremendous depth. I thought these were terrific, and very memorable, stories.

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.