About book The Beggar Maid: Stories Of Flo And Rose (1991)
Don't tell anyone, but I've never read any Alice Munro. I know, I know. All of my bookish friends love her -- even the ones who generally avoid anything written by women -- so this isn't a confession made lightly. I've meant to find something of hers for a while now, but it just never happened. There are so many books and so many writers that I want to read that things usually just have to bubble to the top for me to take notice. Confession, The Sequel: I haven't been reading much of anything lately, and by lately I mean months. If memory serves, and it frequently doesn't, it's been well over a year since I finished anything I started. I don't know why exactly, but I suspect it has something to do with this neurotic approach to work that I've been dutifully cultivating. The problem is, it isn't like raising daisies or potatoes. I don't get to enjoy any beauty or practical use from what I've planted. Instead, it's like I dug a hole with the heel of my boot, dropped in the seeds for a sweetgum tree, kicked dirt over them and left. Now I've come back, and I have something. I've grown something, and it's impressive and it looks beautiful in certain parts of the year, but damn if it isn't the messiest, most curmudgeonly tree ever. It throws its pointed gumball fruit at me. I slip and slide on hundreds of the round burrs every time I try to pass. The sweetgum pretends to be majestic while planning to kill me or, at the very least, break my leg. Congratulations, Self. So now I can't sit down and relax. I can't concentrate on anything without work thoughts and visions of my calendar creeping in, and I can't focus for shit. My mind skips from one idea to the next, from a to-do list to stacks of ungraded essays and dozens of opened but unanswered emails. It makes reading difficult. It makes reading impossible. I've started a scant handful of books, but I haven't made it through any of them, so I was hesitant to start again, but Munro's reputation and my curiosity about her won out. As it turns out, I picked the perfect time for reading The Beggar Maid. I found it on the fireplace mantel in the room I've stayed in for the past few days. I'm at a writer's retreat in central Virginia, and I haven't quite figured out why, but this book feels right for this place. It probably has something to do with the connections I make between poverty and rural life because really the book isn't much like this spot in the mountains, but something about my sparsely decorated room and the simplicity of being in the middle of not much makes this a good time to read this particular book. As I've worked on this review this morning two trains have passed in full view of the second floor porch, the James River has rushed loudly at the base of the next mountain, and various birds, and the resident dog Maisie, have provided a steady stream of background noise. Most recently, a woodpecker spent several minutes working on a large tree in the front yard. Oh, and here's the third train in as many hours. This one is really long, made of dozens of CSX coal cars. I realize this isn't much of a review. It's more about me wallowing in the warmth of this place and Munro is along for the ride. Cut me some slack if you can, though, because this is a feeling too few of us have a chance to experience anymore. About the book. The Beggar Maid is a collection of short stories about Rose and her stepmother Flo who live in rural Canada. Though they could stand alone, the stories are tightly connected so that when read together they feel like chapters in a novel. The advantage over a traditional novel, though, is the complexity of the storytelling. Munro abandons a linear narrative, thrusting us back and forth in time and making it hard to remember which bits of stories belonged to Rose and which to Flo as a child. I really like this, though. It feels messy and complicated like my own vastly imperfect memory. Munro makes you work for it, and the experience is all the better for it. It's easy, too, to see why people love Munro. She does beautiful things with sentences: "She mooned and daydreamed, she was vain and eager to show off; her whole life was in her head."She cuts characters open and lays bare their guts. She says of Rose's interactions with a father she desperately tries to please: "Until he had passed through the room she was holding herself still, she was looking at herself through his eyes. She too could hate the space she occupied."And she's funny. In describing the family's newly installed indoor toilet, perched in a corner of the kitchen no less, she writes, "The door did not fit, the walls were only beaverboard. The result was that even the tearing of a piece of toilet paper, the shifting of a haunch, was audible to those working or talking or eating in the kitchen. They were all familiar with each other's nether voices, not only in their more explosive moments but in their intimate sighs and growls and pleas and statements. And they were all most prudish people. So no one ever seemed to hear, or be listening, and no reference was made. The person creating the noises in the bathroom was not connected with the person who walked out."Oh, the nether voices. Confession Part 3: Return of the Guilt. I haven't finished this book. I've never posted a review for a partially read book, but I'm headed home in an hour or so, and I don't know when I'll get back to Flo and Rose. I'm ashamed to admit that I'm just a fifth of the way through, so do what you will with this opinion, but I'm already a Munro fan. Surely this isn't her best work, but it is solid and interesting, and I feel for Rose. I want to keep reading, and, after all, that's always the best recommendation there is.
