History & Criticism
![Alice Munro - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B000APECX6.jpg)
Dear Life: Stories (Vintage International)
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013
A New York Times Notable Book
A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction
A Best Book of the Year: The Atlantic, NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Vogue, AV Club
In story after story in this brilliant new collection, Alice Munro pinpoints the moment a person is forever altered by a chance encounter, an action not taken, or a simple twist of fate. Her characters are flawed and fully human: a soldier returning from war and avoiding his fiancée, a wealthy woman deciding whether to confront a blackmailer, an adulterous mother and her neglected children, a guilt-ridden father, a young teacher jilted by her employer. Illumined by Munro's unflinching insight, these lives draw us in with their quiet depth and surprise us with unexpected turns. And while most are set in her signature territory around Lake Huron, some strike even closer to home: an astonishing suite of four autobiographical tales offers an unprecedented glimpse into Munro's own childhood. Exalted by her clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, Dear Life shows how strange, perilous, and extraordinary ordinary life can be.
A New York Times Notable Book
A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction
A Best Book of the Year: The Atlantic, NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Vogue, AV Club
In story after story in this brilliant new collection, Alice Munro pinpoints the moment a person is forever altered by a chance encounter, an action not taken, or a simple twist of fate. Her characters are flawed and fully human: a soldier returning from war and avoiding his fiancée, a wealthy woman deciding whether to confront a blackmailer, an adulterous mother and her neglected children, a guilt-ridden father, a young teacher jilted by her employer. Illumined by Munro's unflinching insight, these lives draw us in with their quiet depth and surprise us with unexpected turns. And while most are set in her signature territory around Lake Huron, some strike even closer to home: an astonishing suite of four autobiographical tales offers an unprecedented glimpse into Munro's own childhood. Exalted by her clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, Dear Life shows how strange, perilous, and extraordinary ordinary life can be.
Editorial Reviews
Chapter 1
To Reach Japan
Once Peter had brought her suitcase on board the train he seemed eager to get himself out of the way. But not to leave. He explained to her that he was just uneasy that the train should start to move. Out on the platform looking up at their window, he stood waving. Smiling, waving. The smile for Katy was wide open, sunny, without a doubt in the world, as if he believed that she would continue to be a marvel to him, and he to her, forever. The smile for his wife seemed hopeful and trusting, with some sort of determination about it. Something that could not easily be put into words and indeed might never be. If Greta had mentioned such a thing he would have said, Don't be ridiculous. And she would have agreed with him, thinking that it was unnatural for people who saw each other daily, constantly, to have to go through explanations of any kind.
When Peter was a baby, his mother had carried him across some mountains whose name Greta kept forgetting, in order to get out of Soviet Czechoslovakia into Western Europe. There were other people of course. Peter's father had intended to be with them but he had been sent to a sanatorium just before the date for the secret departure. He was to follow them when he could, but he died instead.
"I've read stories like that," Greta said, when Peter first told her about this. She explained how in the stories the baby would start to cry and invariably had to be smothered or strangled so that the noise did not endanger the whole illegal party.
Peter said he had never heard such a story and would not say what his mother would have done in such circumstances.
What she did do was get to British Columbia where she improved her English and got a job teaching what was then called Business Practice to high school students. She brought up Peter on her own and sent him to college, and now he was an engineer. When she came to their apartment, and later to their house, she always sat in the front room, never coming into the kitchen unless Greta invited her. That was her way. She carried not noticing to an extreme. Not noticing, not intruding, not suggesting, though in every single household skill or art she left her daughter-in-law far behind.
Also, she got rid of the apartment where Peter had been brought up and moved into a smaller one with no bedroom, just room for a foldout couch. So Peter can't go home to Mother? Greta teased her, but she seemed startled. Jokes pained her. Maybe it was a problem of language. But English was her usual language now and indeed the only language Peter knew. He had learned Business Practice-though not from his mother-when Greta was learning Paradise Lost. She avoided an...
To Reach Japan
Once Peter had brought her suitcase on board the train he seemed eager to get himself out of the way. But not to leave. He explained to her that he was just uneasy that the train should start to move. Out on the platform looking up at their window, he stood waving. Smiling, waving. The smile for Katy was wide open, sunny, without a doubt in the world, as if he believed that she would continue to be a marvel to him, and he to her, forever. The smile for his wife seemed hopeful and trusting, with some sort of determination about it. Something that could not easily be put into words and indeed might never be. If Greta had mentioned such a thing he would have said, Don't be ridiculous. And she would have agreed with him, thinking that it was unnatural for people who saw each other daily, constantly, to have to go through explanations of any kind.
When Peter was a baby, his mother had carried him across some mountains whose name Greta kept forgetting, in order to get out of Soviet Czechoslovakia into Western Europe. There were other people of course. Peter's father had intended to be with them but he had been sent to a sanatorium just before the date for the secret departure. He was to follow them when he could, but he died instead.
