Too Much Happiness: Stories

by Alice Munro

303 pages, Paperback

About the author

Collections of short stories of noted Canadian writer Alice Munro of life in rural Ontario include Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) and Moons of Jupiter (1982); for these and vivid novels, she won the Nobel Prize of 2013 for literature.

People widely consider her premier fiction of the world. Munro thrice received governor general's award. She focuses on human relationships through the lens of daily life. People thus refer to this "the Canadian Chekhov."

(Arabic: أليس مونرو)
(Persian: آلیس مانرو)
(Russian Cyrillic: Элис Манро)
(Ukrainian Cyrillic: Еліс Манро)
(Bulgarian Cyrillic: Алис Мънро)
(Slovak: Alice Munroová)
(Serbian: Alis Manro)

Reviews

[Eileen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m rating this prematurely, since I’m abandoning it.

Actually I found myself glued to the stories once I was settled into reading one (I read one or two a sitting for a few days), but that urgency I think was motivated mostly by wanting them to be over. I’ve heard that Munro is a master stylist, excellent with tight and sharp prose, and a great observer of human behavior. Judging by these stories, she is a competent writer. But her world doesn’t interest me. Her ‘authorial voice’ slides right out of my head as soon as the story is over. Once I’d gotten into the rhythms of the first few stories, I felt no excitement about reading any more. Coming to this after reading Claire Keegan’s short stories, I just can’t see the point in continuing. Nothing about this collection so far has really caught me.


Aside from one thing. I hate reading from an author’s life into their work, but I’m going to make an elementary observation here: A lot of these stories revolve around or at least feature tragedies that happen to children. Murder, injury, abandonment, etc.. (Additionally, I observe that so far, the children are in no way narrators of these stories.) Given that it’s been publicly revealed that Munro was aware of abuse by her spouse against her daughter, and appears not to have interceded on her daughter’s side, this aspect of those stories it applies to took on an increasingly outsized role in my mind. It has become the most compelling part of the collection, for me, and I’m too fixated on that frangible extratextual idea to continue. There’s no bright spot in the stories that is drawing me back; I would only be reading to continue making thready observations about the connection between her personal life and her stories. There are people who will study and biographize Munro, and maybe they can do that. I don’t want to. I think I’ve gotten what I can get from the stories.

This is the first time I’ve abandoned a book for a reason like this (though I’ve definitely abandoned many for being boring) and I hope it will be a long time before I do again. I’m going to read Keegan’s collection, ANTARCTICA, instead.

[Rachel Dressler · Rating 4 out of 5]

all of the stories were good but Child’s Play?? probably the most memorable 4/5

[Aaron Ambrose · Rating 2 out of 5]

Something awful happens - domestic violence, adultery, it doesn't matter much - and someone is haunted by it for years. This character appears calm on the outside but is stoically anguished on the inside. Mustn't let the pain show. What is the current-day trigger that will unleash all this repressed pain? Is there a deep rumble of portent in the unexpected random event on the second to last page? Or is it just moody vapidity? This is the kind of bland, tasteful glumness I associate with 90% of the stories I ever read in The New Yorker - which originally published most of these. A soggy slice of sad cake.

[Marilyn Sue Michel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This volume was published in 2009, after Gerald Fremlin, Munro's husband, pled guilty in 2005 to the indecent assault of Munro's daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner. The stories deal with murder, sexual exploitation, betrayal, shame, and rape.

Munro was convincingly confronted with the evidence of Fremlin's assault in 1996, although the attacks dated back to 1976, when Skinner was 9 years old. Munro did not leave her husband. She may have been a "secondary perpetrator," someone who suffered abuse herself, and did not protect her daughter. Some survivors, such as Robert Oxnam, refuse to identify the names of their abusers as an aid to healing.

There is no doubt that failure to address one's own issues may result in atrocities to one's children.

Munro has left a puzzle for us to think about.

[Anne Moorhouse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alice Munro died while I was reading this book. I selected this book to read while I was travelling through Canada. I was unaware of her fame when I started.

I like stories about women but I found these awkward and difficult. They seemed incomplete to me.

[Abby Kolbrenner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some were great, some were meh, some weird messed up af. Realized I’m not really a short stories person, or maybe they just need to have more happen for me to like them more. These were pretty subtle.

[Susan Blexrud · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alice Munro is a competent writer, but her subject matter is not of interest to me. The creepiness of her stories did not draw me in, and I found myself skipping ahead to the endings. I don't want to spend time in any of her worlds.

[Gabriella Sgro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fiction was my favorite story.

[Angela Lewis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lives and relationships described in these tales are engaging and surprising, the characters strong.

[Anne McKinley · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's been a long time since I have read short stories, and these were a wonderful change of pace.

[Chris Piel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t find too much happiness in the pages but te writing was great

[Maria · Rating 2 out of 5]

Alice Munro is a talented writer. Each story pulled me in, intrigued me and left me astounded at Alice Munro's skill to weave each word, each detail and each thought into short stories that caught my attention. However, I did not enjoy the book because I don’t enjoy stories that are dark and disturbing. Ironically, the title of this book, Too Much Happiness, was deceiving. There's little happiness. Too often the themes were degenerate, macabre and depressing.

[Callista · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rather dark and twisted all around. I’d be more wary about recommending this collection. But Munro is such a master of finding a knot to gnaw on, if that makes sense—some moment that is complicated and unexpected and yet ordinary and almost familiar at the same time. The iconic Child’s Play is in this, and the rest are pretty shocking too.

[Alex McNicoll · Rating 4 out of 5]

five big booms
💪💥💪💥💪💥💪💥💪💥

edit: four big booms
💪💥💪💥💪💥💪💥