The Beggar Maid : Stories of Flo and Rose (Vintage Contemporaries)

Rating:
Summary: Dry and undistinguished....a rather shapeless affair
Review: Alice Munro's "The Beggar Maid" is probably the best collection of short stories I've evr read, though their interconnected nature makes it seem like you're reading a novel. In either case, it shows the trademark of all good literature: it touches you, deeply.

Alice Munro may very well be the best short story writer alive today. Comparisons to Chekhov are not far-fetched. The title story, "Royal Beatings," and several others are masterpieces of the form. Munro's writing shows a wisdom and a psychological depth possessed only by the most accomplished artists and students of human nature. Not to mention her prose: spell-binding (I would read the Yellow Pages front to back if Ms. Munro penned them).

Rating:
Summary: Masterful short story collection
Review: I don't even LIKE short stories. I always turn the last page over, and go, 'Huh? Where's the rest of it?' But I make an exception for some authors, and Alice Munro is one of them. The Beggar Maid is a collection of stories that verges on some vague new definition of The Novel. It's full of unexpected time leaps in time and even more unexpected transformations of the constant characters. It's all a bit mysterious, confusing, suggestive - and altogether exhilarating. Munro weaves, picks apart, reweaves, then interweaves these stories about two women over a span of 40 years. They are prudish and suspicious Flo, and Rose, her stepdaughter, an awkward pathetic creature who somehow pulls herself out of her stultifying home town and embarks on her own life out in the big bad world.

Rating:
Summary: Masterful short story collection
Review: I don't even LIKE short stories. I always turn the last page over, and go, `Huh? Where's the rest of it?' But I make an exception for some authors, and Alice Munro is one of them. The Beggar Maid is a collection of stories that verges on some vague new definition of The Novel. It's full of unexpected time leaps in time and even more unexpected transformations of the constant characters. It's all a bit mysterious, confusing, suggestive - and altogether exhilarating. Munro weaves, picks apart, reweaves, then interweaves these stories about two women over a span of 40 years. They are prudish and suspicious Flo, and Rose, her stepdaughter, an awkward pathetic creature who somehow pulls herself out of her stultifying home town and embarks on her own life out in the big bad world.

Rating:
Summary: A Major Work in a Minor Key
Review: I had read a review in the ATLANTIC MONTHLY extolling Alice Munro to the skies, so I decided to give her a try by reading this novel.

Without a doubt, the praise is well deserved. If one just looks at a summary of the story by itself, it's another typical women's novel about relationships. What makes it so much more is the fineness and fitness of Munro's perceptions about the way real people think, feel, and express themselves. On the second page, Rose's biological mother says that she feels as if there were "a boiled egg in my chest, with the shell left on." She then proceeds to die of a blood clot on her lung. An image like that sticks in one's craw for many pages.

Later, Rose takes a train trip through heavy snow to Banff: "The train crept along slowly, fearful of avalanches. Rose ... liked the idea of their being shut up in this dark cubicle, under the rough train blankets, borne through such implacable landscape. She always felt that the progress of trains, however perilous, was safe and proper. She felt that planes, on the other hand, might at any moment be appalled by what they were doing, and sink through the air without a whisper of protest."

As we see Rose grow up, get married, get divorced, try as a single mother to hook up with skittish males, and make her way through a middling, muddling life path, we experience a rising crescendo of minor epiphanies. Munro's language always gives dignity to moments of embarrassment, frustration, and minor-key elation.

After having second thoughts about her marriage to Patrick, she falls in love with him again as she sees the vulnerable nape of his neck as he, unknowing, studies in a library carrel. In the end, it turns out to be a bad move as Patrick gives up everything he held dear to become a carbon copy of his obnoxious suburbanite father. What saves the moment is that I can feel each such objective correlative deeply because I've made major decisions on equally shaky grounds.

Munro knows the language of the heart in all its minuteness and treats every step and misstep with the same respect and even love. She is a superb writer, and I eagerly look forward to reading her other works.

Rating:
Summary: The waste of a skilled writer
Review: Nobody can deny that Alice Munro is a very skilled author. You can see all her experience at The New Yorker. Nonetheless, this book's lack of an interest story just throws that away. The most interesting character, Flo, appears in few occasions, while Rose is sometimes a very flat character. Probably the book doesn't deepen much in her other than her relationships with men. It serves the feminist purpose but not quite the literary. It should be considered as a possible weekend entertainment, just like reading magazine fiction.