The Moons of Jupiter
Alice Munro
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0679732705
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013
In these piercingly lovely and endlessly surprising stories by one of the most acclaimed current practitioners of the art of fiction, many things happen: there are betrayals and reconciliations, love affairs consummated and mourned. But the true events in The Moons Of Jupiter are the ways in which the characters are transformed over time, coming to view their past selves with an anger, regret, and infinite compassion that communicate themselves to us with electrifying force.
oldest, you know, she was twenty or twenty-one years old when I was born.” “So, you don’t think she had a romance?” “I wouldn’t think so. It was just a joke. He was an Austrian or some such thing. Black was just what he was called, or maybe he called himself. She wouldn’t have been let near him. He was buried right there under a big boulder. My father tore the shack down and used the lumber to build our chicken-house.” I remembered that, I remembered the boulder. I remembered sitting on the
In a way, he couldn’t afford to buy it. In another way, he couldn’t afford not to. While carrying on this conversation we were walking up and down the corn rows looking for the stone. We looked in the corners of the field and it was not there. He said that of course the corner of a field then was not necessarily the corner of a field now. But the truth probably was that when the field got put in corn the stone was in the way, so they would have hauled it out. He said we could go over to the
to turn his chair around, with a violent, awkward motion. Charlotte stood up. Mrs. Cross made herself speak. “Yes, you better push him home now. He better go home and cool off and repent of his bad manners. He better.” Jack made a taunting sound, which seemed to point out that Mrs. Cross was just telling Charlotte to do what Charlotte was going to do anyway; Mrs. Cross was just pretending to have control of things. Charlotte had hold of the wheelchair and was pushing it towards the door, her
over in the front, even for two such skinnies. “I’m the chauffeur!” said Mildred merrily. “Where to, your ladyships?” “Just anyplace you’d like,” said one of them. When she wasn’t looking at them Mildred couldn’t be sure which was talking. She drove them around Winter Court and Chelsea Drive to look at the new houses with their landscaping and swimming pools. Then she took them to the Fish and Game Club, where they saw the ornamental fowl, the family of deer, the raccoons, and the caged
child. Why should I think she wouldn’t be susceptible, that she would always be straightforward, heavy-footed, self-reliant? Just as I go around saying that Nichola is sly and solitary, cold, seductive. Many people must know things that would contradict what I say. In the morning Don and Judith left for Mexico. I decided I wanted to see somebody who wasn’t related to me, and who didn’t expect anything in particular from me. I called an old lover of mine, but his phone was answered by a machine: