The slowly creeping insight

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What is amazing is how much Munro can make out of so little, the lives of observant but unexceptional people, most of them in and around London, Ontario, in the 1990s or 2010s, who perhaps once in their lives have experienced an exceptional event. Within this restricted fictional territory, the author finds innumerable variations.

After the first few stories I was hoping for a change of scenery and skipped to the last, and title, story of the collection, "Too Much Happiness," and was surprised by something quite different. Here the protagonist is an entirely exceptional person and so far from contemporary Canada she probably could not even imagine the Ontario forests and suburbs. The Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850-1891) was the first woman to earn a doctorate in a European university at a time when women weren't admitted even to sudy in universities (summa cum laude, University of Göttingen, 1874). Kovalevskaya's extraordinary triumphs and disappointments, including difficult romance with another Russian intellectual exile, all really occurred. The fictional imagination is in making us feel as though we are she, living all these frustrations and sometimes wild hopes, until the fatal "too much happiness."

This is not the only wonderful story in the collection. Other favorites of mine included "Wood," which seems to understand a man's loneness — his need to be alone, but in a place where he feels himself as part of something greater — as clearly as Munro's other stories understand women's ways of relating to, and sometimes, avoiding one another. "Some Women" and "Child's Play" are especially about that complicated ballet. "Free Radicals" is another memorable story — or rather, two memorable stories, first of a woman's sudden and unexpected widowhood, and then of a startling irruption into her life that seems to reconfigure the meaning of everything. But even in this story, the conclusion is not an event but the protagonist's sudden understanding of events in a new way, even though she, or he, or we, may not be able to describe just what that new understanding is.

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Canadian literary adventure with Atwood & Gibson

For info on this literary cum outdoors opportunity, click on Atwood and Gibson in the wild.

A view of Labrador, from Adventure Canada

I'd love to see Newfoundland & Wild Labrador, and I'm sure it would be a pleasure to spend some time with Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson. Sorry I haven't the time or money just now. As the announcement informs us, 

Novelist and poet Margaret Atwood is one of Canada’s best known, most prolific and most honoured authors. Among her numerous awards, she has won the Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and twice the Governor General’s award. With Graeme Gibson, she is co-chair of BirdLife International’s Rare Bird Club.

Graeme Gibson co-founded the Writer’s Union of Canada and the Writer’s Trust. He's a former council member of the World Wildlife Foundation and the chair of the Pelee Island Observatory. He is the author of several novels, as well as the bestselling Bedside Book of Birds and Bedside Book of Beasts.

Guess I'll just stay at home and read Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman (sounds delicious), or maybe The Handmaid's Tale or Surfacing, all of which are staring at me from my bookshelves. I don't have anything by her partner Graeme Gibson, though. Wild Labrador will have to wait.