Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro | Goodreads

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro | Goodreads




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Too Much Happiness

by
Alice Munro
3.82 · Rating details · 16,377 Ratings · 2,055 Reviews
In these ten stories, Alice Munro once again renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.

Ten superb new stories by one of our most beloved and admired writers—the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize.

In the first story a ...more

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Hardcover, 304 pages
Published November 17th 2009 by Knopf (first published 2009)
Original Title
Too Much Happiness
ISBN
0307269760 (ISBN13: 9780307269768)
Edition Language
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Nov 05, 2012Rakhi Dalal rated it it was amazing
Recommended to Rakhi by: s.penkevich


“We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.”

― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending


As I proceeded on my voyage through this intense collection of short stories by Alice Munro, this quote by Julian Barnes kept coming to my mind. For, this collection is essentially about people encountering unprecedented events in their lives. Events, where time and the choices/ judgement made by the characters, play an important role .Time, abounding moments, which possess the power to alter a state of life. Forever. Time, constantly reminding, that we live in a mortal world which is not consistent in its living. It is a world which is ephemeral. A world which enfold every thing, every joy, pain, sorrow, misfortune, lust, desire, ecstasy, every possible feeling experienced by a human being, and, is still constantly altering in the sense in which it makes it supremacy felt.

Alice portrayed this supremacy in the story “Dimensions” profoundly. It is a story where Doree, the female character, in a rage of anger, gets out of the house only to return and find the dead bodies of her three kids. Kids strangled to death by her husband. It wasn’t the first time that they had a fight, but it was the first that she went out of the house in anger. If only she hadn’t at that time, her kids would still be with her. Did she get over it? Not exactly. Did she forgive her husband? May be, she did. Here is the letter which her husband wrote to her from the institution where he was kept:

“People are looking all over for the solution. Their minds are sore (from looking). So many things jostling around and hurting them. You can see in their faces all their bruises and pains. They are troubled. They rush around. They have to shop and go to the Laundromat and get their hair cut and earn a living or pick up their welfare checks. The poor ones have to do that and the rich ones have to look hard for the best ways to spend their money. That is work too. They have to build the best houses with gold faucets for their hot and cold water. And their Audis and magical toothbrushes and all possible contraptions and then burglar alarms to protect against slaughter and all (neigh) neither rich nor poor have any peace in their souls. I was going to write neighbour instead of neither, why was that? I have not got any neighbour here.

Where I am at least people have got beyond a lot of confusion. They know what their possessions are and always will be and they don’t even have to buy or cook their own food. Or choose it. Choices are eliminated. All we that are here can get is what we can get out of our own minds. At the beginning all in my head was perturbation (Sp?). There was everlasting storm, and I would knock my head against cement in the hope of getting rid of it. Stopping my agony and my life. So punishments were meted. I got hosed down and tied up and drugs introduced in my bloodstream. I am not complaining either, because I had to learn there is no profit in that. Nor is it any different from the so-called real world, in which people drink and carry on and commit crimes to eliminate their thoughts which are painful. And often they get hauled off and incarcerated but it is not long enough for them to come out on the other side. And what is that? It is either total insanity or peace.”

In other stories like 'Fiction', 'Wenlock Edge', 'Deep Holes' and 'Too much Happiness' also, she makes you sit, and contemplate the choices/decisions taken by characters, at different points in their lives. Decisions, which if, were different from those taken, would have altered their living tremendously.

In Wenlock edge, a young girl is disgraced by a Mr. Purvis, who demands her presence sans any clothing for a dinner at his house. The girl acquiesces, and even goes to the extent of reading aloud before the man. It is noteworthy that the man does not even touch her. But some time later, when she is still restless, her mind is occupied by these thoughts “I would never think of those lines again without feeling the prickles of the upholstery on my bare haunches. The sticky prickly shame. A far greater shame it seemed now, than at the time. He had done something to me, after all.”

Here the reader is actually left to brood over the morality of human beings. Capriciousness, in some weak moments, may result in hasty and insensitive decisions, thereby changing the disposition in a manner, which may not be retractable.

