Levens van meisjes en vrouwen

by Alice Munro, Pleuke Boyce (Translator)

Canada, jaren veertig. Als het gezin van Del Jordan van het platteland naar de stad verhuist, wordt Del omringd door vrouwen: haar moeder, een pittige, wat bijzondere vrouw, haar moeders wellustige kostganger, en haar beste vriendin Naomi. Via hen en haar eigen ervaringen met seks, geboorte en dood ontdekt Del de slechte en de goede kanten van het vrouw-zijn.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Canada, Classics, Book Club, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

379 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

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

[Cecily · Rating 5 out of 5]

RIP to one of only 17 women to win the Nobel Prize for Literature: Alice Munro, 10 July 1931 – 13 May 2024. She wrote a huge number of short stories, plus this novel.


Image: Alice Munro (Source, The Independent obit)


This is my favourite sort of novel: writing that is acute, astute, and beautiful, sugaring deeper questions and messages that take time to ferment and mature.

“All weekend thought of him stayed in my mind like a circus net spread underneath whatever I had to think about... I was constantly letting go and tumbling into it.”
I felt similarly about Del Jordan, though for completely different reasons.

This is my first encounter with Munro, and it’s her only novel. It is not far removed from short stories, with Del describing her childhood and adolescence in seven episodic, loosely-themed (death, God, friendships, sex, ambition etc), but chronological chapters, plus a short epilogue in different style. The prose is carefully crafted to seem simple, as are the brilliantly relatable insights and anxieties of an adolescent girl's life.

It’s raw and realistic. It’s subtly philosophical without ever being pretentious. And it exposes the hopes and fears of different and changing gender expectations, without ever being academic or preachy.

Universal

“Where she was going I did not want to go. But things were progressing for her…
She had moved as far beyond me in… the real world, as I in all sorts or remote and useless and special knowledge… had moved beyond her.”

Most of us don’t question our gender, but I expect everyone has pondered aspects of the societal expectations that are based on it, especially in our teen years: whether girls can show cleverness, how to handle relationships with friends and potential partners as bodies change and hormones rage, what ambition girls can have beyond marriage, the meaning of death and life… You know; the little things. It’s not an original concept for a novel, but Munro executes it exquisitely.

Del lives in the small Ontario town of Jubilee, during and after WW2. Her father raises silver foxes for fur. Her mother is eccentric (but with “odd little pockets of conventionality”), opinionated, and aspirational: an atheist who sells encyclopaedias. Her younger brother, Owen, is mostly in the margins, as little brothers often are.

It’s a time of great change, especially for girls and women, and the most influential characters in her life are predominantly female: mother, aunts, friends, friends’ mothers, and teachers.

She reminded me strongly of a cross between a Carson McCullers character and myself (despite differences of geography, decades, and reality). In particular, her tussles with God and religion: wanting to believe and to feel, to belong, yet not quite expecting it, maybe not wholeheartedly wanting it, were hallmarks of my adolescence too.

It’s a small town, but it encompasses a range circumstances and beliefs, both between individuals, and within individuals over time: degrees of conformity, educated and not, rural and suburban, comfortable and poor, religious (different denominations) and not, single/chaste and married.

Nature, nurture, or both? Can we escape our past and our presumed destiny? Is Del made by Jubilee and the women in it, or does she make herself?

Tenses

“It was not the individual names that were important, but the whole solid, intricate structure of lives supporting us from the past.”
Uncle Craig is devoted to genealogy (the past). Mother is devoted to knowledge (the past in service of the future). Others are devoted to God (present and future/eternal), and to romance, marriage, and sex (mostly in the present, but not necessarily in that order).

Teenagers try to wrestle free of the past, of their parents, as they try to forge their futures, and Del tries out different personae and priorities. I felt the gentle pain of small-town adolescence, where there is no anonymity, no privacy. The ambivalent, confused feelings of a child-adult, present and future, about her changing body, the bodies of others, and the implications and opportunities arising, is brilliantly, realistically, comically, and painfully portrayed.

Christmas baubles on a summer sponge cake

Munro has a knack for dropping an unexpected word in an otherwise ordinary phrase - the most outstanding aspect of this novel for me. Most are not quite oxymorons, but they startle, and make me refocus my mind to see things in a new way. We are all a strange and sometimes uncomfortable mix of characters and emotions, regardless of the masks we wear:

• "A delicate predatory face"
• "Horrific playfulness" of hyperbolic crimes
• “Prosaic as a hiccup” (parents downstairs when children in bed)
• "Heartless applause"
• “Fierce but somehow helpless expressions”
• "Authoritative typing"
• "Nimble malice that danced under their courtesies"
• “Putting her rouge on at the dark mirror”
• “Relatives… looking benevolent, but voluntarily apart”
• “My mother’s voice… unwillingly deferential.”
• “Their artificiality bloomed naturally” (women in the presence of a man)
• “I felt my anonymity like a decoration”
• “Nosing along, almost silently, like an impudent fish” (a big American car)
• “Pure-hearted indifference” (brother Owen’s attitude to God)
• “His grinning pessimism, his mournful satisfied predictions”
• “A foreboding, yet oddly permissive, tone of voice” (about sex)
• “Windy yellow evening” (Spring)
• “The landscape was postcoital, distant and meaningless.”
• “A worried jovial face”
• “His face contained… fierceness and sweetness”
• “His dark, amiable but secretive face”

The final chapter is another unexpected contrast. It’s almost from another book, another writer. It’s shorter than the others, and Del reflects on the motives and meaning of fictionalising real life, with a slight magical-realist aspect, infused with the wisdom of one who was presumed a fool.

Other Quotes

No spoilers, just hidden for easy scrolling.

• “The deep, deep, layered clutter and dirt of the place swallowed light.”

• “The Irish gift for rampaging mockery, embroidered with deference.”

• “Knowledge. A chilly commodity that most people, grown up, can agree to do without.”

• Soldiers’ uniforms “had an aura of anonymous brutality like the smell of burning.”

• “A dome of light, a bubble radiant and indisputable… He would flower suddenly as a bank of day lilies.” How Del hopes God might reveal himself.

• “Rituals which in other circumstances might have seemed wholly artificial, had here [church] a kind of last-ditch dignity.”

• “I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds.”

• “We knew too much about each other to ever stop being friends.”

• “It’s the girl who is responsible because our sex organs are on the inside and theirs are on the outside and we can control our urges better” - a friend quoting her mother, who is a nurse!

• Del’s first sight of a penis: “It looked blunt and stupid, compared, say, to fingers and toes... It did not seem frightening... Raw and blunt, ugly-colored as a wound, it looked to me vulnerable, playful and naive... It did not seem to have anything to do with me.”

• “She sent those [school] operettas up like bubbles, shaped with quivering, exhausting effort, then almost casually set free, to fade and fade but hold trapped forever our transformed childish selves.”

• Meeting the parents: “Each of us was suspected of carrying the seeds of contamination… atheism… [and] sexual preoccupation.”

• “It was that stage of transition, bridge between what was possible, known and normal behaviour, and the magical, bestial act, that I could not imagine.”

• “No foul shimmer of corruption… the skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness” - a prostitute is disappointingly ordinary.

• “I knew I was altered by his presence.”

• “Love is not for the undepilated.”

• “I would try to recreate the exact texture of his skin, touching my own, try to remember accurately the varying texture of his fingers.”

• “Sex seemed to me all surrender - not the woman’s to the man but the person’s to the body, a act of pure faith, freedom in humility.”

• “We were close enough to childhood to believe in the absolute seriousness and finality of some fights.”


Postscript 1 - McCullers and other influences

After reading the book and writing this review, I pondered McCullers some more. I had assumed there might not bet enough of an age gap for much influence, but then I found this (undated) interview here, including this question and answer:
What writers have most influenced you and who do you like to read?
"When I was young it was Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee. Then Updike, Cheever, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Taylor, and especially and forever, William Maxwell. Also William Trevor, Edna O'Brien, Richard Ford. These I would say are influences. There are dozens of others I just like to read. My latest discovery is a Dutch writer, Cees Nooteboom."

Postscript 2 - Atwood loves this


Image: Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood in 2005 (Source, CNN obit)

In The Testaments (see my review HERE), this is one of Aunt Lydia's five favourite books! She also wrote an appreciation of Munro in The Guardian in 2008, HERE.

See also

I've reviewed these Munro short story collections:
• Dear Life, HERE
• Runaway, HERE
And this short story:
• How I Met my Husband, HERE

[Candi · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What was a normal life? It was the life of the girls in the creamery office, it was showers, linen and pots and pans and silverware, that complicated feminine order; then, turning it over, it was the life of the Gay-la Dance Hall, driving drunk at night along the black roads, listening to men's jokes, putting up with and warily fighting with men and getting hold of them, getting hold – one side of that life could not exist without the other, and by undertaking and getting used to them both a girl was putting herself on the road to marriage. There was no other way. And I was not going to be able to do it."