"I've read stories like that," Greta said, when Peter first told her about this. She explained how in the stories the baby would start to cry and invariably had to be smothered or strangled so that the noise did not endanger the whole illegal party.
Peter said he had never heard such a story and would not say what his mother would have done in such circumstances.
What she did do was get to British Columbia where she improved her English and got a job teaching what was then called Business Practice to high school students. She brought up Peter on her own and sent him to college, and now he was an engineer. When she came to their apartment, and later to their house, she always sat in the front room, never coming into the kitchen unless Greta invited her. That was her way. She carried not noticing to an extreme. Not noticing, not intruding, not suggesting, though in every single household skill or art she left her daughter-in-law far behind.
Also, she got rid of the apartment where Peter had been brought up and moved into a smaller one with no bedroom, just room for a foldout couch. So Peter can't go home to Mother? Greta teased her, but she seemed startled. Jokes pained her. Maybe it was a problem of language. But English was her usual language now and indeed the only language Peter knew. He had learned Business Practice-though not from his mother-when Greta was learning Paradise Lost. She avoided an...
Readers Top Reviews
PurpleJulieBearAlima
This was our chosen book club read and, struggling with time, I was delighted to have short stories on the list so that I could still comment even if I hadn't read them all. Whilst there's no doubt that they're beautifully written and the scenery and weather is a stunning feature, I found the lack of plot, characterisation and character motivation made it a difficult read. Whilst I don't need everything spelt out, I personally do like some sort of understanding as to why certain things happen. I'm sure many will find the beauty in the unexplained but this wasn't for me personally.
Rae Cowie
First off I confess to not having read many short story collections, so I was pleased when my book group chose Dear Life by Alice Munro - a writer I've be meaning to read for some time. Set mostly in small town Canada, Munro's characters are vivid, her prose spare yet filled with the kind of precise detail of everyday life that brings settings alive. This was a real mixed bag of stories, woven loosely around leaving, chance meetings, hinted at abusive relationships. Those I loved - including Gravel and Dolly - will stay with me for some time. However there were a few where I struggled to grasp the characters' motivation for acting as they did - making this a four rather than a five star read for me. That said, I particularly enjoyed the final three semi-autobiographical stories, which offered the reader an insight into Munro's challenging early life.
WeAreWhatWeRead
While not every story in 'Dear Life' appealed to me, and it's true that the overall effect is that of mellow, overwhelming sadness, I can absolutely see why Alice Munro was given the Nobel prize. Her writing covers such an enormous range of human emotions yet it is taut as a drum, no waffling whatsoever - sentimental or otherwise. This relentless economy is perhaps what some readers find hard to cope with; plus, people nowadays seem to whine all the time that 'Oooo, argh, the characters aren't to my liking!', to which I would say grow up, people, or go back to reading children's books. In the adult world, the gold standard is NOT to produce saccharine, "likeable-at-all-cost" stuff, but well-written characters and stories. And boy, does Alice Munro know how to do it. This book contains 'Amundsen' which is, for my money, the most beautiful and heart-breaking love story ever written (bar Joyce's 'The Dead'). It is so elegant and atmospheric, I felt transported inside of a 1940s film, and it tugs at your heartstrings without even trying. I can't ever remember shouting 'Whaaaat?!' in the middle and then being reduced to tears by a single, unexpected little sentence at the end of one little story. Sure, we won't feel all warm and fuzzy inside after reading this book, but then again, real life also rarely leaves us feeling full of beans, does it? I love this writer for showing so much respect for us, her readers, by refusing to sugar-coat anything.
John P. Jones III
This is the 7th volume of short stories of Alice Munro that I've read (and reviewed). It is like coming home to an old friend; one who knows all too well the stories of the lives of the people one grew up with. How did so-and-so turn out? She knows, and she can explain the twists and turns of their lives in wonderful incisive prose. Never too much, just the essence of the story, a novel's worth of character development distilled into 20 or 30 pages. Faulkner famously knew the many stories of the people who inhabited the area around Oxford Mississippi that he called Yoknapatawpha County. Munro's characters will range over much of Canada, but they are centered on small town life in Huron County, western Ontario. Both have been awarded, rightly, the Nobel Prize for Literature. And, for what it is worth, I've given each of Munro's six collections of short stories that I have previously read a "6-star" rating at Amazon, as I have this current collection. Love, and un-love, its "anti-matter" complement are woven into most of her stories. So too is the impact of the Great Depression as well as World War II on rural Canadian life. Her stories weave back and forth across time, and a character's motivation is often explained in words that ring so true, and you have to wonder how Munro would know them. For example, one of the longest stories is entitled "Train." A soldier is coming home from World War II, and inexplicable hops off the train before it arrives at his destination. He stops at a farm house, and takes up with the woman who is living there alone. He proves himself handy, performing those essential functions that some women seek, often described as "taking out the garbage." In this story, as in some others, there is the chance meeting of someone from your youth, that you had not seen for 40 years. And then there is the motivational insight, summed up in a pithy observation of a woman in far-off Southhampton, England: "That's enough, sonny boy, you're down and out." In this collection the last four stories are directly drawn from Munro's life, or, as she says: "I believe they are the first and last - and the closest - things I have to say about my own life." As with so many stories, they strongly resonated, and stirred up memories of my own childhood I had never truly reflected on. Like, for example, how one's childhood home was orientated, and the distance it was from the town, and how that might have impacted one's development. There was an older "caregiver," as we call them today, how she suddenly disappeared, and how that was explained. It has been decades since I thought about the first time I was in the hospital, age 6, to have my tonsils removed, and the crazy hallucinations that ether can induce. One of Munro's stories about her own first operation - her only one - stirred up those memories. As did the last story, whose titl...
