by Alice Munro
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013
Alice Munro mines her rich family background, melding it with her own experiences and the transforming power of her brilliant imagination, to create perhaps her most powerful and personal collection yet.
A young boy, taken to Edinburgh’s Castle Rock to look across the sea to America, catches a glimpse of his father’s dream. Scottish immigrants experience love and loss on a journey that leads them to rural Ontario. Wives, mothers, fathers, and children move through uncertainty, ambivalence, and contemplation in these stories of hopes, adversity, and wonder. The View from Castle Rock reveals what is most essential in Munro’s art: her compassionate understanding of ordinary lives.
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013
Alice Munro mines her rich family background, melding it with her own experiences and the transforming power of her brilliant imagination, to create perhaps her most powerful and personal collection yet.
A young boy, taken to Edinburgh’s Castle Rock to look across the sea to America, catches a glimpse of his father’s dream. Scottish immigrants experience love and loss on a journey that leads them to rural Ontario. Wives, mothers, fathers, and children move through uncertainty, ambivalence, and contemplation in these stories of hopes, adversity, and wonder. The View from Castle Rock reveals what is most essential in Munro’s art: her compassionate understanding of ordinary lives.
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Excerpts-
- From the book No AdvantagesThis parish possesses no advantages. Upon the hills the soil is in many places mossy and fit for nothing. The air in general is moist. This is occasioned by the height of the hills which continually attract the clouds and the vapour that is continually exhaled from the mossy ground . . . The nearest market town is fifteen miles away and the roads so deep as to be almost impassable. The snow also at times is a great inconvenience, often for many months we can have no intercourse with mankind. And a great disadvantage is the want of bridges so that the traveller is obstructed when the waters are swelled . . . Barley oats and potatoes are the only crops raised. Wheat rye turnips and cabbage are never attempted . . .There are ten proprietors of land in this parish: none of them resides in it.Contribution by the Minister of Ettrick Parish, in the county of Selkirk, to the Statistical Account of Scotland, 1799 The Ettrick Valley lies about fifty miles due south of Edinburgh, and thirty or so miles north of the English border, which runs close to the wall Hadrian built to keep out the wild people from the north. The Romans pushed farther, and built some sort of fortifications called Antonine's Wall between the Firth of Clyde and the Firth of Forth, but those did not last long. The land between the two walls has been occupied for a long time by a mix of people—Celtic people, some of whom came from Ireland and were actually called Scots, Anglo-Saxons from the south, Norse from across the North Sea, and possibly some leftover Picts as well.The high stony farm where my family lived for some time in the Ettrick Valley was called Far-Hope. The word hope, as used in the local geography, is an old word, a Norse word—Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and Gaelic words being all mixed up together in that part of the country, as you would expect, with some old Brythonic thrown in to indicate an early Welsh presence. Hope means a bay, not a bay filled with water but with land, partly enclosed by hills, which in this case are the high bare hills, the near mountains of the Southern Uplands. The Black Knowe, Bodesbeck Law, Ettrick Pen—there you have the three big hills, with the word hill in three languages. Some of these hills are now being reforested, with plantations of Sitka spruce, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they would have been bare, or mostly bare—the great Forest of Ettrick, the hunting grounds of the Kings of Scotland, having been cut down and turned into pasture or waste heath a century or two before.The height of land above Far-Hope, which stands right at the end of the valley, is the spine of Scotland, marking the division of the waters that flow to the west into the Solway Firth and the Atlantic Ocean, from those that flow east into the North Sea. Within ten miles to the north is the country's most famous waterfall, the Grey Mare's Tail. Five miles from Moffat, which would be the market town to those living at the valley head, is the Devil's Beef Tub, a great cleft in the hills believed to be the hiding place for stolen cattle—English cattle, that is, taken by the reivers in the lawless sixteenth century. In the lower Ettrick Valley was Aikwood, the home of Michael Scott, the philosopher and wizard of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who appears in Dante's Inferno. And if that were not enough, William Wallace, the guerrilla hero of the Scots, is said to have hidden out here from the English, and there is a story of Merlin—Merlin—being hunted down and murdered, in the old forest,...
About the Author-
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Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published thirteen collections of stories as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women, and two volumes of Selected Stories. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England’s W. H. Smith Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Man Booker International Prize. In 2013 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, Granta, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron.
Reviews-
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September 25, 2006
Reviewed by Sigrid Nunez
Ten collections of stories and one novel have made Alice Munro one of the most praised fiction writers of our time. In The View from Castle Rock
her full range of gifts is on display: indelible characters, deep insights about human behavior and relationships, vibrant prose, and seductive, suspenseful storytelling.
Munro, in a foreword, tells how, a decade ago, she began looking into her family history, going all the way back to 18th-century Scotland. This material eventually became the stories presented here in part 1, "No Advantages." Munro also worked on "a special set of stories," none of which she included in previous collections, because they were "rather more personal than the other stories I had written." They now appear here in part 2, "Home." With both parts, Munro says, she has had a free hand with invention.
