#394 Dimension- Alice Munro

#394 Dimension- Alice Munro

This was a hard story to read. An emotionally oppressive marriage ends it the murder of three children. Lloyd was insane, getting there slowly, while Doree seemed happy at first, but as it is in this situation, she couldn’t reason with herself a way to get out.

“No matter how worn out she got with him, he was still the closest person in the world to her, and she felt that everything would collapse if she were to bring herself to tell someone exactly how he was, if she were to be entirely disloyal.”

Her fears seemed to be dead-on. When they had an argument and Doree spent the night with a friend to give it some space, he took that as betrayal, and killed their children: “I wanted to save them the misery…the misery of knowing that their mother walked out on them.”

In her emotional recovery—if a person can really recover from something like this—she decided to go visit him in prison. “It was almost like seeing a ghost.”

He was more worried about his own soul--“Peace. I arrived at peace and I’m still sane”—then the souls of his children. He wasn’t contrite or apologetic, just interested that he, himself was getting better. I guess that’s the true definition of psychosis…you murder three people, and make it all about yourself.

Rating: 8-7-7-8 Total= 30

#126 Sredni Vashtar- Saki (H.H. Munro)

#126 Sredni Vashtar- Saki (H.H. Munro)

“Conradin was ten years old, and the doctor had pronounced his professional opinion that the boy would not live another five years.”

“One of these days Conradin supposed he would succumb to the mastering pressure of wearisome necessary things—such as illness and coddling restrictions and drawn-out dullness. Without his imagination, which was rampant under the spur of loneliness, he would have succumbed long ago.”

A doomed, lonely child with a wonderful imagination. He has a guardian that is strict and nobody but himself to keep busy. He keeps a ferret that he has dubbed a God, Sredni Vashtar. The guardian is skeptical of the child’s secret and takes the key that will unlock his secret. He prays that his God will escape these evil forces:

Sredni Vashtar went forth,

His thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth were white.

His enemies called for peace, but he brought them death.

Sredni Vashtar the beautiful

They accidentally allow his pet to escape and worry that they have ruined the one thing he cares about, but he is excited that his God has been set free.

Notable Passage: “The few fruit trees that it contained were set jealously apart from his plucking.”

Rating: 8-7-9-10 Total= 35

#79 Tricks- Alice Munro

#79 Tricks- Alice Munro

This is a tragic Love Story. We haven’t had many of those in the past few months. This is at once familiar and completely fresh.

Robin is a single 26 year-old traveling to Stratford for her annual night of theatre. She likes to go alone and ride the train home afterwards. Due to a serendipitous string of events, she has the romantic night of her life. After losing her purse she meets a man walking his dog that offers his assistance:

“She had trusted him for faulty reasons. But she had not be mistaken to do so.”

They part, but not before agreeing to meet again next summer: “We will not write letters, letters are not a good idea. We will just remember each other, and next summer we will meet.”

But alas, it is not to be. The Shakespearian circumstances that lead to their failed re-meet is heartbreaking to ponder, but as a reader of short stories, completely satisfying. This is a fantastic read!

Notable Passage: “Move and inch this way or that…and you’re lost.”  Such is life.

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

#65 Trespasses- Alice Munro

#65 Trespasses- Alice Munro

This story grew on me as it developed.  I didn’t get the flow at first, and although it came together nicely by the end, I think the story’s exposition was a bit scattered. As always Munro’s characters are thoughtfully rendered, especially Lauren.

Lauren is a 10-year-old precocious and lonely child. “She had been brought up to believe that children and adults could be on equal terms with each other, though she had noticed that many adults did not understand this…”

Her parents are newspapers writers and have a very open style of parenting: “we are not your average family. We like to move around. Try things, be flexible.” This leads to Lauren’s loneliness. She can’t find a place among her new classmates, and has no interest in having the adult-to-adult relationship with her parents who insist that she call them by their names instead of Mom and Dad.

While her parents are out observing the world for stories: “He was hoping that one day Mr. Palagian would thaw out and tell the story of his life,” Lauren befriends an older Woman working at the Hotel Coffee Shop.  Delphine is eager for this friendship, a little too eager. While it never crosses the line to be inappropriate, it’s certainly a bit creepy. We learn later why.

The title references The Lord’s Prayer and the sins of the 3 adults in the story.

Notable Passage: “Everything might still be cheerful but the cheerfulness was hard as knives.”

Rating: 8-7-7-8 Total= 30

#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