<p>On October 10th of this year, Alice Munro was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy deemed her a master of the contemporary short story, comparing her to Anton Chekhov.</p>
<p>In honor of this achievement, and in recognition of the fact that the CC book club has never tackled short stories, our December selection will be the 2013 Trillium Book Award winning Dear Life by Alice Munro. </p>
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<p>Discussion begins December 1st. Please join us!</p>
<p>Just bumping this up to remind people that our discussion of Dear Life begins one month from today. (Where did October go?)</p>
<p>I know I’ve been among the missing for many months, not only on the Book Club threads, but also on CC in general - but I do hope to join in the December discussion. As it turns out, my RL Book Club is also reading “Dear Life” for December! “See” you all on 12/1.</p>
<p>Mine too but I am finding the stories a bit dreary. I guess if they were fun they wouldn’t be Nobel worthy. I find Philip Roth considerably more readable, which may be why he didn’t win!</p>
<p>I just finished a Booker-prize winning novel (The Sea by John Banville) that was pretty darn dreary, though beautifully written. Lots of new vocabulary words! :)</p>
<p>I suspect that Alice Munro is going to seem like a little ray of sunshine after Banville. Not sure whether or not I want to try any other books by him.</p>
<p>I just finished a mystery written by a woman I know in real life and while the story was fine, the writing had a lot of realyl awkward moments.(Where were the editors?) The first pages of Munro were a breath of fresh air. Not saying anything about the plot! (Well I haven’t read far enough to tell you anyway!)</p>
<p>I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and is enjoying Cyber Monday Christmas shopping from the comforts of home. Welcome to our discussion of Dear Life by Alice Munro.</p>
<p>Although I have read anthologies of short stories, I can’t think of when I last sat down and read of book of stories by the same author. My first reaction was surprise that they were all set in the same (or nearly the same) time period – the 1940s, either during or just after the war. The settings were all similar too – rural/small-town Canada (this I expected from the little I knew about Munro’s works). Because of the similarity in time and place, Dear Life had a Winesburg, Ohio feel to it for me. I could imagine the people in these stories all being from the same town; I almost expected one character to cross over and appear in another story.</p>
<p>Here’s an interesting interview with Alice Munro from earlier this year: [VQR</a> » An Interview With Alice Munro](<a href=“http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2013/spring/munro-interview/]VQR”>An Appreciation of Alice Munro | VQR Online)</p>
<p>Discussion questions follow. I will be on the road all day taking my dear college student back to school, but will check back this evening. Carry on!</p>
<p>Reading Guide Questions</p>
<p>“To Reach Japan”</p>
<ol>
<li> What are Greta’s feelings toward her husband and her marriage as she is leaving for Toronto? What remains unspoken between them?</li>
<li> Discuss what Katy understands and experiences on this journey. What does Katy feel about Greg, and then about Harris Bennett? Why does Munro end the story as she does, with Katy pulling away from her mother? Does the story suggest that there is an inevitable cost when a woman attempts to break through the limitations of her life?</li>
<li> Discuss the paragraph beginning, “It would become hard to explain, later on in her life, just what was okay in that time and what was not”, in light of Greta’s actions. She is a poet: How troubling is the gap between her identities as wife and mother, and as poet and artist?</li>
</ol>
<p>“Pride”</p>
<ol>
<li> What do Oneida and the narrator have in common? How are they very different? The narrator is embarrassed that she has taken care of him when he was ill, and assumes that he is “like a neuter to her.” Why does he misunderstand Oneida’s willingness to care for him, and her desire to live with him?</li>
<li> What does the sight of the baby skunks evoke, at the end of the story? What light does the narrator’s preface bring to your sense of what has happened between him and Oneida?</li>
</ol>
<p>“Corrie”</p>
<ol>
<li> As in “Pride,” a man underestimates a woman who is attached to him: discuss what is different about the motivations and desires of the characters in the two stories.</li>
<li> How surprising is it when Corrie realizes that Howard has been keeping the money supposedly meant for Lillian’s blackmail payments? How does Corrie figure this out? How do you interpret the final paragraph?</li>
</ol>
<p>“Train”</p>
<ol>
<li> After the removal of a tumor, Belle is in a strange state of mind and tells Jackson about what happened on the day her father stepped in front of an oncoming train. She is relieved to have spoken about this memory. What effect does this conversation have on Jackson? What makes Jackson decide not to return to the hospital, or to Belle’s house, which he stands to possibly inherit?</li>
<li> Do the story of Jackson’s relationship with Ileane Bishop, and what we learn about his stepmother’s abuse, offer an adequate explanation for Jackson’s transient life? What are the human costs, in this story, of what Belle calls “just the mistakes of humanity?”</li>
</ol>
<p>“In Sight of the Lake”</p>
<ol>
<li> At what point do you understand that the narrator is having a dream? What strange details indicate this? What is dreamlike about the narrator’s efforts to find the doctor’s office?</li>
<li> In what ways does the story most accurately represent the disorientation and confusion that come with aging and memory loss?</li>
</ol>
<p>“Dolly”</p>
<ol>
<li> Franklin wrote a poem about his passionate affair with Dolly just before the war, and now, when he is eighty-three, Dolly turns up selling cosmetics. Is the narrator’s reaction overblown?</li>