My favourite story of the collection is “Too much Happiness”, which entails the story of an erudite Mathematics scholar, Sophia, who rises to fame from a humble background. Her journey involving those decisions which help her find her place in the Society. But does she feel happy subsequently? Is she happy after achieving recognition? Is she happy for her decision to remarry after the death of her ex Husband? At one stage she wonders whether her decision to enter into a sort of contract marriage with her ex Husband was right. Alice tries to give a sight into it through these lines:

“Many persons who have not studied mathematics confuse it with arithmetic and consider it a dry and arid science. Actually, however, this science requires great fantasy. She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements. It could be brimful of occupations which did not weary you to the bone. Acquiring what you needed for a comfortably furnished life, and then to take on a social and public life of entertainment, would keep you from even being bored or idle, and would make you feel at the end of the day that you had done exactly what pleased everybody. There need be no agonizing.”

The story ends with the demise of Sophia brought about by pneumonia. Could it be avoided if she hadn't taken a journey to meet her teacher? And does she die being “Too Happy”? I would let you ponder upon that, since, I would not want go ahead further and spoil your reading of the work.

This collection of short but powerful stories by Alice Munro does lead to emphasize the helplessness of humans when lost into the maze of consequences brought about by their own decisions. And does convey us the necessity to be more judicious when still making ours.

Thanks to a dear friend for introducing me to Munro. Thank yous.penkevich.

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Dec 13, 2009brian rated it really liked it
is there another living writer of fiction who, while reading, produces as many of these: 'yes! exactly! a tiny but revelatory detail i've never considered in such a light... and never so precisely expressed!' -- no. there isn't. alice munro is chimney-smoke smell and end-of-day melancholy. the goal is to read everything she's written.
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Jan 28, 2015Glenn Sumi rated it it was amazing
Shelves: short-stories, nobel-winners, canadian
The title of her latest collection could sum up the feeling Alice Munro's fans get when they encounter her work. Yet is it possible to get too much of a good thing?

Hardly, when you're in the hands of such an inventive writer, one whose carefully crafted, richly suggestive stories burrow their way into the subconscious like actual memories.

Even in her late 70s, this year's Man Booker International Prize winner gets to show off some new tricks. Two of the stories are among the handful she's written from a male point of view, including the long-uncollected story "Wood," set in the world of tree-cutting and forestry.

The insights Munro offers here - and in the story "Face," narrated by a man born with a disfiguring birthmark - should quash any notion that she's exclusively a chronicler of the lives of girls and women.

Long-time readers will note subtle allusions to earlier stories - a play on one of her titles here, a similar character there - making this feel like a look back at four decades of creating fiction.

In fact, one of the most enigmatic stories is called "Fiction," which is told in a playful, sophisticated fashion. Munro presents a series of scenes, catapults us to a time years later and then adds a clever twist about a young writer of short stories that has us reading the whole tale again.

About those endings: they're chiselled and satisfying but often open-ended, allowing the narratives' mysteries to deepen and take root.

I've read "Some Women" - about a group of women tending to a dying man - several times, and with each encounter I see something new, some surprise flaring up in a character or bit of dialogue.

Violence and sexuality lurk beneath many of the stories: family murders, a questionable death by drowning, a creepy fetishist. But these aren't the point of the stories.

As Nita, the compelling character in the story "Free Radicals," tells us, "She hated to hear the word ‘escape' used about fiction... it was real life that was the escape."

So true. This is fiction to live by.

