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Too Much Happiness: Stories
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Too Much Happiness: Stories
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Too Much Happiness: Stories
Audiobook11 hours

Too Much Happiness: Stories

Written by Alice Munro

Narrated by Kimberly Farr and Arthur Morey

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

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.

Too Much Happiness is a compelling, provocative-even daring-collection.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editor's Note

Exquisitely insightful…

Nobel Laureate Alice Munro doesn’t write short stories — she crafts exquisitely compact novels that are as rich with insight and psychological acuity as the best of Chekhov and Faulkner.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 17, 2009
ISBN9780307576743
Unavailable
Too Much Happiness: Stories

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Reviews for Too Much Happiness

Rating: 3.854330788976378 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    As usual I'm a bit stuck to know what to say about this collection: it's great in the way that all Munro's short stories are, there are plenty of fireworks and no damp squibs in the box. And all the usual glee in luring us gently down into the darkness that lurks just below the surface of "normal" life. In Canada, at least...The non-compliant duckling in this clutch is the title story, a longer-than-usual piece based on the life of the late-19th century Russian mathematician and novelist, Sofia Kovalevskaya, the first woman in (modern) Europe to be appointed to a chair in mathematics. Possibly this suffers a little bit from Munro's excitement at having found out about Kovalevskaya and wanting to tell us everything she could about her, but she sounds to have been a very interesting woman, so I didn't feel robbed of my time. And the nightmare rail and ferry journey at the core of the story is Munro at her best.The audiobook read by Kimberly Farr and Arthur Morey (for two stories with male narrators) is pleasant listening on the whole, but someone really should tell Ms Farr not to try to do non-Canadian accents. This time she creates a bizarre "Allo Allo" atmosphere by putting unnecessary and rather offensive Herr Flick accents in the mouths of the refined Weierstrass household...
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'm not a big short story reader - they make me impatient somehow, and I end up rushing toward the end, not really enjoying the story itself. That said, Munro is a master, and each one of these is a perfectly contained little world of its own. You can easily imagine the characters lives extending out beyond the margins of the page, beyond the narrow time frame given them in the story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Has Alice Munro written a bad book? I haven't read it yet, if she has. The stories here are all wonderful. The only one that didn't work for me was the closer and title story about Sophia Kovalevski. Was a bit of a departure from her usual sparse style, and the story demanded a bit more detail. The best for me were: Some Women, Fiction, and Wood. Child's Play and Dimensions were also good, if a little more obvious.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Favorite stories: Dimensions; Free Radicals.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Alice Munro is a marvel. She focuses in on very specific subject matter (though she pushes those boundaries more in this collection than any other I have read, especially in the title story). Yet with all the similarities in her work, every story surprises me, and leaves me feeling off kilter. I think its the way she frames stories. Her narratives start at moments that seem like the middle of a story and make you wonder what came before, and then the stories end somewhere utterly different from where you expect them to end. It leaves you feeling like you missed something before and after, and yet each story is absolutely complete. I do not know how she does this, but she always does. I crave that off-kilter feeling. There is a beauty in the way she manages to make you see things from uncomfortable perspectives which implies a mastery of language. Munro brings language to heel and makes it do what she wants to it to do, but her language is not expansive or beautiful. Her language is plain, sometimes rather ugly, sometimes positively vulgar. Yet there are no more perfect words for what she is saying. Bottom line, another perfect collection, though for me the greatest among equals was Wenlock Edge, which is odd and creepy and speaks exquisitely to the ways in which women accept the unacceptable, repress our honest reactions, take the blame for wrongs visited upon us, and lower our standards to recast situations to make even the most repulsive things appear as if they are satisfying to us.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Alice Munro takes her title from the final rather long short story of this recent collection, her only story, in fact, that I could not finish. Of course, these stories have little to do with happiness. In Dimensions the narrator witnesses and is profoundly affected by a teenager's near fatal car crash. Fiction tells of a love and relationship that was not to be permanent. Wenlock Edge is a creepy story with shades of 50 Shades of Grey. Deep Holes deals with alienation from conventional society and family. Free Radicals is a sort of horror/crime story; Face about adult and childhood cruelty. I can go on and on. Where's the happiness? I suppose Munro has caught the irony bug.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Seemed a little different than other Munro short stories I’ve read - great but seemed like she was experimenting with different techniques. The final (pretty long) story which gives the book its title was like a mini Russian novel.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Although there isn't a deliberate theme of happiness which links all the stories together, it is an interesting exercise to do so and notice how happiness can be expressed in such variable ways.This is definitely Munro at her best: quaint stories with full emotions, and often devious and evil deeds: she explores the natural conclusion of fully embodied feelings, even though in polite society we repress them to maintain our veneer of civilization.A wonderful set of stories!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It could be that my mood was wrong for this book, and that I would have liked it better at another time.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was an unexpected collection of short-stories. I have not read anything by Alice Munro before reading this, somewhat restrained yet wildly cathartic collection of odd stories.