In a review of the Selected Stories that functioned as herald, Updike spoke of “a well-mediated complexity and multiplicity of plot, an intense clarity of phrase and image, an exceptional psychological searchingness and honesty,” “a grittiness…and a bold reach”—promises of pleasure I retained, and recalled over time, until circumstances (fatigue with the fiction I was reading, ambitious browsing in a store that carried a quantity of Munro) placed The Beggar Maid in hand. And it’s wonderful. These stories show a Woolf-like stylistic ambition: the point and swiftness of good prose, with a fineness of verbal texture, poetic sentences to savor. I love writers who try to prove Valéry wrong: you can walk and dance at the same time. To the Lighthouse just ascended a few rungs of the to-read. Flo and Rose are stepmother and stepdaughter. In chronological order (though the stories do not really obey that order, they glimpse backwards and forwards, poignantly), the settings are: the Depression-poor rural Ontario town, (West) Hanratty, where Rose is a schoolgirl and Flo a storekeeper; university; a Vancouver suburb; “a town in the Kootenay Mountains”; professorial parties in Kingston; then back to Hanratty, and the melancholy stations of senescence (Flo’s), the Legion hall, the County Home. I preferred the six (of ten) stories set in Hanratty. Munro has a genius for the constitution of the small town: the jealousies, the watchfulness, the fine parsing of status; also, for even the most humdrum community’s violent sur-reality of rumor, legend, and whispered-over past infamies. The middle stories of Rose’s aimless, peripatetic, vaguely metropolitan career as a determinedly free spirit did less for me. I found her most interesting as a young woman first feeling her difference:Flo was his idea of what a woman ought to be, Rose knew that, and indeed he often said it. A woman ought to be energetic, practical, clever at making and saving; she ought to be shrewd, good at bargaining and bossing and seeing through other people’s pretentions. At the same time she should be naïve intellectually, childlike, contemptuous of maps and long words and anything in books, full of charming jumbled notions, superstitions, traditional beliefs……So part of Rose’s disgrace was that she was female but mistakenly so, would not turn out to be the right kind of woman. But there was more to it. The real problem was that she combined and carried on what he must have thought of as the worst qualities in himself. All the things he had beaten down, successfully submerged, in himself, had surfaced again in her, and she was showing no will to combat them. She mooned and daydreamed, she was vain and eager to show off; her whole life was in her head. She had not inherited the thing he took pride in, and counted on—his skill with his hands, his thoroughness and conscientiousness at any work; in fact she was unusually clumsy, slapdash, ready to cut corners. The sight of her slopping around with her hands in the dishpan, her thoughts a thousand miles away, her rump already bigger than Flo’s, her hair wild and bushy; the sight of the large and indolent and self-absorbed fact of her, seemed to fill him with irritation, with melancholy, almost with disgust.The themes of Rose’s adulthood—manners complicated by mobility, the composite self-creation of the “disowned [and] prayed for”—draw from Munro a treatment gentler and less emphatic than I think I like. But who knows, further reading of Munro, or rereading of The Beggar Maid, may disclose something subtler and more interesting, in this line, than grim Yates’ futile puppet strivers, or Edmund White’s self-inflicted autobiographical ironies. In the Rose-only stories I may have just missed Flo. Not because I think Flo "what a woman ought to be," but because she's just a great character. I like Munro's presentation of her grim hilarity, her store of lurid local anecdotes, her worldview peopled from the nickelodeon villainies and tabloid panics of the 1910s and 20s:Flo said to watch for White Slavers. She said this was how they operated: an old woman, a motherly or grandmotherly sort, made friends while riding beside you on a bus or train. She offered you candy, which was drugged. Pretty soon you began to droop and mumble, were in no condition to speak for yourself. Oh, help, the woman said, my daughter (granddaughter) is sick, please somebody help me get her off so that she can recover in the fresh air. Up stepped a polite gentleman, pretending to be a stranger, offering assistance. Together, at the next stop, they hustled you off the train or bus, and that was the last the ordinary world saw of you. They kept you prisoner in the White Slave place (to which you had been transported drugged and bound so you wouldn’t even know where you were), until such time as you were thoroughly degraded and in despair, your insides torn up by drunken men and invested with vile disease, your mind destroyed by drugs, your hair and teeth fallen out. It took about three years, for you to get in this state. You wouldn’t want to go home, then, maybe couldn’t remember home, or find your way home if you did. So they let you out on the streets.
