Our first Literary Masters meeting this year will take place on Thursday April 11th. Vivien Lane will be leading our group again. For the first two meetings we will be reading short stories by Alice Munro, from the book of short stories Dear Life. “Munro focuses on every aspect of our ordinary lives and how the extraordinary often comes uncalled for. With a deceptively simple style, some- times what is left unsaid carries more weight than what is actually said. Her characters live in a stable, small-town world and yet they become universal because her stories touch on childhood, youth and old age and how time and memory sharpen our apprehension in our own lives. Having lived throughout the greater part of the twentieth century she is a witness to all the changes that have taken place, concentrating especially on the world of women.”
In the first meeting we will be looking at the stories: To Reach Japan, Gravel, and Amundsen.
Literary Masters Meeting Notes
On Thursday April 11th, six members met to talk about and analyze three beautiful stories by Canadian writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Alice Munro: “To Reach Japan”, “Amundsen”, and “Gravel” from the book “Dear Life”.
The descriptions are precise and economical, and even though the reader experiences sadness and perhaps anger at the situations, the women in these stories seem to be much more accepting. The plots move back and forth in time showing the unpredictability of life.
The first story “To Reach Japan”, begins as Greta and her young daughter board a train to Toronto to house-sit for a friend while her husband is working in the North and ends with them getting off in Toronto. We learn during this long and eventful train ride that she defines herself as a poet living in a little town in Western Canada where reading books, let alone writing them, would get you dirty looks, and any mention of politics might cost her husband his job. She met a writer briefly some months before this trip, a man whom she obsessed about and yearned for. She wrote him a slightly cryptic letter addressed to his newspaper and felt it had about as much possibility of reaching him as a letter put in a bottle had in reach- ing Japan. However, as the story ends, he does indeed find her at the train station in Toronto.
Kathy Hall