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On a clear day, you could see America from Edinburgh's Castle Rock - or so said Alice Munro's great-great-great-grandfather when he had had a drink. Then, in 1818, he left and sailed to the new world with his family. This is the story of those shepherds from the Ettrick Valley and their descendants, among them the author herself. They were a Spartan lot, who kept to themselves; showing off was frowned upon, and fear was commonplace, at least for females. But opportunities present themselves for two strong-minded women in a ship's close quarters...
On a clear day, you could see America from Edinburgh's Castle Rock - or so said Alice Munro's great-great-great-grandfather when he had had a drink. Then, in 1818, he left and sailed to the new world with his family. This is the story of those shepherds from the Ettrick Valley and their descendants, among them the author herself. They were a Spartan lot, who kept to themselves; showing off was frowned upon, and fear was commonplace, at least for females. But opportunities present themselves for two strong-minded women in a ship's close quarters...
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Reviews-
Fiction? Memoir? Genealogy? Whatever you choose to call it, this book marks a distinct departure for Munro. The first half traces her father's Scottish relatives and their journey to Canada in the early 1800s: "Their words and my words, a curious recreation of lives." It takes a while to form an identification with men and women whose names have been quickly rattled off, but Kimberly Farr's agile rendering of each character's unique speech pattern helps set them all forth as individuals. The second half of the volume contains stories that Munro never included in her other collections--not memoirs exactly, but fiction drawing from a more autobiographical base. Everything comes full circle in the end, a fascinating blend of past and present. R.R. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
Acclaimed Canadian writer Alice Munro takes the facts of her family's emigration to Canada and turns the earlier parts into fiction, and the recent past into a tender memoir that offers a glimpse into her own part in that history. Kimberly Farr picks up the thread that Munro weaves, bringing a Scots accent and a harsh sparseness of emotion to Munro's early ancestors and gradually dropping both as they assimilate over the generations. Farr becomes the voice for family members as they struggle in the New World and easily transitions into contemporary times as she recounts Munro's cancer scare. Farr is the perfect match for this exquisite writing. H.L.S. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
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 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).
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