People You Once Knew

“I sit at the bottom of sleep, As on the floor of the sea. And fanciful Citizens of the Deep Are graciously greeting me.” (68)

I always find short stories to be somewhat depressing.  They are short bursts of reality. A melancholic photograph of a life.  Despite the sadness that is always a constant in short stories, Alice Munro’s Friends of My Youth is a book filled with so much experience and insight into the human psyche. Sadly poetic, and so fundamentally Canadian this series of short stories covers many lives, different hometowns, and situations.  The only distraction I found when reading, was (and it is my own fault) that I was reading an American publication of the book.  Munro is so strongly tied to the Canadian literary world that reading a book with words spelled without "u" was strangely distracting.  Particularly entrancing stories within the book are Hold me Fast, Don’t let me Pass, Pictures of Ice, and Oh What Avails. The back cover copy states that Munro states the “unsayable”. This I think is true. Her ability to understand the human condition and then transform it into beautiful stories is uncanny.

Two summers ago I read Flannery O’Conner’s A Good Man is Hard to Find and while O’Conner is strongly associated with American Gothic, you can still see such a strong resemblance in the writing and the characterization and the situations people find themselves in.  Friends of My Youth is a book about the past and how people change, how the landscape changes, and how places you grew up in change.  In with the new, out with the old, and eventually in with the old again.  Munro prosaically shows us how a sleepy town grows into a modern suburbia and how people you felt you knew, become complete strangers.  Even more interestingly, she shows us how children become like their parents, in their thoughts, their mannerisms and speech.  All that was old is new again. 

Posted on April 7th, 2007 by Mary Clare
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