Alice MunroVintage Munro: Nobel Prize Edition (Vintage International)

Wonderful insightful stories. Prose that is close to poetry. Clean and vivid. Quiet & human, love & death. And foolishness.

The Noble Prize for Literature has been awarded 111 times to date.. Among the lot only one author has merited the honor solely for short stories. Alice Monro is that honoree.Broadly speaking fiction authors either write beyond the limits of reality or stay within its limitations. Examples of the first: Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, Agatha Christies solvable murders, Ray Bradbury’s sentient robots. As for the other class examples are Steinbeck’s migrants, Capote’s Cold Blood account, Faulkner’s blighted Snopes and Sartorises Proust’s remembrance of characters past. As usual the number of mixes exceed the number of poles.Judging from the stories in the Vintage Alice Monro she sticks to the travails of reality. She exhibits the two skills all great writers have. One is a eye for close observation; that is, a memorable rendering of the sensory world. The second is to endow the ordinary with significance. How many people in the course of a day commit suicide? How many eat a meal? Have sex? Drive a car? Use a computer? Compete in a sport or on the job. How many fall in love or out of it per day? On a statistical scale the occupancies are commonplace to the point of ‘oh hum’. But in a Alice Monro story the ordinary becomes an insight, a revelation. Reality’s width and height gains a third dimension; depth. It’s Joyce’s epiphany served up on the pages with precision and compassion. And that is why I enjoyed reading her stories in this collection. It’s good to know there are more of them yet to encounter.I read some where on the internet Alice Monro has, as has Phillip Roth, sworn off fiction writing. She won’t die in harness, as the saying goes. She leaves behind an impressive array of work and numerous accolades. The resulting paper monument may well outlast the granite one with its weathered ‘RIP’. The creation an artist leaves behind is like a second life. The literary creator lives again, albeit briefly, in the reading. In that regard Alice Monro should be around a long time.

To me her writing is weighty in different senses of the word: (1) depth, gravitas, seriousness; (2) plodding and joyless. Even though there were moments when I laughed, there's little whimsy and flow here. With some of the stories I felt a subtle sense of inauthenticity -- like they had been carefully crafted by a master over a very long period of time -- more dedication and hard work than channelling of inspiration. This is not to deny her considerable talent but I recently read two volumes of stories by Joesph Epstein (waiting for the third) and those gave me much more pleasure.

Didn't think I was going to enjoy this book of short stories at first but, gradually, I came to be gripped by them. Alice Munro's writing seems to be effortless - and effortless to read, too. I believe she's a writer who will grow on readers the more of her work they read. I shall certainly read more of her stories and probably the one novel she wrote, too.

I bought this little book to sample her writing after learning that Munro has won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. It is amazing how a story with just 50 pages or less can make you feel that you really have insight into a character's circumstances and adaptation to them. I read one story twice I was so involved in it and wrote a book review for the newsletter of the community where I live. The stories all feature female main characters but by no means are they "chick lit" (although I'm not sure that I fully grasp what that means). They are far more memorable than most best-selling full-length novels, although not all equally so. I highly recommend the book as a way to acquire an inexpensive sampling of a great writer's work.

A fascinating book! The way Ms Monro tells a story is unique. Over and over in her descriptions of people and/or places, I felt, hey, I have seen that or experienced that; deja vu! I enjoyed every story in the three different collections of her works I have read so far. She often incorporated a twist in her stories that made me smile and think, "Right On"! I often found, though, that I had to read a particular story twice; the first time to get a feeling for the plot and to get familiar with the main characters, and then a second time to savor the story in all of its detail. Ms Munro is truly deserving of the honor she has received.

So far, I like the format of short stories.

Alice Munro's short stories often have more in the way of character, mood, pace, plot, development than does a book. The mood depends on the story. The pace varies with the tale and plot. Some had me asking for more, I wanted to know what happened next. Beautiful use of words and phrases to create thoughts and people. Do read it. You'll be happy and perhaps feel the better for the stretching of your mind.

While I have all the original anthologies from which these stories are sourced, this book is beautifully made, an exquisite “hymne dhommage” to A Nobel Laureate and is a pleasure to hold and read.

I loved these stories. Alice Munro is brilliant at creating characters and relationships that are revealed through undramatic but beautifully told stories. Her understanding of human nature shows itself in the smallest details.

Grea

Sólo puedo decir que al leer el Discurso de Presentación del Premio Nobel, encontré las palabras apropiadas para expresar los sentimientos que en mi habían provocado las historias de Alice Mundo.

Gute Zusammenstellung, angenehme Schrift