I remember really liking Alice Munro's Selected Stories, unfortunately this mixture of family history and short fiction results in a combination that is neither fish nor fowl. I doubt Munro's family history would captive anyone not directly related to her and her usually-immaculate prose fails to carry the day. The overall effect is something like being cornered by a well-meaning Auntie keen to tell you all about her fascinating new hobby.

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

This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

I think this is my new favorite Alice Munro collection. Usually in her collections--in all collections of stories--there's a clunker or two, stories that seem to be there merely to fill out the book. Not so in this one. It's solid all the way through.

This book reminds me a bit of Munro's book The Beggar Maid, which is pretty close to a novel in that it follows a single character's life through a series of stories, from childhood to middle age. This one extends the reach of the narratives on either end, encompassing tales of the narrator's Scottish ancestors, beginning in 1695, and extending all the way through the narrator's old age and even a foretaste of death. Munro notes in the foreword that the stories are fictionalized, but are also closer to her own experience than any she's published before.

The first half of the book is focused on the narrator's family--legendary tales of ancestors who are close to folk heroes, an imagined Atlantic crossing by a group of family members, struggles to establish homes out of the bush, and finally her own father and mother's faltering attempts to make a living. The stories in the second half zero in on the narrator's own experiences of family, passion, work and class distinctions, marriage (though the narrator's own marriage is addressed only out of the corner of her eye), landscape and change, and, in the penultimate story, history.

The Canadian title of The Beggar Maid is Who Do You Think You Are?, which I think is far superior. Likewise, I think a better title for this book might be the title of the penultimate story, "What Do You Want to Know For?" The title comes up while the narrator is investigating a mysterious unmarked burial mound that she and her husband have discovered off a rural road in Huron County. She's poking around in the library, aware that such researches may seem strange. In fact, such investigations are what the book is all about--a probing of one's past, both the distant family past and more proximate personal past--for whatever it might yield as an answer to the mysteries of existence.

"It happens mostly in our old age," Munro writes of this urge in her Epilogue, "when our personal futures close down and we cannot imagine--sometimes cannot believe in--the futures of our children's children. We can't resist this rifling around in the past, sifting the untrustworthy evidence, linking stray names and questionable dates and anecdotes together, hanging on to threads, insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore to life."

Of course, Munro has been engaged in this activity, this rifling through untrustworthy evidence, this tying together of threads, throughout her career. It's no wonder that, in pursuing the activity that captures the imagination of so many people in their latter years, Munro has produced a work of such fascinating range and depth.

Alice Munro follows her ancestors from Scotland, the old country, to North America. The stories she tells are partly true, partly made up. Munro has studied old documents, both in Scotland, and in Canada. From the persons she found in them, she has cut out the paper-doll figures she wanted her ancestors to be.

The last part of the book is about Alice Munro herself. How she grew up on a fox farm (!) in Ontario, restricted by the unwritten rules of the countryside. Know your place. Don't waste your life on books.

I like Alice Munro's writing. She is there, she identifies with her characters, at the same she keeps her distance. And she is respectful. Always,

More like 4.5/5. Solid writing, solid storytelling.

Belatedly, I suppose, my first Alice Munro experience. I immediately took to her confident and beautiful writing, and how she strung the autobiographical vignettes together. I did find the array of characters in the beginning somewhat confusing to sort out; thereafter I enjoyed Munro's musings about the relationships of her parents and grandparents' generations. The stories are personal and moving; the pace slow and contemplative. My best parts were 'Lying Under the Apple Tree' and a paragraph about our need to pursue our family histories as we get older: '..It happens mostly in our old age, when our personal futures close down and we cannot imagine - sometimes cannot believe in - the future of our children's children. We can't resist this rifling around in the past, sifting the untrustworthy evidence, linking stray names and questionable dates and anecdotes together, hanging on to threads, insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore to life.' (pg 347)

3,5

Décédée il y a tout juste 2 mois, le 13 mai 2024, madame Munro a maintenu la manchette des grands quotidiens alors qu'éclatait le scandale révélé par sa fille, violée à l'âge de 9 ans par son beau-père, le mari d'Alice Munro, fait qu'elle a ignoré après révélation... Le milieu littéraire se perd en conjonctures à savoir si l'on doit séparer l'oeuvre de l'artiste ou bannir tout ce qui touche à cette icône canadienne.
Déjà, l'Université Western suspend son programme de la chaire Alice Munro. Les réactions sont vives et rappellent, à une autre époque, celles concernant le cinéaste Claude Jutras.

