Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You

On the last page of this early collection of stories, Alice Munro reveals a little bit of the secret of her magic:
"If I had been making a proper story out of this, I would have ended it, I think, with my mother not answering and going ahead of me across the pasture. That would have done. I didn't stop there, I suppose, because I wanted to find out more, remember more, I wanted to bring back all I could. Now I look at what I have done and it is like a series of snapshots, like the brownish snapshots with fancy borders that my parents' old camera used to take."
Alice Munro's stories are not "proper;" they refuse to obey the rules of short stories, to confine themselves to a single moment, a single incident. As I have written with regard to a couple of her other collections, her short stories have the sweep of novels, spanning years and great distances, in some cases.
She always wants to "find out more, remember more," to flesh out where others in this form leave tantalizing gaps.
Actually, in Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You, from 1974, Ms. Munro hews closer to the rules than in her more recent, glorious collections such as Open Secrets and Runaway. These early stories are less expansive than her later ones, but nevertheless begin to break away from the conventions of the form. So we get small digressions from the main plot line, a bit of filling in of characters' backgrounds and peculiarities, a side story here and there that clarifies the main thread.
Read in the light of these recent masterworks, Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You reads like a practice volume. You can perceive the author honing her craft in these 13 tales. There are many pleasures here in these stories of messy relationships, familial and marital. As always, Ms. Munro makes you understand what the characters believe should have happened in their lives, in contrast with what really did.
Alice Munro is a treasure.

Open Secrets

When I read Alice Munro's newest collection of stories, Runaway, earlier this year, I was very impressed by this writer who had previously been only a name to me.
Now, having just finished her 1994 collection, Open Secrets, I am convinced that Ms. Munro is one of the greatest living writers.
Like many writers, she builds a world of allusion and cross-reference, with recurring characters and locations -- the towns of Carstairs and Walley in Ontario, the Doud family and their piano factory.
But Ms. Munro's short stories are like no others I have read, spanning decades (nearly 100 years in the case of "A Wilderness Station" in this collection) and encompassing multiple, momentous events in the lives of the characters as well as acts of shocking violence.
I may be narrow in my knowledge of the short-story form, but to me Alice Munro seems to stretch the boundaries of the short story form as surely as Borges does.
"The Albanian Virgin" may recall Singer in its telling of an other-worldly old-world village tale. In "Spaceships Have Landed," Ms. Munro includes a science-fiction moment. But in overall effect, her work is unique and extraordinary. I can't wait to read another collection (the one I have selected from my local library is Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You, an early collection from the mid-1970s. More on that later)