by Alice MunroMcClelland & Stewart
~ Review in Halifax Herald, October 2009
The London Review of Books is not given to hyperbole, so when their September issue made reference to Alice Munro as “possibly the world’s greatest living writer of short stories”, (London Review of Books, September 2009) one must believe there is a basis of fact.
Munro’s latest collection of short stories, Too Much Happiness, is part of that fact. Her fourteen other books would be the rest. Certainly, the judges of The Man Booker International Prize thought so.
The stories in Too Much Happiness are as good as anything Munro has written. Perhaps better! But judge for yourself - read her book. Even if short stories aren’t your thing, read the book. Perhaps your taste will change. Perhaps not, but read it anyway. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Take your time. Breathe between the stories. Savour the words, because Munro doesn’t waste them. Sit quietly with the endings for a few minutes. There’s no special order to the stories so pick a title that appeals and start reading. You won’t be sorry!
It is clear Munro likes her characters. They have a humanness, which, in spite of their sometimes dire circumstances, asks for and often gets compassion which perhaps would not otherwise be granted. When a man murders his children (Dimension), we ache for their mother, despair for her grief and yet, through a chance highway accident, begin to understand why she is unable to break free, continuing to visit him in prison.
In Fiction, Joyce is drawn to a young woman at a party. She is an author, her first book just published, and for Joyce she resurrects the past, a time of betrayals, passions and manipulation. And even as Joyce seeks her out in a bookshop, Munro can’t resist a dig at the lowly status short stories continue to endure. The book was “a collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book’s authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.”
We are way ahead of Nita in Free Radicals, whispering “NO” in horror as she carelessly lets a stranger into her house. We see what depression masks from her. Danger! Read the book!
The title story quite fittingly ends the collection. Sophia Kovalevsky was real, a brilliant mathematician in 19th century Russia and Munro moves into different territory with this fictionalized account of a life. Sophia is driven by her extraordinary talent to break out of the rigidity of Russian society, but she is tiresomely ordinary in affairs of the heart. She wins awards, dazzles the intelligentsia with her talent and promise, but can’t find a job. The universities of Europe are not yet ready for a woman professor.
“They had given her the Borden Prize, they had kissed her hand and presented her with speeches and flowers in the most elegant lavishly lit rooms. But they had closed their doors when it came to giving her a job. They would no more think of that than of employing a learned chimpanzee.”
This is Munro at her shining best. A Must Read!