R. M. Peterson
For me, Alice Munro has been a late-in-life reading discovery, and pleasure. I had not read any of her short stories until after she had been awarded the Nobel Prize. (If, inexplicably, the Nobel Committee had never seen fit to give her its Prize, would I have missed out on her altogether? Heaven forfend.) As it is, DEAR LIFE is only the third book of hers that I have read, and she is so good that I just might, if I last long enough with eyesight and sentience, read another dozen. DEAR LIFE was published in 2012, when Munro was eighty-one. As of now, it is her last book of entirely new material, as is likely to remain the case given her age. These late stories are more stripped down and straightforward, the prose simpler and sparer. But the stories are just as beguiling, and their characters just as nuanced and headstrong and surprising in their own usually quiet ways. The book contains two groups of stories. The first consists of ten rather conventional short stories. All are set in Munro's native Canada, most of them in rural or small-town Ontario, with a few excursions into Toronto. Two of them are set during WWII, and two start in WWII and stretch into the Sixties. The characters are rather ordinary people, though they tend to be loners, existing a little outside the main currents of society. (Perhaps more of us fit that description than we would like to admit -- which may be one of Munro's lessons.) The last four pieces in the book are personal to Alice Munro. In a brief introduction to them, she writes that they are "autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact." She also writes that they are "the first and last--and the clearest--things I have to say about my own life." In one, she goes to a viewing at age six; the deceased, struck by a car while walking next to the road after a dance, is the young woman who helped around the house and took care of Alice after her brother and sister were born. Another takes place the summer after Alice had her appendix removed as well as a tumor the size of a turkey egg (apparently benign given that she is writing about it seventy years later), and her father masterfully eased her mind when she had unsettling thoughts about strangling her sister. I won't attempt to summarize the other two. All four, however, are special -- even more so than the ten short stories in the first grouping.
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1
To Reach Japan
Once Peter had brought her suitcase on board the train he seemed eager to get himself out of the way. But not to leave. He explained to her that he was just uneasy that the train should start to move. Out on the platform looking up at their window, he stood waving. Smiling, waving. The smile for Katy was wide open, sunny, without a doubt in the world, as if he believed that she would continue to be a marvel to him, and he to her, forever. The smile for his wife seemed hopeful and trusting, with some sort of determination about it. Something that could not easily be put into words and indeed might never be. If Greta had mentioned such a thing he would have said, Don't be ridiculous. And she would have agreed with him, thinking that it was unnatural for people who saw each other daily, constantly, to have to go through explanations of any kind.
When Peter was a baby, his mother had carried him across some mountains whose name Greta kept forgetting, in order to get out of Soviet Czechoslovakia into Western Europe. There were other people of course. Peter's father had intended to be with them but he had been sent to a sanatorium just before the date for the secret departure. He was to follow them when he could, but he died instead.
"I've read stories like that," Greta said, when Peter first told her about this. She explained how in the stories the baby would start to cry and invariably had to be smothered or strangled so that the noise did not endanger the whole illegal party.
Peter said he had never heard such a story and would not say what his mother would have done in such circumstances.
What she did do was get to British Columbia where she improved her English and got a job teaching what was then called Business Practice to high school students. She brought up Peter on her own and sent him to college, and now he was an engineer. When she came to their apartment, and later to their house, she always sat in the front room, never coming into the kitchen unless Greta invited her. That was her way. She carried not noticing to an extreme. Not noticing, not intruding, not suggesting, though in every single household skill or art she left her daughter-in-law far behind.
Also, she got rid of the apartment where Peter had been brought up and moved into a smaller one with no bedroom, just room for a foldout couch. So Peter can't go home to Mother? Greta teased her, but she seemed startled. Jokes pained her. Maybe it was a problem of language. But English was her usual language now and indeed the only language Peter knew. He had learned Business Practice-though not from his mother-when Greta was learning Paradise Lost. She avoided anything useful like the plague. It seemed he did the opposite.