<li> What is comical or incongruous about this story? What does it say about the intersection of aging, memory, and passion?</li>
</ol>
<p>“The Eye”</p>
<ol>
<li> What aspects of the mother’s behavior are troubling to her daughter and make her welcome an alliance with Sadie? What is admirable about Sadie, especially given the time period?</li>
<li> What is strange or uncanny about the idea that Sadie, in death, might have moved her eyelid? The narrator thinks, “this sight fell into everything I knew about Sadie and somehow, as well, into whatever special experience was owing to myself.” How do you interpret this moment and its meaning?</li>
</ol>
<p>“Night”</p>
<ol>
<li> The narrator attributes the strangeness of her thoughts that particular summer to a special status, “all inward,” conferred on her by learning that during a routine appendectomy, the doctor had removed a tumor “the size of a turkey’s egg.” She says, “I was not myself.” What do you make of the narrator’s efforts to explain the reasons for her state of mind and the worry that she could strangle her little sister?</li>
<li> How does the encounter with her father help the narrator to deal with her fear about her thoughts? Why is it significant to the impact of this encounter that in this family, emotional troubles or worries usually go unexpressed?</li>
</ol>
<p>“Voices”</p>
<ol>
<li> How is the mother’s character revealed in her reaction to the presence of a prostitute at the dance, as channeled through the daughter’s observations? Why does the narrator find the voices of the soldiers so intriguing and so comforting?</li>
<li> What does the story express about the difficult relationship between mothers and daughters, especially regarding the mother’s supposed role as model and mentor in her daughter’s adolescence?</li>
</ol>
<p>Questions About Dear Life</p>
<ol>
<li> What is the effect of the collection as a whole, given the order, pacing, and content of the stories? What view of life does it project?</li>
<li> Compare the treatment of women by men in “Train,” “Amundsen,” “Haven,” and “Corrie.” Why do these women allow themselves to be lied to or taken advantage of? What is the dynamic that permits an uneven power relationship?</li>
<li> Compare the endings of several stories. Do they end in a state of suspension or resolution? Think about how the endings invite questioning, reflection, and interpretation.</li>
</ol>
<p>Discuss the last four stories in light of Munro’s brief introduction of them as “not quite stories,” as “autobiographical in feeling, though not . . . entirely so in fact,” and as “the first and last—and the closest—things I have to say about my own life.” Should they be read as if they were fictional stories, or somehow differently? If you were to tell four important stories from your own life, what would they be?</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.bookbrowse.com/reading_guides/detail/index.cfm/book_number/2804/dear-life[/url]”>Reading guide for Dear Life by Alice Munro;
<p>At first I really didn’t know what to make of these set of stories. I read the first one and was disappointed by the open-endedness and by the harrowing theme. Yet the very things that bothered me (lack of a conclusive ending and difficult subject matter) ended up being what made this set of stories so thought provoking. The characters and their situations would pop into my head and make me wonder. So very happy I read this book…perhaps my favorite of the year. I was also surprised how quickly I was drawn in as I read along.</p>
<p>I liked the stories very much too, psychmom. Although most of them took place in another era, they did not seem dated, because often the narrator was looking back on an earlier time and would talk about the changes that had happened between then and the present.</p>
<p>I felt very indifferent about the stories in Dear Life. I didn’t hate the book, but I’m not rushing to recommend it to anyone else. I’m hoping the discussion here will enlighten me and help me appreciate it more. I liked some stories more than others and, quite honestly, I simply forgot some of the stories as soon as I finished reading them. They didn’t stick with me as memorable. Also, the similarities between some of the stories made it difficult for me to separate the stories in my mind. I guess I like stories with a clearer beginning, middle, and end.</p>
<p>I had read a couple of the stories before in The New Yorker. One was “Amundsen.” I recalled that it was about a teacher at a sanatorium, but I had managed to forget that the doctor decided at the last minute not to marry her, and I was shocked all over again!</p>
<p>One thing I really liked about the stories was the common theme, in many of them, of tolerance and forgiveness…of startling things happening, but people surviving and doing okay. Munro even mentions this at the very end of the last story:</p>
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<p>I don’t think I’ve ever read so many stories in a row where my reaction at the end of each one was, “Hunh? That’s it?” and occasionally “What happened anyway?” I read one a day for a while just before bed and found myself pondering them as I fell asleep, in a way I don’t usually think about what I’ve read. So many stories ended with a last mysterious sentence that seemed to send all of what preceded on a slant and made me question everything I just though had happened.</p>
<p>Weirdly enough, those questions don’t bring back the story plots at all to me. I’ll deal with them in a bit, after skimming the stories again, except to say regarding “In Sight of the Lake”, I never understood the story as a dream. I saw no clues. I figured it was a confused Alzheimer’s patient somehow reliving past experiences.</p>
<p>The last four stories felt like memoir to me. I’d be curious to know what was true and what wasn’t in them.</p>
<p>The stories that had the most impact on me were the ones with a certain kind of a twist or a surprise:</p>
<p>-- “To Reach Japan,” in which the child Katy disappeared.