Munro has used personal material in her fiction before, but at 75, she has given us something much closer to autobiography. Much of the book concerns people who have died, and places and ways of life that no longer exist or have been completely transformed, and though Munro is temperamentally unsentimental the mood is often elegiac.
One difficulty that can arise with this kind of hybrid work is that the reader is likely to be distracted by the itch to know whether an event really occurred, or how much has been made up or embellished. In the title story, the reader is explicitly told that almost everything has been invented, and this enthralling multilayered narrative about an early 19th-century Scottish family's voyage to the New World is the high point of the collection. On the other hand, "What Do You Want to Know For?" at the heart of which is an account of a cancer scare Munro experienced, reads like pure memoir and seems not only thin by comparison but insufficiently imagined as a short story.
Perhaps none of the stories here is quite up to the mastery of earlier Munro stories such as "The Beggar Maid" or "The Albanian Virgin." But getting this close to the core of the girl who would become the master is a privilege and a pleasure not to be missed. And reliably as ever when the subject is human experience, Munro's stories—whatever the proportions of fiction and fact—always bring us the truth. (Nov.)
Sigrid Nunez's most recent novel, The Last of Her Kind, will be published in paperback by Picador in December. -
Starred review from October 1, 2006
With this new collection, Munro ("Runaway") more than lives up to her reputation as a master of short fiction. In 12 exquisitely constructed tales, she draws on family lore and letters to interpret the history of her Laidlaw relatives, a tough bunch from Scotlands Ettrick Valley that eventually emigrated to the New World. The title story, set in 1818, details a transatlantic voyage undertaken by six Laidlaws for whom ocean sailing is a totally new experience. Their struggles in adjusting to shipboard life anticipate challenges ahead in America as their fears and hopes culminate in the arrival of baby Isabel, all her life to be known as one born at sea. In No Advantages, a modern-day narrators visit to Ettrick reveals what the family gained (and perhaps lost) by leaving the legend-haunted valley, while other stories explore how the harsh realities of wilderness pioneering affect several generations. All the narratives exhibit Munros keen eye for realistic details and her ability to illuminate the depths of seemingly mundane lives and relationships. Highly recommended."Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA"Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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September 1, 2006
Munro is universally accepted as one of the outstanding writers of the short story in English, but her new book is both frustrating and exhilarating. "The nerve it took, to pick up and cross the ocean," remarks a character in one of the stories in the first--the frustrating--grouping of stories; that statement could stand as the theme underlying the entire book. Munro has always relied on characters' personal and familial histories as chief material from which her beautifully articulated stories are fashioned, and this traditional type of Munro story populates the second half of this collection. There, Munro traditionalists will find much to feast on. It is the first half of the book that is problematic. She introduces these stories as fiction; topically, they are about her Scottish ancestors coming to Canada and the roots and branches established therein. Writing style--yes, predictably limpid and lovely. And they are as psychologically astute as one would expect from a very "smart" writer. But they taste like autobiographical essays; her intrusions into the prose not as narrator but as actual author prove distracting and erode the veil of suspension of disbelief. On the other hand, only purists will howl over the issue of authorial intrusion, and the vast number of fiction readers will be completely absorbed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.) -
Starred review from January 29, 2007
The beauty of Munro's writing is greatly enhanced by audio. Farr is a fine reader in every respect but one—her precise pronunciation of each syllable of every word is often distracting and impedes the flow of Munro's conversational prose, so integral a part of her literary achievement. Otherwise, Farr is an intelligent and expressive reader admirably able to handle a variety of characters and accents. Munro's characters and settings have always come out of her rural Canadian upbringing, but this time she fuses autobiography with fiction. The form arises from a conscious search for roots, for family history derived from journals, letters, town records, cemeteries, distant relatives and close neighbors in Scotland, Canada and the U.S. Each selected story is unabridged, and most of the exclusions are the more biographical ones, though the book is not so long that any needed to be cut. As always, Munro's remarkable insights and exquisite storyteller's voice come through, echoing our need to discover and connect to our own dead people, and therefore to life. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 25). - Jhumpa Lahiri "Her work felt revolutionary when I came to it, and it still does."
- Jonthan Franzen "She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion."
- Elizabeth Strout "The authority she brings to the page is just lovely."
- Jeffery Eugenides "She's the most savage writer I've ever read, also the most tender, the most honest, the most perceptive."
- Julian Barnes "Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can."
- Loorie Moore "She is a short-story writer who...reimagined what a story can do."
- Jim Shepard "There's probably no one alive who's better at the craft of the short story."
- Salman Rushdie "A true master of the form."
- Joyce Carol Oates "A wonderful writer."
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