With the glass between them, and Katy never allowing the waving to slow down, they indulged in looks of comic or indeed insane goodwill. She thought how nice-looking he was, and how he seemed to be so unaware of it. He wore a brush cut, in the style of the time-particularly if you were anything like an engineer-and his light-colored skin was never flushed like hers, never blotchy from the sun, but evenly tanned whatever the season.
His opinions were something like his complexion. When they went to see a movie, he never wanted to talk about it afterwards. He would say that it was good, or pretty good, or okay. He didn't see the point in going further. He watched television, he read a book in somewhat the same way. He had patience with such things. The people who put them together were probably doing the best they could. Greta used to argue, rashly asking whether he would say the same thing about a bridge. The people who did it did their best but their best was not good enough so it fell down.
Instead of arguing, he just laughed.
It was not the same thing, he said.
No?
No.
Greta should have realized that this attitude-hands off, tolerant-was a blessing for her, because she was a poet, and there were things in her poems that were in no way cheerful or easy to explain.
(Peter's mother and the people he worked with-those who knew about it-still said poetess. She had trained him not to. Otherwise, no training necessary. The relatives she had left behind in her life, and the people she knew now in her role as a housewife and mother, did not have to be trained because they knew nothing about this peculiarity.)
It would become hard to explain, later on in her life, just what w...
To Reach Japan
Once Peter had brought her suitcase on board the train he seemed eager to get himself out of the way. But not to leave. He explained to her that he was just uneasy that the train should start to move. Out on the platform looking up at their window, he stood waving. Smiling, waving. The smile for Katy was wide open, sunny, without a doubt in the world, as if he believed that she would continue to be a marvel to him, and he to her, forever. The smile for his wife seemed hopeful and trusting, with some sort of determination about it. Something that could not easily be put into words and indeed might never be. If Greta had mentioned such a thing he would have said, Don't be ridiculous. And she would have agreed with him, thinking that it was unnatural for people who saw each other daily, constantly, to have to go through explanations of any kind.
When Peter was a baby, his mother had carried him across some mountains whose name Greta kept forgetting, in order to get out of Soviet Czechoslovakia into Western Europe. There were other people of course. Peter's father had intended to be with them but he had been sent to a sanatorium just before the date for the secret departure. He was to follow them when he could, but he died instead.
"I've read stories like that," Greta said, when Peter first told her about this. She explained how in the stories the baby would start to cry and invariably had to be smothered or strangled so that the noise did not endanger the whole illegal party.
Peter said he had never heard such a story and would not say what his mother would have done in such circumstances.
What she did do was get to British Columbia where she improved her English and got a job teaching what was then called Business Practice to high school students. She brought up Peter on her own and sent him to college, and now he was an engineer. When she came to their apartment, and later to their house, she always sat in the front room, never coming into the kitchen unless Greta invited her. That was her way. She carried not noticing to an extreme. Not noticing, not intruding, not suggesting, though in every single household skill or art she left her daughter-in-law far behind.
Also, she got rid of the apartment where Peter had been brought up and moved into a smaller one with no bedroom, just room for a foldout couch. So Peter can't go home to Mother? Greta teased her, but she seemed startled. Jokes pained her. Maybe it was a problem of language. But English was her usual language now and indeed the only language Peter knew. He had learned Business Practice-though not from his mother-when Greta was learning Paradise Lost. She avoided anything useful like the plague. It seemed he did the opposite.
With the glass between them, and Katy never allowing the waving to slow down, they indulged in looks of comic or indeed insane goodwill. She thought how nice-looking he was, and how he seemed to be so unaware of it. He wore a brush cut, in the style of the time-particularly if you were anything like an engineer-and his light-colored skin was never flushed like hers, never blotchy from the sun, but evenly tanned whatever the season.
His opinions were something like his complexion. When they went to see a movie, he never wanted to talk about it afterwards. He would say that it was good, or pretty good, or okay. He didn't see the point in going further. He watched television, he read a book in somewhat the same way. He had patience with such things. The people who put them together were probably doing the best they could. Greta used to argue, rashly asking whether he would say the same thing about a bridge. The people who did it did their best but their best was not good enough so it fell down.
Instead of arguing, he just laughed.
It was not the same thing, he said.
No?
No.
Greta should have realized that this attitude-hands off, tolerant-was a blessing for her, because she was a poet, and there were things in her poems that were in no way cheerful or easy to explain.
(Peter's mother and the people he worked with-those who knew about it-still said poetess. She had trained him not to. Otherwise, no training necessary. The relatives she had left behind in her life, and the people she knew now in her role as a housewife and mother, did not have to be trained because they knew nothing about this peculiarity.)
It would become hard to explain, later on in her life, just what w...