Del Jordan, growing up in rural Ontario, Canada during the 1940s and 1950s, relates in her own voice what it is like to be a young, bright and inquisitive girl struggling against the current of expectations. The characterizations of every single person in this novel are simply brilliant and fully authentic. I am confident that any reader could recognize and relate to at least one character between these pages. Del's mother, who sells encyclopedias door-to-door and "could not bear drunkenness, no, and she could not bear sexual looseness, dirty language, haphazard lives, contented ignorance," is often a source of embarrassment to Del. Del's father is not a constant presence in her life as he chooses to remain on the outskirts of town while Del and her mother live in town. Living at the end of Flats Road on his fox farm, "he felt comfortable here, while with men from town, with any man who wore a shirt and tie to work, he could not help being wary, a little proud and apprehensive of insult, with that delicate, special readiness to scent pretension that is some country people's talent." Del spends part of her summer with her unmarried aunts. I think we all have an Aunt Elspeth or Auntie Grace in our lives – joking yet judgmental, flourishing their outworn views of a woman's place in the world. "Their house had a chiming clock, which delicately marked the quarter hours; also watered ferns, African violets, crocheted runners, fringed blinds, and over everything the clean, reproachful smell of wax and lemons."

At the heart of this book are Del and her relationships with these individuals and others – her best friend Naomi, her teachers, her mother's boarder Fern Dogherty, her brainy classmate Jerry, and even God. Her life is molded not so much by the views of these people around her as by her own opposition to those views. I loved her search for faith and an understanding of the various branches of religion within her hometown – with an exquisite sense of yearning she carries out this quest by going from church to church. Her journey is not preachy but down-to-earth and often quite funny. "On wet windy Sundays, snowy Sundays, sore-throat Sundays, I came and sat in the United Church full of this unspeakable hope; that God would display Himself, to me at least, like a dome of light, a bubble radiant and indisputable above the modern pews; that He would flower suddenly as a bank of day lilies below the organ pipes. I felt I must rigidly contain this hope; to reveal it, in fervor of tone or word or gesture, would have been inappropriate as farting." Del also explores the mystifying world of relationships and sexuality, she experiments with alcohol, and continues to aspire towards a life different from the one expected of a girl living in this place of strict boundaries and a time of conformity.

I found myself wholly captivated by the superb writing of Alice Munro. She drew me into Del's life; I recognized and empathized with many of Del's feelings as a young girl. Her curiosity and confusion are a distant yet piercing memory. I admired her strength and her resilience. This is not a young adult novel by any means, despite the age of the protagonist. I highly recommend this book to those that may identify with the struggle of a young person trying to find his or her own place in the world and those that appreciate an excellent literary piece of work. This author is a new favorite and I can’t wait to immerse myself in more of her writing!

[Guille · Rating 5 out of 5]

“La vida de la gente, en Jubilee como en todas partes, era aburrida, simple, asombrosa e insondable…”

Munro lo hace una y otra vez y no sé por qué me sorprendo tanto a estas alturas de nuestra literaria relación (puramente platónica y unidireccional, todo lo demás son fake news): parte de unas vidas normales y sencillas y las torna reveladoras y esenciales haciendo verdad aquella frase de Cioran, que leí recientemente, en la que tan bellamente dice:

“Las experiencias subjetivas más profundas son asimismo las más universales, por la simple razón de que alcanzan el fondo original de la vida.”

Aunque es una novela, la única que ha escrito la autora, tiene la atmosfera y el aroma de sus cuentos y, al igual que en ellos, destaca la significación de los detalles, la precisión de las metáforas, las frases demoledoras con las que retrata a un puñado de personas enmarcadas en los paisajes de un pequeño pueblo de Canadá muy parecido a esa América profunda que nos es ya tan conocida. Un pueblo como en el que vive Del Jordan, protagonista y alter ego de la niña que fue Munro, una chiquilla observadora, inteligente y rebelde a la que seguiremos en su tránsito de la infancia a la adolescencia.

“Creo que va a haber un cambio en la vida de las niñas y las mujeres. Sí. Pero depende de nosotras que se produzca. Todo lo que han tenido las mujeres hasta ahora ha sido su relación con los hombres. Eso es todo. No hemos tenido más vida propia, en realidad, que un animal doméstico.”

En la descripción de ese tránsito se hace un retrato certero de su vorágine emocional, sin escatimar crueldades y escatologías varias tan frecuentes en esas edades y que tanto parecen olvidar algunos, en la que se caracteriza su visión de la vida adulta, sus preguntas, sus miedos a aquello que creen estar a punto de descubrir, los problemas con la fe y la religión, tan importante en todo el norte americano donde la gente se define y la definen por la iglesia a la que asiste, la repentina aparición del deseo, la curiosidad por el sexo, lo difícil que es llegar a descubrir quién se es y qué se quiere, la sensación de ser dos personas, la que sufre y la que observaba el sufrimiento. Cuestiones todas ellas siempre difíciles pero que se pueden volver dramáticas en un pequeño pueblo en el que el control social es opresivo, y en el que impera, con más fuerza que una ley o un castigo, el pavor a sobresalir o a ser el hazmerreír, “lo peor que podía pasarte en la vida”.

En este camino, Del nos irá presentando a aquellas personas que jugaron un papel relevante en su vida de una u otra forma. Así, conoceremos a su tío Benny y su demencial satisfacción por las derrotas, a su tío Craig con el que, gracias a su juicio grande e impersonal, se sentía más libre que con nadie, a las tías Elspeth y Grace, siempre dispuestas a contar historias del pasado mientras, sentadas en el porche, deshuesaban cerezas o pelaban guisantes, a su prima Mary Agnes, a la que mordió con odio en el brazo y el odio le pareció algo muy deseable, a Fen Dogherty, la inquilina de su madre, y al señor Chamberlain, objetivo ambos de libidinosas murmuraciones, a su tío Bill, el hermano pequeño de su madre, de niño malvado y cruel, ahora un hombre amarillento, a Naomi, su primera gran amiga, y a su madre y su maligno chismorreo, a su hermano Owen, con una predisposición ilimitada a aceptar los retos y las promesas del mundo exterior, a la señorita Farris, de quién la gente se reía por su extravagante forma de intentar cazar a un hombre, al señor Boyce, que no se hacía respetar por lo diferente que era de un profesor corriente, a Jerry Storey, poseedor de un coeficiente intelectual tan prometedor que su madre impediría por todos los medios que se hiciera cargo de ella si se quedaba embarazada, a Garnet French, su primer gran amor, del que las palabras le separaban pero cuyos dedos poco a poco se fueron posando sobre su mano hasta cubrirla por completo con la suya durante una reunión evangélica.

Y, por encima de todas estas personas, conoceremos la difícil relación que mantuvo con su madre, de hecho, la novela me ha parecido una maravillosa forma de pedirle perdón. Del odiaba a su madre, tanto como inconscientemente la admiraba, por ese empecinamiento en sobresalir que ella tanto detestaba, por sus excentricidades, por mandar cartas a los periódicos exigiendo que “los profilácticos deberían ser distribuidos por el gobierno de forma gratuita a todas las mujeres del condado”, por su amor al conocimiento, que ella compartía a su pesar…en definitiva, por ser tan diferente a las demás madres y, al mismo tiempo, ser tan inocente y optimista que la obligaba a ella a defenderla y protegerla de todo y de todos. Una situación que la dejaba en una soledad dolorosa frente a sus amigas y su deseado y predecible futuro.

“Odiábamos su inmunidad, su educada falta de curiosidad, lo que fuera que las hacía flotar, caritativas y satisfechas… y las haría seguir flotando hacia las fraternidades universitarias, los compromisos, los matrimonios con médicos u abogados en poblaciones prósperas y lejanas.”

Hay otra persona que resalta extraordinariamente en el relato, aunque en este caso lo sea por su irrelevancia, por ser como un fantasma sin efecto real en la vida de Del Jordan: su padre.

En efecto, Munro lo ha vuelto a hacer y se consolida una vez más en lo más alto de mi lista de autores/as preferido/as.

[Dolors · Rating 4 out of 5]

Straddling two genres, "Lives of Girls and Women" features eight seemingly disjointed snapshots of daily life in Jubilee, a rural town in Ontario, seen through the eyes of Del Jordan, a feisty girl on the threshold of adolescence, that build on the common theme of women swimming against the backdraught of societal indoctrination towards rightful emancipation.

