Lives of Girls and Women

I've been trying to read all the Nobel Prize winners from the last half century. They are not all novels, but this book, described as one, is also not. However, it could be read as a novel inasmuch as it describes the experiences of a preteen girl living in a small Canadian town during WW2 in short stories. So don't expect a story per se; instead you'll be transported from event to event, or from description of this to that friend or family member. Though a short book at under 300 pages, I actually found it difficult to read because of its lack of a real engaging story. It was divided into eight short stories of over 30 pages so I read one a day for a week, almost like a chore to get through, rather than excitedly each time. But having said all this, it is without doubt masterfully written and I could see why the author would win the Nobel for even creating this type of short story that departs from traditional story telling; after all, it is a story, the protagonist's. There were some very insightful psychological observations that were impressively brilliant, and Munro's ability to capture a child's mind, presumably somewhat based on her memories as a young girl, could be profoundly accurate or realistic, including the funny things children think, such as how they evaluate each other or the adults in their lives. I don't think I'll pick up another book by this author but it is claimed this work is one of her best. No one says great art must be easy to absorb. Some may have an easier time with it, and get lost more than I did in the flow and detail of the lives she is describing. It is without doubt brilliant writing, and well worth exploring and enjoying, since I think in the end its reading experience gave me something precious that I will remember, and that did add to my life, as all great art should do.

The writing was wonderful. It was a little short on plot, more like a series of short stories about the same character, probably because she really is a short story writer. Some wonderful passages, observations, descriptions that one feels inclined to write down and keep. I would recommend this book to lovers of good literature, not to those who require an action packed tale.

While it is a novel, individual chapters could be read and enjoyed as short stories. My favorite chapter is Lives of Girls and Women p. 157. But there is a cumulative effect. As you get to know the narrator and those who matter to her the book gets better, much better. Her first-person narrative feels like she is talking to you. That casual tone makes her concise descriptions of people and settings all the more striking: "My mother had not let anything go. Inside that self we knew, which might at times appear blurred a bit, or sidetracked, she kept her younger selves strenuous and hopeful; scenes from the past were liable to pop up anytime, like lantern slides, against the cluttered fabric of the present." p. 83 "He said there was a quicksand hole in there that would take down a two-ton truck like a bite of breakfast." p. 4 "It was a hot and perfectly still evening, light lying in bands on the tree trunks, gold as the skin o apricots." p. 41 "... eyes round and wet-looking, like sucked caramels." p. 134 "they had the Irish gift for rampaging mockery, embroidered with deference." p. 43 Writing about women in 1971, with the story starting decades before, in the aftermath of WWII, she was prophetic and inspirational. "There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals." p. 193 She inserts nuggets of wisdom and witty comments about human nature: "... he was the sort of man who becomes a steadfast eccentric almost before he i out of his teens." p. 4s "It was not the individual names that were important, but the whole solid, intricate structure of lives supporting us from the past." p. 37 nuggets of wisdom "There it was, the mysterious and to me novel suggestion that choosing not to do things showed, in the end, more wisdom and self-respect than choosing to do them." p. 44 "There is no protection, unless it is in knowing. I wanted death pinned down and isolated behind a wall of particular facts and circumstances, not floating around loose, ignored but powerful, waiting to get in anywhere." p. 55 "Love is not for the undepilated." p. 197 I particularly like her insights into the process of writing fiction "The reasons for things happening I seemed vaguely to know but could not explain; I expected all that would come clear later. The main thing was that it seemed true to me, not real but true, as if I had discovered, not made up, such people and such a story as if that town was lying close behind the one I walked through every day. p. 270 "They were talking to somebody who believed that the only duty of a writer is to produce a masterpiece." p. 70 "People's lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable -- deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum." p. 276

