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Read The Love Of A Good Woman (2000)

The Love of a Good Woman (2000)

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4.06 of 5 Votes: 5
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ISBN
0099287862 (ISBN13: 9780099287865)
Language
English

The Love Of A Good Woman (2000) - Plot & Excerpts

I don’t know where to start with this book so I'm just going to dive in. Alice Munro is a very very good writer, the sort of talent who makes me think of Anne Rice's quip that Renoir sold his soul: it doesn't figure that a person can craft such luminously wonderful art without divine or diabolical help!One of the things she does magnificently is write about children from their perspective in a way that is as delightful and frustrating and surprising as actually being with children. Once you've marvelled at this feat for a while you realise she is somehow doing the same thing with everyone, letting them speak and think and astonish and reveal, as if they live behind the scenes.She is so gentle though, so respectful. She doesn't make that error that Katherine Mansfield stamped on in DH Lawrence of invading bodies and psyches as if we could ever understand others by magical omniscience rather than by empathy. The boys in the title story keep their fierce dignity, their sacred privacy. Even when Munro describes horrible traumatic episodes, she manages, with great sensitivity and care, to maintain a distance that keeps the reader safe from visceral response. You might want to call that shying away, but personally I'm kneeling in gratitude when an author can achieve this balance. I want to hear about trauma without being triggered where possible.Loving Munro is also easy because her ethics of care and compassion for others are embodied by these stories, for example by Enid, the protagonist of the title story. Yet Munro refuses to paint an icon for worship: Enid can live as she does only because of her enabling circumstances, she experiences poisoned fantasies, and her goodwill is not unconditional. The same is true for other characters: each person in the book is carefully drawn as an individual shaped by histories, enmeshed in social structures that influence, constrain, oppress, enable, direct, oppose and support them in interconnected ways. They are at least partly responsible for their fortunes and failings, but Munro never victim-blames or hero-worships.There are vile abusers and detestable bigots. These are villains that propel drama. Mrs Gorrie is a particularly realistic monster, but Munro skilfully uses her to unpick attitudes to disability, poverty and gender roles that are surprisingly mainstream. Sometimes no villain is required; misunderstandings and failures of empathy, the stuff of all our lives, are sufficient to push characters far enough out of their comfort zones to experience transcendence and hand it on to us. The gift Munro has is of keeping each life she fashions open, stretching past the fringes of her telling. There is no answer given, no resolution is final. We go on living.

Sottilissima, ineffabile, Munro. Entra nelle vite della gente evitando ogni didascalia. Sceglie un... “improvviso” e comincia a dire ciò che vede, a sguardi. Dopo un po', con la medesima istantanea leggerezza, si distacca, abbandona la vicenda al suo cammino e il lettore al suo pensiero. Non si dilunga, osserva e basta. Il racconto, poi, lo facciamo noi, con quel bisogno naturale di paragoni che distingue gli uomini, quando osservano l'altrui destino. Componiamo scenari, caratteri, vicende e giudizi. Distinguiamo apparenze da sostanze, soddisfatti dall'intuito. Elaboriamo emozioni che nessuno ha suggerito.Quattro stelle, anziché cinque, perché il campionario selezionato in questi otto racconti è particolarmente duro, talvolta atroce, e si fatica un po' a separare l'affanno esistenziale dalla somma bravura dell'artista. Subtle, ineffable, Munro. Logs in people's lives without any caption. Chooses a ... "Sudden" and begins to say what she sees, in looks. After a while, with the same instant lightness, she detaches herself from the tale, leaving the story to its path and the reader to his thoughts. We do compose the story, then, with that natural need to compare that separates men, when sneaking around someone else's destiny. We compose scenes, characters, events and judgments. We distinguish appearances from substances, happy of any intuition. We develop emotions that no one has suggested.Four stars instead of five, because the samples selected in these eight stories are particularly hard, sometimes cruel, and a little effort is needed to separate the anxiety from the incredible skill of the artist-writer.