– “Amundsen,” in which the doctor changed his mind.
– “Gravel,” in which there was a drowning.
– “Corrie,” in which Corrie was tricked by her lover (I thought this one was amazing!).
– “Train,” in which Jackson lives with Belle for so long but then just moves on.
– “Night,” in which the urge to strangle a sister is just a passing phase.</p>
<p>I’ve found that I really like stories where troubled people enter into new, challenging situations and do well or thrive. (Examples: Jane Eyre, the hired man in Katherine Anne Porter’s “Noon Wine,” Ada and Ruby in “Cold Mountain.”) Therefore, I really liked how the teacher at the sanatorium was good with the children in the story “Amundsen” and I also really liked the descriptions of how Jackson fixed up Belle’s place in the story “Gravel.”</p>
<p>I felt indifferent about the book as a whole. I might have liked stumbling across a short story or two or more, apart from the others. However, after a bit - collected together, they seem to be cut from the same cloth and I waited for - expected - even predicted the twist. For example, I like the short story “Corrie” but predicted the twist almost from the start. If I expect it - even predict it - then somehow the surprise diminishes, does it not? </p>
<p>I like:
“Gravel”
“Corrie”
“Train”
(I like “Pride” but for the frolicking skunks at the end of the story that scream deeper meaning.)</p>
<p>I dislike:
“To Reach Japan”
“Amundsen”
“Dolly”</p>
<p>Ambivalent:
The rest
(“In Sight of the Lake” seems to be the confusion of an Alzheimer’s patient rather than a dream, in my humble opinion.) </p>
<p>As for the last four stories, let’s just say that I don’t think of Alice Munro as a happy person. (Definitely parent issues - yes?)</p>
<p>I need something more, something that Munro holds back in these stories. I don’t understand the characters in the stories I dislike. Why does the young mother act the way she does in “To Reach Japan” - I’m never made to care, so I don’t. I feel the same way about “Amundsen” - no understanding of the characters whatsoever.</p>
<p>I probably come across more negative than I intend. I think the choice of book was a good one - a departure from the usual. I read a story a day - easy enough. I had a bit of fun with predictions. I do wonder if I would like a earlier Munro book after reading this review:</p>
<p>[Review</a> of Dear Life by Alice Munro | Quill & Quire](<a href=“http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=7798]Review”>http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=7798)</p>
<p>Still, I doubt I’ll pick up another … so much to read, so little time … but maybe.</p>
<p>The “pared-down, almost expressionistic form of story-telling” (quote from your Quill & Quire review, Ignatius) in this book seems typical of most of the stories that I have read in recent years in the New Yorker…stories by both Monro and others. Maybe it’s what’s in vogue these days??</p>
<p>You kind of have to read between the lines in this type of story. I rather like that, actually.</p>
<p>I also wanted more explanation for why the selfish, thoughtless, insensitive characters acted the way they did. But then I found it kind of refeshing that Munro did not feel compelled to explain these parts of human nature. Twists in life happen and some people are twisted, but that is life and it all goes on somehow.</p>
<p>I liked the stories. I agree with BUandBC82 that there were similarities between them, but I thought of this more as a strength than a weakness – or at least as a deliberate move on Munro’s part rather than the result of limited ability or imagination. She creates a snapshot of a community at a certain time and place, perhaps different in setting from our own lives, but still reflecting common joys and sorrows: falling in love, struggling to be independent, losing a loved one, reconnecting with an old flame, aging.</p>
<p>I didn’t look at the endings as “twists” – at least not in an O. Henry kind of way. From the outset, the tone of each story told me not to expect happiness. So I didn’t. I just waited for the details to unfold.</p>
<p>My least favorite story was “To Reach Japan” and my favorite was “Amundsen.” I think it came down to likability. I didn’t care for the wife/mother in “Japan” at all, yet I liked and respected the teacher and the doctor in “Amundsen.” I think NJTheatreMom put it well when she wrote that they are all survivors. That seemed to be a common thread in the stories.</p>
<p>Here is one man’s interpretation of “Amundsen”: [Reading</a> the Short Story: Alice Munro’s “Amundsen” and The Stories in Her New Book, Dear Life](<a href=“http://may-on-the-short-story.blogspot.com/2012/08/alice-munros-amundsen-and-stories-in.html]Reading”>Reading the Short Story: Alice Munro's "Amundsen" and The Stories in Her New Book, Dear Life)</p>
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<p>^ Your first example is especially apt because the Washington Post makes an astute observation about Vivien being Jane Eyre:</p>
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<p>“The sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into” sounds very much like Mr. Rochester. Both Rochester and Fox share a sort of gruff magnetism, and both have staffs that view them with a mixture of fear, respect and curiosity. And both are reluctant father figures to precocious young girls (Adele and Mary).</p>
<p>Absolutely wonderful review of “Amundsen” by that Charles May guy, Mary.</p>