#52 Soon- Alice Munro

#52 Soon- Alice Munro

Returning to your childhood home as an adult can be tricky, the emotions confusing, the disconnect infuriating. It evokes feelings of resentment against unsaid expectations, embarrassment for past failures, and shame about unfulfilled promises. What we are as children will always define us in that place.

These are the same characters as in the previous Munro story, Chance. Juliet returns to her parent’s house as a young unwed mother. This fact has preceded her and caused chatter and conflict between her parents and the town folk.  Her place in the house has been taken by a care-taker, Irene.

Irene seems intent of being miserable. “[Her] wariness seemed hardened and deliberate.” When being asked about her husband’s fatal accident she makes Juliet feel bad by telling her: “’Yeah. Right in time for my twenty-first birthday.’ As is if misfortunes were something to accumulate, like charms on a bracelet.”

Irene’s indifferent, and uncompromising countenance seem cold and judgmental to Juliet and makes her feel inadequate. Irene seems to make the whole family feel that way. Juliet’s father removed the print she had given them, I and the Village, because it was modern and might upset Irene. 

These feelings turn from passive shame to aggressive resentment. “Just what is so wonderful about all this misery, does it make her feel like a saint.” Juliet “felt no real sympathy. She felt herself rebelling, deep down, against this retched litany.”

There’s quite a bit of Oedipal relationships developing in the house.  Juliet sees Irene as a sibling rival.  Juliet also gets jealous of the attention her father gives her mother. Her father has a crush on Irene, and that feeds further into Juliet’s jealousy of her. It’s quite a Freudian case study going on in there, too i guess. 

Faith vs. fact is also a theme.  Juliet has a drag-out argument with a minister about the existence of God, which ends with the minister nearly having a diabetic seizure. Fact literally wins out when Juliet is able to use reason to deduce the cause and cure of the ailment and save the ministers life.

Life goes on, and “home” eventually shifts from childhood house to adult house.

Word of the day: Thaumaturgy- The working of wonder or miracles, magic.

Notable Passage: (not meaningful but I found it funny) “Chagall, I like Chagall…Picasso was a bastard.”

Rating: 9-8-7-7 Total= 31

#37 Chance- Alice Munro

#37 Chance- Alice Munro

Juliet is an anachronism, an oddity, a young smart woman looking for a comfortable place in the world.  She studied the Classics, Greek Mythology and dead languages, all choices that are steeped in “irrelevance and dreariness.” 

“In the town where she grew up her sort of intelligence was often put in the same category as a limp or an extra thumb.” Her experience so far in the world is only those she found in books. Her fantasies of men are that of old tales or the works Shakespeare.  Even her name is the very symbol of the quintessential young lover, which she is destined to become.

She attempts to overcome her oddities by accepting the mundane and trying to have normal college experiences and asserts to her family “I am extremely ok.” 

Her real life experiences consist of a 6 month teaching job and a cross country train ride where she clumsily finds a older man, that she doesn’t find too physically attractive, to become her hopeful lover.  Besides a nice conversation about constellations, I found it hard to follow the attraction.  That she pursued this married man actually made me disappointed and a little sad for Juliet.

Two stories in to his collection and there seems to be a common element of woman settling for less than their worth.  “Odd choices were simply easier for men, most of whom would find a woman glad to marry them. Not so the other way around.”

This was incredibly beautiful writing, although the end was a little abrupt and felt like an unfinished story.

Notable Passage: “The book slipped out of her hands, her eyes closed, and she was now walking with some children (students?) on the surface of a lake. Everywhere each of them stepped there appeared a five-sided crack, all of these beautifully even, so that the ice became like a tiled floor. The children asked her the name of these ice tiles, and she answered with confidence, iambic pentameter. But they laughed and with this laughter, the cracks widened. She realized her mistake then and knew that only the right word would save the situation, but she could not grasp it.”

Rating: 9-8-7-7 Total= 31

#31 Runaway- Alice Munro

#31 Runaway (2004)- Alice Munro

“It was as if she had a murderous needle somewhere in her lungs, and by breathing carefully, she could avoid feeling it. But every once in a while she had to take a deep breath, and it was still there”

Of all the beautiful writing in this piece, this passage stuck with me.  I’ve never read a more poignant description about what its like to be in an emotionally abusing relationship, painfully breathtaking.

And with that, I am introduced to Alice Munro.  A legendary Canadian author, her name is at the top of nearly every list of best short fiction writers, and for good reason.  Runaway, the title story of this collection I cant wait to read more of, is a seamless literary tapestry, emotional but not pushy, grand but no flamboyant.  It’s a piece that stays with you.

Life is hard.  Changing that life, no matter how uncomfortable, unfulfilling, oppressive it may be, is possible the hardest thing we can do.  Carla is the victim of just such a life, but she like many, can’t see the world beyond. She’s poor and lives in a trailer which she philosophically thinks:

“Some people live in trailers and there’s nothing more to it.”

That’s her feeling on most of her life. This is just how it is.  When they were first married and starting a horse farm, she not unhappily saw herself as one of her husbands horses as “a captive, her submission both proper and exquisite.”

The pastoral nature of this piece softens the level of angst for the reader, as her own pastoral setting probably softened her own suffering sometimes.  Their lost goat, Flora, who was put in the stables to calm the hoses was very much representative of Carla, there to calm her angry husband.  But to her husband, Flora was a symbol of freedom he didn’t want Carla to see.  Carla even dreamed about Flora with an enticing Eden-like red apple in its mouth.

There is a lot to this story, themes about anger, about family, about freedom.  Great, great short story!

Notable Passage: *see above

Rating: 10-9-10-9 Total =38