The View from Castle Rock
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | The View from Castle Rock: Stories |
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| Author: | Alice Munro |
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| Publisher: | Alfred A. Knopf |
In stories that are more personal than any that she’s written before, Alice Munro pieces her family’s history into gloriously imagined fiction. A young boy is taken to Edinburgh’s Castle Rock, where his father assures him that on a clear day he can see America, and he catches a glimpse of his father’s dream. In stories that follow, as the dream becomes a reality, two sisters-in-law experience very different kinds of passion on the long voyage to the New World; a baby is lost and magically reappears on a journey from an Illinois homestead to the Canadian border.
Other stories take place in more familiar Munro territory, the towns and countryside around Lake Huron, where the past shows through the present like the traces of a glacier on the landscape and strong emotions stir just beneath the surface of ordinary comings and goings. First love flowers under the apple tree, while a stronger emotion presents itself in the barn. A girl hired as summer help, and uneasy about her “place” in the fancy resort world she’s come to, is transformed by her employer’s perceptive parting gift. A father whose early expectations of success at fox farming have been dashed finds strange comfort in a routine night job at an iron foundry. A clever girl escapes to college and marriage.
Evocative, gripping, sexy, unexpected—these stories reflect a depth and richness of experience. The View from Castle Rock is a brilliant achievement from one of the finest writers of our time.
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Reviews
Barnes and Noble
Like many of the best writers, Alice Munro borrows from life to create a brilliant fictional universe. Although her short stories are not strictly autobiographical, many are set in the Canada of her hardscrabble youth and peopled with characters whose life experiences parallel her own. However, in The View from Castle Rock, it’s clear Munro has done something different, if only because she says as much in the book’s foreword. Asembling material from her family’s Scottish immigrant history and reworking an older story cycle centered on her own self, Munro weaves autobiography into a stellar collection of intimate, affecting tales that (in a statement of full disclosure) “pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on.” Disgraced “memoirist” James Frey would have done well to follow suit.