Munro's prose is spare but not scanty. She skips major episodes in Del's life in favor of extended descriptions of the details that really count, details that flood the unadorned first-person narration with fierce authenticity.
Del’s psyche is exposed, devoid of the glorified tint of nostalgia. It is also painstakingly shaped by the external occurrences in a community ruled by the tight grip of a suffocating religious dogma that shears the futures of those who dare to challenge its traditional heritage. Employing the intricate map of Christian sects; Presbyterian, Anglican, Baptist, Catholic and Union Church that coexist in town as a menacing background combined with a good share of disabled characters and some doses of mordant humor -highly reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor’s style-, Munro delineates Del’s personal growth on the choices she makes along the road to adulthood.
Ignoring her unconventional mother, an agnostic amidst an ocean of fervent believers,
Del experiments with faith as she does with sexuality or with premature first love, with rigorous self-determination, always remaining the mistress of her actions. She needs to discover her wishes, construct her ambitions on her own terms and so she dismisses preconceived ideas, even from her best friend Naomi who aspires to secure a good marriage or from her modern mother who covets a college education for her. Her mistakes, disappointments and frustrations teach her the most constructive lessons and set the founding pillars of her path to mental and physical independence.

These thematic lines have been addressed, exploited and scrutinized before, but, in my opinion, what distinguishes Munro from other writers is her ability to construct a multi-dimensional world –domestic, personal and equally subversive– that moves dexterously from introspective narration, minimalistic dialogue and objective narration to sketch flesh and bone characters whose inner struggles make the reading painful at times for the pangs of recognition it provokes in the reader. Munro is unapologetic and so are her characters, which become afire with life through her economical yet incisive prose.
Also, on this occasion, the reader is not only rewarded by the deft unfolding pathos of a classical bildungsroman, but also by the processes that take place in the making of an artist. Del Jordan discovers that her literary vocation will transform her words into powerful weapons that will provide a voice to those silenced by decades of sustained social injustice.
My first Munro, but certainly not my last.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

My introduction to Alice Munro is Lives of Girls and Women and what a sensory feast this is. Published in 1971, it could qualify as a short story collection for some, a novel for others; the seven titled chapters capable of being read out of order and standing alone as short stories, but all narrated by the same character, teenager Del Jordan as she grows up in the (fictional) southern Ontario town of Jubilee in the 1940s. Under the supervision of her mother Ada, Del determines whether her ideal is a life spent in service of a husband, or dictated by her own choices somewhere else. Of the many approaches to this story, Munro's is marvelously detailed, with a warm touch and unmistakable humanity.

From The Flats Road: The Flats Road was not part of town but it was not part of the country either. The curve of the river, and the Grenoch Swamp, cut if off from the rest of the township, to which it nominally belonged. There were no real farms. There were Uncle Benny's and Potters' places, fifteen and twenty acres, Uncle Benny's going back to bush. The Potter boys raised sheep. We had nine acres and raised foxes. Most people had one or two acres and a bit of livestock, usually a cow and chickens and sometimes something more bizarre that would not be found on an ordinary farm. The Potter boys owned a family of goats, which they turned loose to graze along the road. Sandy Stevenson, a bachelor, kept a little gray donkey, like the illustration to a Bible story, pasturing in the stony corner of a field. My father's enterprise was not out of the way here.

In Heirs of the Living Body: Heart attack. It sounded like an explosion, like fireworks going off, shooting sticks of light in all directions, shooting a little ball of light--that was Uncle Craig's heart, or his soul--high into the air, where it tumbled and went out. Did he jump up, throw his arms out, yell? How long did it take, did his eyes close, did he know what was happening? My mother's usual positiveness seemed clouded over; my cold appetite for details irritated her. I followed her around the house, scowling, persistent, repeating my questions. I wanted to know. There is no protection, unless it is in knowing. I wanted death pinned down and isolated behind a wall of particular facts and circumstances, not floating around loose, ignored but powerful, waiting to get in anywhere.

From Princess Ida: The war was still on then. Farmers were making money at last, making it out of pigs or sugar beets or corn. Possibly they did not mean to spend it on encyclopedias. They had their minds set on refrigerators, cars. But these things were not to be had, and in the meantime there was my mother, gamely lugging her case of books, gaining entry to their kitchens, their cold funeral-smelling front rooms, cautiously but optimistically opening fire on behalf of Knowledge. A chilly commodity that most people, grown up, can agree to do without. But nobody will deny that it is a fine thing for children. My mother was banking on that.

In Age of Faith: "Christ died for our sins," said my mother, jumping up. In the hall mirror she peered aggressively at her own dim face. "Well, well, well. Redeemed by the blood. That is a lovely notion. You might as well take the Aztecs cutting out live hearts because they thought the sun wouldn't rise and set if they didn't. Christianity is no better. What do you think of a God who asks for blood? Blood, blood, blood. Listen to their hymns, that's all they're ever about. What about a God who isn't satisfied until he has got somebody hanging on a cross for six hours, nine hours, whatever it was? If I was God I wouldn't be so bloodthirsty. Ordinary people wouldn't be so bloodthirsty. I don't count Hitler. At one time maybe they would be but not now. Do you know what I'm saying, do you know what I'm leading up to?"

"No," I said honestly.

From Changes and Ceremonies: After this, we talked all the time about these two boys. We called them F.A.'s. It stood for Fatal Attraction.

"There goes your F.A. Try not to faint."

"Why don't you get your F.A. some Noxema for his boils, ugh?"

"I think your F.A. was looking at you but it's hard to tell with his cross-eyes."

We developed a code system of raised eyebrows, fingers fluttered on the chest, mouthed words such as Pang, oh, Pang (for when we stood near them on stage). Fury, double Fury (for when Dale McLaughlin talked to Alma Cody and snapped his fingers against her neck) and Rapture (for when he tickled Naomi under the arm and said, "Out of my way, butterball!)

In Lives of Girls and Women: My mother spoke to me in her grave, hopeful, lecturing voice.

"There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals. He shall hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, a little closer than his dog, a little dearer than his horse. Tennyson wrote that. It's true. Was true. You will want to have children, though."

That was how much she knew me.

"But I hope you will--use your brains. Use your brains. Don't be distracted. Once you make that mistake, of being--distracted, over a man, your life will never be your own. You will get the burden, a woman always does.”

"There is birth control nowadays," I reminded her, and she looked at me startled, though it was herself who had publicly embarrassed our family, writing to the Jubilee Herald-Advance that "prophylactic devices should be distributed to all women on public relief in Wawanash County, to help them prevent any further increase in their families." Boys at school had yelled at me, "Hey, when is your momma giving out the proplastic devices?"

From Baptizing: This was the first summer my mother and I had stayed in Jubilee, instead of going out on the Flats Road. My mother said she was not equal to it and anyway they were happy as they were, my father and Owen and Uncle Benny. Sometimes I walked out to see them. They drank beer at the kitchen table and cleaned eggs with steel wool. The fox-farming business was finished, because the price of pelts had fallen so low after the war. The foxes were gone, the pens were pulled down, my father was switching over to poultry. I sat and tried to clean eggs too. Owen had half a bottle of beer. When I asked for some my father said, "No, your mother wouldn't like it." Uncle Benny said, "No good ever come of any girl that drunk beer."

That was what I had heard Garnet say, the same words.

Two qualities of Lives of Girls and Women that are noticeable are Alice Munro's taste and her potent descriptive talent. As a storyteller first and foremost, she rejects screeds and dodges political activism. Her stories are calibrated toward Del's self-discovery, where bitterness is smartly balanced against sweetness and sourness. Along with these sensory explorations, Munro has the abilities of a missionary when it comes to recording a Canadian town in the mid-twentieth century. She has John Steinbeck's gift of watching human beings gripped in sloth, envy, lust and other sins and bringing them to life with a splash of wit. It's glorious work.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There is a change coming in the lives of girls and women ... All women have had up till now has been their connection with men."

A first person narrative from the perspective of a young girl growing up in a rural region of Canada. The mother has intellectual aspirations; the father is a fox fur farmer and very much of the soil. The narrative begins in the middle of the second world war.

The massive stand out feature of this novel is quite simply the stunning quality of the writing. That and the fabulous insights Munro provides about adolescent female sexuality -its gifts, its morally baffling kick-starts and obstacles, its impediments to the fulfilment of other aspirations of the growing self. In this regard it's one of the most exciting novels I've ever read. Almost every sentence she writes is like a fully grown flower, thrilling and somehow inevitable in all its detail. I loved this so much I'm about to begin another of her books.

[Angela M · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have no excuse for never having read, until now after her recent death, Nobel Prize winning author Alice Munro, other than to say that for years short stories just didn’t appeal to me. I found them to be too short, too open ended, found myself wanting just more of a story. Over the last years, I have come to appreciate them more, having found some wonderful connected story collections as well as some amazing stand alone stories. This book is considered by some to be her only novel, but it is also described as a collection of short stories. Either way, I shouldn’t have waited so long.

Del Jordan is a young girl growing up in rural Ontario, Canada in the 1940’s, discovering who she is from the women in her life. Her mother, ahead of the times defied convention and her father to get an education. She sold encyclopedias, had a penchant for learning and lives in town away from the end of Flats Road and their the fox farm. Del’s aunts, stalwarts of tradition especially when it came to the place of women in society, her best friend Naomi and others give Del much to consider on her journey to womanhood.

