Alice MunroLives of Girls and Women

Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women is the closest we get to a novel in her oeuvre. Her mainstay is her seemingly prosaic, but actually unsettling and jarring short stories; this collection is somewhere between the two.Many of the chapters could stand alone as short stories, but indeed, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The title is true to the content: Munro follows the life cycle of her protagonist from girl to young woman. Along the way, her character Del Jordan observes the lives of other girls and women in her corner of rural Canada with a critical and discerning but eye.Along the way are conflicts with boys and men. This culminates in the disturbing, but finely written ‘baptism’ chapter between Del and her boyfriend. Religion. Violence. Male domination. All there, a clearly written and apt charge against men. But Del is not trapped by this. The end hints at greater horizons for Del, far beyond her small hometown, beyond its narrow norms and customs, a town named, aptly, Jubilee – the biblical year of release.

Alice Munro is a very compelling voice in being able to speak the experience of women. Her heroine in this book is fascinating, the milieu of small town Canadian life is fascinating. The book ended rather abruptly, and left me wishing for more, but what are you going to do there? The author writes as the author writes and when they are done, that's it, however, I loved the book. She has just won a Nobel prize in literature.Of her, Wikipedia says: "Alice Ann Munro (née Laidlaw; born 10 July 1931) is a Canadian author writing in English. Munro's work has been described as having revolutionized the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time.[2]Munro's fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario.[3] Her stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style.[4] Munro's writing has established her as "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction," or, as Cynthia Ozick put it, "our Chekhov."[5] Awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature for her work as "master of the modern short story",[6] and the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work, she is also a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction.[6][7][8]

The best short story writer writing in English takes a foray in to novels. If you think you don't like short stories, read this and then read her story collections. She will knock your socks off.

Del, a young rural Canadian growing up in the 1940's grows up surrounded by friends, family and neighbors. She observes and describes her interactions with them and their interactions with each other in a way that connected with me in California in the 1990s and again with me and my students in the 2010s. It is a quietly exuberant celebration of everyday and every-man-and-woman.Munro is known for her short stories, so a novel is something special, although each chapter can be read as a story in itself. I loved it and now I am reading it with my 11th and 12th grade students. After recommending it, I am gratified to find that some of my students are as awed, delighted, and disturbed by her keen observations as I am.

The jacket describes LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN as Alice Munro's only novel. But this is misleading, since the book's seven chapters read more like a sequence of the short stories for which Munro is justly famous, and the whole seems more like an autobiographical memoir than a fictional narrative. The setting is the small town of Jubilee in Southern Ontario, not so different from Alice Munro's own birthplace of Wingham. Like Munro herself, the narrator, Del Jordan, is the daughter of a fox fur farmer, and is of a similar age, passing through adolescence in the 1940s. Each chapter focuses on a different year in Del's life, from fourth grade through high-school graduation. She is a normal girl from modest surroundings, and her experiences are by no means unique. Yet she has a mother who, for all her eccentricities, believes in ideas and education; it soon becomes clear that Del (like the author) is destined to break clear of the limitations of these surroundings and become a writer.Munro's writing is straightforward and evocative, but it relies on small realizations rather than big events, so the book may seem dull at first. It began to take wing for me with the fourth chapter, "Age of Faith," describing Del as a young teenager becoming interested in religion. "Changes and Ceremonies," the next section, is about the school musical and what appears to be a budding romance between the producer and the school music teacher -- a touching story set off by the gentle sadness of its ending. In the final two chapters, "Lives of Girls and Women" and "Baptizing," romance is no longer something that Del observes from the outside, but a force that she must fit into her own view of herself, as she struggles with the changes in her body, confusing emotions, and the effect she has on men. One result of Munro casting the story as fiction is to enable her to treat Del's sexual discoveries much more frankly than she might have felt free to do in an autobiography. Temporarily derailed by love, Del's plans do not work out entirely as she had hoped, yet there is no doubt where she is heading in the end.Just as Alice Munro has used her birthplace as a source of wisdom without allowing herself to be confined by it, so Del Jordan leaves home only to return in spirit. A touching epilogue shows her looking back at Jubilee, consciously altering its details for the sake of her fiction, yet poignantly aware of the life there that she cannot capture on the page. It is a surprisingly postmodern device for 1971, but it gives this charming hybrid a context that has one foot in art and the other in everyday reality.

A lovely book, back and forth through time, it almost reads like many of her short stories woven together. If you've read "Family Furnishings",or many of her short stories in the "New Yorker" and other publications, much of this book will feel familiar to you, if not redundant. If this is your first time to read Alice Munroe, I recommend this "fictional" biography. Even if you're well versed in Munroe, you'll want to have this book, as it's her one and only "novel."

This is an early memoir by Nobel laureate, Alice Munro. It is, I'm told, her only full length book. It tells the story of her life from early adolescence through to her final school exams in small town Canada. It is in turns moving, funny, charming, quirky and very much of its time. I loved it. It is a very female piece. Men play a small role and are mostly objects of amusement or bemusement, and, in one case, thorough grubbiness - but, though the title may sound off-putting, it was, for me a joyous read.

The master of short stories.

