The View from Castle Rock
Alice Munro
Language: English
Pages: 368
ISBN: 1400077923
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013
Alice Munro mines her rich family background, melding it with her own experiences and the transforming power of her brilliant imagination, to create perhaps her most powerful and personal collection yet.
A young boy, taken to Edinburgh’s Castle Rock to look across the sea to America, catches a glimpse of his father’s dream. Scottish immigrants experience love and loss on a journey that leads them to rural Ontario. Wives, mothers, fathers, and children move through uncertainty, ambivalence, and contemplation in these stories of hopes, adversity, and wonder. The View from Castle Rock reveals what is most essential in Munro’s art: her compassionate understanding of ordinary lives.
which leaves to mash to make a soothing poultice. At the thought of her mother such misery overcomes her that she wants to kick somebody. Andrew folds up his plaid to make a comfortable seat for his father. The old man seats himself, groaning, and puts his hands up to his face, so that his speaking has a hollow sound. “I will see no more. I will not harken to their screeching voices or their satanic tongues. I will not swallow a mouth of meat nor meal until I see the shores of America.” All
than hers. “No I do not,” she says. “What then?” says her father. “I think they were dead people.” “What do you know about dead people?” her father asks her, finally speaking with some sternness. “Dead people won’t rise up till the Day of Judgment. I don’t care to hear you making light about things of that sort.” “I was not making light,” says Nettie carelessly. The sailors are scrambling loose from their sails and pointing at the sky, far to the west. They must see there something that
twelve years old at the time of the controversial Union, a young man by the time of the bitter failed Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, a man deep into middle age by the time of Culloden. There is no telling what he thought of those events. I have a feeling that his life was lived in a world still remote and self-contained, still harboring its own mythology and local wonders. And he was one of them. The first story told of Will is about his prowess as a runner. His earliest job in the Ettrick
Sometimes they celebrated a certain characteristic—as when they called the innkeeper Tooth, because of the long eyetooth that caught on his lip—or sometimes they picked on the very opposite of what the person wanted to be, as with the innkeeper’s wife, who was very particular about her clean aprons. They called her Greasy-gravy. The boy who looked after the horses was named Fergie, but they called him Birdie. This annoyed him quite satisfactorily. He was short and thickset, with black curly hair
thought that that had happened to her, that she had actually been singled out for such a gift and duty. Then Forrest came from the back of the house to see her stoop and pick it up, and he knew at once what it was. So did she, once she felt it. A parcel of straw in sacking, tied with cords, to resemble a baby, the face marked with crayon at the appropriate place on the sacking, to crudely show a baby’s face. Less innocent than Lizzie, Forrest caught the implication, and he grabbed the bundle