It’s one of those quiet books without a lot an action, telling of ordinary lives, daily life during that time, yet intimate and introspective touching on death, sexuality, belief in God and the role of women in society. It’s a book that becomes extraordinary because of the impeccable writing and the way Munro takes you into the heart and mind of Del Jordan, how we come to know her and the women around her through such perfect characterization.

Of course, I’ll definitely try some of her short stories. Thanks to my Goodreads friend Patty for providing this link to 25 Munro stories you can read right now https://lithub.com/25-alice-munro-sto...

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

“There is a change coming in the lives of girls and women ... All women have had up till now has been their connection with men.”

This is the theme threaded through this wonderful 1971 coming-of-age novel. A bit of a shame it's Alice Munro's only novel. She is well known for her mastery of the short story, but that is not where her talent begins and ends.

Set in a small southern Ontario town, this story centres on the growing up years of Del Jordan, a smart and perceptive girl who has one boot in her rural roots, and one stretching out further afield.

It has all the ingredients you might expect in a typical bildungsroman: a growing awareness of family dynamics, spirituality, death, social mores, sexual experience, and, especially in this book, the trajectory a girl's life can take if she only dares to follow her truth, beyond convention.

But there is more to it than that. The first thing I noticed was the humour. My goodness Alice Munro is funny! The details and innocence of Del's observations had me laughing out loud on many occasions. She's also quite daring - she is rebellious and unapologetic in her depiction of the female experience, something for which Doris Lessing is lauded, but which Lessing does on a much less readable level.

There's something dated about this book. It has a quaint quality, revisiting a small-town Canadian world - now extinct - in which snobbery between Christian denominations still preoccupies minds, where it's believed that no good can come from a woman who drinks beer, and a mother goes door-to-door selling encyclopedias. It's a beautiful thing. I am so grateful this time and place is captured, that the humble life here is recorded. Subtle but beautiful complexities exist within this life; a million things to reject or hold dear, or both, in remembrance.

Despite its specificity of date and place, I believe any woman can read this and relate. Discovery of self is as universal as a naked body. I think people like reading coming-of-age books precisely because they want to see their awkward fumblings mirrored back to them. If this is true for you, you've come to the right place.

I was also charmed by the possibility that I was reading something autobiographical (after all, Del is a budding writer) and that these pages tell a version of Munro's own journey. Not only her growth into empowered womanhood, but also into the fullness of life as an artist. What an inspiration.

"I did not want to be like my mother, with her virginal brusqueness, her innocence. I wanted men to love me, and I wanted to think of the universe when I looked at the moon."

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published in 1971, Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women feels fresh and new like it could have been written today. It reads like a short story cycle rather than a novel. These chapters are a chronological following of a group of characters in the 1940's and '50's in the small town of Jubilee, Ontario. Each is contained, tightly scripted with each word precisely chosen, layered, and perfect. Munro explores what it's like to grow up female and society's viewpoints on what are and are not appropriate roles for us. Girls and women are the stars of these narratives. In the minor roles that men hold, they come across almost as caricatures, none of them particularly appealing.

Our protagonist, Del Jordan, is a girl/young woman trying to figure out who she is and who she wants to be. I can see myself in her thoughts and some of her actions. Through each story I see her progressively lose more of her innocence. As she approaches adolescence she begins to pull away from her mother.

"Who else had a mother like that? People gave me sly and gloating and pitying looks. Suddenly I could not bear anything about her--the tone of her voice, the reckless, hurrying way she moved, her lively absurd gestures . . ."

She frets about how she compares to other girls and young women. Is there any young adult who never experienced this feeling?

"Well-groomed girls frightened me to death. I didn't like to even go near them, for fear I would be smelly. I felt there was a radical difference, between them and me, as if we were made of different substances. Their cool hands did not mottle or sweat, their hair kept its calculated shape, their underarms were never wet . . ."

Del grapples with God and religion, wanting to believe, and yet not convinced. I was raised in the church and can remember being a young teen pretending to believe; thinking that if I pretended enough it would become real.

"If God could be discovered, or recalled, everything would be safe. Then you would see the things that I saw--just the dull grain of wood in the floor boards, the windows of plain glass filled with thin branches and snowy sky--and the strange, anxious pain that just seeing things could create would be gone. It seemed plain to me that this is was the only way the world could be borne, the only way it could be borne--if all those atoms, galaxies of atoms, were safe all the time, whirling away in God's mind. How could people rest, how could they even go on breathing and existing, until they were sure of this?"

First crushes--sweet. Then raging hormones--more difficult to contend with and containing life changing possibilities.

"The very word pleasure had changed for me; I used to think it a mild sort of word, indicating a rather low-key self-indulgence; now it seemed explosive, the two vowels in the first syllable spurting up like fireworks, ending on the plateau of the last syllable, its dreamy purr."

What I have written here, focuses on Del. Munro's book also includes tales of Del's mother, her aunts, and her best friend. These women are products of their time, their community, economics, and their natures. I can relate to at least one aspect of each of these women. I find this work incredibly rich. I read and spent time with each story before moving on to the next chapter, sometimes re-reading sections, to squeeze out everything I could from each episode of the tale.

"There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come."

[Pedro · Rating 5 out of 5]

This isn’t actually a novel in the pure sense of the word. Whether you have read Alice Munro before or not, don’t go into it expecting an uninterrupted storyline because the only difference between this one and any other of her short story collections is the fact that all the stories in this one are told from the same character’s point of view in different periods of her life.

Because this wasn’t my introduction to the brilliant writing of Alice Munro (I’ve read several of her stories over the years) and I always wished she’d also write novels instead of short stories, I went into this one with a lot of anticipatory feelings.

And I wasn’t disappointed. From page one, I read it all with a smile on my face. When I wasn’t smiling I was actually laughing out loud and that was the biggest surprise for me about this book.

How funny was this! And I so much needed a good laugh (can I have some more, please!). If you have read Alice Munro you know she’s not what we’d call a “funny” kind of writer and if you haven’t, well, now you know what to expect.

Munro’s stories are all about ordinary life. As far as I’m concerned she has never written a story that wasn’t focused on things like relationships, marriage, family, friendship, love, etc. You get the idea.

For me, the best way to read Munro is to take it slowly; to savour every word and appreciate every nuance.

Read one story at the time and take a break. Let it all sink in before you get to the next one. You won’t regret it.

What’s simple is true.

If we had been older we would certainly have hung up, haggled over the price of reconciliation, explained and justified and perhaps forgiven, and carried this into the future with us, but as it was we were close enough to childhood to believe in the absolute seriousness and finality of some fights, unforgivability of some blows. We have seen in each other what we couldn’t bear, and we had no idea that people do see that, and go on, and hate and fight and try to kill each other, various ways, then love some more.

[Garima · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thousands of questions which rise at different stages of life need not find answers but they give birth to a colorful diorama which has its share of black and white shades too. I have little to say here but for the past few days I was thinking about this book and the lives it depicted. Lives of Girls, lives of Women, lives which are similar and different than ours. Alice Munro doesn’t glorify anything and at the same time she brings out the essence of reality in a glorious way. She writes with a sublime understanding of a born writer which in turn reveals the human emotions in the best and simple way which subtly testifies the power of literature.

People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.

She acquaint us with her quotidian town with regular folks which gradually makes several train of thoughts run through our protagonist’s mind that carry her from a diffident childhood to curious adolescence and finally to the dynamic years of youth where the confrontation with numerous choices, magnanimous ambitions and prophetic quotes helps in delineating a life which was all set to make a deep impact with her words.

There is still time for me to get the Nobel Prize...(But)You know I’m kidding. We could not get away from the Jubilee belief that there are great, supernatural dangers attached to boasting, or having high hopes of yourself. Yet what really drew and kept us together were these hopes, both denied and admitted, both ridiculed and respected in each other.

I smiled amidst tears and rejoiced at finding a book which gave me much more than I’m being able to express.

Highly recommended, of course.

[Josu Diamond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Increíble novela sobre el papel de la mujer en una época complicada, sobre la sexualidad, los tabúes y el querer ir a contracorriente.

Lo más destacable de La vida de las mujeres es sin duda la magistral manera en la que Alice Munro expresa sus ideas. Toda la historia está increíblemente bien narrada, plasmando perfectamente situaciones que consiguen conectar con el lector, y sobre todo, convirtiendo la vida de la protagonista en algo íntimo a la par que público.

No esperaba que la historia ahondase en temas de un modo tan explícito, pero es más que interesante ver cómo florece la sexualidad de Del, y de cómo tiene que luchar contra lo que la sociedad le dicta. El mensaje que la novela transmite es un mensaje de fuerza, de lucha y sobre todo, de crítica al patriarcado.

De verdad, me ha gustado muchísimo. Se tocan tantos temas y de un modo tan magistral que me es imposible hablar de la novela en unas pocas líneas. Ha sido una lectura increíble, me ha ayudado a descubrir una autora que sé que me va a gustar en otras novelas (su estilo es impecable, en serio), y por supuesto me ha dejado con un buen sabor de boca. No todos los días se leen novelas tan buenas.

