#Friday56 & #BookBeginnings: Too Much Happiness


For Book Beginnings:
Doree had to take three buses—one to Kincardine, where she waited for the one to London, where she waited again for the city bus out to the facility.
- p. 1, from the short story "Dimensions"

For Friday 56:
“I think there is another proper name for them, but I like to call them chocolate lilies. It sounds so delicious [..]"
- p. 56

About Too Much Happiness: Stories by Alice Munro*: 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 young wife and mother receives release from the unbearable pain of losing her three children from a most surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other stories uncover the “deep-holes” in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and how a boy’s disfigured face provides both the good things in his life and the bad. And in the long title story, we accompany Sophia Kovalevsky—a late-nineteenth-century Russian émigré and mathematician—on a winter journey that takes her from the Riviera, where she visits her lover, to Paris, Germany, and, Denmark, where she has a fateful meeting with a local doctor, and finally to Sweden, where she teaches at the only university in Europe willing to employ a female mathematician.

With clarity and ease, 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.

***
This April, I am hosting Where in the world will your Nobel take you? which combines Nobels, travel, and reading! Hope you check it out!

Where in the world will your Nobel take you?

I'll be featuring Nobel-winning literature in April. I thought it was high time I shared this collection of short stories by Alice Munro, 2013 Nobel Prize Prize Laureate. I've had this on my shelf for about 6 years now and it's been years since I read it. I look forward to rereading because I honestly remember only bits and pieces.

Hint: the title is so ironic for a book that is most certainly not about happiness.

Are you an Alice Munro fan? Tell me about your faves!



*Affiliate link

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© guiltless readingMaira Gall