collection an elderly man, seemingly long past romance yet smitten again by an old girlfriend, tries to explain the nature of the attraction to his angry wife: know, it’s not even “You the person. It’s like a sort of aura. It’s a spell. . . . Do you understand? It just strikes like an eclipse or something.” Munro is among the least fanciful of short story writers, seldom resorting to an image or a metaphor. This may reflect a lifelong habit of Canadian understatement a — suspicion of cleverness and a resistance to making too much of things but it also accords with a sense in her fiction — that the world is strange enough, without need of embellishment. In one of those last autobiographical stories, Munro makes a joke at her own expense. After describing in some detail a woman wearing a showy, too-tight dress, she remarks, think that if I was writing fiction instead of “I remembering something that happened, I would never have given her that dress. A kind of advertisement she didn’t need.” In fact, Munro’s fiction is full of details that initially seem distracting or extraneous, because life is like that, and especially life as we recall it. The stories in this volume are filled with incidents, subplots, even characters that at first glance don’t fit the requirements of a classic, well-made short story like those — of Chekhov, to whom Munro is always being compared — and they’re why the narratives often take such surprising directions. In the story about the “Amundsen,” schoolteacher and the doctor, there’s a character both the principals wish weren’t there: a schoolgirl named Mary, clever, needy, a bit of a wiseass, who turns up at inopportune moments. At one point she interrupts a romantic dinner by appearing in costume and insisting on performing a number from M. S. Pinafore.” She won’t “H. be shut up or brushed away because she’s too full of life — or dear life, as the book’s title would have it: precious but also costly and so unpredictable it’s all one can do to hang on.
collection an elderly man, seemingly long past romance yet smitten again by an old girlfriend, tries to explain the nature of the attraction to his angry wife: “You know, it’s not even the person. It’s like a sort of aura. It’s a spell. . . . Do you understand? It just strikes like an eclipse or something.” Munro is among the least fanciful of short story writers, seldom resorting to an image or a metaphor. This may reflect a lifelong habit of Canadian understatement — a suspicion of cleverness and a resistance to making too much of things — but it also accords with a sense in her fiction that the world is strange enough, without need of embellishment. In one of those last autobiographical stories, Munro makes a joke at her own expense. After describing in some detail a woman wearing a showy, too-tight dress, she remarks, “I think that if I was writing fiction instead of remembering something that happened, I would never have given her that dress. A kind of advertisement she didn’t need.” In fact, Munro’s fiction is full of details that initially seem distracting or extraneous, because life is like that, and especially life as we recall it. The stories in this volume are filled with incidents, subplots, even characters that at first glance don’t fit the requirements of a classic, well-made short story — like those of Chekhov, to whom Munro is always being compared — and they’re why the narratives often take such surprising directions. In “Amundsen,” the story about the schoolteacher and the doctor, there’s a character both the principals wish weren’t there: a schoolgirl named Mary, clever, needy, a bit of a wiseass, who turns up at inopportune moments. At one point she interrupts a romantic dinner by appearing in costume and insisting on performing a number from “H. M. S. Pinafore.” She won’t be shut up or brushed away because she’s too full of life — or dear life, as the book’s title would have it: precious but also costly and so unpredictable it’s all one can do to hang on.
Dear-Life-review-by-Ch.-McGrath.docx