Too Much Happiness: Stories
by Alice Munro
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Book Summary Information
Author: Alice MunroEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2009-11-17
ISBN: 0307269760
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780307269768
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Too Much Happiness: Stories
Book Review: Happiness Is Reading Alice Munro
Summary: 5 Stars
Alice Munro is one of the few authors I have read who so artfully relates the throes of the human condition through her characters' active and reactive thoughts revolving around people with whom they are intimate and others whom they've simply met on their path through life. Having just devoured Too Much Happiness, Munro's book of short stories, I am reeling from the power of her words.
I have the habit, when reading brilliant authors' works, of writing down certain passages that strike me with their eloquence or bite me with their awful truths.
The following are several extracts, in italics, from the ten stories in Munro's newest book (short thoughts from me tagged on without italics). While reading these clips, as they flow down the page and with the characters' thoughts out of context, I'm hoping the effect will not be too strange. If you take your time with each, and I believe the protagonists' inner thoughts will grab hold of you like they did me so you'll be enticed to read Too Much Happiness, although I don't think you'll find too much happiness overflowing the pages.
Love...if the great happiness--however temporary, however flimsy--of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another. This thought had me questioning happiness altogether.
She was nearly crying with exhaustion and alarm and some familiar sort of seeping rage. This is another line from another story where familiar paired with seeping rage caught hold of me, because of the sad fact that seeping rage would actually sound familiar and resonate globally.
There is something I think you ought to know, said a mother to her daughter after her father's funeral. These may be among the most unpleasant words that person ever has to hear. There's a pretty good chance that whatever you ought to know will be burdensome, and that there will be a suggestion that other people have had to bear the burden, while you have been let off lightly, all this while.
I began to understand that there were certain talkers--certain girls--whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say, but because of the delight they took in saying it. A delight in themselves, a shine on their faces, a conviction that whatever they were telling about was remarkable and that they themselves could not help but give pleasure.
The worst was that her fingers had pressed my back. Through my coat, through my other clothing, her fingers like so many cold snouts.
The yellow paint seemed to be the very color of insult, and the front door, being off center, added a touch of deformity. I playing with the color of verbs.
But only adults would be so stupid as to believe she had no power. A power, moreover, that was specifically directed at me. I was the one she had her eye on. Or so I believed. As if we had an understanding between us that could not be described and was not to be disposed of. Something that clings, in the way of love, though on my side it felt absolutely like hate.
When I first saw the look on Charlene's face I thought that her money had been stolen. But then I thought that such a calamity would not have made her look so transformed, the shock on her face so joyful. When you read this story, you'll be shocked that Charlene could be joyful doing what she did!
From what I had said, Charlene seemed to have got the idea that Verna had actively harassed me. And I believed that was true, except that the harassment had been more subtle, more secret, than I had been able to describe. Now I let Charlene think as she liked because it was more exciting that way.
Memories of childhood were much more distant and faded and unimportant than they seem today.
He knew how much she valued me and now at the end of her life she seemed very keen to see me. She had asked him to get hold of me. It may be that childhood memories mean the most, he said. Childhood affections. Strength like no other. Yes, and the strength of childhood bonds are the mortar of memoir.
He still tells her things--it's a habit--but he is so used to her now not paying any real attention that he hardly notices whether there is an answer or not. This time she echoes what he himself has said, "Never mind. You've got enough to do anyway." That's what he would have expected, whether she was well or not. Missing the point. But isn't that what wives do--and husbands probably the same--around fifty percent of the time?
I have never been so tempted to write romances, as when with Fat Maksim. And he takes up too much room, on the divan and in one's mind. It is simply impossible for me, in his presence, to think of anything but him.
And at the end of his letter one terrible sentence--"If I loved you I would have written differently."
Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind, and when a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her. It will serve me well to remember this pearl of wisdom.
Which surely meant that he would consider she had some hold now, and would have felt it beneath his dignity to deceive her.
He had to be careful about saying what he really believed--that there must be something like intuition in the first-rate mathematician's mind, some lightening flare to uncover what has been there all along. Rigorous, meticulous, one must be, but so must the great poet. I've been teaching for years that writing memoir is simply uncovering what's already there mindfully.
She was learning, quite, late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood--that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements. It could be brimful of occupations which did not weary you to the bone.
I'd have given this book more stars if I could. Now go buy the book.
Summary of Too Much Happiness: Stories
Ten superb new stories by one of our most beloved and admired writers?the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize.In the first story a young wife and mother receives release from the unbearable pain of losing her three children from a most surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other stories uncover the ?deep-holes? in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and how a boy?s disfigured face provides both the good things in his life and the bad. And in the long title story, we accompany Sophia Kovalevsky?a late-nineteenth-century Russian émigré and mathematician?on a winter journey that takes her from the Riviera, where she visits her lover, to Paris, Germany, and, Denmark, where she has a fateful meeting with a local doctor, and finally to Sweden, where she teaches at the only university in Europe willing to employ a female mathematician.
With clarity and ease, Alice Munro once again renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.
Too Much Happiness is a compelling, provocative?even daring?collection.
Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2009: "She hated to hear the word 'escape' used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about." Taken from a story called "Free Radicals," this line may be the best way to think about the lives unfolding in Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness. Real life assaults her central characters rather brutally--in the forms of murder and madness, death, divorce, and all manner of deceptions--but they respond with a poise and clarity of thought that's disarming--sometimes, even nonchalant--when you consider their circumstances. Her women move through life, wearing their scars but not so much wearied by them, profoundly intelligent, but also inordinately tender and thoughtful. There's more fact than fiction to these stories, rich in quiet, precise details that make for a beautiful, bewildering read. --Anne Bartholomew
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