Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You: 13 Stories

This is the seventh collection of Alice Munro’s stories that I have read. Serendipity so often introduces us to a new author, and I still recall when I first made the acquaintance of her work. The Love of a Good Woman : Stories, a title that captures the aspirations of many a man, was sitting on the dining room table of a Canadian friend, in Riyadh, of all places. He was a reader of quality books, so I duly took note, and purchased a copy for myself, based on his recommendation. And it has been a love affair ever after.This is the second collection of her stories, published in 1974. I remain impressed with the uniform quality of her stories: all excellent. There is no “early period,” no period where she was “trying to find her voice.” She had profound insight into the human condition, right from the very beginning of her writing.Her stories are between 20 and 30 pages. Many of them are “epics,” in that they range over the entire life of a person, or a family, and sometimes span a couple generations. Usually they are told from the female point of view. Both the longing, and the cynicism in the search for love and meaning in life are expressed. Unlike perhaps any other writer, she helps me recall incidents of my youth that have long been forgotten. I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, some 250-350 miles from the settings of various stories which are set in Ontario, Canada. I still recall “white-out” snow storms, and washing machines with ringers… and in one story a five-year old girl lost her arm to an automatic ringer.Yes, the ‘40’s and ‘50’s were simpler times, in some ways, before the addiction to electronic communications, and before “active shooter drills.” Sensory deprivation was less… the weather more real, the nature of work, also. But there was also violence, as her story, “The Executioners,” reminds us. And all too often a child’s life was cut short, by drowning in a lake, or by some disease that we did not have a ready remedy for. The yearning for love seems to be the one constants that transcends then and now.Take the story that lends its title to this collection: “Something I’ve been meaning to tell you.” It concerns two sisters, who have never left their native town, and the high school lover of one (or both?). He has left, and come back, still charming, after two wives, and drives a tour bus around the rather invented “sights” of the area. One sister, late one night, in high school, observed the other… yet she herself, even beyond middle age has never told the other about… “Something I’ve been…” “The Found Boat” reminds the reader how we entertained ourselves in the pre-electronic era. There were the spring floods from melting snow, not all of which were harnessed by dams. Kids played hopscotch on the sidewalks, for the first time in the year, cleared of snow. When was the last time anyone saw kids playing hopscotch… particularly without adult supervision? And there were the “coming of age” sexual dares, long before a kid might be arrested for sexting. There was always “plausible deniability”!Again, and again there is that “Remembrance of Things Past” aspect. How did that first lover, or first spouse turn out? In another story a woman has made the “safe choice” of a reliable Rumanian engineer as a second husband. But how did the more mercurial and selfish writer first husband turn out? In another story, a 15-year old high school drop-out works as a servant in a country house, dresses up in the wife’s finery when she is not away, and explains how she met her husband. Time and time again Munro provides the telling detail(s) of the lives of her characters that explain most, if not all of the “big picture.” In another story, after the death of her lover, a woman travels across the country, and is hit hard by the bag full of letters that she receives.As a final sampling, consider the following, also with a female narrator, from the story, “Tell me Yes or No.” “At the age when young girls nowadays are growing their hair to their waists, traveling through Afghanistan, moving – it seems to me – as smoothly as eels among their varied and innocent and transitory loves.” “When I finished The Magic Mountain I meant to get us though Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove (Vintage).” “But occasionally I would have to get out of bed, later, and go into the bathroom to put in my diaphragm…creatures of daily use, inseparable from infants, stoves, and tubs, turned now to our nightly use, with its connotations – rapidly fading – of sin and splendor… I remember far back…how sex had seemed apocalyptic (we read Lawrence, many of us were virgins at twenty.)”Munro never ceases to dazzle. Each of her prior six collections I have given my special 6-star rating to. There is certainly no reason to stop: another 6-stars.

The writers skills are evident in every story in this collection. There isn't a false note in her descriptions of her characters, their lives and their experiences but the stories are all so sad and bewildering that they become pretty depressing, no happy endings in this collection.

She is one of the best writers out there. She does not wast one word; sometimes one has to reread what she wrote because she manages to say so much in so few words. Perhaps that is why she never wrote a full novel but only short stories. She got the Nobel prize and is well worth it. Longwinded writers could learn from her - but it is a gift to write as she does. Her stories are great - show so much insight.

