Short Story Wednesday: the Juliet stories by Alice Munro

Recently I read three short stories from Runaway by Alice Munro. All of these stories are about the same woman, Juliet. Together they total about 110 pages, about the length of a novella. 

The first story, "Chance," takes place in 1965, and tells about how Juliet first meets Eric, the man she later moves in with. Juliet had been teaching in a girls school; Eric fishes for prawns and lives in a cabin in Whale Bay, north of Vancouver.   

In the second story, "Soon," set in 1969, Juliet takes her 13-month-old daughter Penelope to visit her parents in the small town she grew up in. Juliet and Eric are still together but have not married, and this embarrasses her parents. Although Juliet's family has never been affiliated with any religion, a minister visits her mother and lectures Juliet about not raising her daughter with any religious beliefs. 

The third story, "Silence,"  takes place about 20 years later. Juliet now has a job interviewing people on television. Eric died years before while he was out fishing during bad weather. Juliet is taking a ferry ride from Buckley Bay to Denman Island, to see Penelope at a spiritual retreat. She has not seen or heard from her daughter for six months. Penelope invited her to the island but when Juliet arrives, she is not there and no one can tell her where to find her. The issue of the lack of spiritual training comes up again in this story.

I liked all of these stories, but I did find Juliet to be an enigma. She seemed to keep her emotions under the surface, and worried a lot about how people viewed her. As is often true, other readers interpreted these stories differently.

I recommend reading these stories all at the same time (or close together). I read the first story, "Chance," two or three weeks earlier than the other stories. While writing this post I went back and reread "Chance" online. I had not remembered that one of the characters, Christa, had featured prominently in the first and last story. Each one of the stories are fine alone, but as a whole they are more meaningful. I am sure I will reread them again later.

"Chance," "Soon" and "Silence" were first published in The New Yorker in 2004.

The three Juliet stories have been made into a movie directed by Pedro Almodovar, titled Julieta. 

Short Story Wednesday: "Runaway" by Alice Munro

Last night I spent the evening reading several short stories by Lorrie Moore. But this morning I heard that Alice Munro had died at 92, and I decided to read one of Munro's stories for my post this week instead. Luckily, I have several of her books of short stories, and the one I decided on was Runaway, published in 2004. I read the title story.

All of the stories in this collection are longer stories, usually between 35 to 45 pages in length.

In "Runaway," Carla and Clark run a stable for boarding horses; they also provide trail rides to campers nearby and riding lessons for children. They live in a mobile home on their land. One morning, Carla sees their nearest neighbor, Sylvia Jamieson, driving home from a trip to Greece. Carla is afraid of what will happen when Clark discovers that Sylvia is home. What happens after that is surprising and unexpected. The story is an interesting look at marriages and relationships.

I liked the story, but it was a little unsettling.

The next three stories in this book are about a single character, Juliet. I hope to read them soon.

I don't have a lot of experience with Alice Munro's stories, but overall, I have been impressed with those that I have read. She is a Canadian author, and the settings of her stories are usually in Canada, which is an added attraction for me. Last year I read a collection of her stories published in 2012, Dear Life. My comments on those stories are here and here. 

Short Story Wednesday: More Stories from Alice Munro

 

Back in November 2022 I read the first eight stories in Dear Life, a short story collection by Alice Munro. This week I read the remaining six stories. Overall I was very pleased with my first experience with reading stories by Alice Munro. I am not sure this collection was the best choice for a novice reader of Munro's stories, since it is a later collection, but there were some very good stories in the book. 

Following are my thoughts on the last six stories in the collection:

"In Sight of the Lake" and "Dolly" are both about elderly women and on the sad side. Since I am also elderly it wasn't pleasant reading. But both were very good stories. 

In "In Sight of the Lake," Nancy has an appointment with a doctor to discuss her "mind problem." She has to drive to a town nearby to find the doctor's office which she has never visited before. She gets lost and upset along the way. The ending surprised me. 

