Ben Marcus's books The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women were considered "experimental" fiction because of his unconventional use of...
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Alice Munro is the finest writer of fiction today. That she works almost entirely in the short story form (and sets stories almost always in small town Canada)is much remarked upon by the heavyweight (male) novelists who write bigger, butcher books but genuflect before her, awestruck by the huge, quiet journeys her stories cover in the space of so few pages, so few words. She sometimes travel across decades in a single, sweeping, epic sentence, and she does so without breaking a sweat.
To say that The View from Castle Rock shows an artist "at the height of her powers" is, I suppose, as euphemistic as saying that this is a woman "of a certain age." OK, then. Alice Munro is both: She's getting older and getting greater. Her art and life now have the scope of maturity, and that maturity is the real "view" of the title.
In this collection she teases the borders between memoir and story, and she explores how the voices of family and heritage and autobiography grow up to become the narrative voices of fictions.
It's absolutely wonderful to watch the master at work.
I have only one quibble with the book: Its utterly unnecessary introduction in which Munro explains the form of the collection (this batch is based on family history, this batch I just made up, but none of it happened exactly like this, etc).
Come on, Alice. You the Man. You don't need to explain. Leave that stuff to the pygmies and the kids.
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(10 of 19 readers found this comment helpful)
The Road delivers a double punch to the reader's solar plexus:
First, there is the horror of its nuclear winter - a world emptied of everything but burnt stumps and ashes, traversed by son & father on a road likewise emptied of any real destination. It is terrifying.
Second, there is its language - without herald a bleak description becomes a soaring, gorgeous metaphor (a swimming trout, for example, becomes all the brooding history of the world). A flat, brief exchange of dialog suddenly carries all the emotional intensity of impending suicide. All this comes without warning, and it comes on every page.
For the reader it is eventually as frightening and breath-taking to broach the next sentence as it is to travel the next mile of The Road.
This is a horrible world, brilliantly written. The Road has nothing to do with science fiction and everything to do with the high art of the terrible and the sublime.
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(5 of 12 readers found this comment helpful)
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rhrjruk has commented on (2) products.
The View from Castle Rock: Stories by Alice Munro
rhrjruk, January 10, 2007
Alice Munro is the finest writer of fiction today. That she works almost entirely in the short story form (and sets stories almost always in small town Canada)is much remarked upon by the heavyweight (male) novelists who write bigger, butcher books but genuflect before her, awestruck by the huge, quiet journeys her stories cover in the space of so few pages, so few words. She sometimes travel across decades in a single, sweeping, epic sentence, and she does so without breaking a sweat.To say that The View from Castle Rock shows an artist "at the height of her powers" is, I suppose, as euphemistic as saying that this is a woman "of a certain age." OK, then. Alice Munro is both: She's getting older and getting greater. Her art and life now have the scope of maturity, and that maturity is the real "view" of the title.
In this collection she teases the borders between memoir and story, and she explores how the voices of family and heritage and autobiography grow up to become the narrative voices of fictions.
It's absolutely wonderful to watch the master at work.
I have only one quibble with the book: Its utterly unnecessary introduction in which Munro explains the form of the collection (this batch is based on family history, this batch I just made up, but none of it happened exactly like this, etc).
Come on, Alice. You the Man. You don't need to explain. Leave that stuff to the pygmies and the kids.
(10 of 19 readers found this comment helpful)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
rhrjruk, January 10, 2007
The Road delivers a double punch to the reader's solar plexus:First, there is the horror of its nuclear winter - a world emptied of everything but burnt stumps and ashes, traversed by son & father on a road likewise emptied of any real destination. It is terrifying.
Second, there is its language - without herald a bleak description becomes a soaring, gorgeous metaphor (a swimming trout, for example, becomes all the brooding history of the world). A flat, brief exchange of dialog suddenly carries all the emotional intensity of impending suicide. All this comes without warning, and it comes on every page.
For the reader it is eventually as frightening and breath-taking to broach the next sentence as it is to travel the next mile of The Road.
This is a horrible world, brilliantly written. The Road has nothing to do with science fiction and everything to do with the high art of the terrible and the sublime.
(5 of 12 readers found this comment helpful)