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The Moons of Jupiter
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By Alice Munro, review by Bruce Meyer
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The Moons of Jupiter
By Alice Munro, review by Bruce Meyer
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The stories of Alice Munro are profoundly elemental in the way they narrate the emotional inner lives of everyday characters. Munro crafts her stories with a clear eye: when we meet her characters we feel that they are people we have encountered in our own lives.
Making the ordinary extraordinary
As a storyteller, Munro has used this powerful realism to her advantage by holding a mirror up to the contemporary world without pretense, fashion or any sense of the unlikely. Her reputation as one of the masters of the modern short story comes from the fact that, at heart, she is a chronicler of the commonplace where the primary strength of her work resides in its truthfulness and in the way her characters learn from the world.
Munro's style
In The Moons of Jupiter (1982), Munro adds an extra dimension to her chronicles of Canadian experience by offering insights into the search for a broader personal memory in stories such as Connection and Chaddleys and Flemings. Unlike Margaret Laurence who sought to draw distinct connections between place and personal past, Munro's use of the past in The Moons of Jupiter is far less studied, less distinct and more personal. The characters look to put their inner worlds in order in ways that will allow them to get on with their daily lives. The strong sense of elemental sexuality that appears in some of Munro's earlier stories such as The Found Boat, is still present in The Turkey Season, but with the added element of shock and revulsion that comes from her graphic descriptions of work in a poultry abattoir.
Details, details
Munro's keen interest in the details of life and landscape in Southwestern Ontario is a hallmark of her work, and her stories never stray far, either geographically or psychologically, from the region of her birth. This, however, is not parochialism, but the sense of individuals searching their own experience and their own recognizable worlds for the understanding and assurance that they are human.
For more reading on Alice Munro, check out the following websites:
http://members.aol.com/MunroAlice/
http://www.ucalgary.ca/
http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/.
Visit the Reading Room forum for book club discussions.
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