THE BEGGAR MAID Stories of Flo and Rose (urspr publ 1977; utgåvan 1979)

This was the first book I've read where I felt the author truely understood what women thought about and felt. ( )

Alice Munro's award-winning book is a set of very loosely, but Chronological stories about Rose, who grows up poor in a small rural Western Ontario town. The stories, which can be read stand-alone but which are satisfying to read in order, are periods in Rose's life -- from her home life with her step-mother Flo and her father, her early school and high school days through marriage, motherhood, divorce, and making a livelihood. Those are the nuts and bolts. In the stories are the hopes, dreams and disappointments of becoming a woman.

I knew I would love this book because Alice Munro is one of my favorite authors. Her settings are of her home in rural Ontario as well as big city life in Toronto. It's a geographic area I know well, from my many wanderings there from my WNY home. These settings are familiar and comfortable. Although Munro is, perhaps, a generation older than I am the customs and mores of coming of age - shopping at Woolworth's, painting fingernail polish so as to leave a half moon at the base, fashions, school - a long forgotten, more innocent time, in some ways, and yet all too familiar. Then there the feelings and emotions that always vividly define Munro's women characters - making her way in work, marriage, motherhood; the complex emotions, the thoughts - all expressed so beautifully. Sometimes it's just a phrase, sometimes a mood. They strike a chord. Are they nostalgic? Yes, in many ways, certainly. But also, I think, universal. ( )

I had never read Alice Munro before, so I am grateful to The Mookse and the Gripes group's project revisiting the 1980 Booker shortlist.

This book is difficult to categorise, and is somewhere between a short story collection and a novel. I can see why the Booker jury chose to accept it as a novel, because the stories are all episodes in the life of one woman, Rose, and they are arranged in a chronological sequence, but each could equally be read as a self-contained story.

Rose's mother died when she was young, and the dominant figure in the early stories set during her childhood is her stepmother Flo, who runs a shop in a poor district of a small Canadian town. Her education allows her to escape, but the last couple of stories see her sucked back as she deals with Flo in old age.

These are quiet stories with fairly humdrum subject matter, but Munro is a master of telling detail, and the whole adds up to something universal, effective and moving. ( )

Some of the most beautiful writing I have read recently. I kept having that feeling you get when you read a really gorgeous sentence or paragraph or scene and you just think, "WOW," and want to put it in your pocket and remember it forever. One of the critics' comments on the back of my copy used the phrase "psychological precision" and I don't think I could really put it any better. One of my favorite things about it was how it captured a person's feelings toward the people in the margins of their lives--people you might have met only a few times, or friends of friends and how profoundly they can affect you without ever knowing it. I also liked that it isn't really a novel but also isn't really a collection of short stories either...it imitates the patterns of life in a lovely way, highlighting small moments while sweeping over large accomplishments. This was my first Alice Munro book and I have a hunger for more. ( )

Oh, dear Alice. Caught up in the flood of your spectacular writing. In awe. ( )