The second story I read, "Dolly," was less straightforward. An older couple, not married but living together, are planning their deaths; he is 83, she is 71. The woman narrates the story. The man decides not to go ahead with the plan because the woman is much younger. Sometime after that, the couple meet a female friend from his past. The man, who is a poet, even wrote a poem about her. The narrator feels threatened by this experience. The end of this story is very poignant.

The last four works in the book are described by the author as "not quite stories." They are somewhat, but not entirely, autobiographical. 

• "The Eye" goes back to Munro's childhood, and is about her relationship with her mother. 
• "Night" describes a bout with appendicitis and the aftermath, and is about her relationship with her father. It is very touching. 
• In "Voices," she goes with her mother to a dance at a neighbor's house. A prostitute is at the dance, and her mother is upset by this and they leave soon after they arrive. My least favorite story in this group.
• "Dear Life" covers a lot of ground, focusing on her father's various occupations and how they affected her life and her mother's gradual deterioration from Parkinson's disease.

With the exception of "Voices," I liked all of those, although I don't enjoy reading about unhappy childhoods, and that is what she seemed to be describing.

My post on the first eight stories in the collection is here. I read this book for the Canadian Reading Challenge. The author is Canadian and her stories often are set there.

"In Sight of the Lake" is available online on The Nobel Prize site. It isn't a very long story so it is easy to read online. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2013 was awarded to Alice Munro for "master of the contemporary short story."

Short Story Wednesday: Dear Life by Alice Munro

The stories in this book are my first experience with reading Alice Munro. The first story I read in this collection was "Train." It was not the first story in the book, the title just caught my attention. It was the longest story in this collection, about 40 pages. 

Not quite sure why she chose that title. The story begins and ends on a train, but most of the story is in between the train rides. The story held my interest but when I got to the end, I was not sure what the point was. I ended up reading it two more times.

"Train" is the story of a man's life after his return to Canada following World War II, covering about the next 20 years of his life.  The next stop on the train is his home town but he obviously doesn't want to go there because he jumps off the train and walks the other direction towards a nearby town. He is offered a meal by a woman living alone on a farm that has seen better days. She doesn't even have a car but gets around with a horse and buggy. He ends up staying with her for several years and fixing up the place and taking odd jobs in town when available. Eventually he does move on to another area, lucks into a new job, and with each move we learn a little more about him. Some reviewers found this story to be sad but I did not have that reaction.

After reading "Train," I began reading from the beginning of the book. The next two stories I read, "To Reach Japan" and "Amundsen," also feature train journeys. I wonder if this is a common theme in Munro's stories. "Amundsen" was also set in a TB Sanatorium, which was very interesting. Most (all?) of the stories that I read so far are set in the 1950s.

Two stories ("Pride" and "Corrie") have characters with physical disabilities and the story illustrates ways they cope with the world. "Corrie," about a woman who is lame due to having polio, was very interesting, and was probably my second favorite in the book. I happened upon a very interesting post about the fact that this story has three different endings in various places they were published (first in the New Yorker, later in The PEN/O. Henry Awards anthology and then in Dear Life). The three different endings for "Corrie" are discussed at this post on the Reading the Short Story blog.

I have now read 8 stories out of the 14 in the book. Some of the stories were more appealing than others, but every one of them was a worthwhile read. My comments on the stories in the book are related to those 8 stories.

In general, the stories sometimes seemed fairly bland and flat on a first read, but as I got used to the stories, I acclimated to Munro's style. Some of them have ambiguous or disappointing endings, but I liked reading them anyway. They all have interesting, if very different, characters and the main characters are usually very well developed. The people are often misfits, not fitting into "normal" society. Often the stories are about relationships.

A small thing, but I like that Munro mentions the town of Kitchener in several stories. It made the setting of the stories in small-town Canada feel real to me.  I know nothing about Kitchener but it is the town that Margaret Millar was born and raised in. Her husband, Ken Millar (AKA Ross Macdonald) was also raised there although he was born in the US.

That is enough for now. The stories I read are:

• "To Reach Japan"
• "Amundsen"
• "Leaving Maverley"
• "Gravel"
• "Haven"
• "Pride"
• "Corrie" 
• "Train "