Du côté de Castle Rock, ironiquement, décrit l'histoire des ancêtres d'Alice Munro depuis la fin du 18 siècle en Écosse et immigrés au Canada, jusqu'à sa propre enfance, adolescence et vie adulte. Un récit très personnel où l'autrice entreprend des recherches généalogiques, visite des cimetières et raconte ses premiers émois amoureux. Même si l'écriture est d'une forme impeccable, le sujet traité l'est plus ou moins. La force de Munro réside davantage dans ses nouvelles de fiction.

The View from Castle Rock snød mig godt og grundigt, men på den gode måde. Her troede jeg, at jeg havde fået fingrene i en novellesamling, som var knivskarp, provokerende på flere planer og et pragteksemplar på litterær nytænkning - hvor jeg efter de første 40 sider måbende måtte indse, at disse livskapitler var så langt fra at være plotbaserede, som man overhovedet kan komme. Jeg bed skuffelsen i mig og læste videre; eftersom værket er en Man Booker Prize vinder, måtte der jo være et eller andet, som gjorde den speciel.

Jeg ved ikke hvornår det skete, hvilke ord, sætninger og passager, der gjorde det - men lige pludselig var jeg solgt. Munros smukke beskrivelser, langsomme rytmiske tempo, oder til naturens enkle skønhed og kærlige selvkritik var vidunderlig at læse. Mange af de oplevelser og begivenheder beskrevet i bogen rammer så klokkerent, at jeg flere gange blev transporteret tilbage til min egen barndom og spæde ungdom; begivenheder, dengang trivielle, fik pludselig en dybde og betydning, som kun kan forstås med erfarne øjne, og flere gange måtte jeg stoppe min læsning for at svælge lidt i den følelse, den stemning og den fysiske lethed der indfandt sig, dengang jeg lagde øjnene på min første hundehvalp, fik mit første kys, afsluttede min første uddannelse, fik mit eget sted at bo.

Munro says with emphasis, ‘These are stories.’ But, this collection is the closest one could imagine short stories come to a memoir. Sure, Munro can’t help herself and adds some unusual events to spice her narration up and to make the mundane and anticlimactic more dramatic. She does it in the same way she made her boring summer job as a maid much more dramatic than it really was in her letter to a friend in her short story, ‘Hired Girl’, and she calls everything short stories. The story of her family’s immigration from Scotland to Canada and their settlement is necessarily fictionalization, even though she had three generations of writers to fall back on as well.

There has always at least one writer per generation in her family, anyway. Even her father wrote not only his memoir, but tried his hand at novel writing as well. When we come to more contemporary times what the stories reflect is probably a fairly accurate rendering of some episodes of her own life plus an electrocution here and a gun shot in the barn somewhere else. But, aren’t all memoirs like that? Don’t people spice things up to make them more interesting? Even when they think they are accurate and true to the facts, they still present their own version of them. She put the tales she wanted to tell in a short story format, since it is the form she feels most comfortable with, but this is what it is: a memoir with some added flesh on the bones.

I must say, I didn’t fall in love with this collection right away. Apart from the introduction, the initial stories were interesting, but not at all as gripping as the stories by Munro in general are for me. They were not exploratory in a psychological sense; they were much more ventures into the family history realms. As I progressed through it though, and got to the times more contemporary to mine, I found more of the Munro I know with her elegant sentences and suave and insightful observations.

The image of Scottish immigrants was an interesting one for me. It showed the way of life influenced by their Presbyterian variety of the Christian faith: industrious, stern, modest, concentrated on not falling out of line, not standing out. My Catholic country experience is different- people in the country where I grew up were much more bawdy, flamboyant, liked to drink (too much most of the time) and to dance, and had no problem showing off whatever best they had in church on Sunday. Interestingly, Munro’s father’s second wife, who is Irish, glaringly stands out with her openness, desire for the unusual and the gossip, and her bawdiness.

I also found quite a bit of the history and images of rural and small town Southern Ontario- not exactly my place, but landscapes I know very well and travel through. What drew my attention was the number of cemeteries in the book. I tried to find some of them, and what startled me was that some of them are on tiny plots smack in the middle of the town I live in surrounded by houses, plazas, roads and new subdivisions. There is actually one very close to where I live sandwiched between a road on one side and an Indian restaurant and Blockbuster on the other. Somebody’s ancestors.
Munro conveys the feeling of a river of time and the insignificance of individual experience and how individual life becomes history and part of a bigger whole somehow through them.

She is thinking of death, looking at her roots, getting rooted herself as well, and it’s her farewell too. By the end of the book she puts it into such an observation,
‘We are beguiled. It happens mostly in our old age, when our personal futures close down and we cannot imagine- sometimes cannot believe in- the future of our children’s children. We cannot resist this rifling around in the past, sifting the untrustworthy evidence, linking stray names and questionable dates and anecdotes together, hanging on to threads, insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore to life.”
It’s apparent throughout the collection, and to add to it, in the interviews to promote this collection she said she didn’t think she was going to publish any more collections. She is not very old yet at all- she is only 76.