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LA VERGINE MENDICANTELa sensazione che mi procura la maggior parte dei racconti di Alice Munro, essere collocati in un tempo eterno, non moderno, men che meno contemporaneo, deriva molto probabilmente dal fatto che sono in gran quantità ambientati in quella parte del Canada definita Sowesto (la contea di Huron, nel sudovest dell’Ontario), dove gli esseri umani sembrano saperla più lunga della terra e essere lì da più tempo degli alberi e dei fiumi, e dove chi vuole sapere più cose, leggere più di quello che la scuola richiede, vuole allungare lo sguardo verso l’orizzonte, e possibilmente oltre il confine, si interessa di arte o cerca di raggiungere un’indipendenza di pensiero, si sentirà immancabilmente chiedere con fastidio e rimprovero “Chi ti credi di essere? Pensi di essere migliore di me, ti credi superiore?”, solo perché non riesci a essere gretto o meschino o provinciale come me.E’ il primo romanzo che leggo di Alice Munro, che certo non ne ha scritti molti: è però definito una raccolta di racconti, visto che Munro è regina della narrazione breve. Ma io qui ho letto un vero romanzo: dieci capitoli, dieci racconti volendo, con Rose protagonista, che dagli anni della Grande Depressione la portano a quelli della contestazione studentesca. Un arco di tempo che si ferma una quarantina d’anni fa, visto che quest’opera fu pubblicata per la prima volta nel 1978. Se si tratti di romanzo o racconti, dal mio punto di vista, è questione comunque irrisoria: quello che conta è che sia un magnifico libro, una bellissima lettura.È la Munro che conosco e ho già imparato ad apprezzare: quella che prende la più ‘normale’ umanità, la seziona e disseziona, la scruta perfino ossessivamente, l’analizza sottilmente e la trasforma, ne mostra gli aspetti oscuri come quelli più evidenti, la voglia di fuggire e l’attaccamento alle origini, la violenza dentro una carezza, ci rende partecipi del mistero, della scoperta e dello stupore, lasciandoci comunque davanti all’insondabile, al fatto che non esiste una trama lineare e un approdo davvero definitivo in una vita umana. Trasforma un aneddoto in arte. Trasforma un dettaglio in una dimensione vasta, aperta, profonda. Trasforma il brutto in Bello. La memoria è il modo in cui non cessiamo di raccontare a noi stessi la nostra storia e di raccontare agli altri versioni in certa misura diverse della nostra storia. A. Munro
—orsodimondo
Who doesn't love Alice Munro! I feel like quite a heel only giving this book three stars but it just didn't grab me. It's written as a series of short stories following the relationship between a girl/woman and her stepmother. Its very, um, earthy. It starts when Rose is a child as she grows up in total poverty. Her father had married Flo when Rose was very young and they move into the apartment behind Flo's store. Flo has installed indoor plumbing but the toilet is in a closet in the kitchen so everyone can hear everything going on in there (earthy). she goes to a school where kids peek at each other using the outhouse (earthy), her father dies of lung cancer in the upstairs bedroom (icky) and she finally gets accepted to a better high school but the girls still have lots of sex (some of it very earthy). Finally she goes away to college and things get less earthy and more depressing. She ends up marrying a guy she doesn't love because he adores her and she likes that. Marriage of course falls apart and she finally goes off to start the life she really was meant to live. Guess what? her new life involves a fair amount of sex! Not quite so earthy now thank goodness.I always find books that cover a person's whole life annoyingly superficial and this book was definitely not that. It was billed as a story about the relationship between Flo and Rose but it really wasn't that either. It was more of an medium-interesting character development story. If you just have to read Alice Munro I'd try one of her other many works instead.
—Jeanne
Finally I have entered the world of Munro readers and am delighted to find myself there. It's interesting to learn that the transitions of Munro's own life are reflected in Rose's story and the emotional complexities circling round that central issue of 'who do you think you are', with deep uncertainty about self. In every story, we see this manifested in some way - Rose's indecision about marriage, the aftermath of that decision, misjudged relationships, wild exhilaration, lasting embarrassments.It's often very funny, but embarrassment underlies much of the surface humour.Flo's admonitions to Rose about being wary of white slavers, particularly those dressed as clergymen are followed by a long train journey in which a self-professed clergyman sits next to Rose and then - is he, isn't he - touching her leg? How can she deal with this? Indecision and anguish, locked into immobility because she doesn't know how to call him out.Years later, Flo turns up unannounced to a ceremony where Rose is to receive an award, dressed outlandishly, crowned with a mad wig and behaving outrageously. The wig appears again after Flo's dementia has taken hold, and again the scenes are funny but excruciating.The structure works very well. Each piece works as a contained story, with the sort of twist at the ending that I associate with Katherine Mansfield. It's not a continuous narrative, but we see enough shaping moments of Rose's life to have as clear an idea as we can of who she is, even if she is not so sure herself. Flo appears more as a foil, a force to be contended with, almost a caricature. She is the source, but also the butt, of most of the humour, and a significant contributor to the embarrassments in Rose's life.I'm glad I started with an early work.I borrowed this one from a university library and have bought Dear Life which will be the next of hers I read, but I'll need a bit of time in between.
—Lyn Elliott
