Word: munro
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...past have undoubtedly inspired many to learn more about their family histories, to attempt to imagine what ancestors’ worlds and experiences might have been like and what they might have to do with one’s own life.The same has apparently happened to Alice Munro. Munro, whose collections of intimate, thoughtful short stories have earned her vast acclaim, explains in the introduction to her newest—and potentially last—collection, “The View From Castle Rock,” that someone in every generation of her family has had a habit...
...make your characters consistent. Life doesn't. A janitor abruptly decides he will become a writer, while his glamorous wife, selling fox capes in a big hotel, suddenly, while still young, develops Parkinson's. Munro's fiction seems uncannily true to the world because destiny plays havoc with characters' circumstances even when they don't do the same themselves...
...give us a steady point of view. Describing her family's long passage across the ocean, Munro swerves like a roaming camera from one heart to the next, and the happy result is that we see all her people as they seem to themselves--but also as they look to everyone else...
...look away from anything. Blessed with a farmer's unsentimental eye, Munro offers up a clear, highly practical explanation of how you kill a trapped...
...afraid of going where you've never been before. There may be a tad less assurance and narrative latticework in these memory pieces than in Munro's more familiar masterworks, as she experiments with different voices (old Scottish), different settings (the 19th century), different structures (one piece lasts 61 pages). Yet all the stories ultimately come back to her master themes, of sloughing off the world one knows and trying on a new life that's unimaginable...