Customer Reviews

Lives of Girls and Women (Bloomsbury Classic)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Alice Munro is truly the master of the short story. "Lives of Girls and Women" deserves to be on everyone's list of must-read books. Munro is an exceptionally talented writer, one who can take ordinary situations and turn them into something wonderful. Here, she presents a traditional coming of age story, then spices it up with her own unique brand of dry, subtle wit and a host of zany characters. In "Lives," we follow Dell Jordan from childhood to young adulthood as she struggles with her identity in a small town in southern Ontario. Along the way, we meet many colorful characters, including Dell's Baptist boyfriend, her social outcast mother, a suicidal music teacher, and a lecherous friend of the family. "Lives" is more of a collection of short stories than a novel, but each story is like a puzzle piece. In the end, each piece fits together to create a massize jigsaw puzzle of Dell's life. I have read "Lives" three times, and it is one of my favorite books - addictive, humorous, and thoroughly enjoyable.

What an amazing book! This not merely a good book for middle-aged women, or good instruction for girls, or any such claptrap. To label Munro as good "women's lit" is demeaning to women and demeaning to "The Lives of Girls and Women." (Plus it makes men who enjoy reading her a bit funny.) It's a great book! In any category!

Munro is a master of characterization and narrative structure. Del's description of her mother, for example, reveals: (1) Del's feeling of discomfort at her own place within Jubilee's hierarchy and environment; Del wants to fit in, and her mother embodies the eccentric within her own self. (2) Del's mother's strengths, pulling herself from abject poverty, putting herself through school, starting her own business in conservative postwar rural Canada - this woman evokes our admiration, despite the disgust of our narrator. It's these multidimensional portraits that makes Munro so great - yes, a character (Del's mother) can earn our admiration, disgust, and pity all at once...

Then in the building of conflict, Munro ALWAYS surprises us. Every scene is fresh, new, interesting, every culmination of conflict resolves in ways we would never expect. Take the time when Del was being molested by her mother's boarder's boyfriend. One day she goes off with him in his car out to the country, and we're expecting some "Bastard Out of Carolina" child-raping exploitation and subsequent weepy victim hood. But Munro makes a left at the light, has the man simply masturbate in front of the child, who for her part is excited, charmed, and repelled by the sight and is grateful to be introduced to the mystery of the penis.

And lastly, Munro refuses to depict her women in the same, old tired way. Her women are not dragged around by the hand by handsome strangers, as they so often are in movies. Her women are not victims of rape, incest, or peer pressure, as in way too many contemporary novels. No, Munro's women are real. They have drive, ambition, and a deep desire to be seen as people.

Definitely one of my favorite books, ever.

I was forced to read this book during the final exams for my H.S.C. but actually found that it was very enjoyable. It is the touching story of a young girl growing up in Canada in the 40s, who yearns to be an artist, and her journey towards womanhood. The format of the story is unique and the characters are likeable and real enough to believe in. This is a well-told semi-autobiographical novel which stays in the memory long after it's has been read.

I couldn't possibly say all I want to say about how good this book is. I am Alice Munro's biggest fan and this is my favorite of her books. Many of her later stories are larger in scope, more ambitious in their reach, but this book is truly a gem. Get lost in Del's world. Munro creates a lush, astounding, painfully, gorgeously real world. Read this book and then read it again. And give it to every one of your friends.

One of the most insightful and remarkable short story writers living today, Alice Munro's stories are like events, rich, beautiful and knowing. "Lives of Girls" traces the life of one girl into womanhood, supplying a blueprint, in many ways, of how to write a short story. Munro is a master, and this work is one (of many moments) of her at her greatest.

I first read this book when I was 15, for an high school english class, and have returned to it many times since. Munro is a deceptively simple writer whose style is subtle, witty, and rings of truth. After many reads, I still find something new each time I pick Lives of Girls and Women up. Another Munro favorite: The Beggar Maid. Fantastic writing and use of the short story form.

This is the first book I've read by Alice Munro, and I've found it to be really impressive, and I'm definitely going to seek out other writing. She's undoubtedly good.