What do You think about The Love Of A Good Woman (2000)?

In this collection of eight short stories, Alice Munro writes about the ordinary lives of small town folk – mostly women – generally set in Canada around the 1950s. I’m not a fan of short story collections to begin with, and this collection hit all the reasons why I don’t care for them. With very similar settings and topics, all the stories blend together in my mind. Nothing and no one becomes memorable. And, I certainly can’t become attached to any character or emotionally invest in a story if I can’t even remember them.Beyond my initial bias against short stories, Munro’s writing does nothing for me. Why? BecauseNothing happens. Ever. In any of the stories.Munro has the most passive, roundabout, opaque way of storytelling that I’ve ever read. She purposely doesn’t spell out what is going on or exactly how characters are related. For instance, she begins “Save the Reaper” with two names – Eve and Sophie. And for the longest time, I thought they were friends, best friends perhaps, but certainly peers. Some pages later, I discover that I’d be wrong all along. In reviewing the text again, I notice that Munro leaves miniscule hints about their relationship, such as writing “when Sophie was a little girl” and neglecting to mention Eve’s age. Seriously? This is just frustrating.Munro has sometimes been described as a feminist writer, but I found that to be a bit of a misleading descriptor. She writes about female issues, for sure. She writes about the oppression experienced by women of bygone times. Pregnancies hidden. The lack of opportunity. Female sexuality. Motherhood. But, generally the label “feminist” fiction connotes a strong female lead to break through the oppression, to defy the rules, or at least to recognize the oppression and seethe at the injustice. There is usually something or someone for the reader to root. Nothing of the sort appears in any of these stories. Instead, we feel the oppression and read about the injustices with absolutely no recourse. The characters are too ordinary, too weak, and too unlikable for readers to relate to or root for.
—Viola

Now that I’m coming late to the books of Alice Munro, I’ve finally arrived at this: Nothing flashy, no showoff tactics and no clever calling attention to the author’s mastery. The whole-life characters who open their souls in Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman are drawn from a section of the planet where people are clouded in drizzle and where every step is hazarded on a piece of ground that sooner or later reverts to a path of slippery, sucking mud. In contrast to the murky, sliding settings, a continuous, no-nonsense brilliance illuminates every paragraph of these eight stories, and a never-shaken foundation of narrative clarity grounds each sentence. Munro surfaces life’s profundities in lyrical, colloquial prose that extends a sure grasp of the tangled complexities inherent to human relationships, all presented as a simple reading pleasure. The Love of a Good Woman, along with all its faceted depths, is fun. I admit: I have just this hour shut the book and am reeling from an initial contact high. It may be too early in my Munro studies to judge. Nonetheless, I suggest that the most valuable byproduct of Alice Munro’s genius is trust, a faith in the author based upon her thousand laser-points of insight and unwavering commitment to courage and truth. I need the reassurance of believing that somebody knows what’s going on here.
—Allan MacDonell

It's interesting that goodreads asks the question, "What did you think?" When reading Munro there are other questions that deserve asking: how did you feel; what shook your roots; what changed your beliefs? The stories in this collection all raised those issues, in varying degrees of course. Yesterday I went into the readers' comments for this book and was surprised that some people thought there was little going on and thus gave the book 2 stars. Looking at only one story, "Save the Reaper" for example, had so much happening on so many levels that my head hurt, my heart pounded, and I looked up in awe and wondered how Munro could pull it all off in such a low-key but brutal way. Several stories in this collection dealt with the consequences when things are kept mum between the generations or relations. That one simple element in her work(s) could be the basis for a dissertation.And, here is the problem with reading on my iPad. Sure, I have finished the book but, really, I will never be finished with it. So, do I store it in a file to return to months or years later? How different from having an array of actual books here in the house where I can easily return to them for more thought. Yet, so much easier to take a Munro collection on my travels for reading that a suitcase 3/4 filled with books and not enough clothes!
—Frances Sawaya

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