⇒ PDF The Moons of Jupiter Alice Munro Books

The Moons of Jupiter Alice Munro Books

Download As PDF : The Moons of Jupiter Alice Munro Books

The Moons of Jupiter Alice Munro Books

…discovered with a telescope.” … “Io, Europa, Ganymede, Calistro.” Who amongst us knows why they were so named, and by whom? In Munro’s story that lent its title to yet again another brilliant collection of short stories, the father who is being prepared for open heart surgery, and the daughter, who had just gone to the planetarium, “to chill,” as the expression now has it, prior to the operation, debate the naming of the moons.

This is the 8th collection of short stories by Alice Munro that I have read. The 7th was read in 2014 (gulp!). There are no valid excuses why I have not read at least one collection annually. I must make amends. Munro, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, has her own built-in “telescope” for examining the human condition, seeing so many things that the vast majority of us are oblivious too, in part due to the “light pollution” of the hyperactive modern world.

What is a “Dulse”? Thanks to the eponymously named story, I now know. A woman of a certain age retreats to a coastal New Brunswick town to contemplate the recent breakup of a relationship. In the dining room of a lodging, she sees a man who appears to be 60. Turns out: “That man is eighty-one. Isn’t that amazing? I really admire people like that. I really do. I admire people that keep going.” And he has come to the town to learn more about the American writer, Willa Cather, who used to spend time there every summer. But he is NOT going to write a book about it; he just wants to know. What he did NOT want to know was that Ms. Cather was there with her female lover; an “inconvenient fact” that he must set aside. And the protagonist, the woman nursing the “breakup,” surveys the table of workers who are laying an underwater cable to an adjacent island, and assesses the nuances of each, in bed with her. Hum. All of this is just part of a 20-page story. Munro has this phenomenal ability to distill the action and insights of a 200-page novel into a tenth of the space.

Chance. Blind luck (or not). Contingency, if you will. The unlikely connections that shape one’s life are brought out in the story “Accident.” A married man and a woman are having an affair. As so often happens, they think they are being discreet, but everyone in the small town knows it. Then the accident happens. Joltingly so, for me, since my son would do the same thing, though, for sure, there was no snow in Riyadh. My son, like the married man’s son, would grab onto a vehicle (in my son’s case, the hospital’s shuttle bus, in the story, a passing truck) and let it pull them (roller blades / sled). Fortunately, contingency if you will, I was spared the tragedy in the story. Munro concludes her story by advancing 30 years, using a funeral to depict how that one event irrevocably changed lives.

O, Canada! In reading Munro’s stories, I invariably contemplate how Canada wound up a different country… sometimes a very different country… than the United States, and “facially,” as they say in the legal profession, it should not have, with so many similar roots and geography. Ah, but the differences transcend, and are reflected in universal health care vis-à-vis not. From the story “Connections”: “My father would never have admitted there were inferior people, or superior people either. He was scrupulously egalitarian, making it a point not to ‘snivel,’ as he said, to anybody, not to kowtow, not to high-hat anybody, either, to behave as if there were no differences.” As Munro will frequently do, she concludes the same paragraph by suggesting that her father’s outlook could have been precisely the opposite of that.

I’ve mentioned three of the eleven stories so far. All are great. I’d also like to mention as particularly noteworthy “Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd,” two women in the nursing home. May we all keep going, as the Willa Cather-seeker did, in the coastal New Brunswick town. It may have been a four-year gap since my last Munro. Amends dictate only a four-month gap to the next one. As with the rest of her works, 6-stars.


