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Book Group: The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro

Tuesday, June 28, 2022 29 Sivan 5782

7:00 PM - 8:30 PMZoom Room Bet

Fiction/Short Stories, 352 Pages.

Winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize for literature, Alice Munro is perhaps the greatest short story writer since Chekhov.  Her fluid and seamless movement of time and perspective has revolutionized the genre and influenced countless short story writers.  What she achieves in a 30 page short story far exceeds in depth and complexity what many novelists struggle to accomplish in 500 pages. Her economy of words is breathtaking.

Munro’s stories tend to be about ordinary people doing ordinary things and yet coming to the end of a Munro story leaves the reader with the sense of awe that comes with having witnessed the profound.   Alice Munro has a genius for entering the lives of her characters and capturing the passions and contradictions that lie just below the surface.

In The Love of a Good Woman she takes mainly the lives of women - unruly, ungovernable, unpredictable, unexpected, funny, sexy and completely recognizable - and brings their hidden desires bubbling to the surface. The love of a good woman is not as pure and virtuous as it seems: as in her title story it can be needy and murderous. Here are women behaving badly, leaving husbands and children, running off with unsuitable lovers, pushing everyday life to the limits, and if they don't behave badly, they think surprising and disturbing thoughts.  If you have not read Munro you are in for a real treat.

Discussion led by David Newman in Zoom Room Bet.

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Thu, March 28 2024 18 Adar II 5784