Habituée aux nouvelles. Ces nouvelles-ci ont formé un roman sur l'histoire de la famille de l'auteure, issue d'une lignée écossaise émigrée au Canada. AM remonte le fil de l'Histoire et de son histoire. La seconde partie du livre est fait de ses propres souvenirs et observations.

Un autorretrato (Reseña, 2021)

(También disponible en: https://cuadernosdeunbibliofago.wordp... )

“Como si entonces se viera más, aunque ahora se vea más lejos” (346)

Por encima de la línea quebrada que dibujan las almenas del castillo, el hombre señala en la distancia una vaga sombra que contrasta apenas con el azul del mar. “América” dice, y los otros que lo acompañan, como él borrachos, asienten sin decirle, ya por ignorancia o porque es más entretenido seguirle el error, que esa es Inglaterra, y que América está mucho más allá, cruzando un mar sin nada más que mar alrededor, invisible a la mirada.
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El dedo de ese hombre borracho en la cima de una torre en ruinas marcará el camino de la inmigración de una familia que luego de las olas y las fiebres y los árboles y los arados aprenderá a criar y vender zorros, y a lidiar con la soledad y la enfermedad, y eventualmente a escribir su historia desde las manos de una de las hijas de las hijas de los hijos de las hijas, quien por algún motivo considerará necesario recorrer la trama de la memoria. La vista desde Castle Rock es un libro de cuentos de carácter biográfico donde Alice Munro compone un retrato de su familia y de sí misma, donde busca en la memoria para construir la íntima y hogareña mitología de su historia familiar.
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Hay dos momentos en el libro, y ambos pueden distinguirse de acuerdo con las fuentes que sirven como sustrato a la escritura. El primero es aquel donde la memoria juega con el archivo, y compone los relatos más antiguos, esos cuyos protagonistas son nombres en los registros de inmigrantes, en las tumbas de viejos pueblos, en las crónicas de las bibliotecas que conservan ajados ejemplares de periódico. El segundo hace de la memoria anécdota, y se fía de la mirada niña y adolescente y joven adulta de la autora para contar el carácter de la familia m��s cercana, y trazar la propia identidad partiendo de los límites y las esperanzas que ese círculo inmediato configura. De alguna manera, entre el borracho soñador que embarcará a su progenie para ir al nuevo mundo, y la mujer que recorre las carreteras buscando un túmulo funerario mientras espera el diagnóstico de un tumor que se descubrió, está contado lo que Munro considera que la moldeó como autora.
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Porque si bien la clave biográfica incluye eventos sobre el amor, la muerte, y la economía doméstica, el centro es la insistencia en pertenecer a una estirpe que podía nombrar cosas. Desde los lejanísimos familiares que llevaban a bordo del barco un diario secreto, hasta la más reciente fabulación con que mamá vendía pieles de zorro a huéspedes de los hoteles. La palabra está aquí como una herencia, como un aprendizaje. Algunos de los relatos hacen explícito el aprendizaje del oficio de escritura. El mejor de los cuentos, “Ayuda doméstica”, concluye con la escena brillante de una adolescente que lee y descubre los Nueve cuentos góticos de Dinesen.
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Una frase de Margarite Duras dice algo así como que escribimos para saber de qué escribiríamos si escribiéramos. Este libro de Munro es una extensión de esa frase. Escribe para saber por qué escribe, para entender de qué escribir. Este es su autorretrato, y lo logra con belleza y pulcritud, y aunque no ha sido mi libro favorito entre los suyos, siento que en términos de obra funciona como un eje de gravedad. Leerla no será lo mismo luego de Castle Rock. Algo he aprendido aquí, algo ha quedado insinuado, que dará un aliento de lejanía y cansancio, de reverencia y misterio, al resto de su obra, que espero, claro está, seguir descubriendo, poco a poco.

I'm actually glad this has been I mandatory read. Although I would have never picked a book like this on my own, I'm happy I have added this to my collection now.

Because the book is a collection of short stories I could read a story at a time, which made this a real page turner. One story equalled one bus ride to school, so the easiness of combining reading with travelling, made for a quick first read-through.

Part 1 was a bit of a struggle for me, but I can appreciate the way Alice has written. It's incredibly detailed and created vivid images in my head.

Part 2, created a more realistic view on things for me. Intriguing and captivating.

Part 3 was definitely my favourite. I loved the way it was written and the way it made me feel as well.