Libro Runaway. Sinopsis libro, reseña libro. The incomparable Alice Munro’s bestselling and rapturously acclaimed Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from the title story about a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband, to three stories about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate the luster of her intimate relationships.
In Munro’s hands, the people she writes about–women of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and children–become as vivid as our own neighbors. It is her miraculous gift to make these stories as real and unforgettable as our own. Libro Runaway.
Manuela –
Not, who has read more Alice Munro that I have, wants to know why she doesn’t write novels. Her uncharitable hypothesis is that Munro is too lazy to do the necessary work; she’d rather just scribble down each idea in short story form and then move on to the next one. Other people criticize her for being «cerebral» or «contrived». I don’t agree with any of this, but I can see where the accusations are coming from.
After some thought, I find a metaphor which sums up my own feelings. It’s true that a Munro story can seem just a little too perfect. Everything fits together so elegantly; there is nothing wasted. A non-chessplayer might compare it to a chess game. But for someone who does play chess, the image doesn’t work. A normal chess game is like a novel. It’s a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, where things often go in unexpected directions and painfully have to be put back on track. Novelists can never quite control their characters (Proust somehow ended up putting in a couple more books than he had originally intended), and chessplayers have an even harder time controlling their pieces.
A Munro story feels to me rather like a study. There is a small group of people and a set of relationships between them. Nothing seems out of the ordinary. But somehow, as the story unfolds, a logical but completely unexpected scene arises. A woman with psychic powers, baking little dough mice in an institution; or a child, with a winter coat over her pyjamas, standing shivering in a snowdrift and helping scatter ashes. You suddenly understand that this is what the story was about.