Although this book is a compilation of short stories, it is considered to be a novel by most critics because the narrating character, Del Jordan, to is central every story. The events are however not always presented in a sequential format. I would have liked more depth about some of the male characters. It would probably have been provided had this been a ‘proper novel.’ Munro wrote these stories when in her late thirties and some think that she alluded to experiences and relationships from her own youth. That would make the work semi-autobiographical. Small-town and rural Ontario, such as the fictional Jubilee in this book, is typical of the locales customarily used by the author in many of her stories.Munro presents us with Del’s coming of age from about age ten to seventeen, from the late 1930s to the late 40s. As far as interests are concerned she is strongly influenced by her mother. She loves literature, music and history. Although her parents do not quarrel, their relationship can be described as tepid. Her mother regards herself as intellectually advanced to her husband and most of the residents of Jubilee. Her only close friend is a woman who has room and board in her residence. Del has only one close friend, Naomi, with whom she has little in common. Del likes the freedom to explore future possibilities, such as achieving recognition and scholastic honors. Being independent, in adolescence she takes advantage of every opportunity that presents itself to learn about sexuality without regard for consequences. She finds sexual attraction electrifying and it becomes a distraction to her academic pursuits. For Naomi, on the other hand, sex is mostly a means to accomplish catching a man to marry and have a family.Munro is an accomplished wordsmith. Her descriptions of characters’ traits, actions and thoughts are superb. She employs humor and irony wisely. She does not shy away from presenting events that may be shocking and tragic but are integral to everyday occurrences. Successfully maneuvering through life’s maze is no cakewalk for Del or Munro’s other characters.

This is a wonderful book, rich as a banquet, as finely worked as an intricate embroidery, the kind of book I love to read and the kind I aspire to write.It reads like an auto-biography but is in fact a novel, which chronicles the girlhood and journey to womanhood of Del. Del is an extra-ordinary girl in an ordinary town - the town's name, Jubilee, is beautifully ironic as nothing the least bit celebratory or festive ever happens there. Two things make her extra-ordinary. Her non-conforming, encyclopaedia-selling mother is the first. She brings Del up in spite of her dull, compliant father, to question everything, especially the sacred cows of Jubilee society, and to expect great things of herself. The second thing is Del herself, her gimlet eye and penetrating understanding, her capacity for reflection, her innate intelligence.Warring against these forces are the usual, but so truthfully rendered, forces of adolescence; peer pressure, childish curiosity, teenage rebellion. Any woman and I suspect most men will have spent time, as Del does, both yearning for God and not believing in him, hating and loving their parents at one and the same time, eaten up with stammering self-consciousness when the boy we have been fantasising about in explicit, breathless Technicolor just so much as looks our way. The consuming fear and obsessive fascination of sex. This is a coming of age novel as good, and probably better, than any I have read.Jubilee is peopled by a cast of wonderful characters, some of them only sketchily drawn and yet still amazingly corporeal; Del's two eccentric Aunts, Mr Chamberlain, the paedophile Radio announcer, Miss Farris the doomed school teacher. The small town shops and lack-lustre amateur theatricals, the fiercely parochial church communities, the nefarious goings-on at the out-of-town dance hall; they will make you see your own town and your own neighbours in a new light.This novel read to me like an HD, deluxe version of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls but whereas that book has a dashed, lightweight quality (it was written in a fortnight, and it shows), this one is written in considered, substantial, clever prose. Munro's language drips with nuance and colour and glinting facets; she has a knack of describing a thing from two different angles, `tender', say, and then `obstinate', which makes the tenderness not a thing of slush and weakness but a thing of obdurate strength. The words may not hurry the story along but goodness we get dimension, depth and flavour which lingers long after the story is done.Munro's books and her style of writing may be out of fashion. The modern taste for literature is for boiled-down prose and accelerated plot; `too many words' is the plaintive cry. To me, we might as well say that Van Gogh used too much paint or Beethoven too many notes.If you like this let me offer, with great humility, this:  Lost BoysLost Boys

I don't usually recommend book after they've been nominated for huge awards. I'd read some Alice Munro years ago, and thought it would be a perfect choice for the Women's Resource Centre book club that I'm part of here in Brandon.The combination of books I read for the month of November, and consequently during NaNoWriMo was maybe not the best combination of choices. Each one was heavy and laden with dense material the require digesting, which is why it's taken me so long to write reviews lately.On the other hand, it's led my brain to go a few places it wouldn't have normally. It helped me think a little bit more about how I'd like 2014 to go compared to 2013.That can be a good thing right???I like to let people wonder, and I like to watch, and observe. This is how I read Munro's book, as an observer, and someone listening to the stories and thoughts of others. These are qualities I put to work for me in my working life as well. It's a little like reading the book Gripped by Jason Donnelly, but without the cat or the sock. You can read my review of that book here, or better yet, just go read that book.Lives of Girls and women was like listening to a story my Grandma would have told. It was like being transported back to her time on the prairies in the 1930's. This was situated slightly later, and in north-western Ontario, but the feelings, sentiments and Canadiana that appeared throughout the book made me feel like I was a kid again, waiting for Grandma's bedtime stories.It's a group of short stories, and yes, they all feature some of the same characters. They happen to be arranged in chronological order in the book, and each story focuses on a theme.Why isn't it a novel then?For one, because it's brilliant, and secondly because you could read each story as a stand alone. They are each succinctly crafted and beautifully written. As an introduction to Munro's works, I would highly recommend starting with this book. I plan to read many more of her works in the future, and I hope you do the same.