Customer Reviews

The View from Castle Rock

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Alice Munro is a wonderful Canadian writer. She has won numerous awards for her work in Canada, the United States and in the United Kingdom. The View from Castle Rock is her eleventh book of short stories-and it is terrific.

Castle Rock is a high rocky outcropping in Scotland, not too far north of the Hadrian Wall that divides England and Scotland. From that vantage point one of Munro's ancestors was said to have looked out and thought he saw America and inspired his young son to later emigrate to Ontario, Canada. Obviously, he didn't really see America, but the family story persisted. From this story and others told by family members, Munro has created a delightful cast of characters who live, work, and die on their piece of Huron County, Ontario.

While the book is a group of stories, they are attached to one another so that the book reads almost like a novel or memoir. Each connecting story adds a layer to the fictionalized family history that she is creating. While inspired by actual family members, the book is not a recitation of fact. She finds a name, a place, and a date of birth and/or death and creates a life.

Munro starts her book in Scotland with the story about the rock. Another story tells of the ocean journey that ends in Ontario. Another tells of the building of a farm. Another set of stories comes from letters written by the narrator's father. She tells of the life of a young girl going to school in a remote part of Ontario where she is considered an oddity because she likes to read. Munro's characters are full of life - sometimes pathos, sometimes humor, but always feeling as though they could be real people.

I really enjoyed reading Alice Munro again and would agree with her publicist, that this "is one of her most essential works."

Armchair Interviews agrees.

Be warned getting into The View From Castle Rock - it's a stretch to call this a book of short stories. As a long time fan of Munro's work, I had an entirely different experience with this book as I had with my beloved copies of The Love Of A Good Woman or Hateship, Loveship, Courtship, Friendship, Marriage. Munro admits as much in her prologue here - expressing this is a strange fusion of autobiography and short story. Munro begins long long ago, with a view in Scotland of a mythical life in America. The title story here has a sort of fascination, but it's hardly the fascination of the title stories of Hateship of Love of a Good Woman - here, the fascination is Munro's ability to impute personalities on a wide variety of people whose lives and life philosophies are long dead, it's not on telling a compellingly moving "story." In that story, Munro's voice comes in like a quick wind saying save for some letters crossing the ocean, everything has been a product of her imagination. Moving forward in her timeline, Munro's voice becomes more and more the focus of what she wants to explore, and so she does. She tracks her ancestor's journey from Illinois to Canada as a strange exploration of one boy's lost sense of isolation. She explores her mother and father's career with a historian and sociologist's gaze. She moves forward with fascination to her own first kiss, and something lost in herself - the ability of those around her to sense her unease with getting married. She finishes with a trip back to a homeland long lost to her, but realizes her connection to the long dead is a connection to life now, which turns out to be a bit of a deconstruction of why she wrote this book as she did here. I found that point to bring together a great collection of ideas lost, the idea of holding on to less tangible ideas of feelings, justifications, outlooks, and interpretations. For Munro, the intangible is reflected in the world around her and it too changes with the landscape. In the great moments of The View From Castle Rock, you look for clues of what people have seen and interpreted in neutral landscapes with a fascination, with a lifetime of lost ideas continuing to float around in our world.

This is a family saga, but unusually structured - instead of the characters being carried along by the sweep of history, Alice Munro presents fictionalized vignettes from her family tree in chronological order. Major events - births, deaths, marriages - set the backdrop and are casually alluded to in passing, historical events mentioned almost none at all. The focus is in illuminating interior spaces - hope, loss, resentment, struggle, defeat. The final story - the author's first brush with her own mortality - identifies the connection between the vignettes in the description of how Ontario's landscape was shaped by ancient glaciers moving over the earth. This movement formed a variety of unique, particular, but identifiable formations, separate from each other but connected in their origin by the moving ice, as individuals recognize each other through time.

Once again I have been pulled into a world created, peopled and revealed by Alice Munro. This was a pleasure to read the first time and I can guarantee that I will read it again and again like all her other books.

The book surprised me, it wasn't what I expected at all. But I loved it, the long voyage into history, family-history. And what is clear from the start is that most members of this family have a special talent for storytelling, from the old man who emigrates to the new world to the writer of the book. She knows how to make a beautiful story with little things, small happenings.

I was very let down with the book. When I previewed in Amazon, it had 5 stars so I expected it to be a good first read of Alice Munro. I found the book very sluggish and couldn't keep tract of who was who or even what generation she was talking about. I didn't even finish the book, which is unusual for me.

It's about a year since I dabbled in Munro's short stories. And, like almost everybody else, I'm delightfully hooked, seeking her high and low in all sorts of shops. So, recently I pleasured myself with the discovery of her first collection in a fairly out of the way seconds shop, and what a relief from the tedium of that location, to plunge headfirst into early Munro, stories of youthful female,rite of passage stuff. This book was again a bargain in every sense of the word. The mature author in full career, retracing her Scottish roots. It is an amazing and spell inducing gift, possessed of only the very few,to swiftly ans simply absorb you into a parallel world with utter conviction. Whether you want to be in that world is a matter of taste, of course. But Munro eye for detail, setting, character and dialogue, makes it very hard to resist.

I found this book to be really entertaining, fun and easy to read through; but it's not a book that I had to keep on reading because I was so into it that I couldn't put it down. I don't believe that it's a `masterful', `Fascinating', `Exhilarating' or `Revelatory' book as the different reviews claim it is.

First of all, because you never go deep into one character, so when you are finally familiarizing with one, she just changes the story and that character is never mentioned again, so it doesn't allow you to really involve yourself into a story (I like reading short stories, and usually you do get into the character or story). The characters have a common family origin, but the stories of the different generations are not much related. I don't mean this as a negative thing, it just makes the reading `entertaining' more than `fascinating'.

I would recommend this book to somebody that is looking to read something before sleeping or that doesn't have much time to read, and wants to `get away' the stress and the daily tension, or even in a long boring airplane trip. It will entertain you, make you laugh, and leave a happy overall feeling, but it won't make you stay until 5 am awake because you HAD to go on reading!

It was the first time I read Alice Munro, and I will probably read another of her books in some time.

This seller should be a 5 star great seller. Somehow I mistakenly only gave one star.