I purchased this collection of short stories because the author recently won the Nobel Prize and I thought I should read her work. Quite honestly, I fail to see what the fuss is all about. Most of the stories seemed abstract and vaguely depressing to me. I am educated and well-read, but my feeling at the end of each story was, "What the heck was THAT?" I soldiered on, thinking that surely I would discover the magic, but it did not happen. I do not dispute Ms. Munro's talent as a wordsmith, and God knows I don't have a Nobel Prize in my pocket, but I was not at all moved by her writing, and I guess for me, that is the bottom line.

If you like to read then you have nothing to lose by reading anything this woman writes, and if you hope to write then you have everything to gain and might as well get to this collection because it's a good place to meet Munro. Some favorites include: the title story; then How I Met My Husband which had a slight pleasant twist to the ending; Forgiveness in Families, a woman's touching and funny reflection on her eccentric brother; Marrakesh was a fascinating read, and the last two stories: Memorial, about a sister's betrayal & The Ottawa Valley were just so methodically moving without hitting you over the head.

Alice Munro isn't for everyone. OK, OK, she is for about 95% of humanity! That makes a lot of people. She has this knack about taking some of the most simple, mundane events and turning them into deeply meaningful events with carefully crafted characters. No place or no one is ordinary for her and soon it also isn't for us. I love reading a story by her and putting the book down to let the story sink in before I pick it up again few days or a week later for the next story. I wouldn't think it would be fair to her just to go through her stories to come to the end of the book. They need to be cherished and internalized to become nourishment for one's soul. I guarantee you will never face another person, a small town, a not-so-important location or task and understand it as such. You will view all you face with a fresh smile.

I enjoy short stories but for someone looking for a novel to dive into they may be disappointed. I have now read three of Alice Munro's collections and I find them very compelling. Her insights into life in a small town, in a challenging environment and time period she helps me appreciate how far women have been able to progress in being masters of their own lives, and how far we still need to go.

that I had missed this valuable author for many years and finally discover her.

Ich habe das Buch für mein Englisch-Studium bestellt und bin froh, dass alles tatsächlich wie beschrieben ist (und schnell ankam!)

That Alice Munro’s writing is one of the most luminous that I have come across and which made her one of my favourite short story writers is something I have already established. And yet, returning to her work again after some time away, I am struck anew by other qualities in her writing that I have not observed previously.There’s something bold and insistent about Alice Munro’s stories, a force in them that pulls at you once you’ve read the first line or paragraph, and refuses to let you go until it releases you, almost kicking you out of its frame when it’s done. And usually it leaves you where you least expect it.That relentless quality is very much apparent in the stories of this early 1974 collection. Take the tale about a young maid’s dangerous flirtation with pilot of a leisure plane in “How I Met My Husband” with an ending that no one sees coming, because the reader’s attention is diverted elsewhere.Then there is the closing story, “The Ottawa Valley,” in which the narrator admits near the end that it is really ‘a series of snapshots’ when all she really wanted to do was to bring her late mother into focus, which I did not even realise as I was reading, so drawn in as I was by the little vignettes she told, but which felt so natural, as something you would do when you reminisce about someone you have lost and miss terribly. They come to you in fragments and isolated incidents, such that even the smallest of gestures trigger some precious memory. Munro’s narrator feels she has failed to paint an accurate picture of her mother because she ‘looms too close, just as she always did’. Instead, through the other characters in her mother’s lives, she takes shape, that even as she ‘is heavy as always, she weighs everything down, and yet she is indistinct, her edges melt and flow.’ The difficulty of holding someone dearly departed at an objective distance holds true.There is always that contrariness in the human condition, in the closest relationships that Munro captures, the layers that go unobserved and unmentioned, even though they lurk just under the surface. In these stories, Munro gives voice to these contradictions, as her characters struggle with dualities in themselves and their relationships; between sisters, best friends, spouses, in-laws, and neighbours. They may not always come away changed for the better, or enlightened in any way, but these slices of life in Munro’s fiction leave an indelible mark on the reader as he examines his own experiences and his motivations, and reminds him to embrace the flaws in life and its unceasing ebbs and flows.

My book group chose this book right after Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature. We are going to discuss the stories in this book at our December meeting. Also, we shall discuss another Munro book at our January meeting.

I love it

文章はやさしいが、むずかしい単語が出てくる本である。１３の短編があるが、それぞれ面白く読める。印象に残った作品は1 本のタイトルと同じもの2 How I met my husband3 Forgiveness in families4 The Spanish Ladyである。