![]() But most just keep going: looking at the passing world, drifting in and out of the strange kind of contemplation travel can induce, until they’ve reached their destination.Īnd that’s the sort of state these stories put their readers in, too, a neither-here-nor-there reverie in which people and landscapes zip by quickly and yet with an unusual clarity, reminding you of things you thought you’d forgotten or making you wonder how other people, in other places, live their lives. ![]() Some of Munro’s pilgrims, like the unhappy wife in “Runaway,” go part of the way and then turn back. Others in “Family Furnishings” have longer, harder journeys, with more ambiguous rewards: a new country, an uncomfortable truth, a difficult love. The narrator of “Home,” one of the two dozen stories culled here from collections published in the last two decades, has to take three buses to visit her aging father and annoying stepmother and to learn a small thing about herself. There are no direct flights, no express buses or trains in the world her characters move through: They always have to change somewhere. For the protagonists of Alice Munro’s stories - mostly women, usually Canadian, never quite content - it can be tough to get from one place to another, from where they are to where they’d rather be. ![]()
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