"Dear Life" by Alice Munro

"English-Canadian Fiction  in the 21st Century"

   This is the title of a course being offered  by Third Age Learning in Guelph this fall. I am enrolled and looking forward to the lectures . One of the first books in the lecture series is "Dear Life" by Alice Munro.

  I had previously read 2 books by Alice Munro: "Lives of Girls and Women" and "The Love of a Good Woman".  I was not impressed by either book, and this one did not excite me either.

  But..many readers greatly enjoy her writing.  Amazon has printed 747 reviews from readers about this book. Almost half of them rated this book with five stars (5 stars out of 5).  Wow!
   Alice Munro has won many prestigious awards-notably the Nobel prize for Literature in 2013.
   In the reviews in Amazon, I read this type of response:
- her beguiling characters are nuanced, headstrong and surprising
- she has revolutionized the architecture of short stories especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time
  I have not found any of her characters memorable and I wouldn't really enjoy a story 'moving forward and backward in time'.
  I look for a clear narrative forward and I enjoy interesting characters.  I really appreciate seeing the characters develop as the story unfolds.  I never felt a connection with any of Alice Munro's characters.  They did not evoke any emotion.  Each character was just moving along through life.  Perhaps that is what people enjoy- just the ordinariness of her stories.