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    The View from Castle Rock
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    The View from Castle Rock
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    The View from Castle Rock
    Audiobook (abridged)6 hours

    The View from Castle Rock

    Written by Alice Munro

    Narrated by Kimberly Farr

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    In stories that are more personal than any that she has written before, Alice Munro pieces her family history into gloriously imagined fiction.

    A young boy is taken to Edinburgh Castle Rock, where his father assures him that on a clear day he can see America, and he catches a glimpse of his father's dream. In stories that follow, as the dream becomes a reality, two sisters-in-law experience very different kinds of passion on the long voyage to the New World. Other stories take place in more familiar Munro territory, the towns and countryside around Lake Huron, where the past shows through the present like the traces of a glacier on the landscape, and strong emotions stir just beneath the surface of ordinary comings and goings.

    Evocative, gripping, sexy, unexpected-these stories reflect a depth and richness of experience. The View from Castle Rock is a brilliant achievement from one of the finest writers of our time.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateNov 7, 2006
    ISBN9780739339824
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for The View from Castle Rock

    4/5

    301 ratings33 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Can't fault the writing. And normally I like local history, family history, genealogy, and historical fiction in general. I was captivated by the first 2-3 stories, but Munro seems to run out of engaging material about halfway through, which is when my interest started to lag. Didn't finish the book.
    • 3/5
      Alice Munro is a great writer. I have thoroughly enjoyed her short story collections. This book is a series of short stories that is really a family saga. The prose was very plain and the types of stories were not up to the usual Munro level of engagement type work. Not her best for me. In showing the day to day lives of people in the 19th and 20th century rural world that she grew up in she actually created the struggle they had. It was just not al book for me. If you have not read Alice Munro you should but try "Runaway" is a better starting place then this book.
    • 5/5
      Munro has played with the truth, mixing in a little fiction here and there, and it succeeds admirably. This collection of short stories begins with some family history in Scotland followed with her Canadian experiences. The writing conveys stories that are sincere and painfully candid, stories of ordinary people who made an unforgettable impression on a young woman, who is recounting her history. If the reader is unfamiliar with Alice Munro, this might not be the best place to start. However, the writing has that unmistakable Munro excellence.
    • 4/5
      This is the first of Munro's books I have read. It reads like a memoir and leaves me wondering how much of the stories is drawn from her own life. Enjoyable read.
    • 3/5
      This was a memoir based on the author's family history that she had uncovered over time. It is told in short stories. It was interesting, not my very favorite but I would call it "good."Of course, this is just my opinion, since this author was the recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature! So I guess she's pretty "good." ;)
    • 4/5
      Less intense than Munro's "real" stories, this is still worth reading. The first part is mainly family history based on an abundance of facts and interestingly showing the aimilarities and differences that develop between only a few generations of a family. The second part are personal recollections of the last generations and the authors own life.
    • 4/5
      This book is presented as a short story collection, but - untypical for Munro - all the material for it is either from her research into the history of her family (in Part One) or autobiographical (in Part Two). The stories form a chronological sequence, but individually they are largely self-contained. We start out in the Scottish Borders around the end of the 18th century (it turns out that Munro's emigrant forebears were cousins of James Hogg "the Ettrick Shepherd", the writer who got Scott interested in ballads), and come forward to Ontario at the beginning of the 21st.She cautions us against taking it as straight non-fiction, though: everything has been shaped and re-imagined from the perspective of a writer of fiction. Possibly a good way of ensuring that you annoy at least some of your friends and relatives, but it seems to suit her technique very well. I think there might be a buried joke in the way most of the stories subvert the usual formula of an Alice Munro story, by building up a narrative that is clearly heading for a catastrophic pivotal event (adultery, rape, murder, natural disaster, you know the sort of thing) but then having it not happen after all... Fun!
    • 4/5
      I almost gave up on this book at the beginning because I was confused about place and location. But I stuck with it, and eventually found myself enjoying what really appears to be a family saga, thinly disguised as a novel.
    • 4/5
      This is Alice Munro's most autobiographical collection of short stories. Some of the early stories in the book stem from research she was conducting on the history of her family. The characters are her ancestors who came from Scotland to settle in Western Canada. Munro seems to have inherited a writing gene as several of her forebears had the gift of words and had even published in their time. These family histories are well imagined while grounded in reality. Her great, great, great grandparents lived the hard and short lives of the early settlers to North America. The latter half of the stories in this collection revolve around a young Alice Munro and her more immediate family - parents and grandparents (though her grandfather did not live long enough for her to get to know well). They're deeply personal and Alice honestly presents herself as a young girl and woman, warts and all. There's a connection between the centuries because the family's roots remained agrarian and poor, though her father began the process of severing, though not entirely eliminating, these ties. The stories, spanning centuries and generations, chronicle change and transformation, in the land and in lives.
