Customer Reviews

Runaway

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Somebody around here nominated Munro for a Nobel prize and for the title of strongest writer in the English language. Tempted by so much praise from a trustworthy source, I tested/tasted the Runaway and I second the motion.
The title story itself is one of the best long short stories that I can remember. (But I would still like to know what happened to Flora...)
The story called 'Silence' is a very troubling horror story out of real life.
Munro writes about daily life and 'human' relations and neighborhood problems and life stories, including several versions of plausible horror, with a simplicity and precision that can only be achieved through hard work (or through lucky genius). She is entirely free of mannerisms and of cheap tricks (unlike other contemporary American writers that I am just having a big disagreement about.)
Outstanding.

If you have not read Alice Munro, how I envy you. You have so much pleasure ahead of you. She writes for us about wonder- the wonder of everyday life; the small things; the touching things; the things that make you say, yes, this is the human heart; all of these are her fictional world, much as they are our pasts, and our presents. This is a strong collection and an excellent place to get to know what she is about. After this, explore her backlist. My personal favorite besides this is an early collection called,The Moons of Jupiter, which is still in print in a nice paperbak format. I hope you enjoy discovering her as much as I have.

Munro is an absolutely gorgeous writer. I was discussing this book with some friends over dinner and we all realized that the more we talked, the more sadness we saw in the stories. The prose is so luminous and the characters are so real, it is easy to forget the quiet and unquiet desperation that their lives are describing.

Runaway seems to be a meditation on several themes. The obvious one is the idea of flight. Her characters flee in a multitude of ways-- successfully, unsuccessfully, with large rebellion and small. Small town life with all its constraints and beauty is explored through the context of young women trying to come to terms with its limitations.

This book would be suitable for anyone who is a lover of strong character-driven fiction (short or otherwise). If you read and appreciate writers like Marilynne Robinson, then this will likely be a book for you. It will be high on my list of books to be given as a gift this year.

In her last collection of short stories, Alice Munro investigates her typical emotional terrain: young girls defined and confined by Canadian small towns, marriages stripped bare of illusions of romance, women grappling with diminishing expectations of their lives. In few pages, Munro deftly reveals entire life spans in these eight stories, each revolving around an impulsive decision made that irrevocably alters the future.

In the title story, "Runaway," a young horse trainer contemplates leaving her volatile marriage with the dubious assistance of an older woman. As with many Munro's stories, Nature plays an ominous role as a wild force unable to be tamed. Here, animal sacrifice is all that will quell one husband's rage. Three subsequent stories tracks choices made at the various stages of a woman's life--girl, mother, and crone. In "Chance," a young girl, Juliet, believes in her intellectual powers, but with sorrowful clarity she predicts its loss as she waits for the man she will soon marry: "The thing that was your brightest treasure. You don't think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember." Fear, loneliness, and desire lead Juliet to the expected roles of wife and mother taming her individuality, waylaying and obscuring this "treasure." Only when her husband has died at sea and her daughter has severed communication after an escape to the wilderness, does Juliet regain her power by devoting her time to this unique gift.

In the final work, "Powers," a vivacious small town girl and her neighbor, a fortune teller, reconcile the last years of their lives with lost chances at love, petty jealousies and cruelties, and the fragility of memory that adjusts to make the burdens of wrongheaded choices easier to bear. When this story ends, the mind too has gone wild as both women hover between knowing and not knowing what has become of those they love. The subtlety of this discomfort highlights the foreboding quality of all of Munro's work: "But deep in that moment some instability is waiting that Nancy is determined to ignore." This, just before a woman is lead gently to death. Each of these stories shows Munro at her "Runaway" best.

It doesn't matter if you have heard of Alice Munro or not. This collection of short stories by one of the best short writers in the world bespeaks of sensitivity and a high mastery of the craft of writing.

The stories are about women and love in all of its forms. Deceit, trust, love, desire and regret. The protagonists in each story are well thought out individuals, not a false note in any of them. Alice Munro succeeds in telling a story without slipping into a basket of clich's, rather telling stories as they really do happen in real life without a twinge of regret for having done so. Her characters are introspective while very much being a part of the world they inhabit. They are strong, weak, they have faults, in essence, they are believable which is the highest compliment a writer can receive.

Anyone wishing to learn the craft of writing short stories would do well to start here.

Alice Munroe is widely lauded as one of the most brilliant modern short story writers. As a lover of short stories, I was expecting to really enjoy this collection. Certainly the stories are well-written and enjoyable to read. They are peopled largely with women, many of whom seem to exhibit a host of stereotypical feminine flaws (far too subservient or braggingly independent, ready to throw their lives away for randomly met men, etc). It isn't necessarily that the characters are not realistic; they seem real, but in such a way that I think I would despise or pity them if I met them out in the world. A few of the stories also employ thematic elements which struck a false note, at least with me (the main offenders - the mistaken identity of murdered adopted baby, a deaf-mute twin brother, sudden defection of a beloved child to a cult camp). That said, I did enjoy reading the stories, especially the title story (Runaway) and Passion. Worth reading, but I think I will reserve judgment concerning Monroe's status at the pinnacle of the craft.