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The Moons of Jupiter Alice Munro Books Reviews

These relatively early Alice Munro stories are the best I've read and I am a real fan owning four of her last short story collections in hardback. Although in her last collection she mentions that several stories there are the most "personal," I find the the early stories in the book like "Chaddley's and the Flemings" and "Dulse" to the most emotionally involving of any of the many I've read. Highly recommend to any lovers of the well honed short story
Superb! Bought for an online class I am taking. I had only read one other Munro story and was hooked. She's simply amazing. This collection is quite diverse. I've read 7 in this book so far and have learned a lot about characters from her.
As usual, Ms. Munro tells these stories of small town characters of past decades with customary people and their emotions in mind. I enjoy reading about what people think and do without the crimes and warring so prevalent in much literature. These stories calm and entertain me.
This was my first foray into Alice Munro's Short Stories. I am a changed woman from reading them. There is really nothing I can add to the numerous descriptions already made about Munro's writing, her stories, her characters. Examples that come closest to describing the experience of these stories are "piercingly lovely" ; "endlessly surprising"; "magical exhilaration". After I completed the book, I returned to the beginning on my and re-read all the accolades by numerous newspaper/magazine reviewers - all were spot on. Don't just read their reviews, really digest them to fully prepare yourself for the stories you are about to read, all about incredible, every day women. This is one of those rare times I know I shall re-read the entire book again - I don't think anyone can fully digest the content of each story the first go-round. I was highlighting poignant passages throughout the stories - examples

"She hadn't got fatter or thinner, her looks had not deteriorated in any alarming way, but nevertheless she had stopped being one sort of woman and had become another, and she had noticed it on this trip."

"She felt as if she were muffled up, wrapped in layers and layers of dull knowledge, well protected. It wasn't altogether a bad thing - if left your mind unclouded. Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire."

"With him she could foresee doors opening, to what she knew and had forgotten; rooms and landscapes opening. The rainy evenings, a country with creeks and graveyards, and chokecherry and finches in the fence-corners."

"It is impossible for me to tell with women like her whether they are as thick and deadly as they seem, not wanting anything much but opportunities for irritation and contempt, or if they are all choked up with gloomy fires and useless passions."

"Isn't it true that people like Herb - dignified, secretive, honorable people - will often choose somebody like Brian, will waste their helpless love on some vicious silly person who is not even evil, or a monster, but just some importunate nuisance?"

"How attractive, how delectable, the prospect of intimacy is, with the very person who will never grant it. I can still feel the pull of a man like that, of his promising and refusing. I would still like to know things. Never mind facts. Never mind theories, either."

"And along with all this order and acquiescence there is a familiar pressure, of longing or foreboding, that strange lump of something you can feel sometimes in music or a landscape, barely withheld, promising to burst and reveal itself, but it doesn't, it dissolves and goes away."

"I come of straitened people, madly secretive, tenacious, economical. Like them, I could make a little go a long way. A piece of Chinese silk folded in a drawer, worn by the touch of fingers in the dark. Or the one letter, hidden under maidenly garments, never needing to be opened or read because every word is known by heart, and a touch communicates the whole."

"I defend her, saying that she is not condemned to living with reservations and withdrawals, long-drawn-out dissatisfactions, inarticulate wavering miseries. Her trust is total, her miseries are sharp, and she survives without visible damage. She doesn't allow for drift or stagnation and the spectacle of her life is not discouraging to me."

"I can't continue to move my body along the streets unless I exist in his mind and in his eyes. People have this problem frequently, and we know it is their own fault and they have to change their way of thinking, that's all. It is not an honorable problem. Love is not serious though it may be fatal. I read that somewhere and I believe it."

"There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can't know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you've reached it."

"When you start really letting go this is what it's like. A lick of pain, furtive, darting up where you don't expect it. Then a lightness. The lightness is something to think about. It isn't just relief. There's a queer kind of pleasure in it, not a self-wounding or malicious pleasure, nothing personal at all. It's an uncalled-for-pleasure in seeing how the design wouldn't fit and the structure wouldn't stand...."

"There was something about the way he said 'her daddy' that made me see the money on her, the way he saw it, like long lashes or a bosom - like a luxuriant physical thing. Inherited money can make a woman seem like a treasure. It's not the same with money she's made herself, that's just brassy and ordinary."

"What matters is to want to do it enough. To have the will to disturb. To be a femme fatale you don't have to be slinky and sensuous and disastrously beautiful, you just have to have the will to disturb."

"There's the intelligent sort of love that makes an intelligent choice. That's the kind you're supposed to get married on. Then there's the kind that's anything but intelligent, that's like a possession. And that's the one, that's the one, everybody really values. That's the one nobody wants to have missed out on."

