Who Do You Think You Are?
Review of the book by Alice Munro
The style is engaging, the turns of phrase are often unique and memorable.
This feels more like an autobiography than a novel — regardless of whether it is based on the author’s experiences. There is no plot. There does not need to be. The reader is presented with scenes from the life of the main character, which sometimes echo one another and/or develop from one another, but sometimes could stand alone, as stories.
A few of my favorite passages:
“… even the tearing of a piece of toilet paper, the shifting of a haunch, was audible to those working or talking or eating in the kitchen. They were all familiar with each other’s nether voices, not only in their more explosive moments but in their intimate signs and growls and pleas and statements. And they were all most prudish people. So no one ever seemed to hear, or be listening, and no reference was made. The person creating the noises in the bathroom was not connected with the person who walked out.” p. 5
“She felt almost sick as they drove through West Vancouver, watched the neon lights weeping in the puddles on the road, listened to the condemning tick of the windshield wipers.” p. 121
“Such things always threatened to happen but they didn’t happen, except now and then to peripheral and unappealing characters. People watching trusted that they would be protected from predictable disasters, also from those shifts of emphasis that throw the story line open to question, the disarrangements which demand new judgments and solutions, and throw the windows pen on inappropriate unforgettable scenery. Simpson’s dying struck Rose as that kind of disarrangement. It was preposterous, it was unfair, that such a chunk of information should have been left out, and that Rose even at this late date could have thought herself the only person who could seriously lack power.” p. 215
