The View from Castle Rock

The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It's been a while since I've posted anything about books; I feel a little rusty. The upcoming holiday distractions have got hold of me -- knitting, making cards, a cooking frenzy this week (Thanksgiving on Thursday), shopping, well, you know the drill.

I especially wanted to write something about Alice Munro's family history memoir, The View from Castle Rock, both because I loved reading it and because it is the last book I'm counting for the Women Unbound Challenge this year.

Like some of Munro's other works, this one can be read either as a collection of linked short stories or as a unified work, like a novel. The View from Castle Rock is a fictionalised memoir, not quite fact, not quite fiction, based on family stories and drawn from the lives of Munro's Scottish ancestors.

Two things. Every moment in Munro's work is alive and present. The past doesn't feel like the past, it feels very much here and now. I can't really offer an example; you've got to experience it for yourself.

Yet there is also a reflective, nearly nostalgic tone to the writing. A reader can always just about see Munro herself floating behind the scenes, peering back through time at the lives of her forebears, watching and taking notes.

I like Munro's style and it felt like familiar territory (especially after reading Lives of Girls and Women last year). Her highly intelligent, yet odd, slightly gangly and tomboyish young narrators clearly bear some resemblance to her adolescent self.

And her awkwardnesses, her feminine difficulties, her awakenings and small rebellions -- all these played a part in the development of the writer's identity in this book, as they similarly featured in Lives of Girls and Women.

I wouldn't have read Lives of Girls and Women as autobiographical at the time, but after reading this book, I probably would now. There are just too many similarities to overlook.

One theme I must touch on is Munro's portrayal of her experience of other people's disapproval, of their watchful, prying eyes. It almost feels Victorian at times, to think that in the 1950s or roundabout then, in this part of Canada at least, a girl couldn't ride a bicycle without people talking.

People talk, or taunt, or shun, or scorn, all too easily -- when a girl is too clever, when she walks down the country roads alone, when she has ambition. I think it is worthwhile being reminded that what now to us seems ordinary, in other times would have been extraordinary. A girl, riding a bike, going to college, writing a book!

Munro's is a gentle but persistent feminist vision of the lives people lead and the forces that shape them. Ordinary, everyday, next-door kinds of people, not so different from us after all.

I'm glad I read this book, if just to get to know Alice Munro a little bit better, to see her vision applied a bit closer to home.

I read this book for the Women Unbound Reading Challenge which is wrapping up at the end of this month! Visit the website to see an amazing collection of reviews of works by and about women.

Lives of Girls and Women

Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A quiet little book, yet stunningly evocative. Lives of Girls and Women is absolutely alive with truth and experience, novelty, curiosity and the shock of growing up.

When reading this novel, I had the feeling of dipping in and out of a community. While I was there I got to know some of the townspeople of Jubilee -- the nutty schoolteacher who puts on the school musical every year, Fern the boarder and her sterile suitor, the nurse's daughter Naomi and her morality tales of sex and death.

Our narrator is, of course, the perceptive center of this world. She is a little bit wild (she bites her cousin once at a funeral) but eventually grows into an awareness of herself as a book-smart, adventure-seeking and somewhat unconventional young woman.

Munro is the master of leaving things out. She only tells us what we most need to know in order to experience the story, to feel it pulse. Do we need to know the narrator's name, how old she is, or what year it is? Of course not.

What we do need to know is who people are, deep down, what makes them human in their own bizarre or eccentric ways. Uncle Benny ('He was not our uncle, or anybody's.') who sends away for a bride from the classified ads. The fanatic mother who sells encyclopedia sets to rural customers and the father who raises foxes on his solitary farm.

Our narrator (Del, we finally learn her name is) moves through life with a child's appreciation for nuance and undercurrent. She reads the moods of those around her, especially the adults. When she visits her aunts:

There was a whole new language to learn in their house. Conversations there had many levels, nothing could be stated directly... My mother's disapproval was open and unmistakable, like heavy weather; theirs came like tiny razor cuts, bewilderingly, in the middle of kindness. They had the Irish gift for rampaging mockery, embroidered with deference. (41)

One thing I like in Munro's writing is the blending of complex and contradictory feelings. Here's another example:

I felt remorse, that kind of tender remorse which has on its other side a brutal, umblemished satisfaction. (70)

Del also exhibits a craving for new experiences that leads her into a few sticky situations. Sexual awakening takes up a good third-to-half of the book. While I initially felt sad when Del started to move out of her rambunctious, dirty tomboy stage into young womanhood, I could appreciate her desire to gain experience, to discover what it's all about.

Del's mother is a driving force, not specifically toward sexual knowledge but toward all sorts of knowledge. At one point, Del realises that they are different from most people:

to some people, maybe to most people, knowledge was just oddity; it stuck out like warts. But I shared my mother's appetite myself, I could not help it. (73)

Identity, I suppose, is what any coming-of-age novel ultimately explores, and this story follows Del through all the changes in outlook and temperament one expects between ages 10 and 18.

What makes this story interesting is the many ways Del rejects the 'normal life' as presented to her by her school friends, magazine articles, and conventional wisdom, and chooses to forge her own path, riddled with mistakes though it may be.

Instead of making herself pretty, attracting boys and planning her married future, Del seeks glory, achievement and life experience on what she thinks of as a man's terms. Women were damageable, prone to being sullied; men could

go out and take on all kinds of experiences and shuck off what they didn't want and come back proud. (196)

Who among us hasn't felt the sting of men's apparent freedom at one time or another?

I read this book for the Women Unbound Reading Challenge. This novel sensitively explores many themes of girlhood and womanhood without being preachy; in fact, if it weren't for the title, you could almost miss the undercurrents of feminist awakening.



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Open Secrets

Open Secrets: Stories by Alice Munro


My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Everything they say about Alice Munro is true. Her stories are deep, novel and haunting. Wonderful and disturbing. Her characters are flawed and mysterious. Why they do the things they do, we'll never know. But then, maybe we do know after all.

The most appalling acts have origins in some distant past event, or in a bizarre stubborn individuality.

Letters provide a narrative when "real" events are hidden from us. We read the words written by the characters explaining everything, or hiding behind a false identity.

They can never really bring themselves to tell the whole truth. Secrets bubble up like blisters.

These stories demand to be read over and over again. The way they fit together is something like a novel, one set in many places, times and settings at once, but like a family tree in the stories' relation to each other. One begets another.

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