Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories by Alice Munro | Goodreads

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories by Alice Munro | Goodreads




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Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories

by
Alice Munro
4.06 · Rating details · 14,229 Ratings · 1,374 Reviews
In the her tenth collection (the title story of which is the basis for the new film Hateship Loveship), Alice Munro achieves new heights, creating narratives that loop and swerve like memory, and conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves.

A tough-minded housekeeper jettisons the habits of a lifetime because of a teenager’s practical joke. A college student visiting her brassy, unconventional aunt stumbles on an astonishing secret and its meaning in her own life. An incorrigible philanderer responds with unexpected grace to his wife’s nursing-home romance.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is Munro at her best, tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, deeply and gloriously humane. (less)

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Paperback, 323 pages
Published October 8th 2002 by Vintage (first published 2001)
Original Title
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
ISBN
0375727434 (ISBN13: 9780375727436)
Edition Language
English
Literary Awards
National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for Fiction (2001), Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book in Caribbean and Canada (2002), Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Nominee (2001)




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Rating details


Jul 08, 2017Julie rated it really liked it
Shelves: book-club, o-canada
My reaction to almost every movie I watch is to announce loudly to the room after finishing it, “WELL, I'LL NEVER GET THOSE TWO HOURS OF MY LIFE BACK.”

I get peevish and resentful after sitting through bad movies, and I usually need to read a new book or watch Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy emerging from the lake in his wet, white shirt before I can shake other bad movie images from my mind.

So, imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon Hateship, Loveship with Kristen Wiig, and I not only liked it, I kinda loved it. Like, I loved it so much, I watched it twice in one week. Wha??

(And, how is this a book review, you might be ready to ask?)

Okay, I'm getting there. So, I loved Hateship, Loveship SO much, I did a little homework and found out that it was based on a short story by Canadian writer, Alice Munro. A short story of only 54 pages was the inspiration for that break-my-heart-I-surprisingly-love-this film.

And, even though I think it's the best story of this collection, the book includes nine.

Nine stories total. . . and what do they have in common? Well, as the doctor in the ninth story declares, “We don't know, do we? Till we see the pattern of the deterioration, we really can't say.”

Yes, patterns of deterioration. . . of marriages, of health, of mental and physical stability, of lives. . . and each of the nine stories features a prominent female protagonist who is typically a part of a childless couple.

Yet, for the men reading this review. . . please don't be hasty in dismissing this as “Feminist Lit.” Women are the featured leads, so to speak, but we come to know their men, too. And unless isolation, loneliness, and fears of death and diminished health have suddenly become exclusive to women, I think the universal quality of these issues would pull in any readers.

But it's not fluff. And it's not entertainment. This is a sturdy collection of serious “thinks” and big “feels.”

Looks like Ms. Munro's been paying some close attention to people. (less)
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Apr 09, 2011Emily added it · review of another edition
Shelves: read-in-2011
I sometimes get into conversations with people who have a hard time connecting with the short-story format; they say that they hardly have time to muster an emotional involvement in the characters and events, before the story is over. To those readers I might recommend Alice Munro. True, I have only experienced one of her collections, but the stories in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage are nothing if not emotionally affecting—or "crushingly tragic," I suppose, if you want to get specific about the thing. Indeed, the understated yet unrelenting tragedy of small unkindnesses built up over decades and lifetimes; of the inevitable disappointments and compromises that result when people do their best and their best is not very good; of the human tendency to feel pride in one's flaws and shame in one's strengths: all this is the lifeblood of Munro's collection, and there's no denying that it's more bitter than sweet. At times, the bitterness becomes overpowering. At other times, Munro strikes a compelling balance between the deep sadness in all her characters (particularly her female characters) and the moments of true connection they manage to glean from the world around them, often at unexpected moments.

