The View from Castle Rock: Stories [Hardcover]

Alice Munro (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 7, 2006

A powerful new collection from one of our most beloved, admired, and honored writers.

In stories that are more personal than any that she’s written before, Alice Munro pieces her family’s history into gloriously imagined fiction. A young boy is taken to Edinburgh’s Castle Rock, where his father assures him that on a clear day he can see America, and he catches a glimpse of his father’s dream. In stories that follow, as the dream becomes a reality, two sisters-in-law experience very different kinds of passion on the long voyage to the New World; a baby is lost and magically reappears on a journey from an Illinois homestead to the Canadian border.

Other stories take place in more familiar Munro territory, the towns and countryside around Lake Huron, where the past shows through the present like the traces of a glacier on the landscape and strong emotions stir just beneath the surface of ordinary comings and goings. First love flowers under the apple tree, while a stronger emotion presents itself in the barn. A girl hired as summer help, and uneasy about her “place” in the fancy resort world she’s come to, is transformed by her employer’s perceptive parting gift. A father whose early expectations of success at fox farming have been dashed finds strange comfort in a routine night job at an iron foundry. A clever girl escapes to college and marriage.

Evocative, gripping, sexy, unexpected—these stories reflect a depth and richness of experience. The View from Castle Rock is a brilliant achievement from one of the finest writers of our time.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

[Signature]Reviewed by Sigrid NunezTen collections of stories and one novel have made Alice Munro one of the most praised fiction writers of our time. In The View from Castle Rock her full range of gifts is on display: indelible characters, deep insights about human behavior and relationships, vibrant prose, and seductive, suspenseful storytelling.Munro, in a foreword, tells how, a decade ago, she began looking into her family history, going all the way back to 18th-century Scotland. This material eventually became the stories presented here in part 1, "No Advantages." Munro also worked on "a special set of stories," none of which she included in previous collections, because they were "rather more personal than the other stories I had written." They now appear here in part 2, "Home." With both parts, Munro says, she has had a free hand with invention. Munro has used personal material in her fiction before, but at 75, she has given us something much closer to autobiography. Much of the book concerns people who have died, and places and ways of life that no longer exist or have been completely transformed, and though Munro is temperamentally unsentimental the mood is often elegiac.One difficulty that can arise with this kind of hybrid work is that the reader is likely to be distracted by the itch to know whether an event really occurred, or how much has been made up or embellished. In the title story, the reader is explicitly told that almost everything has been invented, and this enthralling multilayered narrative about an early 19th-century Scottish family's voyage to the New World is the high point of the collection. On the other hand, "What Do You Want to Know For?" at the heart of which is an account of a cancer scare Munro experienced, reads like pure memoir and seems not only thin by comparison but insufficiently imagined as a short story.Perhaps none of the stories here is quite up to the mastery of earlier Munro stories such as "The Beggar Maid" or "The Albanian Virgin." But getting this close to the core of the girl who would become the master is a privilege and a pleasure not to be missed. And reliably as ever when the subject is human experience, Munro's stories—whatever the proportions of fiction and fact—always bring us the truth. (Nov.)Sigrid Nunez's most recent novel, The Last of Her Kind, will be published in paperback by Picador in December.
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From Bookmarks Magazine

Alice Munro's fans will find many familiar themes in this collection: father-daughter relationships, small-town repression, domestic work, discontented girls, and education. At the same time, Munro extends her craft deeper into her own past. Yet while she labels some parts historical-autobiographical, it's unclear just how many stories arise from personal experience, no matter how much depth each possesses. Perhaps it doesn't matter: Munro's particular talent lies in recreating art as life. If this collection pleased most critics, however, its "waffling between genres" and kitchen-sink feel raised concerns for others (San Francisco Chronicle). Despite its powerful prose and sheer beauty, Castle Rock may not be for Munro novices; instead, try Carried Away, a new selection of the author's small masterpieces.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 349 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (November 7, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400042828
• ISBN-13: 978-1400042821
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #738,063 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published eleven previous books.During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the W.H. Smith Prize, the National Book Circle Critics Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, the Lannan Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and the Rea Award for the Short Story. In Canada, she has won the Governor General's Award, the Giller Prize, the Trillium Book Award, and the Libris Award.Alice Munro and her husband divide their time between Clinton, Ontario, and Comox, British Columbia.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A poignant collection of stories loosely based on actual events in Monro's family history, December 8, 2006

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Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The View from Castle Rock: Stories (Hardcover)

When it comes to writing short stories, Canadian author Alice Munro (RUNAWAY) is one of the best. She has published 11 new collections of short stories, a volume of SELECTED STORIES and a full-length novel. Her stories' timelines and subject matter range from birth to death and hit every thinkable topic in between. She is the master of unmasking feelings through words, and her landscapes are so vividly depicted that one can envision them jumping off the page and into reality.

