This book within a book eloquently memorializes our common past and the manner in which it formed us and continues to shape...
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: Sept. 29, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26486-6
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10963-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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