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The View From Castle Rock |
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This volume collects a dozen stories by the acclaimed Canadian writer, many of which are based on her family's history.
Knopf, 368 pages
11/07/2006
$25.95
ISBN: 1400042828
Fiction
Short Stories
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
New York Observer Anna Shapiro
Perhaps Alice
Munro's overtly autobiographical "I" -- less animating, more like that of any number of intelligent and talented but not superlative writers -- reflects a balance she’s achieved through writing superlative fiction. [27 Nov 2006, p.6]
Library Journal Starr E. Smith
All the narratives exhibit Munro's keen eye for realistic details and her ability to illuminate the depths of seemingly mundane lives and relationships.
Atlantic Monthly Deborah Eisenberg
The View From Castle Rock is not only every bit as beautiful and substantial a work as Munro’s readers might hope for; it is also a work of dizzying originality. In fact, it creates an entirely new category of book into which only it can fall.
The New York Times Book Review A.O. Scott
[Munro's] ability to travel into the minds and feelings of people long dead, whose deaths were barely even recorded, is uncanny.
Washington Post Geraldine Brooks
In short, Munro is the illusionist whose trick can never be exposed. And that is because there is no smoke, there are no mirrors. Munro really does know magic: how to summon the spirits and the emotions that animate our lives.
Daily Telegraph Jane Shilling
It is almost otiose to add to the clamour of praise for her writing, but necessary, nevertheless. This is a remarkable book, and anyone who has ever felt the pull of the secret past, 'the tremendous pounding', as Munro puts it, describing herself as a child listening to a seashell, 'of my own blood and of the sea', should read it and marvel.
The Economist
Mesmerising and cleverly interlinked, these stories are well balanced -- neither overly inventive nor stolidly factual.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Lydia Millet
None of this changes the fact that Munro herself has, as usual, written a lovely book and is serenely well-honed in her craft, both sharp and discreet as an observer of interpersonal relations and understated as a moralist -- restrained almost to the point of neutrality, were her eminently readable prose not infected with a wry knowingness. [23 Sept 2006]
The Guardian Hilary Mantel
The View from Castle Rock is an act of salvage rather than appropriation. It is a memoir that has taken a breath, and expanded itself beyond genre and beyond the confines of one life.
The Independent Patricia Craig
There are several outstanding stories in this vibrant collection - "Lying Under the Apple Tree", for example, which gets an ambiguity into its title (it turns on an instance of sexual duplicity); and the title story, "The View from Castle Rock".
The Independent David Mattin
It's in that style - one that depends on the articulation of free-floating, unprogrammatic detail, like experience broken down into its constituent parts - that Munro's claim to greatness resides.
The Observer Adam Mars-Jones
[Munro's] psychology is rich even when the lives described are bare.
London Review Of Books Tessa Hadley
For all the power with which Munro conjures and speculates, readers have remained where we belong: outside, noses pressed up against the glass of our separation from the past, perhaps from all experience not contiguous with our own. But the story, in its act of imaginative re-creation, cuts us loose if it can from our moorings in our own lives and carries us away inside another place.
New York Review Of Books Alison Lurie
Even in these stories, which are closest to her own history, Alice Munro's commitment to indeterminacy and the essential confusion and mystery of life remains.
The Spectator Anita Brookner
This loyalty to her own experiences is of a different order from knowledge gleaned in careful research. [Munro] lays claim to those ancestors, but her own trajectory is different, rooted in her early home but taking shape in ways that could not have been foreseen. There is a kind of fidelity in this, one that transcends mere repetition, and that fidelity is perhaps her outstanding characteristic as a writer. [4 Nov 2006]
The New York Times Richard Eder
In the finest among these fictions (fact-ions?), as transporting as anything she's written, we bump along for a while with the memoir material. Comes a puff, a lift. We are skimming buoyantly in the Munro balloon. Then back down to the real: the real, touched by traces of story, the way dream-shreds drift a moment around the morning toothbrush.
Boston Globe Gail Caldwell
A work of aching authenticity -- more desultory and less commanding than Munro's finest fiction, but still compelling in its search for the sovereign young self.
Chicago Tribune Jennifer Haigh
These read like classic Munro stories, and here, as before, we don't much care where they came from. Munro's powers are at their peak. [5 Nov 2006, p.3]
Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp
Next to J.D. Salinger or Harper Lee, Alice Munro might be the last writer from whom anyone would expect a memoir. But then, it's hard to imagine anything that looks less like a traditional memoir than the 12 stories collected in her new book.
Entertainment Weekly Nicholas Fonseca
She doesn't broach any new themes, but Munro's prodigious talent is all here.
LA Weekly Michelle Huneven
The mix of memoir and fiction provides a privileged glimpse into both her method and the prima materia of her fiction -- it's a scholar's (and a fan's) trove.
Publishers Weekly Sigrid Nunez
Reliably as ever when the subject is human experience, Munro's stories -- whatever the proportions of fiction and fact -- always bring us the truth. [25 Sept 2006, p.42]
Booklist Brad Hooper
Both frustrating and exhilarating. [1 Sept 2006, p.6]
Kirkus Reviews Bruce Allen
Alice Munro has honored the world of her fathers and mothers in an echo of the promise made to the medieval Everyman: "I will go with thee and be thy guide." In the last century, we have had no better guide than this indispensable author. [1 Sept 2006]
San Francisco Chronicle Floyd Skloot
It is difficult not to see the book as a cleansing of the writer's files, a gathering of older unpublished material Munro deemed too personal, along with family history sketches she tried to make into stories by altering some details to make them fit with the other bits on hand.
Daily Telegraph Daniel Swift
The View from Castle Rock is a tentative gamble: it hedges its bets somewhere between memoir and fiction, and nothing is won.
Wall Street Journal John Freeman
It seems like whenever the reader is about to gain some purchase on the prose, or exactly what happened, another one of Ms. Munro's many authorial intrusions arrives.
The average user rating for this book is 9.0 (out of 10) based on 1 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Tina N gave it a9:
Alica Munro proves once again why she is the goddess of short stories.
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