    • 3/5
      An interesting, diverse yet unified (by Scottish ancestry/family immigration life) collection of short stories. Very memoir-like in their flavour. As a descendent of Dutch immigrants (third generation), I related to the stories, even though the ethnicity and time period are different (maybe the two or three references to Dutch people in the stories helped). Nothing profound from me on this one; just quaint stories that reflect Canadian history.
    • 2/5
      I got completely bogged down in the first hundred pagesof this book as the Laidlaw family (Munro was a Laidlalw) as they migrated themselves from the Ettrick Valley in Scotland to Canada. I found the section on her Mum and Dud just like wading through treacle too - but then in the last third there were these brilliant insight into family relationships, memory, hiow we are connected to the dead, our ancestors - and a really good assessment of a librarian etc.
    • 4/5
      Alice Munro's The View from Castle Rock (2006) is a collection of stories about her family's journey from Edinburgh's Castle Rock to settle and farm in Ontario. Drawing from accounts written by family members, she re-imagines the experiences of those she never knew and examines and ponders the lives of her grandparents and parents and her own adolescence in the late 40s and early 50s. Munro would have been a slightly younger contemporary of Gabrielle Roy's Florentine LaCasse in The Tin Flute (1945), but her rural, Anglicized life, though affected by the hardships of the Depression, was a far cry from the urban, grinding, hardscrabble life faced by the Lacasses in Montreal.
    • 3/5
      It's not often that I don't finish a book, but I couldn't finish this one. It is the first Alice Munro book I've opened.It struck me as a self-indulgent piece of writing. The sort of thing that a first-time author couldn't get away with, but that a well-established 'name' is allowed to do because the publisher knows it will sell anyway.Or perhaps I'm being unkind. The writing was fine - nothing to complain about there - but the fictionalised family history just didn't engage me.
    • 2/5
      Alice Munro is at her best when writing about her past, or so I think. These essays are very rich and enjoyable to read. To use a word my friend Rachel detests, they were very relatable. Munro very often paints herself out of the pictures she presents to us, yet we can still see her there, the way she must have stood out growing up. I do regret buying the book as opposed to borrowing it from a library. I don't think I can re-read these essays.
    • 5/5
      This collection deserves five-star plus, as probably all Alice Munro's books do. She's been inspired to write this series from what she knows about her own family history. Not only were ancestors 19th century immigrants from Scotland to rugged Ontario. She's even been able to find some scraps about the family back in Scotland. There's always been a chronicler somewhere along the line, she says. They're in different styles, though, and from different points of view.I wish I had written down some passages, as I usually do with her. But one story, "Hired Girl," close to our time, particularly resonated with me. If it's taking place when Munro was a teenager, I guess that would be the 1940's or early 1950's. The character is sort of a farm girl; we'd guess from a previous story that her father was a trapper turned fox farmer turned factory watchman. From the country anyway. She gets a summer job helping out in a household on a lake. Rich city people's summer getaway. She's quite isolated, doesn't have any friends or co-workers. Very delicately, Murno conveys how this character learns about class differences. The mother of the house (consciously) and the young daughter (semi-deliberately?) enforce the lines. Class is such a crude word, though. Differences. Our main charater of course is a voracious reader and happens upon a book the robust daddy of the house has been reading, Nine Gothic Tales. The mother shrugs off such a strange book, she wasn't able to get far in it. Father can't articulate what he likes about it. But near the end of the story, he comes to the boathouse, where our character sleeps, to give her the book in private, beyond his wife's eyes. Finally, our heretofore harmless heroine also learns this summer to wield the dagger of cruelty herself--on the matron of the house of course. She's going to be much more adept than that woman could ever be.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book. Because she is 'from around here' Alice Munro's stories have always been very special to me. I especially liked the penultimate story "What Do You Want To Know For" where she describes her visit to the Regional Reference room at the university near her. (pp. 325-6).
