Bibliofreakblog

The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro

In the weeks I spent back home in Michigan after my Dad died, I read this book.  I had been excited to read it when I bought it a month or so before, because Alice Munro traces her family history from Scotland in the 19th century, to their emigration to Canada.  The Oldfields also came from Scotland and England to Canada, and some, eventually, to Detroit.  I had actually thought that if I liked the book, I’d give it to my Dad.  Instead, I read it as part of my mourning.

My Grandfather was born in Parry Sound, Ontario (same place as Bobby Orr, best.  Hockey player.  ever.  My Dad liked to say that if he had been born in Parry Sound, it would have been the same year as Bobby Orr and they would have been friends).  So I got out my Mom’s Atlas, which is too big to keep anywhere but underneath the living room couch, and therefore quite dusty, and I looked up Parry Sound in relation to all the places in Canada Munro writes about.  Huron County, it turns out, is not by Lake Huron.  In fact, it is inland, quite a bit north of Lake Superior.  So, not by Parry Sound.  But it was till exciting for me.

I say all of this because it bears on my interpretation of this book.  I may have been more emotionally attached to it than other readers.  

And yet, every single story is stellar.  Even the ones that I had little to no connection to on a personal level.  

For example, The Ticket recounts Munro’s preparation for her first marriage.  If you know something about the life of Alice Munro, you might be aware that she was married twice, and so obviously this first one didn’t work out.  So when, in this story, her aunt gives her money, in case she has to get herself out of her marriage, you want her take the money and run, but know that she’ll go through with the ceremony.  I like that kind of story.  It’s like how you can read stories about the Titanic or the Civil War, but knowing the ending doesn’t spoil–it just makes it kind of sadder.

Munro weaves so much into each page of her stories.  Working for a Living is about her father, who was a fur trapper, but it’s also about landscape (something Margaret Atwood has written about extensively with regard to Canadian writers), country boys vs. city boys, men’s views vs. women’s views.  Even her digressions add to the story.  She begins with telling how smart her father was, but that he struggled in the city high school because he couldn’t understand what his teacher was saying.  And then she explains that the farms of Ontario had been cleared in the 1800’s (she is writing about just before WWI).  She explains about the landscape,

“The early farmers hated the very sight of a tree and admired the look of open land.  And the masculine approach to the land was managerial, dictational.  Only women were allowed to care about landscape and not to think always of its subjugation and productivity.”

After then relating a short tale about how her grandmother insisted on keeping a line of trees along the field, she continues to create an image in the readers head of the backlot farmers needed to keep behind the fields for wood, both to use and sell.  She writes about her father’s extensive reading for a farmboy, and his love of the wilderness in these back lots.  Eventually, she comes back, subtly, to the frustration her father felt at school, and ties that into his love of nature, to explain that he started trapping in the the backlots behind farms.

And that’s just the introduction, just the background story.  

All of Munro’s stories keep that sense of effortless fluidity.  And yet, every word adds to the story, and every story adds to the saga that is the book.

 
Buy The View from Castle Rock on Amazon

If you like this book/author, you might like:

(my reviews in blue)

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough
Alias Grace by Magaret Atwood
The English Patient by by Michael Ondaatje
The Complete Anne of Green Gables Boxed Set by L.M. Montgomery
The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney
The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence
No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod

Other works by Alice Munro:

The Moons of Jupiter
Vintage Munro
Lives of Girls and Women
The Progress of Love
Friend of My Youth
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories
Runaway
The Love of a Good Woman 
Dance of the Happy Shades
No Love Lost
Who Do You Think You Are
Open Secrets
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
Alice Munro’s Best
Selected Stories