[Raul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I gave myself two days to settle with this book before even attempting a review. Two days of thinking and reflecting and confirming the marvel that is this book. As one can tell from the title of the book, Munro focuses on the relationships between girls and women in this book and each chapter marked a new development for Del, the protagonist of this story.

Del is a precocious girl living first at the outskirts and then in the poor small town of Jubilee, Canada. Her mother writes in the paper and sells encyclopedias, and is considered an eccentric for her agnosticism, beliefs in women’s reproductive rights and other notions that of course must have been extremely “liberal” in a small and religious town in the 1940s, and her father is a fox farmer who lingers at the edges of the story for the most part.

Told in the first person and from Del’s point of view, we journey with her through her childhood and the characters that people her life and thoughts, her awakenings and conflicts and disasters and emerge with her at the end, fully nourished. The kind of story that grows and grows with each turn of the page, filled with brilliant understandings of life, death, spiritualit(ies)y, friendships and love.

One of the most exciting and fascinating aspects of this story is the town of Jubilee itself and the rich detail Munro furnishes it with. From its economic and recreational activities to the townspeople themselves, she creates such an intricate mesh, a breathing steaming town.
If you liked Toni Morrison’s Sula, William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia or The Neapolitan Novels of Elena Ferrante, then you’ll most likely like this one too. With this book Munro solidifies her place in my heart as one of my favourite writers, a great book.

[Ratko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Волим како Алис Манро пише - једноставно, дискретно, смирено, без језичких вратоломија и ватромета.
Овде је реч о одрастању једне девојчице у дубокој провинцији Онтарија, о детињству проведеном на фарми лисица, о родитељима и рођацима, о првим љубавима, откривању сексуалности, али и девијацијама канадског малограђанског друштва. Све је дато онако како јесте, без улепшавања и покушавања беспотребног објашњавања. Право уживање.

[Flo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book closer to a life journey than to a novel structure, because life is more about experiences than plots. That being said, I understand why Alice Munro wrote more short stories than novels. When you write a short story, it is easier to show the importance of a moment and make a character live the truest sentiment of their life. When you write a novel as a collection of short stories, as in this case, you can't help but make these moments a little bit smaller than they would be on their own.

[Gabrielle (Reading Rampage) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, the coming of age/sexual awakening novel. We just can’t get enough of that, can we? Probably because we’ve all been there, and I think we love to make ourselves cringe reading about how other people lived it. We relate, we try not to judge, we silently thank god we don’t have to go through that again…

Alice Munro’s only novel made me smile, and it made me grateful I didn’t come of age in the 50s in rural Ontario. Del’s story is as familiar as can be: she is smart and awkward, her parents embarrass her deeply, she doesn’t quite understand her friends – much less the boys she grows up around. She loves books and is disappointed that life can’t be as interesting as they are. In other words, not a new story, but one told with gentle humor and tenderness. The first half, which introduces the reader to Del’s family and to the small town of Jubilee (and its eccentric inhabitants – those small town are always full of eccentrics!) was sweet but felt a little slow. The second half, however, when Del’s consciousness begins to expand, felt much more poignant.

Munro beautifully captured how strange and confusing the awkward transition from girl to woman is, the weird pangs of adolescence. Del understands all too well that the expectations people have towards her are not the same as they have towards boys. She feels trapped by a gender-based determinism; she wants to be her own person, not a girl as the people of Jubilee define it, or not even as her mother would define it – she wants to create her own definition.

I think that ultimately, this is the sentiment that made “Lives of Girls and Women” stand out for me in the sea of bildungsromans out there. Del and her craving both for romantic passion and for a freedom that goes beyond being a girl felt achingly familiar, and the bittersweet knowledge that if she stayed in Jubilee, she would never find what she was looking for. While the story is open-ended, I like to imagine her hopping on a train or a bus and going off to Toronto or Montreal, and finding what people like her can never find in small towns.

[Antoinette · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book by Alice Munro! I have previously read two other books by the author, and I can’t say that either enthralled me. This is her only novel and I thought it was perfect!!
The time frame is post WWII- late 40’s to early 50’s. Del is growing up in small town Ontario. (As the author did). I did not grow up in that period, but I remember being a teenage girl with weighty thoughts of the world. Del explores/ reflects on her mother, religion, boys and sex.

“What was a normal life.”

In small town Ontario, at that time, normal life for most women was getting married and having children. Del can’t see herself in that mould. I loved watching her evolve- really. I loved the way her mind worked.

I always think of Alice Munro as a serious, high brow author which she most certainly is, but there is humour in this book, which felt so unexpected. Quite a few times she had me chortling.

“ What good is it if you can read Plato and never clean your own toilet.”
“Love is not for the undepilated.”

Many thanks to Candi, whose review made me very interested in reading this book and many thanks to the Calgary Public Library, as they are having an online discussion of this book on Nov 18, so made me bump it up my list.

I highly recommend this book!!

[Caterina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alice Munro: Subversive Autobiographer of Everywoman

People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.

In my review of Runaway I wrote Alice Munro has such uncanny insight into people's interior lives and subtle interpersonal dynamics, it's almost indecent. This, my third by Munro, seemed at first different, gentler. But no. Just, maybe, stealthier. Like one of those wasps that lays its eggs inside another creature. Although the details of my life and personality are not (I think) very much like those of Munro’s protagonists, by touching some deep commonalities, Munro somehow makes her characters’ experiences happen to me — right here, right now. I'm reading along calmly, and suddenly it hits, full intensity.

My initial discomfort gives way to a sense of wonder and amazement at the nearness to life of these unvarnished experiences of girls and women during a time — in history and in a girl’s individual life — when limitation is just opening out to possibility. Set in the post-World War II years, published in 1971, this book is still fresh.

Munro has described this book as “autobiographical in form but not in fact.” It feels autobiographical and intimate. Although described as Munro’s only novel, it is really a collection of sequential short stories, each of which could stand alone, all narrated in the first person by the same character, a girl growing up in small-town Ontario, Canada. This structure makes the book tighter and more consistently engaging than a novel. Del Jordan navigates friendships, family, encounters with the world of boys and men, flirtations with some of the town’s religious offerings — and discovers a desire to live uncircumscribed by limitations placed on girls. She considers her mother’s word of warning:

... I felt that it was not so different from all the other advice handed out to women, to girls, advice that assumed being female made you damageable, that a certain amount of carefulness and solemn fuss and self-protection were called for, whereas men were supposed to be able to go out and take on all kinds of experiences and shuck off what they didn’t want and come back proud. Without even thinking about it, I had decided to do the same.

Seemingly, thankfully, the time has come when this can happen. Yet always complex, Munro (without explicitly pointing out the irony) later brings Del into contact with a young man who has ruined his life — not by sex, as a girl might have, but by violence — and is now seeking his own second chance. Yet can unwanted experience so easily be shucked off? And in another, chilling story, we glimpse the consequences of experience and responsibility shucked off in an extreme way.

Though at least two of the seven stories have deeply tragic elements, most are lightened and embellished with subtle humor. Del’s mother, an earnest, self-styled missionary of secular enlightenment who tries to sell the local farming families encyclopedias, amusingly clashes with Del’s father’s independent yet passive-aggressive maiden farmer sisters. Munro seems to celebrate both -- and Del’s personality takes from both.

My mother went along straight lines. Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace wove in and out around her . . .They had the Irish gift for rampaging mockery embroidered with deference.

If I had to compare Munro’s writing to another's, it would be Eudora Welty's — and maybe Flannery O’Connor's — both of whom she claimed as inspirations. Like Welty, she has a social subtlety, an emotional intelligence that is beyond my ken. Like both, she’s a conjurer of place, the suffocations and sensualities of small town and rural environment, and her turns of phrase are fresh and original without showing off. But Munro is modern. More than any other writer I’ve encountered she conjures the realities and the inner movements of sexual attraction and relationships between women and men -- from the women's perspective. While Del's best friend Naomi joins the town’s cohort of working women — living independently and taking fiancés who become lovers while they prepare for traditional marriage, Del navigates a sometimes hilarious boy-girl friendship with Jerry Storey, the town’s only intellectual boy in her age range. But their semi-chaste semi-sexual overtures, motivated to some degree by "scientific curiosity," are overthrown by the magnetic pull of pure attraction between Del and an earnest young country man named Garnet French.

Nothing that could be said by us would bring us together; words were our enemies. What we knew about each other was only going to be confused by them. This was the knowledge that is spoken of as “only sex,” or “physical attraction.” I was surprised, when I thought about it—am still surprised—at the light, even disparaging tone that is taken as if this was something that could be found easily, every day. . . . seeing the world dense and uncomplicated but appallingly unsecretive; the world I saw with Garnet was something not far from what I thought animals must see, the world without names.