Munro, it should be stressed, is a magnificent craftsman. One of the reasons these stories, at 20 or 30 pages, feel like whole super-condensed novels, is their author's extreme economy of language, her ability to establish whole histories with one or two well-chosen words, which often occur in a paragraph seemingly devoted to another task entirely. In the story "Post and Beam," for example, the graduate student Lionel contemplates the married life of his professor and the professor's wife, a couple he has come to socialize with on occasion:

He came to see them in the evenings, when the children were in bed. The slight intrusions of domestic life—the cry of the baby reaching them through an open window, the scolding Brendan sometimes had to give Lorna about toys left lying on the grass, instead of being put back in the sandbox, the call from the kitchen asking if she had remembered to buy limes for the gin and tonic—all seemed to cause a shiver, a tightening of Lionel's tall, narrow body and intent, distrustful face.

Not only do we get a portrait of a summer evening here, the ambient twilight stimuli as the adults have a drink together, but we also get Lionel's aversion to the everyday accouterments of married life (he comes after the children are in bed, shivers at Lorna and Brendan's everyday interactions). We also get a solid idea of the dynamic between Lorna and Brendan: their marriage follows traditional gender roles in that she is the one expected to take responsibility for cleaning up the children's toys and doing the shopping; if she slips up, Brendan not just allowed but obliged ("had to") to give her a scolding about it. That "had to" might indicate, since we are in his head at the moment, Lionel's point of view, his acceptance of the standard husband/wife hierarchy—although the rest of the story gives the impression that none of these characters would object to the phrase, even as the lack of equality and human understanding in her marriage is making Lorna actively unhappy. Even the addition of "remembered" ("the call from the kitchen asking if she had remembered to buy limes for the gin and tonic") adds to multiple aspects of the marital portrait. On the one hand, it speaks to the familiarity of husband and wife: probably everyone who has shared a household has yelled this type of question at one time or another. On the other hand, combined with Brendan's disconnection from his children and scolding of his wife, his phrasing adds to the picture of his domineering nature. This is not a man who goes to the store to buy limes himself, but tasks his wife with buying them, and then calls from the kitchen to ask if she remembered his request, rather than walking into the other room to ask her or (heaven forbid) looking for the limes himself. One can understand why Lionel might not be jumping on board with the whole marriage proposition, if Lorna and Brendan are his role models.

And in fact, Brendan is largely representative of the male characters in Munro's book. If I have a complaint about the collection, it's this uniformity of male callousness: although we occasionally see a long-married couple who are genuinely caring toward one another (if mutually deeply flawed), or a pair of total strangers who manage to achieve a moment of unfettered connection, for the most part Munro's men are controlling, unfaithful jerks, taking the women around them for granted and generally acting like petulant toddlers. And I don't mean to suggest that Munro does not evoke this character type with great skill and sensitivity, because she absolutely does—and in fact, many of these male characters, in her hands, end up eliciting some degree of sympathy in the reader's mind: quite a feat considering their collective behavior. Munro's analysis of the gender roles in these stories acknowledges that the mainstream culture of the 1950s and 60s set up young men to be the assholes they sometimes turned out, just as those same decades socialized women to be submissive and self-denigrating, simultaneously responsible for raising children and reduced to a child-like state themselves. In the excellent story "What is Remembered," one of the highlights of the collection for me, the narrator writes:



Young husbands were stern, in those days. Just a short time before, they had been suitors, almost figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their sexual agonies. Now, bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving. Off to work every morning, clean-shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days spent in unknown labors, home again at suppertime to take a critical glance at the evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it up between themselves and the muddle of the kitchen, the ailments and emotions, the babies. What a lot they had to learn. How to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives.

So the men don't have a roadmap for how to live, any more than the women do. They, too, are working to conform to certain societal expectations. Yes.

Even so, I've known a good number of men from this generation (or slightly older: my grandparents' generation), and most of them were not domineering, not unkind to their wives or dismissive of their wives' opinions. True, I didn't know them when they were young men. Munro's older characters are significantly gentler with each other than her younger ones, albeit sometimes oddly so. To some degree even the younger characters are not being unkind given their social context: they assume it's the simple truth that a husband's role is to dictate and a wife's is to obey. This is a systemic problem more than a fault of individuals. Still. Munro's bone of contention got a bit monotonous at times, as much as I agree with her insights. The sameness of male/female relationships in the collection dulled the impact of stories which, individually or in more varied company, would have all packed the same kind of punch as the first few did.