In this latest collection, Munro turns her attention inward and delves deeper into her own experiences than ever before. These 12 stories --- including the epilogue's sole story entitled "Messenger" --- are slight variations and half-true fabrications of actual events that took place over the last few centuries on one side of her family's history. As she writes in the Foreword, "You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on. And the part of this book that might be called family history has expanded into fiction, but always within the outline of a true narrative."

The first half of THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK includes a set of five stories, all loosely based on her family's journey from the Ettrick Valley in Scotland to North America and the beginnings of their lives there. In "No Advantages," she describes her poor, hard-working Scottish ancestors in great detail --- half, what was; and the other half, what might have been. In "The View from Castle Rock," a young boy catches a glimpse of America --- and, in turn, his father's dreams --- while perched atop Castle Rock in Edinburgh. (Years later, the affirmation of his hunch that his father was drunk that day and that "America" was merely Fife makes the rest of the story seem all the sweeter.) Here, and continuing on into "Illinois," "The Wilds of Morris Township" and "Working for a Living," the hardships of daily toil, disease, famine and sacrifice, and the saving graces of religious faith and family loyalty, are felt on every page.

The second half of CASTLE ROCK is more loosely connected and consists of stories written during but not published in her recent short story collections. "They were not memoirs," she writes, "but they were closer to my own life than the other stories I had written, even in the first person...I was doing something closer to what a memoir does --- exploring a life, but not in an austere or rigorously factual way. I put myself in the center and wrote about that self, as searchingly as I could." And, as in the first section, the characters around this "self" take off and create a gloriously imagined life of their own.

What stands out most in these stories (and in most, if not all, of her others) is Munro's uncanny gift for turning a phrase and her ability to capture the essence of a moment within the bookends of a few carefully chosen words. In "Lying Under the Apple Tree" --- one of the best in the collection --- a young girl's first fumblings with lust and a Salvation Army boy of lower class is beautifully portrayed in the pairing of question and observation: "Or does it always seem natural to whisper in the dark? Or when you have gone weak in the legs but aching, determined, in another part of your body." In both "Home" and "What Do You Want to Know For?" --- two equally magnificent and ruminant pieces about the nature of belonging and feeling at home in one's present while yearning to grasp the unattainable past and lay claim to the unforeseeable future --- there are countless instances when the urge to stop and meditate on a paragraph or a sentence should certainly be heeded. These are the passages that encapsulate the marrow of life, and in Munro's capable hands they ring true every time.

Regarding her inspiration for THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK, she writes, "Some of the characters gave themselves to me in their own words, others rose out of their situations. Their words and my words, a curious re-creation of lives, in a given setting that was as truthful as our notion of the past can ever be." It is this natural talent for seamlessly fusing habit with possibility, permanence with intention, and fact with fiction, that makes Munro's stories such a unique pleasure to read.

--- Reviewed by Alexis Burling

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Five-Star Career of Writing, November 27, 2006

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Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The View from Castle Rock: Stories (Hardcover)

There's more than a hint of the Icelandic saga about some of the stories in this collection: the tough-minded matter-of-fact narration; the non-judgmental, external point of view. Only briefly and incidentally does Munro peek into any single character's self-awareness. Like the Icelandic sagas, these are chronicles of the author's ancestors, written with the implicit pride that such a family deserves to be chronicled. For anyone who has read Munro's previous stories, The View from Castle Rock will come as a surprise, and those who admire her emotionally acute self-dissection may be disappointed. I prefer to give Munro the latitude to write differently, particularly since she crafts her new genre so skillfully. This may not be her best collection ever or contain any story as good as her earlier masterpieces, but if there is any living writer in English more deserving of the Nobel than Alice Munro, I'd like to know who.
Added after re-reading earlier in the day: I need to retract one element of what I wrote before; the last story in the collection, "What Do You Want to Know For?", is a very great story, one of Munro's most polished ever.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars superb anthology, December 3, 2006

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Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The View from Castle Rock: Stories (Hardcover)

These twelve new short stores are broken into three sections. Part One/No Advantages contains five tales from the author's ancestry as her family sails from Scotland to America. Part Two/Home includes six stories mostly occurring in the Lake Huron area that will be much more familiar to fans of Alice Munro. Finally a one tale Epilogue/Messenger that ties to two segments together. Each contribution is terrific and will enhance Ms. Munro's reputation as one of the best modern day short story writers. This reviewer's personal favorite is the "Roots" like first entry "No Advantages" though the others like the title story are well written, filled with depth so that the audience feels they are either in the Scotland or near Lake Huron, past and present. Once again Ms. Munro vividly brings to life the seemingly ennui everyday people, but makes each person seems so alive and vibrant with this superb anthology.

Harriet Klausner