These scenes, these chapters are stunning. And on reflection, it seems to me that this was the way that many people once found their husband or wife, in societies where individual choice rather than parental arrangement holds sway. (And probably still is.) I had to wonder whether Del's mismatched parents had come together this way, as they managed the post-passion years of their marriage by living essentially separate lives.

Munro brought out in the open all sorts of unspoken things that happen to girls and women. In one especially uncomfortable story from the perspective of 2018, the young teen Del goes along with and rebelliously encourages a seduction by one of her teachers -- one of those teachers about whom my classmates and I would whisper the word "pervert" in morbid fascination.

He had a fine professional voice, welcome as dark chocolate flowing in and out of the organ music on the Sunday afternoon program In Memorium, sponsored by a local funeral parlor.

Munro was writing this intimate, close-to-life autobiographical fiction two generations before contemporary Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard (whose work I like very much) — but unlike Knausgaard — at least in this book — Munro does not truck in guilt or shame. I wondered about this — it doesn’t need to be neurotic like Knausgaard’s, but something human seems missing when it doesn’t come up at all. On the other hand, Munro nails those times when we are just not sorry. Del, and maybe Munro, consciously rebelled against society's subtle and unsubtle shaming of girls and women. This attitude sharpens the edge of these well-honed stories.

The book ends with an epilogue where the mature Del looks back on her journey learning to craft fiction. At first, she turns the lives of her fellow townspeople into amusingly grotesque and macabre tales — until, perhaps, she realizes, that their ordinary, linoleum-paved lives are far deeper and more fascinating.

[N · Rating 5 out of 5]

RIP Alice Munro.

It’s been a while since I picked up a book by Alice Munro, but reading this only "novel" was more like reading separate short stories rather than one cohesive text, only with the same character, Del Jordan narrating and observing thoughtfully on the outside, though it is her story, and the story of her relationship with her feminist mother, and friendships living in rural Ontario.

The novel captures the small town angst and the need to be seen beyond as gossip. Munro's characters are all complex in their beliefs, contradictory, but always written with empathy.

These small details are perfectly captured in two masterful chapters: the title chapter, where Del and her friend Naomi are preoccupied with the thought of sex and experiencing puberty.

They have a fascination with their mother's friend Fern Dougherty, and her relationship with the bachelor, Mr. Chamberlain. Little does Del know, but this fascination becomes a coming of age tale where one might think that an encounter between Del and Mr. Chamberlain is completely inappropriate- but at the same them, mixed emotions are spelled out, and there is much confusion and tension in what is in the law's eyes, indeed a sinful act, "it looked blunt and stupid, compared, say, to fingers and toes with their intelligent expressiveness" (Munro 186).

"Baptizing" is also another bittersweet coming of age tale: Del finds herself in competition academically with Jerry Storey who supposedly has a higher IQ and much more privileged than her. But because she is longing to be noticed by boys in a time of blossoming sexuality, she allows to expose her naked body to him then experiencing a hilariously comic and horrifying situation that calls for her to run home without her clothes, "this was the knowledge that is spoken of as "only sex, or physical attraction" (Munro 242). Then she meets Garnet, charismatic and quietly brooding where she experiences first love, "it did seem almost too private, even lonely a thing, to find at the heart of love...we had come out on another level-more solid, less miraculous, where cause and effect must be acknowledged; and love begins to flow in a deliberate pattern" (Munro 251).

This eventually changes as Garnet's need to control and make a baptized girl out of her becomes a surprising and awful memory- both interactions with Garnet and Jerry change her life.

Ultimately, this novel is another example that shows what a mistress of the craft Alice Munro is as a writer- with the microscopic tendency to capture every minute detail and heartache in each story with a power that lingers.

[Laysee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lives of Girls and Women: A Novel is the only novel by Canadian author, Alice Munro. It is an impressively clear-eyed portrayal of life in rural Ontario in the 1940s. The social complexities women encounter in that era are revealed with astounding literary and emotional depth. There are lines I read and re-read for their transparency in nailing a subtle emotion or distilling an epiphanic moment, marveling at how elegantly and perceptively Munro gave expression to the unutterable.

The story is told from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, Del Jordan, and traces her development from childhood to young adulthood. We first see her as an impish girl fishing at the Grenoch swamp with Owen, her little brother, and Uncle Benny, a socially awkward and lonely bachelor friend of the family. It is not an uncommon coming-of-age story of a girl navigating the academic and social demands of school, deciphering the undercurrents in domestic relations, defining her own spiritual beliefs, testing the boundaries of physical intimacy, seeking love, and finding her way in life.

What gives the story its strong flavor of verisimilitude is its nuanced rendering of the invisible forces that shape emotions and drive behavior. Del describes the “nimble malice” she observes between her mother and her two aunts, Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace: “My mother’s disapproval was open and unmistakable, like heavy weather; theirs came like tiny razor cuts, bewildering, in the middle of kindness. They had the Irish gift for rampaging mockery, embroidered with deference.” Animosity in all its subtle glory. Munro discloses Del’s conflicting wish to be loyal to her mother who is trying to better herself and her embarrassment at her shabby housekeeping and combatant tactics as an encyclopedia seller. Del and her best friend, Naomi, have a grand dislike of the popular girls in school. She let on, “We hate their immunity, well-bred lack of curiosity, whatever kept them floating, charitable and pleased, on the surface of life in Jubilee, and would float them on to sororities, engagements, marriages to doctors or Lawyers in more prosperous places far away.” Relatable even if shamefacedly regrettable.

Life in the 1940s is limited and limiting for women. Women get married and are expected to take pride in housekeeping, and making sure that over everything there is “the clean, reproachful smell of wax and lemons”. A pregnant unwed woman’s end is to drown herself in the Wawanash River. Of her school life, Del reflected, “I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds - this was a comfort to me.” She is a girl after my own heart. A bright young woman who aces exams and lives in words, she dreams of securing a scholarship that will liberate her from life in a small town. Alas, that dream is ruinously “sabotaged by love”. A notable chapter describes Del’s fight with her boyfriend (a born again Baptist) who is forcibly trying to baptize Del in the river as a precondition of marriage. It becomes a revelatory moment for Del. I cheered her assertion of her precious personhood.

Read Lives of Girls and Women: A Novel. Munro’s prose is impeccable; her insights rich and remarkable. This is my introduction to Alice Munro. Oh, why did I wait so long to get acquainted? I definitely want to read her short stories. Among the many literary accolades she has received are the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature for her work as “master of the contemporary short story” and the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work.

[Chrissie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although I loved the start, my appreciation sank the further I read. I became less involved and cared less and less what happened to the characters. The book ended up being simply an OK read.

What we have here are interconnected stories about a few characters. The stories read as a novel.

The central protagonist is a young girl and then with the passage of years a teenager. She lives first on the outskirts and then in the center of a small Canadian town, Jubilee in Ontario. The time period is the 1940s, so during and after the Second World War. The story is a coming of age tale. Much of it focuses upon her perception of sex. The writing is at times bordering on the graphic. The physical rather than the emotional takes center stage. A second topic is the girl’s coming to terms with her religious beliefs—often in contrast to her mother’s beliefs. She must figure out where she stands and in doing so, she realigns her relationship with her mother too.

This book might appeal more to younger readers.

Although I do think these questions often arise at puberty, I quite simply could not relate to the questions troubling the girl. Her name is, by the way, Del Jordan. I didn’t relate to boys as she did. As a child of the 60s, I was less reserved, more open to the naturalness of naked bodies. Religion was a subject of little concern to me.

Then there is the prose. I wondered why I wasn’t seeing or appreciating what others do. For me the prose is convoluted. If you are thinking of reading this book, I would recommend your looking at the book’s quotes. If they speak to you, good. Maybe then the book will fit you better than it did me. Here's my favorite line: "Christmas baubles on a summer sponge cake." It's simple. It sparkles. One more quote: “Sex seemed to me all surrender - not the woman’s to the man but the person’s to the body, an act of pure faith, freedom in humility.” For me, the line would have been better had it stopped after the word "body".

I was drawn in by a character, whom we meet at the start. Uncle Benny, he’s named. Unfortunately, Uncle Benny, this guy who is nobody’s uncle, pretty much disappears from the story. In any case, he doesn’t play a central role. I wish he had. It was him, trapsing around in his old clothes and rubber boots, that I relate to best.

Rosemary Ferguson reads the audiobook with panache. She sings the songs. She gives us a performance that is topnotch. The characters’ voices capture who they are perfectly. Five stars for the audio narration. It’s such a shame that the book itself left me cold.

I don’t know if I am going to read more by the author. If I do, it will be The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose because it too is supposed to be a novel rather than a collection of stories.


********************

*The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose TBR
*Runaway TBR
*The View from Castle Rock 3 stars
*Lives of Girls and Women 2 stars

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a little surprised by the claim on the blurb of this book that this is Munro's only novel, if only because to me its structure is very similar to that of the only other Munro book I have read, The Beggar Maid. In both cases a story is told in episodes each of which could work as a short story or novella, but the whole adds up to something more like a novel.