In addition to said bones, though, this collection offers lots of meat. It will be rewarding to return to individual stories in the future, which I think will be a more palatable way of appreciating Munro than reading a collection of hers cover to cover. And there is plenty here to appreciate: the role of memory throughout these stories, for example, and how we mold our recollections to fill the functions we need them to, forgetting or imagining where it is convenient. Or how Munro so cleanly and expertly handles shifts in time, quietly moving the reader forward and backward in a given history with no unnecessary apparatus and hardly a hiccup in the narrative flow. It's not a Woolfian vision of simultaneity; while the characters often recollect their pasts, the past is not present to them as it is to Clarissa Dalloway or Peter Walsh—but the narrative engine is so weightless and nimble that it can position the reader neatly at any desired perspective point vis-à-vis the action, and whisk them to a different one with no fuss at all, with absolute clarity. (The opening paragraphs of "Family Furnishings" are excellent at this, and the titular story shows a similar character-based flexibility in its use of a roving limited third-person narrator.)

Munro is not comfort reading, in other words, but in small doses I will definitely be returning to her hard, occasionally tender, lying world. (less)
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Jun 14, 2018Glenn Sumi rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: canadian, nobel-winners, short-stories
A lifetime of reading Alice Munro

I feel like I’ve grown up with Alice Munro. I studied some of her short stories as a student (high school and college); I took a senior seminar in her work at university – long before she won the Nobel Prize for Literature; I’ve seen her read several times (my favourite was when she read the masterpiece “Differently” in its entirety.) And I continue to read and reread her work. Some of her stories are so familiar I can recite whole passages by heart.

(Nerd confession: I once played a game with a friend where he read passages from Munro and I had to identity the story.)

My favourite Munro is mid-period, from Who Do You Think You Are? (calledThe Beggar Maid in the U.S. and UK), published in 1978, through Friend Of My Youth (1990).

After that, I felt her stories got a little too complex, too compressed. They’re still brilliant, each as full of life and incident as novels, but many of them don’t have the directness and emotional impact of the early-middle work.

This collection is from a decade later, in 2001, and it’s very fine.

If you know Munro’s work, there are echoes from earlier stories. There’s the uncouth, loud country relation visiting the narrator who’s risen in social stature (“Post And Beam”); there’s a childhood prank that ends up affecting people’s destinies (“Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage”); there are young people who have a chaste connection who meet up again in later life (“Nettles”); there’s the memory of a brief sexual liaison that helps sustain a character through the rest of her life (“What Is Remembered”); and there’s the bright young narrator, an aspiring writer, who rejects a substitute maternal figure/working woman in her life (“Family Furnishings”).

What I always love about Munro is just how deep she goes into human interaction.

There’s a passage in “Floating Bridge,” a powerful story about a couple, one of whom has just been to see a physician about how her cancer has progressed. This passage has nothing really to do with the plot, such as it is, but it’s so true to life.


When Neal was around other people, even one person other than Jinny, his behavior changed, becoming more animated, enthusiastic, ingratiating. Jinny was not bothered by that anymore – they had been together for twenty-one years. And she herself changed – as a reaction, she used to think – becoming more reserved and slightly ironic. Some masquerades were necessary, or just too habitual to be dropped.
How true to life. Every word is necessary, even that “she used to think,” implying that she’s changed.

The title story, the longest in the collection and one that spans decades, is a marvellous tale that keeps shifting perspectives. Imagine holding up a valuable jewel and seeing how the light catches it from different angles – that's sort of the effect. The first perspective is from a smug, small-town station agent:

The station agent often tried a little teasing with women, especially the plain ones who seemed to appreciate it.

Then later:

She spoke to him in a loud voice as if he was deaf or stupid, and there was something wrong with the way she pronounced her words. An accent. He thought of Dutch – the Dutch were moving in around here – but she didn’t have the heft of the Dutch women or the nice pink skin or the fair hair. She might have been under forty, but what did it matter? No beauty queen, ever.

