This is one of those novels that is hard to describe without the word "poignant," as McGregor describes in fine detail the happenings on one block in a British city on one day that something tragic occurs with the block’s residents as witnesses. The build-up to this one event is a selective peering into of the neighbors’ secret troubles, fears, desires. His ability to bring depth to such a large cast is impressive.
One of those witnesses is a young girl who was in the process of packing that day to move house and, interspersed into the narration of that single day, is her first-person account of later finding out she is pregnant from a one-night stand and her struggle to find the support she needs. Though she is dealing with greater troubles, she has a hard time putting that day behind her.
The story seems to heading towards a predictable end, but then it turns out the real tragedy is something nobody witnessed.
After the semi-disappointment in Dance of the Happy Shades, I picked up this collection and worked my way through it over autumn in between other books. I’d probably read half of these seventeen favorites in their original collections, so reading this was a combination of finding and revisiting. I can now be sure that her earlier stories just don’t grab me as completely.
The re-reading of stories was sometimes the best part: the first instantly nostalgic ones I’d read in "The Beggar Maid," the devastating "Runaway," plus I’d forgotten that "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" was the inspiration for the film Away from Her — both are lovely and melancholy but there are definitely some more internal sections that were difficult to communicate in the film.
Some of the new-to-me stories became favorites too: the epic titular "Carried Away" and the way "A Wilderness Station," composed entirely of letters, feels like a story pieced together from different dusty, likely faded and worn, sources.
Though Munro suggested in 2006 that she not publish another book, 2009 brought a new collection, Too Much Happiness, which will definitely end up on my to-read list for 2010.
I read Breakfast of Champions back in high school or early college but for some reason never branched out further. It’s hard to remember my exact reaction, but I’m guessing it was a little more science fiction than I found interesting at the time. If my first Vonnegut had been this one, maybe that wouldn’t have been the case.
Probably you know what it’s about already: WWII, Dresden, a fatalist optometrist jostling back and forth through time, the 116 intonations of "So it goes" to acknowledge death and mortality. It still felt important reading it now, having read so much by people who read this and probably wanted to be as concise and humorous about terrible things, and often not even such terrible things.
And I was buoyed by Vonnegut’s introduction as Chapter 1 when he explains:
When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big.
But not many words about Dresden came from my mind then—not enough of them to make a book, anyway.
But eventually, there was this.