Once again Munro writes beautifully and perceptively about fairly humdrum subjects, this time the childhood and rites of passage of a girl, Del, growing up in a small town in rural Ontario. A pleasure to read.

[cristina c · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un racconto di formazione - autobiografico nella forma ma non nella sostanza come precisa la Munro stessa, anche se le analogie con la sua storia personale sono molte - scandito attraverso le tappe dell'infanzia e adolescenza.
La vita in famiglia, la scuola, i misticismi della preadolescente, la prima vera amica, la scoperta del sesso, le ambizioni e le delusioni prima di entrare nella età adulta e l'avvio verso la passione della scrittura.

È una delle prime prove della Munro, il primo e unico romanzo pubblicato nel 1971 quando aveva all'attivo solo una raccolta di racconti e quando il Nobel era ancora inimmaginabile - sarebbe arrivato più di 40 anni e molti racconti dopo.
Ma niente tentennamenti o incertezze qui, il talento e la padronanza della scrittura ci sono già tutti; quella sua apparente semplicità la sua "prosa piana che nasconde segreti" come la definisce la sua eccellente traduttrice di sempre Susanna Basso, e che riesce a definire con esattezza ogni sfumatura dei sentimenti e delle relazioni.
Un certo grado di reticenza che attiva l'immaginazione e la deduzione del lettore facendogli scoprire gradualmente personaggi e situazioni. La capacità di scovare angoli memorabili nelle pieghe di esistenze a prima vista opache.

E poi la memoria; il raccontare di Munro è sempre un ricordare facendo collegamenti col passato e tendendo immaginari fili fra avvenimenti lontani nel tempo e anche questo romanzo con la sua forma più o meno fedele di biografia è un viaggiare nel tempo.
Eppure lei stessa dichiara tutto il suo scetticismo sulla affidabilità della memoria sostenendo che una delle occupazioni più interessanti della vita è guardare come la memoria ci inganna quando cerchiamo di raccontare lo nostra storia e come noi afferriamo solo dei pezzi di quella " misteriosa entità che è la verità ".
Ma forse è proprio da questa possibilità di infinite versioni che un autore trae nutrimento e noi lettori con lui; a proposito del confronto fra i ricordi di persone che hanno condiviso la stessa esperienza, Munro afferma: " più sconcertanti sono le differenze fra le diverse versioni , più lo scrittore che è in me sente una strana euforia".
Alice Munro ha dichiarato che non scriverà più, è anziana e vuole dedicare il tempo che le rimane alle persone care; questo era l'ultimo suo scritto ancora inedito in Italia. Uno scrittore non ci lascia mai del tutto e ci si può perdere per mesi fra i suoi numerosi racconti, eppure so che mi mancherà.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I felt that it was not so different from all the other advice handed out to women, to girls, advice that assumed being female made you damageable, that a certain amount of carefulness and solemn fuss and self-protection were called for, whereas men were supposed to be able to go out and take on all kinds of experiences and shuck off what they didn’t want and come back proud. Without even thinking about it, I had decided to do the same.”

This is one of the most honest books I’ve ever read. Not that it’s a memoir, though it seems to follow some of the facts of Alice Munro’s life. It’s just that it’s so true.

It reminded me of scattered conversations with my mother and grandmother when I was growing up. Conversations that occurred when their guard was down and I was not impatient, when they just talked about what they really thought: my mother, about how the face she saw in the mirror didn’t match the picture of herself in her head; my grandmother, about the painful betrayal of her school friends who (this was shortly after WWI) shunned her for her German heritage. I gathered little insights like these, and put them away to reflect on later. My mother and grandmother are long gone, and I didn’t expect to be adding to my little pile of female insights, but Munro’s narrative did just that.

It takes place in rural Ontario in the 1940’s. Del Jordan is growing up. Her father is a fox farmer, her mother a frustrated intellectual who sells encyclopedias, and Del doesn’t fit well in the town of Jubilee.

“I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds--this was a comfort to me. It was the opposite with Naomi; so many books weighed on her, making her feel oppressed and suspicious. She used to read--girls’ mystery books--but had outgrown the habit. This was the normal thing in Jubilee; reading books was something like chewing gum, a habit to be abandoned when the seriousness and satisfactions of adult life took over.”

The story takes Del from childhood through high school. It’s a reminder of the weight of all we experience during that stretch! At every turn, whether it’s Del’s relationship with her mother or exploring religion, or the disappointment of friendships, or love and sex and studying … it’s just all so revealing, so accurate, so exposed.

“I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it: I had an indifference, a contempt almost, that I concealed from him. I thought that I was tactful, even kind; I never thought that I was proud.”

I have read a few of Munro’s stories, and found them extremely subtle, some almost too much so. But I feel like reading this marvelous novel gave me, among many other things, an insight or framework or background that will make the stories more accessible now, and I’m excited to read more from this very special author.

[Brina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read my first Munro short story earlier this year and thought where had I been all this time to not have read a Nobel prize winner. This is her only full length novel and both the prose and story captivated me. Review coming as I work through my backlog.

[Jean-Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I was trying and trying and trying to write a novel – and it never worked. After even my second and third and fourth books my publishers still hoped I would write a novel – I felt I was wasting my time.”

If the publisher hadn’t slapped ‘a novel’ on the cover, how many people would consider this to be a novel? Probably not many—Alice Munro included, according to an interview in The Guardian—although I’m sure most publishers would prefer the sales figures associated with a novel. In the fifty years since this book’s publication Alice Munro has proven time and again that writing short stories isn’t some sort of prelude to real writing, the writing of novels, but this was early in her career, long before being deemed a ‘master of the contemporary short story’ and even she was feeling the pressure.

This is a collection of tenderly written, loosely linked stories all narrated by Del Jordan, who grows during the 1940s in the fictional rural Ontario town of Jubilee. Stories concerning (like most of Munro’s stories) the lives and girls of women. Death, religion, friendship, sex—Munro is sometimes deliciously bawdy. Mothers and friends and aunts who all live under the thumbs of fathers and boyfriends and husbands. It occasionally reminded me of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, or Mermaids, with Winona Ryder and Cher, and the last three stories are pure magic—the epilogue, as if to confirm that this truly is a novel, was unnecessary. As a collection of short stories I'd consider it excellent, and as a novel slightly less so. Please God, let me someday get to recite dirty limericks with Alice Munro—I suspect she has a few good ones up her sleeve.

The Flats Road - 4
Heirs of the Living Body - 4
Princess ida - 4
Age of Faith - 3
Changes and Ceremonies - 5
Lives of Girls and Women - 5
Baptizing - 5

[Dagio_maya · Rating 4 out of 5]

”Il futuro poteva essere arredato anche senza amore e borse di studio.”


Siamo in Ontario negli anni ’40.
Otto capitoli che fotografano Del: da bambina nella periferica Flats Road al centro di Jubilee nella Contea del Wawanash

Si comincia da occhi che osservano un mondo adulto spesso indecifrabile.
Prima di tutto c’è l’ambiente della provincia canadese con il suo sapore misto tra il selvaggio e il convenzionale.
Poi i personaggi caricaturali su cui si costruisce il racconto.
Si parte con lo zio Benny (che in realtà zio non è: un uomo con abitudini cadenzate dai ritmi della caccia e della pesca; fino al giorno in cui, risponde ad un annuncio di matrimonio stravolgendo la sua vita.
Gli occhi di Del bambina osservano questo mondo di relazioni adulte così complicate perché ormai prive della semplicità infantile.
Poi ci sono le zie (queste sono zie davvero) che ho trovato mitiche.

Con loro Del intravede uno steccato invalicabile:

” Rispettavano il lavoro degli uomini oltre ogni dire; ne ridevano, anche.
Il che era strano; potevano contemporaneamente credere in modo assoluto alla sua importanza e comunicare che, da un certo punto di vista, lo giudicavano frivolo e inessenziale.
Mai e poi mai si sarebbero comunque immischiate; la linea di demarcazione tra il lavoro degli uomini e quello delle donne era nettissima e qualsiasi incursione, o anche solo ipotesi di incursione al di là del confine, veniva da loro accolta con risa stupefatte e leggere di una superiorità nient’affatto compiaciuta.”


Zia Grace e a zia Elspeth sono le severe ammonitrici che con sarcasmo giudicano le scelte bizzarre della madre di Del come quella di andare in giro a vendere enciclopedie a contadini buzzurri che, approfittando delle guerra, pensavano solo ad arricchirsi lucrando.

Si sa, poi, che la crescita è costellata da separazioni e Del adolescente prende le distanze dalla madre – e al mondo dell’infanzia- prima aggrappandosi all’idea di Dio, poi alle mani di Naomi, la prima amica.

Le insicurezze adolescenziali (” Le ragazze curate mi spaventavano a morte. Non volevo nemmeno avvicinarle, per paura di puzzare. Percepivo tra loro e me una differenza sostanziale, come se fossimo fatte di materiali diversi.”) non tradiscono mai la fierezza di essere donna e il rifiuto della mentalità dominante maschile.

