As is becoming my custom, my book review for this month is also my recommendation as a Christmas gift for the reader on you list. This year my recommendation is actually a very special, and very good, collection of short stories.
"Dear Life" by Alice Munro may sound familiar to those of you who pay attention to literary news, because this book was the 2013 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, as well as the International Man Booker Prize, and was an international bestseller for the year. It was first published by Random House through its Vintage division in Canada, and then again through its McClelland and Stewart, LTD division in the United States.
Munro is a Canadian writer, and her stories clearly take place around the Toronto area during the time period immediately before, during, and immediately after World War II. The dialogue and speaking style are also clearly Canadian, but as with any exceptional writer, she does this in such a way as not to distract the reader from the story.
I have not had a collection of short stories make me want to throw up my hands and exclaim "No, that can't be the end!" at the conclusion of each story since I read my first collection of Ray Bradbury stories as an elementary school student. Every one of these tales will jar you to your core, will reach right in and wrap itself around your heart.
This is not an adventure book by any means. It is a collection of stories about life, the people who experience it, and how they go about getting themselves through it. All of these stories are absolutely wonderful and extremely well written. Three of them stood out to me more than the others.
The first story, "To Reach Japan," takes place entirely on a train ride from Vancouver to Toronto, but the information in the story spans a period of several years in the life of Greta, who wants to be a poet, her husband Peter, their daughter Katy, and centers on Greta's belated and clumsy attempts to break out of herself and her life. But although the entire story is told in Greta's voice and centers on Greta, in the last sentence we realize the story will actually end up being about Katy.
The second was also the second story in the collection, "Amundsen," a story about Vivian Hyde, and young school teacher who takes a position at an asylum for children suffering from tuberculosis. She is drawn into an affair with the head physician, who is quite a few years older than her. He finally proposes, and they go into the nearby town, Amundsen, to get married. But as they are pulling into a parking space in front of the government building where they will be wed, her fiancé tells her he cannot go through with it. She is then left to deal with the consequences of that rejection on her own. Again, a little girl whose mother is a cook at the school plays a large role in both her being drawn into the affair in the first place, and in her having the courage to face what she knows she must do.
"Gravel" was the third story that touched me deeply. It is told in the voice of a girl of about four or five. And since it is told through the impressions of a child that age, we get the actual story in bits and fragments. The little girl's mother has decided she is an actress, and becomes involved with a community theater group, where she has an affair with a traveling actor in town for the summer and becomes pregnant. She then takes both her daughters, ages five and eight, and moves into an old trailer in the woods with the actor, who barely makes enough money for them to live even in this rustic way. They have a dog Blitzie, and it is through Blitzie that the tragedy of this story unfolds. And it is a tragedy that dramatically changes the life path of everyone in the story.
As usual, I am not going to include any spoilers in this review. I am going to leave it to you to purchase and read this book, and I am going to recommend you purchase at least one extra copy to give as a gift this year. Every line of this collection is worth reading, and reading again, and I give it a 10 and recommend it for all mature readers.
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