Originally published in NOW Magazine: https://nowtoronto.com/art-and-books/... (less)
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Dec 03, 2011Celia rated it it was ok
Something about these stories makes my skin creep. There is a feeling of total emptiness, as if I am watching people's lives unfold in front the plexiglass of a zoo enclosure. Munro is a talented writer, but there is nothing showy in her style. I felt no connection with the characters, the time and place are not developed in great detail. All you are left with the uncomfortable situations she picks as her material: unfinished lives, death, misunderstanding, lies. I'll come back to Munro the next time I want the literary equivalent of dissecting a frog, but in the mean time, I'll stick to authors who can write beautifully, craft a plot and make a full-blooded human beings leap from the page. (less)
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Jan 10, 2012Fabian rated it liked it
Mighty difficult time choosing between *** & **** for "Too Much Happiness." Alice Munro is more than capable of writing a good sturdy yarn, although the *** may indicate that she is mediocre at best at concocting brilliant short stories. All ten of these shorts are written in an accessible way, but the themes are harsh & bleak. 2 of them involve infanticide (one about a father killing his children, another about kids murdering kids) others are about... straight-up death. The titular story is the only one which seems out of place. All others are contemporary vignettes of Canadian life. The title is ironic, just as you'd expect (kudos for placing that particular story in 19th century frozen Russia-- an unconventional love story involving, yup, mathematics). (less)
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Dec 11, 2009Teresa rated it it was amazing
Five of these stories I'd read before (online at the New Yorker) and it was a pleasure to read them again, even to note a few subtle changes that had been made, in particular, with the one I think is my favorite ("Face"). This pleasure in reading Munro, I think, comes not from her characters or her plots, though she obviously is very talented in those facets, but from the themes of the stories, some of which need to be teased out. I especially felt this way with a story ("Wood") that I didn't even think I liked at first, thinking it only to be a somewhat long-winded way of illustrating an aphorism. Yet, it kept me thinking all night and I reread it the next day.

The longer title story relates the amazing life of a late-19th century Russian female mathematician (and novelist) and sent me looking for more information about her. It's easy to see why Munro was drawn to her, though it couldn't have been easy to get all she related about her in a short story, as she did, as the woman's life could easily take up the length of a novel. (less)

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The emotional housekeeping of the world

Alice Munro's stories bring her readers up against unmediated life, 

says Christopher Tayler

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/aug/15/alice-munro-too-much-happiness

Sat 15 Aug 2009 

---

In "Fiction", one of the 10 new stories collected in Too Much Happiness, a woman called Joyce takes a vague dislike to a guest at a family party. The guest, Maggie, whom Joyce thinks of as the sort of young woman "whose mission in life is to make people feel uncomfortable", turns out to be a writer who's just published her first book. Joyce buys a copy on a whim a few days later, not sure if she'll actually read it ("she has a couple of good biographies on the go at the moment"). She becomes even more unsure when she realises that it's "a collection of short stories, not a novel . . . It seems to diminish the book's authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside."

Alice Munro has said in interviews that she once had similar anxieties about short stories - that she spent her 20s fretting about not producing a novel. These days, along with William Trevor, she is one of the grandees of English-language short fiction. Yet people still like to worry about her authority. In truth, there's little substance to these anxieties: she's had an international readership since the 1970s; this year she added the Man Booker International prize to her already substantial collection of awards; and her daughter has published a memoir about being brought up by "an icon". Even so, there's a persistent idea of her as an underpraised housewife-genius from the Canadian backwoods, perhaps because it's easier to talk about the literary politics of being a woman, Canadian or a short-story writer than it is to give a sense of her densely packed but effortless-seeming work.

Born Alice Laidlaw in 1931, Munro grew up in a small town in southwestern Ontario peopled by descendants of Scottish and Irish settlers. (Through her father, she's descended from the Scottish Romantic writer James Hogg.) She quickly got out of there on a scholarship, married a man she met in college and started a family in suburban Vancouver. Then, not long after publishing Lives of Girls and Women (1971), a kind of bildungsroman made of interlinked stories, she got divorced and found herself back in Ontario, where the sexual and social changes in the air did not always fit well with the religious and class assumptions of small-town Canada. But there she stayed, remarrying and, in her writing, addressing the matter of men and women, trouble with children, the deaths of friends and parents. By the early 80s, it was clear that Huron County - with some excursions to the Pacific northwest - had given her all the material she would need.