Si sorprende quando l’amica di sempre, una volta inseritasi nel mondo del lavoro, diventa come le altre, ossia concentrata verso un unico obiettivo: il matrimonio.

Questa è la vita delle ragazze?

Del ha altri piani:
si aggrappa allo studio e lo rende l’unica cosa concreta (” i voti, pesanti come il ferro. Me li ammucchiavo intorno, mi ci barricavo dentro, e se per caso me ne sfuggiva uno, registravo un vuoto minaccioso.”).

La vita delle ragazze non può ridursi ad un’unica scelta.
La vita delle donne non può avere un unico colore.

Del fa tesoro di ciò che i suoi occhi hanno osservato e se la vita può avere anche altre sfumature sa che la sua strada può essere solo tracciata da una penna:

” Erano immagini, e basta. I motivi per cui le cose succedevano mi pareva di conoscerli vagamente senza però saperli spiegare; ero convinta che si sarebbero chiariti in seguito. L’essenziale era che a me sembrava tutto vero, non reale ma vero, come se non avessi inventato bensí scoperto quelle persone e quella storia, come se quel paese si trovasse giusto alle spalle di quello che attraversavo vivendo tutti i giorni.”

[Carmo · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*


As dores de crescimento de uma rapariga numa pequena cidade do Canadá, mas que bem podia ser em qualquer outra cidade, em qualquer outra parte do mundo, o factor geográfico pouca relevância tem para o caso.
Numa narrativa direta e rica, a autora expõe sem papas na língua, o percurso de descoberta e afirmação pessoal de uma jovem semelhante a qualquer uma de nós.
Num universo muito feminino e exposta às personalidades das mulheres que a rodeiam, também ela vai trilhar o seu caminho de descoberta inspirando-se ou questionando as diversas influências.
Uma história que não tem nada de complexo ou original e onde as personagens não encarnam atitudes heróicas. São mulheres aprisionadas num ambiente rural, sem grandes sonhos ou ambições, contentando-se em repetir o que se espera delas geração após geração, e que não vai muito além de casar e parir filhos. Esta simplicidade é contudo descrita com grande humanidade, e é aí que se encontra a mestria da autora; em estabelecer proximidade com o leitor, quer por empatia quer por identificação.

Apesar de não ser grande fã do conceito de escrita feminina ou masculina, neste caso, acho que é mesmo um livro de uma mulher, para outras mulheres.
Não significa que escape à perspicácia masculina, mas creio que as mulheres o irão acolher em maior sintonia.

[Fátima Linhares · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mais um livro que veio comigo da biblioteca porque: preguiça de ir procurar outros. Fiquei-me por este, que estava na estante das sugestões. Como é de uma autora que nunca tinha lido e que ganhou o prémio Nobel, e eu estou a tentar ler as senhoras que o ganharam, nunca duas coisas se conjugaram tão bem. Não tinha grandes expectativas, até achava que nem ia gostar, mas comecei a ler e olhem, gostei! Lê-se muito bem, apesar dos capítulos algo extensos.

Nesta obra temos a nossa narradora, Del Jordan, uma rapariguinha que morava numa cidadezita meio perdida lá para os lados do Canadá por volta dos anos 1960-1970. Del vai relatando episódios da sua juventude: o liceu, a mãe vendedora de enciclopédias, o pai criador de raposas, o irmão mais novo meio grunho, a amiga que deixou a escola para ir trabalhar, as muitas religiões da terrinha e, claro, os rapazes, incluindo aquele com quem descobriu as maravilhas do sexo.

É uma história meio prosaica de uma miúda da província que, apesar de o livro não o referir, me pareceu que conseguiu emancipar-se e chegar a algum lado. Pela nota da autora no início, também me parece que é uma história um pouco autobiográfica, mas não fui investigar.

Como disse acima, não tinha grandes expectativas, mas gostei muito da escrita de Alice Munro.

[Jeanette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superlative. And her only novel? As much as I loved her short stories, and I've read about 1/2, this novel is BETTER. Magnificent. Do not read this review if you want no spoilers. The book is marvelous for Del in girlhood but it is BETTER for her last years of high school. And it is too central to more than a glancing review here not to climb the pinnacles of this 1971 written work. Most seemed to have ignored some of its crux. Core crux.

It's more than just a coming of age story, it's the story of the girl toward full womanhood in that societal changing period 1940-1960. Majority consistently in all forms of record categorizes the 1960's and the Boomer generation as the pivots of vast change, especially sexual and job changes for women. Vast disruption of traditional roles and also in behaviors and attitudes to former "village" family structures. But the true North on any magnet was, IMHO, the "eyes" caused by WWII and its decade of aftermath. Automation in the home with appliances, economic reversals after the war when the women "lost" their jobs to returning men- and media lens to urban / "other" place possibilities. And birth control. Not access (travel difficulty or physical placement aspects) to birth control as people assume in this century. It was difficult to even approach by mental decisiveness. It took some getting, usually travel of course, too. But birth control as approachable for women's POSSIBILITY if you were bold enough and ventured within your own value mindset to recognize your own need for it. Before then, that was a connotation (self determined in majority of the women's populations) that the road to a woman controlling the birth control was "too brazen" of a "think" to put upon yourself by yourself. Many, no majority, of all women declined to put themselves into that sexual, physical animal based category because of their home, family, society "eyes" they held that taught them to believe that they were NOT. You had to "pre-think" sex! Only terrible and very bad women did that. I myself knew many women who could never do that then, not even IN the 1960's or 1970's.

It was different definitions for nearly all parts of your own young life too. The people who are young now and most of the books written in the last 20 or 25 years! They never "get" that aspect of self-identity each woman held then and it was strongly learned and central to their own entire mindset of how the world worked. Del has it here. Even in "The Group" (Mary McCarthy book that rocked this scenario in movie too to vast audience) deciding upon getting and venturing to actual do it (get a diaphragm) was self daunting. HUGELY. Like calling yourself a bad girl and leaving much of your own altruism and warmheartedness behind. Loose, slutty. Here Del didn't proceed to any dependable protections that she herself controlled. No one who reviews this book seems to get the eventual slant. Del's "giving up" her scholarship push/ drive, maximum ambitions and melting to nothing other than Garnet- it wasn't just timing. It was a preconditioned surety to happen because of her formation years. Thousands of judgments and reactions of those around here. With far more being in that mix than just her own parents. Her Jubilee, it was dozens of adults. And after Garnet and her ability to refuse that force of control (his/masculine centered) over her spiritual beliefs and other goals she "should" ignore in order to be with him? Still, at the end- and I read the last 2 pages 3 times- it was predetermined that she'd end up with some dominance and also with any commonality, motherhood too. Even with the will, there is next to nothing in way. Higher education or not.

Excellent , excellent book. It's head and shoulders above her short stories, IMHO. It's autobiographical, of course. Unselfish too in the ultimate sharing and non-apologies.

In her youth, where she was and with her parents' people being so unlike each other. That was typical too then. Especially in the Northern parts of the continent where "new" people had arrived because of the 1930's dire situations. And many DID return to the country from larger towns that were busy during the war years and then "not so much" after. And the father's extended family- their "attitude" about self-promotion, ambition, or "bragging". That was IMMENSE then, my Dad's family, the absolute same. And trying to learn another language or going "beyond" your place for a hobby or some other "different" training? That was not only vilified for girls, for boys too. My siblings and I were never "allowed" because that would make us unAmerican, or give us an accent. My parents and grandparents were horrified if I tried to speak German or Italian when they did. Very much like Del's dad's family. You were deemed pretentious if you even dared.

The first half of the book was a 5 star, but the second half was a 6. Women still want the role that their heart and body most connotes and often logic or avocation/job or best choice for self expression are put second to it. And that does not happen as much with men. We ARE different.

My era was very close to this one, in the first half I could have BEEN Del. Just in a different place, with relatives in 3 flats on different floors. But still the Aunts and Uncles of daily intersect and just as individual to each other. And lots of hours of life lived "outside" and with crossings to view adults and others in their real work. What a LESSON! And the disdaining factors of those adults too. To slackers or other adult behaviors which didn't "fit". Or to ones who didn't "act" as their gender or age or faith predisposed that they SHOULD. It had consequence for those that did not. Quick and mostly obvious consequence.

Look how Owen ended up- living with his Dad and Uncle Benny in that kind of shambles!

Great record of exactly how things were then. Her quest for religious ritual I also felt was beyond outstanding. Rarely, rarely visited in literature any longer. And it happens to many in college years too. NOW it does! I saw seekers continually on my job. Looking for structure and TRADITION! Tradition in form and ceremony, undervalued and a precious gift that is overlooked in this century. Anger, depression, despair- much less of those then within far more dire circumstances- because some "same" could be counted upon as visibly existing.

She's 86 now. This was her best work. Absolutely.