Lives of Girls and Women
Review of the novel by Alice Munro
While it is a novel, individual chapters could be read and enjoyed as short stories. My favorite chapter is Lives of Girls and Women p. 157. But there is a cumulative effect. As you get to know the narrator and those who matter to her the book gets better, much better.
Her first-person narrative feels like she is talking to you. That casual tone makes her concise descriptions of people and settings all the more striking:
“My mother had not let anything go. Inside that self we knew, which might at times appear blurred a bit, or sidetracked, she kept her younger selves strenuous and hopeful; scenes from the past were liable to pop up anytime, like lantern slides, against the cluttered fabric of the present.” p. 83
“He said there was a quicksand hole in there that would take down a two-ton truck like a bite of breakfast.” p. 4
“It was a hot and perfectly still evening, light lying in bands on the tree trunks, gold as the skin o apricots.” p. 41
“… eyes round and wet-looking, like sucked caramels.” p. 134
“they had the Irish gift for rampaging mockery, embroidered with deference.” p. 43
Writing about women in 1971, with the story starting decades before, in the aftermath of WWII, she was prophetic and inspirational.
“There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals.” p. 193
She inserts nuggets of wisdom and witty comments about human nature:
“… he was the sort of man who becomes a steadfast eccentric almost before he i out of his teens.” p. 4s
“It was not the individual names that were important, but the whole solid, intricate structure of lives supporting us from the past.” p. 37
nuggets of wisdom
“There it was, the mysterious and to me novel suggestion that choosing not to do things showed, in the end, more wisdom and self-respect than choosing to do them.” p. 44
“There is no protection, unless it is in knowing. I wanted death pinned down and isolated behind a wall of particular facts and circumstances, not floating around loose, ignored but powerful, waiting to get in anywhere.” p. 55
“Love is not for the undepilated.” p. 197
I particularly like her insights into the process of writing fiction
“The reasons for things happening I seemed vaguely to know but could not explain; I expected all that would come clear later. The main thing was that it seemed true to me, not real but true, as if I had discovered, not made up, such people and such a story as if that town was lying close behind the one I walked through every day. p. 270
“They were talking to somebody who believed that the only duty of a writer is to produce a masterpiece.” p. 70
“People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable — deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.” p. 276