Munro's localism isn't antiquarian or defensive. Small-town Canada, it turns out, is an ideal place to observe the mysteries of sex and selfhood, of personal formation and deformation. But localism has also insulated her writing from windy notions of universality, giving it a sense of history and a network of social gradations and prohibitions to work with, as well as an understated Gothic turn. Rural or puritanical suspicions of pretension, which often oppress her characters, have left their impress on her writing style, too. Her prose is clean, precise and unmannered; her stories are attentive to emotion but sometimes almost witheringly unsentimental. She's also a storyteller rather than a maker of atmospheric vignettes, not afraid to shift chronology around or have dramatic things happen. In the collections she's published over the past 10 years, she gives the impression of being able to make the form do pretty much anything she wants, and Too Much Happiness is no exception.

"Fiction", for example, seems at first to be a story about Joyce being left by her husband in the 70s. But then the action cuts to the near-present, with the character presiding in grandmotherly style over her second husband's family get-together, being annoyed by Maggie. When she finally gets round to reading Maggie's stories, she sees why the writer seemed nigglingly familiar: she's the daughter of the woman for whom Joyce's first husband left her. What's more, the first story she starts to read - it's called "Kindertotenlieder" - is transparently modelled on Maggie's childhood, in the course of which Joyce taught her music at school and, so Maggie's story recounts, exploited the child's love for her glamorous, freshly husbandless music teacher to prise details of her mother's new domestic setup out of her. Joyce reads on in horror as the child grows up, understands that her innocent love was exploited (though to no great effect), and becomes bitter, "a person never to be fooled again".

"But", Munro writes, "something happens. And here is the surprise ending." The Maggie-figure in the story finds one day that her feelings about that teacher and that time have changed. She realises that her happiness wasn't fraudulent: whatever the teacher's motives, the child singled out for attention experienced love. "It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness - however temporary, however flimsy - of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another." Joyce is suitably cheered by this conclusion, and Munro could honourably have left the story there. Instead, she gives its tone two further tweaks. First, Joyce queues up to get her copy signed and Maggie doesn't recognise her, indeed she acts as though her story was disposed of long before. Then, having made Joyce depart a bit mawkishly, Munro gives her back her composure: "This might even turn into a funny story that she would tell one day. She wouldn't be surprised."

Laid out in a short summary, the story's workings - the lessons and counter-lessons in fiction-making; the fluent, dramatic changes of perspective; the approach to, and retreat from, generalising wisdom - inevitably seem a bit squashed. On the page, though, they hang together beautifully, without strain; and the same holds true for many of the other pieces in the book. In "Dimensions", one of several stories featuring violent death, Munro arrives at a brilliantly ambiguous emotional transaction between a traumatised woman and the mad husband who killed their children. "Free Radicals", in which a widowed woman with cancer has to deal with a dangerous intruder, turns neatly - perhaps too neatly towards the end - on another deftly handled reversal; while "Wenlock Edge" moves easily from surface realism to a David Lynch-like erotic dreamscape involving enforced nudity, chicken-carving lessons and the poetry of AE Housman.

Many of these new stories have a valedictory feel. "I grew up, and old," one ends. The novella-length title story - which recreates the last days of Sofia Kovalevskaya, the 19th-century Russian mathematician, writer and practical feminist - begins in a graveyard and ends with a litany of deaths and fates. The ageing narrators of the stories of childhood and early adulthood are good on the urgency with which once-discarded memories can come back, "wanting attention, even wanting you to do something about it, though it's plain there is not on this earth a thing to be done". At the same time, we get appealing glimpses of the sardonic girls these people once were, as when the narrator of "Wenlock Edge" watches her bachelor cousin pour scorn on a snobbish warning she's received: "This speech of his, the righteousness and approval lighting his large face, the jerky enthusiasm of his movements, roused the first doubts in me, the first gloomy suspicion that the warning, after all, might have some weight in it."

Munro is famously hard to write about, in part because she's the opposite of the Borges character who joked about belonging not to art but to the history of art. Far from hanging on to the gates of literature, her stories create a powerful illusion of bringing their readers up against unmediated life; and life isn't penetrable by the normal procedures of book reviewing. 

Is Too Much Happiness as substantial a collection as Runaway (2004) or Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001)? The only sensible answer is to recommend buying all three.