Munro's coming-of-age story resonates with a real sense of truth and has important things to say about the experience of women during the 40s. The main character is torn between her own passions and intelligence, and the guide of her likeable oddbod intellectual mother, and the conventional house-wife role that her best friend Naomi so vigorously adopts. It's an age-old predicament of most heroines - her inner sensibilites vs. what is commonly acceptable - but its wry observations and emotive language sets the novel apart. Munro's frank approach to sex is also refreshing.

The jacket describes LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN as Alice Munro's only novel. But this is misleading, since the book's seven chapters read more like a sequence of the short stories for which Munro is justly famous, and the whole seems more like an autobiographical memoir than a fictional narrative. The setting is the small town of Jubilee in Southern Ontario, not so different from Alice Munro's own birthplace of Wingham. Like Munro herself, the narrator, Del Jordan, is the daughter of a fox fur farmer, and is of a similar age, passing through adolescence in the 1940s. Each chapter focuses on a different year in Del's life, from fourth grade through high-school graduation. She is a normal girl from modest surroundings, and her experiences are by no means unique. Yet she has a mother who, for all her eccentricities, believes in ideas and education; it soon becomes clear that Del (like the author) is destined to break clear of the limitations of these surroundings and become a writer.

Munro's writing is straightforward and evocative, but it relies on small realizations rather than big events, so the book may seem dull at first. It began to take wing for me with the fourth chapter, "Age of Faith," describing Del as a young teenager becoming interested in religion. "Changes and Ceremonies," the next section, is about the school musical and what appears to be a budding romance between the producer and the school music teacher -- a touching story set off by the gentle sadness of its ending. In the final two chapters, "Lives of Girls and Women" and "Baptizing," romance is no longer something that Del observes from the outside, but a force that she must fit into her own view of herself, as she struggles with the changes in her body, confusing emotions, and the effect she has on men. One result of Munro casting the story as fiction is to enable her to treat Del's sexual discoveries much more frankly than she might have felt free to do in an autobiography. Temporarily derailed by love, Del's plans do not work out entirely as she had hoped, yet there is no doubt where she is heading in the end.

Just as Alice Munro has used her birthplace as a source of wisdom without allowing herself to be confined by it, so Del Jordan leaves home only to return in spirit. A touching epilogue shows her looking back at Jubilee, consciously altering its details for the sake of her fiction, yet poignantly aware of the life there that she cannot capture on the page. It is a surprisingly postmodern device for 1971, but it gives this charming hybrid a context that has one foot in art and the other in everyday reality.

Alice Munro is widely known as a short-story writer. However, in her career there supposedly be a novel: "Lives of Girls and Women", first published in 1971. In one of her rare interviews - to "The NY Times" in the 1980s - she says that to her view this book is more a series of interconnected stories than a novel per se. It is not because she says so, but anyone familiar of the structure of a regular novel is able to know that this is not really one of them.

There are elements that belong to the novel dynamics - the same narrator, the same group of characters and so on - but, then again, they could belong to short stories either. As a matter of fact, each of the `chapter' of "Lives of Girls and Women" ends in itself. In other words, each of them has a beginning, middle, and an end. However, it is not the vital to decided whether this book is a novel or a collection of short stories. Either one will not change how brilliant it is.

The second book published by Alice Munro, this is one of her best accomplished works as a whole. Her posterior collections have some of her best short stories ever - but as a whole they do not keep the same level. However in this one, none of the chapters is better or worse than the following one.

Throughout a 40-year career, Alice Munro has established herself as one of the most important writers currently working. Her stories deal with ordinary people, whose lives would not be supposedly interesting. But, in her pages, this lives become unforgettable.

In "Lives of Girls and Women" we follow the upbringing of a girl in rural Canada - this could be an autobiographical book, but it is not the point to discover it. We accompany Del Jordan since her childhood until her days as a young woman expecting to go to the university and chance the pattern in her family's life.

"Lives of Girls and Women" are, after all, a book about changing times. At some point, Del's mother notices that `there is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women'. More than thirty years after its first publishing, the book proves that those changes came to stay.

Alice Munro is a master. She will be remembered (and is already recognized) as one of the greatest writers of the century. This book is amazing. Every story stopped my heart. Every line spoke truth. Read it immediately.