The Moons of Jupiter by Alice Munro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’m reading through Alice Munro’s books: all of them. Most of them I’d read before, but a number are completely new or I only read a story or two of them. The Moons of Jupiter surprised me in that it’s an older collection (1982) and yet I found it as engaging as any of the collections I’d read. Perhaps I’m finally a mature reader, and don’t require stories to be set in the present time to relate to them. A case in point is the story, ‘The Turkey Season’, which a review referred to as a workplace story. And then suddenly, even though a young woman gutting turkeys before the Christmas season in a small Canadian town is a far distance from my life, it did remind me of the politics, conflicts, intrigue and secrets of one of my workplaces. And that’s what I love so much about Munro’s stories, that they make me think about my own life while set in completely different worlds.
One detail filled me with some wonder and dread. I thought of the Alice Munro revelations from not long ago, and read that her daughter started to be abused by her stepfather in 1976 when she was 9, but that Alice didn’t learn about it until much later. How then does a story published in 1978, the last story in the collection (a very fine one), feature a narrator who has a daughter who she is estranged from? An adult daughter who the narrator describes as ‘sly and solitary, cold, seductive’. Chilling.
I will continue reading the rest of Munro’s work, as I love her stories and story-telling so much. But there is an added layer of complexity that I shall contend with.