The opening story of Alice Munro’s rich new collection, The View from Castle Rock, glancingly refers to the talent of her ancestor, Scottish author James Hogg, for “embroidering” factual histories: i.e., he was known to practice “some canny lying of the sort you can depend upon a writer to do.” Munro’s own homespun genius for transforming received material into imaginative projections of how we’ve lived (and might have lived) has produced ten lavishly praised collections and an early novel-in-stories, and earned her a reputation as both the best short story writer on our continent and her country’s probable first Nobel laureate.
In addition to The View from Castle Rock, which speculates (or, if you will, “lies”) about the lives of Munro’s Scottish ancestors as prelude to a compact fictional semi-autobiography, Munro’s matchless work is represented this fall by Carried Away, a gathering of 17 previously published stories. The tales in Carried Away display a broad range of subject matter, emotional experience and rhetorical effects, though the settings only rarely stray beyond Munro’s native rural Ontario. Among the best: unsparing portrayals of the combative relationship between young protagonist Rose and her impulsive mother Flo (“Royal Beatings,” “The Beggar Maid”); a crisply imagined mystery about a country wife who may have murdered her abusive husband (“A Wilderness Station”); the intricate account of a vulnerable nursing home patient protected and exploited by her frustrated husband (“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”); and the great title story, in which a timid librarian’s life from youth through marriage and middle age is dominated by fantasies of the young soldier who possessed her imagination through all the years when they never met. The View from Castle Rock echoes these earlier works in its concluding half (“Home”), which presents an episodic biography of its unnamed narrator, from her Ontario girlhood through first intimations of romance (“Lying Under the Apple Tree”), maturity and marriage, the aging and deaths of loved ones and confirmation of her own mortality. But the book’s great achievements are the five long stories that trace the harsh lives of her Scots ancestors (the Laidlaws) in a bleak land offering “No Advantages,” their emigration to North America, what and how they endured and what, so far as their descendant can piece together and imagine, became of them. This book within a book eloquently memorializes our common past and the manner in which it formed us and continues to shape our destinies. Alice Munro has honored the world of her fathers and mothers in an echo of the promise made to the medieval Everyman: “I will go with thee and be thy guide.” In the last century, we have had no better guide than this indispensable author.
Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4282-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
SEEN & HEARD
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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