    • 5/5
      Very interesting, enjoyable. This collection of short stories is fiction, but based on Munro's research into her own family history, and her own life. The stories are arranged in chronological order, from the Scottish ancestors who dreamed of emigrating to Canada, those who made the harrowing sea voyage, pioneers in southern Ontario, and on to Munro's own family. The specifics appeal to me, but the emotional content and family relationships are universal. Alice Munro's writing is conversational, accessible, and beautifully descriptive. The stories are snapshots of different people at different times in history, and some people appear in only one story, making me want to know more about them and what happened next. Some people are only dimly known, while others are more completely portrayed. Some, I suspect, are portraits of real people, with a few names and details changed to avoid lawsuits! I enjoyed the connections with my own family history - Scottish immigrants in the 1800s, first land-owners clearing farms in Ontario, the education, dating and marriage of a young woman in the 1930s to 1950s Ontario (the same age as my parents), one story where Munro was the maid at a cottage on Georgian Bay. Later stories portray the different generations of her family, caring for her parents, becoming elderly, a breast cancer scare, a first and second marriage, her father remarrying after his first wife died from Parkinson's. This is a very good book, and I know I will re-read it every few years. I will also give a copy to my mother, and recommend it to other family members in Ontario.
    • 3/5
      Some stories were great for me but others very boring so it took me a long time to read; I was often not engaged.
    • 4/5
      Magnificent. There's more substance to a Munro short story than there is in most novels. The opening story sequence, about her ancestors emigration to Canada from Scotland, is profound and deeply moving.
    • 4/5
      Alice Munro is frequently described as the best short story writer alive. I've read a few of her collections and enjoyed them but never quite saw the brilliance others cite. In the blurbs on this one, she's compared to Chekov, so now I get it - I'm not big on him either. But there's some great stories in this collection that Munro describes as somewhat autobiographical. The girl in these linked stories is from a poor rural farming community and her roots are in Scotland, in a valley described as "having no advantages". She covers her ancestors' horrible voyage to Canada and her stiffnecked, stoic parents and grandparents in Part One, and Part Two is filled with her teenage and adult life. My favorite is the story "The Hired Girl", where she becomes a summer servant on an island (called Nausicca, from The Odyssey!) on a lake in Ontario. There's also an entire section in the story "The Ticket" that features an incredible compare-and-contrast of two trunks, one a humpbacked ancient one that had come over from Scotland, and a new one bought by her affluent fiancé, and their contents, that's a heartbreaker. OK, I do appreciate Alice Munro. I admit it. Quotes: "Another private passion I had was for lines of poetry. I went rampaging through my school texts to uncover them before they could be read and despised in class.""Reunions occasionally reveal how those who seemed most secure have been somewhat diminished or battered by life, and those who were at the fringes, who seemed to droop and ask pardon, have blossomed.""In those days, nobody in town went for walks, except for some proprietary old men who strode around observing and criticizing any municipal projects. People were sure to spot you if you were noticed in a part of town where you had no particular reason to be. Then somebody would say, "We seen you the other day" - and you were supposed to explain."
    • 4/5
      Alice Munro is well known for her short fiction. After all, she won the Nobel Prize for fiction in 2013 and the prize committee commented that she was a "master of the contemporary short story". This book is her most autobiographical. The stories are all taken from her family's and her own life. Munro is the descendent of Scots who came to Canada and took up homesteads in Huron County in Ontario. One of the stories is about her last months at home before she got married and moved out to BC. However, none of the stories detail her married life. Instead she leaps ahead to the time when she had moved back to Ontario after her divorce. I'm not aware that she has ever written about her first marriage. Maybe that is in deference to the children from that marriage but I, personally, would love to know more about that time. After all, she and her husband started Munro's Books which is a great book store in Victoria.I listened to this book but I was rather put off by the narrator, Kimberly Farr, in the first few stories. She tried to do the dialogue with a Scottish accent but to my ear it was not right. I would recommend reading this book and hearing the dialogue in the first few stories in your mind. I am sure you will sound better than Farr did.
    • 5/5
      One of her few novels, I'm told, made up of distinct titled short stories. My preferred ordering principle in my own writing. It covers two centuries of changing characters, from Scotland to Ontario, Canada, as described by a descendant. Which would be, in a mixture of fiction and memoir, narrated by the sensitive and perceptive author who makes it work.