Oh, my. Munro knows her people so well: their vanities, their prejudices, their secret desires. A few pages later, the same woman described above goes shopping for a dress she hopes will be her wedding outfit, and the shopkeeper (named "Milady") comes alive in a few brief, sharp strokes. If aliens ever wanted to learn about humans, all they’d have to do would be read Munro.

The final story, “The Bear Came Over The Mountain,” was made into an Oscar-nominated film by Sarah Polley called Away From Her. It’s about a philandering husband whose wife, living with Alzheimer’s, can no longer remember him and strikes up a very close friendship with another man in the same facility. The economical way Munro sketches out the couple’s life, especially the husband’s affairs – he was a professor before being forced to retire – makes you understand everyone. (It’s very interesting to read in light of the #MeToo movement.)

Flipping through this story again to write this review made me realize why I love Munro so much. She presents humanity with all its flaws intact. She sees people so clearly but she doesn’t judge them. They’re all just a part of the carnival of life. She forgives them. She forgives us.

I’ve always felt that some of Munro’s book titles could be interchangeable. This book’s title – named after a game that kids, often girls, will play, a variation on the “He loves me/he loves me not” flower game – is expansive. But it could just as easily have been The Progress Of Love or The Love Of A Good Woman.

This is an exquisite collection. Definitely “Loveship.” (less)
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Jun 07, 2018Dolors rated it really liked it
Recommended to Dolors by: Those who trust
Shelves: read-in-2018
The first Munro that doesn't have a melancholic atmosphere but rather a humorous touch that seems to say "hey, just flow with it, you never know where the tide will take you, so follow your impulses and it might be alright".
Johanna is a maid who incidentlly crosses paths with Ken, the son in law, now recently widowed, of Johanna's employer. She is plain, uninteresting and rather timid, so she is taken by surprise when a heated letter declaring passionate love from Ken reaches her. What she can't know is that Ken's teenage daughter and her friend are playing a bad taste joke on her and writing letters in the widower's name.
Munro builds a highly believable scenario where all characters have understandable motivations to act the way they do. And it's uncommon that uncoordinated actions might turn into something pleasing. A fair, entertaining short story that returns my old believe in good luck!
(less)
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Oct 16, 2013Richard rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: canadian-literature, by-women, nobel-prize-winners, reviewed, short-stories,2011-2017
This collection of stories by Alice Munro is typical of much of her work. The stories are populated by people leading what looks on the surface like humdrum lives. But just underneath the surface, strange feelings boil, ready to erupt when events occur which make this possible. Munro has a lot of knowledge about the various types of relationships between men and women, how they can be built, twisted, broken and remade. These are not happy stories--in fact, some of them are disturbing. But the narration is powerful, and the author seems always to know exactly what effect she will produce. (less)
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Mar 02, 2014Leo Robertson rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Reading Munro is daunting at first: you can't read her stories like other people's. I thought I could get through at my usual 75%- concentration, skimming past the details of the cousin's wedding and blah blah other accessory nonsense. But with Munro, nothing can be taken as accessory! You'll read for three pages, realise you haven't been paying attention and that Munro won't throw you a pronoun other than "she", and you're like, 'Who is she? Ahhh, I'll keep reading for a few more pages and pick it up', and then "she" kisses "him" and five years later "he" dies and the story ends.

So I got to page 60, realised I wasn't picking up what was going on, and started again. And suddenly I was trained to read Munro, and in so trained, I realised I could probably read just about any of her books, since all the stories are written in the same clear, conversational tone, dipping off the narrative for nanoseconds to add beautiful psychological insights about the characters and most of the time, by extension, about people you know.

Sure, these stories are very Chekhovian, but never quite as tragic. There is much more life affirmation, slowing down to appreciate little moments in people's lives that at the time didn't seem so important but get them thinking hard decades later when they see a particular flower or fabric pattern that throws them back to their uncle's farm as kids. Wonder for other lives unlived is never delivered without love of the path chosen, and this balance permeates the stories in many other aspects.

Munro is a beautiful writer, and I can't wait to read all her books, and here's a tangible reason why you should too!
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10...
(well done, literature! I knew it!) (less)
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