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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Oct 2004, 352 pages
Paperback:
Nov 2005, 352 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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From the book jacket: In Alice Munro’s superb new collection, we find
stories about women of all ages and circumstances, their lives made palpable by
the subtlety and empathy of this incomparable writer. Throughout this
compelling collection, her understanding of the people about whom she writes
makes them as vivid as our own neighbors. Here are the infinite betrayals and
surprises of love–between men and women, between friends, between parents and
children–that are the stuff of all our lives. It is Alice Munro’s special gift
to make these stories as vivid and real as our own.
Comment: This is Munro's 12th book, following Hateship, Friendship,
Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001). It contains eight short stories
(several of which have appeared elsewhere - in the New Yorker I believe) that
confront the facts of aging, changing, remembering, regretting and, of course,
one's own mortality. Three of the stories, "Chance", "Soon" and "Silence",
find Juliet Henderson, a student and sometimes classical culture teacher, at
three different stages of her life; the remaining stories stand alone.
Booklist says the "subject heading assigned to this collection of stories is
"Women--Fiction." Accurate, yes, and helpful to librarians, of course, but at
the same time so reductive, for although Canadian Munro does indeed write about
women, her sheer perception and eloquence make her one of the foremost
contemporary practitioners of the short story in English."
Publishers Weekly says that "nothing is new in Munro's latest collection, which
is to say that the author continues to perfect her virtuosic formula"; while
Library Journal believes "Munro's new story collection will delight fans and
convert those who have never before read her work".
This review
first ran in the November 30, 2005
issue of BookBrowse Recommends.
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Orientation introduces a writer at the height of his powers, whose work surely invites us to reassess the landscape of American fiction.
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