Read the descriptions at the end of the book about other short story books by Munro - it doesn't matter which one I shall choose to read next, I'll be reading them all.
Alicie Munro is the finest. Most everyone reading short stories agrees. Beautiful, simple style; natural pace, events just unfold; contemporary or historical context, similar to the US but not the same - reading her work drifts you into another world. High technique in the service of beauty.
More than that is the payoff in each story. Characters and readers move to new places in their own consciousness. Small shifts of understanding. Love. Enlightenment. Letting go . Losing but gaining. Unexpected happiness, unexpected sorrow.
All praise.
Sometimes reading one Munro short story after the other is unpleasant, a series of short trips. Each story may be such an addition to your reading life. Really best to read one and go off to your other reading for a while.
…discovered with a telescope.” … “Io, Europa, Ganymede, Calistro.” Who amongst us knows why they were so named, and by whom? In Munro’s story that lent its title to yet again another brilliant collection of short stories, the father who is being prepared for open heart surgery, and the daughter, who had just gone to the planetarium, “to chill,” as the expression now has it, prior to the operation, debate the naming of the moons.

This is the 8th collection of short stories by Alice Munro that I have read. The 7th was read in 2014 (gulp!). There are no valid excuses why I have not read at least one collection annually. I must make amends. Munro, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, has her own built-in “telescope” for examining the human condition, seeing so many things that the vast majority of us are oblivious too, in part due to the “light pollution” of the hyperactive modern world.

What is a “Dulse”? Thanks to the eponymously named story, I now know. A woman of a certain age retreats to a coastal New Brunswick town to contemplate the recent breakup of a relationship. In the dining room of a lodging, she sees a man who appears to be 60. Turns out “That man is eighty-one. Isn’t that amazing? I really admire people like that. I really do. I admire people that keep going.” And he has come to the town to learn more about the American writer, Willa Cather, who used to spend time there every summer. But he is NOT going to write a book about it; he just wants to know. What he did NOT want to know was that Ms. Cather was there with her female lover; an “inconvenient fact” that he must set aside. And the protagonist, the woman nursing the “breakup,” surveys the table of workers who are laying an underwater cable to an adjacent island, and assesses the nuances of each, in bed with her. Hum. All of this is just part of a 20-page story. Munro has this phenomenal ability to distill the action and insights of a 200-page novel into a tenth of the space.

Chance. Blind luck (or not). Contingency, if you will. The unlikely connections that shape one’s life are brought out in the story “Accident.” A married man and a woman are having an affair. As so often happens, they think they are being discreet, but everyone in the small town knows it. Then the accident happens. Joltingly so, for me, since my son would do the same thing, though, for sure, there was no snow in Riyadh. My son, like the married man’s son, would grab onto a vehicle (in my son’s case, the hospital’s shuttle bus, in the story, a passing truck) and let it pull them (roller blades / sled). Fortunately, contingency if you will, I was spared the tragedy in the story. Munro concludes her story by advancing 30 years, using a funeral to depict how that one event irrevocably changed lives.

O, Canada! In reading Munro’s stories, I invariably contemplate how Canada wound up a different country… sometimes a very different country… than the United States, and “facially,” as they say in the legal profession, it should not have, with so many similar roots and geography. Ah, but the differences transcend, and are reflected in universal health care vis-à-vis not. From the story “Connections” “My father would never have admitted there were inferior people, or superior people either. He was scrupulously egalitarian, making it a point not to ‘snivel,’ as he said, to anybody, not to kowtow, not to high-hat anybody, either, to behave as if there were no differences.” As Munro will frequently do, she concludes the same paragraph by suggesting that her father’s outlook could have been precisely the opposite of that.

I’ve mentioned three of the eleven stories so far. All are great. I’d also like to mention as particularly noteworthy “Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd,” two women in the nursing home. May we all keep going, as the Willa Cather-seeker did, in the coastal New Brunswick town. It may have been a four-year gap since my last Munro. Amends dictate only a four-month gap to the next one. As with the rest of her works, 6-stars.