Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock
Featured Book
The escape to a better, imagined life, the poisoning influence of pride and the pretensions of class: Munro at her finest.
The queen of the deceptively gentle short story, Alice Munro has always mined her personal history for details and emotional cadence. With The View, though, she consciously turns her most intimate autobiographical moments into fiction for the first time. If you can get past the narrator’s irritating faux Scottish accents in the audiobook version, the first part of the book is a gripping exploration of her ancestors’ journey by boat from Scotland to North America and their early days settling into rural Ontario, as filtered through the actual writings Munro discovered. Many of the themes – the escape to a better, imagined life, the poisoning influence of pride and the pretensions of class – will be familiar to readers of Munro’s other books. Nobody does it better than Munro, and nobody else can render these experiences into words that are so precisely, devastatingly true.
