Friday, May 14, 2021

Alice Munro, Family Furnishings ****

Family Furnishings is a companion collection to Munro's Selected Stories. Selected Stories covers the years 1968 to 1994; Family Furnishings covers 1995 to her retirement in 2014.

The first stories in this collection find Munro at (what I consider) her peak, including a few stories from the book that first hooked me, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. I really enjoyed the stories from the books that preceded and followed that one. 

The stories in the second half of the book show Munro experimenting with different approaches. For example, "The View from Castle Rock" is an historical drama about a family emigrating from Scotland to Canada, and turns out to be the first of several stories/sketches drawing from her family's history. The most recent stories feature more dramatic and lurid events –– murders, sexual assaults –– compared to the more mundane and internal action of her earlier work. Some of them, such as "Dimensions," effectively demonstrate her talents; others, such as "Amundsen," suffer in comparison to other writers' work in a similar mode.

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