    • 5/5
      Billed as a collection of stories, spanning the centuries, connecting storytellers to writers, The View from Castle Rock is, as one reviewer stated, "a delightful fraud." It's a memoir, fleshed out with fiction but based heavily on Alice Munro's family stories, starting with Will O'Phaup, star of rumor and myth and proceeding with his descendents as a character study of all the family members who came across the ocean. Those Laidlaws and O'Phaups who wrote and were written about. The Ettick Valley from whence her Scots ancestors came is described it with the ease of those who did live there, as though all these things are as familiar to her as the bush at the back of her family's farm. Though she has been there, walking the wet midlands while it rained on and off, she maintains that these are all just stories. The emphasis of her Forward is more on the flow of these tales from an original source which is never obscured with her liberties.I read slowly at first, dubiously seeing the connections of past leading to stories she may have heard at the fireplace. Themes and hand-me-downs began to quietly appear, family lines branched, yet always returned to Huron County, and to point toward Munro's own life. Once I reached my last possible return date for this library book, I began to rip through it, and found the effect not at all negative. Nearing the last half of the book the stories become even more personal, dealing with people that Munro has observed in her own life, briefly, like her grandparents, or more closely, like her own parents. This does not mean she does not illustrate their lives as she did with Will O'Phaup, or the little-known-of William Laidlaw, in fact she may be more willing to illuminate them since she can better see what would or could have been.But I had meant, didn't he think of himself, of the boy who had trapped along the Blyth Creek, and who went into the store and asked for Signs Snow Paper, didn't he struggle for his own self? I meant, was his life now something only other people had a use for? (p166)She takes advantage of knowing these people and conjuring bits of fancy to tie to her memories, the details of her childhood impressions filling in the gaps of old memories; reflective commentary solidifies them.It must have meant something, though, that at this turn of my life I grabbed up a book. Because it was in books that I would find, for the next few years, my lovers. They were men, not boys. They were self-possessed and sardonic, with a ferocious streak in them, reserves of gloom. Not Edgar Linton, not Ashley Wilkes. Not one of them companionable or kind. (p226)My favorite thing about The View from Castle Rock was being reminded that this was a collection of people who could be traced from generation to generation, and Munro's reception of this legacy; her family's affection for books, for reading, for writing, for storytelling. It's thrilling to read about readers and writers because it's a bond that we and the author share implicitly, and perhaps connects us in a way books about no other occupation can. With this, the symbols and connections come with almost no effort, occurring to me in a pleasant and gentle manner. I liked finding myself and the things I know easily reflected in several moments across the years, on both sides of the ocean.pp349. Penguin Canada. 2007.
    • 4/5
      In this collection of stories, Alice Munro explores the history of her Scottish immigrant ancestors, imagining the events in Scotland that led to their emigration to Canada. Once settled in the bush of western Ontario, the stories evolve through the mid nineteenth century to the late 20th century. The last two thirds of the book are memoir-like, exploring the author's own life and experiences.This is not truly memoir because there is much that the author invents and imagines. I particularly enjoyed it because I have also reached the age where I speculate on my own ancestors and how they might have been. And I am familiar with the landscape of the Lake Huron shores of Ontario.The writing is quintessential Munro. The work is driven by characters rather than plot. The sequential stories are strung together by characters that appear at different times in their lives, revealing how those people develop over time. I've often thought that Alice Munro was ahead of her time in that her style of writing appeals to the modern desire for short episodic narratives that has evolved in the era of digital media.
    • 5/5
      I may be the luckiest person on earth. I've just discovered a writer, who is prolific, and whose writing is astoundingly beautiful and I now have her whole oeuvre to explore at my leisure. I'm looking at you Alice Munro. What a Christmas present I have given to, er, myself! The most recent Nobel Laureate mined her family's history to come up with the linked stories contained in this collection. From the time her great-great-great-great grandfather stood on Edinburgh Castle Rock and heard his father tell him that on a clear day you could see America, we follow Alice's ancestors in 1818 as they cross the Atlantic to Canada and bear the hardships that other pioneer families before them have also borne. From there on she pivots to a first person narrative and tells of the life of a young girl as she grows into adulthood in the shadow of Lake Huron in northern Ontario. And towards the end of the book, as Alice is investigating cemeteries in Ontario, trying to hone in on family burial plots, the author tells us:"It is difficult to make such requests in reference libraries because you will often be asked what it is, exactly, that you want to know, and what do you want to know it for? Sometimes, it is even necessary to write your reason down. If you are doing a paper, a study, you will of course have a good reason, but what if you are just interested? The best thing, probably, is to say you are probably doing a family history. Librarians are used to people doing that---particularly people who have gray hair---and it is generally thought to be a reasonable way of spending one's time. Just interested sounds apologetic, if not shifty, and makes you run the risk of being seen as an idler lounging around in the library, a person at loose ends, with no proper direction in life, nothing better to do." (Page 326)It is through the most ordinary people that we come to know this writer of exceptional ability. And I am very lucky to have her whole oeuvre ahead of me. Very highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      This is my first collection of stories by Nobel winner Munro and it will not be my last. The first chapter is a bit weirdly filled with details but the totality is a truly pleasurable read. Built with the frame of a family history, the stories build upon one another until suddenly they don't, and then they wrap back around again. Written as if autobiographical, although Munro insists "these are stories" in her forward, they bring insight and poignancy to the generations and branches of an extended family, starting with their emigration from Scotland, escorting us through their settlement and moving around Canada, and evolving through the near-current day which lands us firmly in Ontario. Munro is a master of the moment: the brief verbal or nonverbal exchange between two people, the grief associated with loss and transition as it is captured by a piece of furniture or a landscape, the quiet thoughts of a character in between scenes. Definitely recommended.