Who will most enjoy Runaway?

1. Old hearts who need defibrillating back to a life of passion. If you want to feel again that rush of first love, the sinking of personal rejection, the stabbing realization you've missed out, been decieved, or made a mistake, jump in.

2. The recently or imminently divorced. What are you running from? What else will you lose in the bargain?

3. Tired of your humdrum life? Munro finds the bizarre, the magical, the extraordinary in middle-class or back-woods lives.

4. Mothers. The stories celebrate the intricate psychological and social lives of ordinary women. Most poignant is "Silence," a heart-wrenching mystery of a daughter's desertion of her mother.

5. If you enjoy strong fiction but don't have huge blocks of time to read. The stories are short but rich.

6.Aspiring writers of short fiction. Long established as a master of the craft, Munro is able to draw both scope and depth into each character, each setting, each situation immediately. She is both entertainer and prophet of the modern human condition.

In my opinion, the book falls short of 5 stars because of the unconvincing portayal of life in the early 20th century in the story, "Powers."

It doesn't take Alice Munro a lot of pages to tell a story, to build up feelings and believable characters. As a matter of fact, she can do that from sentence one - and move on with a story. What is mot fascinating in this writer body of work - and her latest "Runaway" is a terrific example - is that she can create a whole world and make it believable, using the amount of words that others would need in an introduction.

This world is inhabited by human beings dealing with human issues: love, lost, betrayal, fear, joy. Name a feeling, a sensation and you will find it in her stories. As Jonathan Franzen once said praise doesn't make justice to her, the best thing to do is read her books to understand why Munro is the best heiress to Chekov's style and stories.

In "Runaway" there is a sequence of three stories with the same main character. We start following the life of this woman when she is still in her late teens until when we are able to see her evolution as a human being, a daughter, a wife, a mother. This so called evolution involves many discoveries and deceptions. Since Munro is interested in the intimacy of her characters, what her reader gets is a deep look in the interior of this character throughout the years - and how her opinions and convictions change. Everything is mutable - it only depends on the moment.

The stories are always populated by women - some are strong, others are not. But they are always very real, very believable. We meet the girl who thinks she may be adopted, the young woman who meets a man after a play, another woman whose marriage is not happy and she wants to run away, and so on. But what would be banal in the hands of a less gifted writer is complex and interesting in Munro's.

Her stories threaten to burst out in life, to leave the pages of the book and create flesh and bones in the real world. But it seems she to work the other way round. Real world is the inspiration to her stories. And this is the best we can expect from a writer, translating real world in art.

I listened to the fine audio version of this and recommend it highly. Munro has the ability to take plots which if described mechanically, as one reviewer did, can sound formulaic (one could say the same of Shakespeare) but never read that way. Sometimes we want to know more, as her characters do, but Munro recognizes the falsity in that. A less talented writer would have made Juliet's story into a tragic melodrama but instead she gives us a haunting portrayal of the consequences of Juliet's character and her choices. Great fiction doesn't always give us what we think we want, but instead helps us understand more fully the challenges of living. She is as deserving of a Nobel prize as any living writer in english. The first story, the title story, was in some ways the weakest. It is pretty good, but if you are a little uncertain after reading it, keep going.

One of the reviewers seems to think that Munro is southern, which, of course, she is not.

Canadian Alice Munro's newest collection of short stories, Runaway, has just been issued in Vintage Contemporaries paperback edition.

For Munro fans it will be no surprise that theses stories are populated with unique, fully rounded characters whose stories are at once highly individual and broad ranging. The plots are grounded in the same human emotions found in most of literature, but each one shows a different take on those emotions, and the events and outcomes that surround them.

In one series of stories a woman named Juliet grows from a young girl falling in love to an older woman making her way on her own. At the end of the three stories about Juliet, when Munro has told her readers all she apparently intends to, I paged ahead in the book in hopes of finding further knowledge of Juliet and her daughter Penelope.

Such is the power of these tales, and such is the nature of fiction: the author decides when, how much, and to what extent her characters will be revealed.

Munro is not a flashy writer, but she creates complex narratives. Her characters are often highly intellectual people, who exhibit the same tendencies to be found in all human beings. Of one character's loss of her impetus to finish her thesis and receive her doctoral degree Munro writes:

That is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don't think about it at all. . . . A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember. That is what happens.

And, that is what is at the heart of these fascinating stories. We all have what Munro calls our "bright treasures." Some of them are living beings, some are accomplishments, some are hopes. Some bright treasures are simply the way in which we see ourselves in the world.

Armchair Interviews says: What keeps the reader fascinated is how Munro weaves each of her stories so tightly, how she shows us the clear humanity in each of her characters.