This is a wonderful book, rich as a banquet, as finely worked as an intricate embroidery, the kind of book I love to read and the kind I aspire to write. It reads like an auto-biography but is in fact a novel, which chronicles the girlhood and journey to womanhood of Del. Del is an extra-ordinary girl in an ordinary town - the town's name, Jubilee, is beautifully ironic as nothing the least bit celebratory or festive ever happens there. Two things make her extra-ordinary. Her non-conforming, encyclopaedia-selling mother is the first. She brings Del up in spite of her dull, compliant father, to question everything, especially the sacred cows of Jubilee society, and to expect great things of herself. The second thing is Del herself, her gimlet eye and penetrating understanding, her capacity for reflection, her innate intelligence. Warring against these forces are the usual, but so truthfully rendered, forces of adolescence; peer pressure, childish curiosity, teenage rebellion. Any woman and I suspect most men will have spent time, as Del does, both yearning for God and not believing in him, hating and loving their parents at one and the same time, eaten up with stammering self-consciousness when the boy we have been fantasising about in explicit, breathless Technicolor just so much as looks our way. The consuming fear and obsessive fascination of sex. This is a coming of age novel as good, and probably better, than any I have read. Jubilee is peopled by a cast of wonderful characters, some of them only sketchily drawn and yet still amazingly corporeal; Del's two eccentric Aunts, Mr Chamberlain, the paedophile Radio announcer, Miss Farris the doomed school teacher. The small town shops and lack-lustre amateur theatricals, the fiercely parochial church communities, the nefarious goings-on at the out-of-town dance hall; they will make you see your own town and your own neighbours in a new light. This novel read to me like an HD, deluxe version of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls but whereas that book has a dashed, lightweight quality (it was written in a fortnight, and it shows), this one is written in considered, substantial, clever prose. Munro's language drips with nuance and colour and glinting facets; she has a knack of describing a thing from two different angles, `tender', say, and then `obstinate', which makes the tenderness not a thing of slush and weakness but a thing of obdurate strength. The words may not hurry the story along but goodness we get dimension, depth and flavour which lingers long after the story is done. Munro's books and her style of writing may be out of fashion. The modern taste for literature is for boiled-down prose and accelerated plot; `too many words' is the plaintive cry. To me, we might as well say that Van Gogh used too much paint or Beethoven too many notes. If you like this let me offer, with great humility, this: Lost Boys

ペーパーバックは、正味２７５ページ各ページ３２行前後で、紙質も比較的良いようです。長短マチマチの８章からなっていて、単語も文章も難しくありません。 始めの３章はまだ年少の頃の身近な人たちの思い出話が扱われ、残りの５章では「性に目覚める頃」である１２歳前後から高校卒業の頃までの男友達、女友達などとの往来が描かれています。 作者自身の経験をベースにしている作品ということになるのでしょうが、読んでいてあまり懐かしい感じがしないのは、時代が大分違うからでしょうか。他の作品集に見られるような切り口の鋭さが余り感じられないような気もします。どちらも個人的な感想で、名作だと評価する方は当然おられると思いますが。 ただ、「男は誰でも勝手にやりたいことをやれるが、女はそうはいかない」といったセリフがあり、腕力を使ってでも女を支配して当然と考える男というものの救いようのなさなども描かれていて、更に「栴檀は双葉より芳し」と感じさせる表現も随所にあって、アリス・マンローのファンならば読んで間違いのない作品ではあると思います。

I love it

I don't usually recommend book after they've been nominated for huge awards. I'd read some Alice Munro years ago, and thought it would be a perfect choice for the Women's Resource Centre book club that I'm part of here in Brandon. The combination of books I read for the month of November, and consequently during NaNoWriMo was maybe not the best combination of choices. Each one was heavy and laden with dense material the require digesting, which is why it's taken me so long to write reviews lately. On the other hand, it's led my brain to go a few places it wouldn't have normally. It helped me think a little bit more about how I'd like 2014 to go compared to 2013. That can be a good thing right??? I like to let people wonder, and I like to watch, and observe. This is how I read Munro's book, as an observer, and someone listening to the stories and thoughts of others. These are qualities I put to work for me in my working life as well. It's a little like reading the book Gripped by Jason Donnelly, but without the cat or the sock. You can read my review of that book here, or better yet, just go read that book. Lives of Girls and women was like listening to a story my Grandma would have told. It was like being transported back to her time on the prairies in the 1930's. This was situated slightly later, and in north-western Ontario, but the feelings, sentiments and Canadiana that appeared throughout the book made me feel like I was a kid again, waiting for Grandma's bedtime stories. It's a group of short stories, and yes, they all feature some of the same characters. They happen to be arranged in chronological order in the book, and each story focuses on a theme. Why isn't it a novel then? For one, because it's brilliant, and secondly because you could read each story as a stand alone. They are each succinctly crafted and beautifully written. As an introduction to Munro's works, I would highly recommend starting with this book. I plan to read many more of her works in the future, and I hope you do the same.

Del Jordan wächst in den vierziger Jahren in einem kleinen Ort in Kanada auf. Das Kleinstadtleben nimmt sie vollkommen gefangen, und unglaublich ehrlich wird von der komplizierten Beziehung zwischen ihren Eltern zum Beispiel berichtet. Del erzählt ihre Geschichte sachlich und mit weniger Sentimentalität, als man erwarten würde. Ganz kühl blickt sie auf teilweise traumatische Ereignisse, und zeigt durch ihren Erzählstil, was sie als Kind gesehen und verstanden hat. Gerade dadurch wird ihr Stil so authentisch! Eine schöne Geschichte, in der die uns allen bekannten Themen (z.B. Entfremdung von alten Schulfreunden) auf eine schöne und ehrliche Art erzählt und verarbeitet werden. Am Ende ist man traurig, Del zurück zu lassen. Man hätte sie gern noch weiter durch ihr Leben begleitet! Ehrlich lesenswert!!