    • 4/5
      70. The View from Castle Rock : Stories by Alice Munro (2006, 349 page hardcover, Read November 16-30)About time I got to last year's Nobel Prize winner. This book of "stories" is more like a book of personal essays on Munro's family history. She starts in Scotland in the late nineteenth century, touching on a few larger historical distant relations, then focuses in on her ancestors departure from Scotland and immigration to Canada, to, eventually, clearing and working a farm in Ontario. Mind you, in her intro she makes a point to say that this is all fictionalized.But much of this is somehow both too odd and too regular to be fictional, the consequences of chance and personality along with the the mystery of history and miscellaneous death and disease. Well, she covers a lot of ground. She wooes us in with hints about ancient Scotland, and then quickly become overtly fictional. The immigration comes as an 80 page short story, with personalities and dialogue essentially created out of the mist. Castle Rock is part of Edinburgh Castle (which was quite gorgeous when I saw it briefly, circa 1987). A great ancestor father takes his son there to look at the view: The sun was out now, shining on the stone heap of houses and streets below them, and the churches whose spires did not reach to this height, and some little trees and fields, then a wide silvery stretch of water. And beyond that a pale green and grayish-blue land, part in the sunlight and part in the shadow, a land as light as mist, sucked into the sky. “So did I not tell you?” Andrew’s father said. “America. It is only a little bit of it, though, only the shore. There is where every man is sitting in the midst of his own properties, and even the beggars is riding around in carriages.”And so goes imagination, I suppose, and much else. But, despite all this history, she ends the book by talking a lot about her younger self and her observations and experiences, and, especially her parents. So, it becomes a biography and one learns a lot about rural Ontario.Probably there are other ways to read this, but for me it left a sense of the oddities of personalities in history and maybe the unpredictability of it all, individual to individual.
    • 5/5
      I hugely enjoyed this book, and I was very impressed with it too. It's not often that a book lives up to the compliments on the blurb- this one does, and how.Munro has - as so many of us seem to do when we get older - investigated her own family background, and she has woven beautiful stories around the facts she gathered. These stories, starting with her ancestors in Scotland, continuing with the settlers in Canada, and later her own youth, make wonderful and inspirational reading.”
    • 4/5
      This was my first book by Alice Munro, who was named as the 2009 Man Booker International Prize winner. This book of stories is a personal, though fictional, history of her family’s emigration from Scotland and their settlement in Canada. It was on the NYT Notable Book list in 2007.Munro illustrated the struggles of her ancestor immigrants very well. Though I am of German ancestry, I know many of my great-grandparents had many of the same challenges when they settled in Nebraska from Germany. (I would soooo love to read a fictionalized account of their story!)I enjoyed this book very much, but some may find it a little slow and boring in parts. I’m very interested in family histories of immigration, so I appreciated both the stories and Munro’s writing. I have to wonder, though, were all European immigrants a little hard and cold? Perhaps just the act of survival took all their energy.
    • 4/5
      I didn't like this (audio) book at first, but by the time it ended I was feeling much more positive. Partly this was due to the reader's lousy Scottish accent which dominated the first story, but partly it was also due to the fact that the stories followed an historical time line, finishing close to the 'here-and-now'...and that's the time I relate to best. I was, however, impressed by Munro's writing throughout. It's really weird, but I although liked the last story best I find it very difficult to say what the story was all about, let alone say why I liked it so much. I can say that Alice Munro seems to write very well about the subtle aspects of relationships. She obviously perceives the small details of interactions between people and understands what the code of unspoken language really means.