"'Now I see. Now I have got a real understanding of it and it was nobody's fault. It was the fault of human sex in a tragic situation.'"
Alice Munro is a Canadian poet and novelist. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, and her stories are known for their tendency to move forward and backward in time.
All of the stories in this collection deal with life in Canada either just before or just after World War II. Most of them are set in rural places, though a couple cross over into urban areas such as Vancouver or Toronto. The subject of sex is at the center of many of these stories, with marital infidelity and women transgressing the bounds of "acceptable behavior" being recurring themes.
On the whole I found this collection easy to get through, though I was a bit frustrated by many of the stories. They never seem to amount to much. It's as if the author had some other premise in mind, or she couldn't think of a proper way to end what might have been a more memorable narrative. It's only in the last few stories, which are, strangely enough, dismissed by the author as "not stories," that her talent really comes to the fore, and in which one begins to understand why she's so celebrated in her native country.
I'd like to read one of her novels. I'm thinking that in novel form she might have a better ending up her sleeve. Her short stories? I thought they were alright, but there isn't much in this collection to recommend her.
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