The View from Castle Rock: Stories

This seller should be a 5 star great seller. Somehow I mistakenly only gave one star.

The book surprised me, it wasn't what I expected at all. But I loved it, the long voyage into history, family-history. And what is clear from the start is that most members of this family have a special talent for storytelling, from the old man who emigrates to the new world to the writer of the book. She knows how to make a beautiful story with little things, small happenings.

Alice Munro is a wonderful Canadian writer. She has won numerous awards for her work in Canada, the United States and in the United Kingdom. The View from Castle Rock is her eleventh book of short stories-and it is terrific. Castle Rock is a high rocky outcropping in Scotland, not too far north of the Hadrian Wall that divides England and Scotland. From that vantage point one of Munro's ancestors was said to have looked out and thought he saw America and inspired his young son to later emigrate to Ontario, Canada. Obviously, he didn't really see America, but the family story persisted. From this story and others told by family members, Munro has created a delightful cast of characters who live, work, and die on their piece of Huron County, Ontario. While the book is a group of stories, they are attached to one another so that the book reads almost like a novel or memoir. Each connecting story adds a layer to the fictionalized family history that she is creating. While inspired by actual family members, the book is not a recitation of fact. She finds a name, a place, and a date of birth and/or death and creates a life. Munro starts her book in Scotland with the story about the rock. Another story tells of the ocean journey that ends in Ontario. Another tells of the building of a farm. Another set of stories comes from letters written by the narrator's father. She tells of the life of a young girl going to school in a remote part of Ontario where she is considered an oddity because she likes to read. Munro's characters are full of life - sometimes pathos, sometimes humor, but always feeling as though they could be real people. I really enjoyed reading Alice Munro again and would agree with her publicist, that this "is one of her most essential works." Armchair Interviews agrees.

The art of short story writing is by no means dead. Looking at the stacks of new books and best sellers in a book store today would give you the impression that everything belongs to the full length novel. Alice Munro has created almost a new form of writing. She specializes in short stories that kind of fit together to tell a more complete story of her life. The stories in this book definitely fall into that category. They are individual stories, complete and independent, but taken together seem to represent what has happened to a person going through life and growing up. In the second part of this book, called 'Home' Ms. Munro has said that they had not been published before because they were too personal. This book, along with her other ten collections of short stories and one novel represent a body of work that isn't exactly autobiographical but which seem to represent her life.

When it comes to writing short stories, Canadian author Alice Munro (RUNAWAY) is one of the best. She has published 11 new collections of short stories, a volume of SELECTED STORIES and a full-length novel. Her stories' timelines and subject matter range from birth to death and hit every thinkable topic in between. She is the master of unmasking feelings through words, and her landscapes are so vividly depicted that one can envision them jumping off the page and into reality. In this latest collection, Munro turns her attention inward and delves deeper into her own experiences than ever before. These 12 stories --- including the epilogue's sole story entitled "Messenger" --- are slight variations and half-true fabrications of actual events that took place over the last few centuries on one side of her family's history. As she writes in the Foreword, "You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on. And the part of this book that might be called family history has expanded into fiction, but always within the outline of a true narrative." The first half of THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK includes a set of five stories, all loosely based on her family's journey from the Ettrick Valley in Scotland to North America and the beginnings of their lives there. In "No Advantages," she describes her poor, hard-working Scottish ancestors in great detail --- half, what was; and the other half, what might have been. In "The View from Castle Rock," a young boy catches a glimpse of America --- and, in turn, his father's dreams --- while perched atop Castle Rock in Edinburgh. (Years later, the affirmation of his hunch that his father was drunk that day and that "America" was merely Fife makes the rest of the story seem all the sweeter.) Here, and continuing on into "Illinois," "The Wilds of Morris Township" and "Working for a Living," the hardships of daily toil, disease, famine and sacrifice, and the saving graces of religious faith and family loyalty, are felt on every page. The second half of CASTLE ROCK is more loosely connected and consists of stories written during but not published in her recent short story collections. "They were not memoirs," she writes, "but they were closer to my own life than the other stories I had written, even in the first person...I was doing something closer to what a memoir does --- exploring a life, but not in an austere or rigorously factual way. I put myself in the center and wrote about that self, as searchingly as I could." And, as in the first section, the characters around this "self" take off and create a gloriously imagined life of their own. What stands out most in these stories (and in most, if not all, of her others) is Munro's uncanny gift for turning a phrase and her ability to capture the essence of a moment within the bookends of a few carefully chosen words. In "Lying Under the Apple Tree" --- one of the best in the collection --- a yo