Author Topic: DEAR LIFE: STORIES by Alice Munro (2012)  (Read 210 times)

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Offline agate

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DEAR LIFE: STORIES by Alice Munro (2012)
« on: March 24, 2014, 04:20:17 pm »
DEAR LIFE: STORIES by Alice Munro (2014)

A fine collection of stories, including several largely autobiographical pieces at the end.

Often the stories--all with a Canadian setting--are told by a woman in the first person, and many of them involve family problems arising from the Depression of the 1930s. Some of the characters have been maimed--one with a lame leg due to polio, for instance.  One takes place in a TB hospital.

Munro's characters do not have happy lives, and at least one of them, Jackson in "Trained," seems inexplicably detached from people with whom he has had long associations.

Munro seems to be presenting the world as she sees it: filled with people whose lives may make no sense, may have very little joy in them, but here they are. She bears witness to those who haven't been able to speak for themselves.

In the final autobiographical piece, "Dear Life," we learn that as a child Alice Munro was often beaten by her father--and that the practice was "not uncommon" at the time (the 1930s). With these stories she has shown a few facets of this past time, with its own forms of cruelty and want.
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