    Ten stories are collected here, all of them surrounding characters who seem to want to belong, who are in different stages of life. The tales are quite contemporary in tone, geographically centered around Canada and the USA, apart from the last story where Stockholm is involved.

    One thing about these tales is that they all made me read faster and faster as I went along, to slow down at the beginning of a new one. Munro's styles spun me along. At times, I really wanted to get to the end, but these writings aren't about the end of the stories. They're based on the content. Or one simple thing. Or they provide an oversight.

    They're a lot of things.

    And I will most definitely recommend this domesticated yet feral tome to anybody who will listen. Impressive.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It was well written. Her characters are fully rounded. Stories are well crafted. Still... I was never pulled in with any real connection.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Like all short story anthologies -- even those from the masters -- I loved some of these stories and couldn't get into others. This says as much about me as about the stories, of course.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    People experience things everyday that are more extreme, more upsetting, than others can imagine. Trauma, tragedy, death. Mistreatment from others or ourselves. Alice Munro has written these things. The way the body and the psyche react to the extreme. Losing a spouse, a close brush with death at the hand of a robber, rape and abuse. But she has written in a way that is, though uncomfortable at times, still beautiful.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I love Alice Monroe, but this collection was not as tight or finely honed as I would have liked. It rambled a bit. There were a lot of loose strings. She's done better. Still, she is a powerful story teller and an exceptional, beautiful writer, so it's worth reading. Any other writer would have gotten at least four stars for this collection, but I expect more of AM.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I started this book shortly after my husband died, because something about the misfortune implied by the phrase "too much happiness" struck a chord with me as I struggled with the feeling that perhaps I had been too happy, really, for it to be a sustainable happiness. I couldn't help feeling, for a time, that maybe I had inadvertently and indirectly brought about this crushing loss, because it is the natural order of the universe to balance itself, and maybe the proximate cause of my pain had been, well, an excess of happiness.

    That may have been too personal a statement for a book review, but now, having finished this book, I am experiencing a faint echo of that feeling I just described. It took me more than a year to slowly finish this book, putting it away whenever the emotion was too much. In the meantime, of course, Ms. Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. But having read that Ms. Munro is not well enough to attend the Nobel ceremony in her honour, I can't help but feel that the universe is being forced to take her away from us to settle a cosmic imbalance of genius that has existed for too long. She's just too talented.

    Fittingly, the last story in this collection is based on a true one, of Europe's first female mathematics professor, who in somewhat Alcottian style finds love and freedom but shortly thereafter dies of pneumonia. Hers is the title story; another instance of too much happiness resolved, apparently, by death.

    Perhaps that's a more maudlin reading than Munro intended. Still, there's no denying that her stories drip with sentimental genius. Read her, if you haven't yet, and steel yourself for the rush of pleasure that must nevertheless be balanced by the disappointment of reaching the end.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Brilliant collection of stories, beautifully written, many about women in the aftermath of a tragedy. This is serious fiction. My only real criticism is there isn't too much terribly surprising. Most of the stories have a similar structure: a first half describing a character's life and a second half where the face some climatic moment, usually divided by the revelation of a terrible event. Still, I found it very affecting.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Alice Munro is a master of the short story, and this volume is no exception. Despite the title, most of these stories are about too little happiness, or really, too much tragedy. But she never takes the obvious approach to her devastating little plot lines, and it is this feature (along with her humor - she has one character express disappointment that a book she'd bought was a story collection instead of a novel, because it makes the writer seem like she is merely hanging on the gates of literature instead of being ensconced within) that distinguishes her. Though her prose is rarely flourished, she does allow herself a few truly beautiful moments, and those alone are worth the price of this latest collection.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The title story is about a real woman, a 17th century Russian novelist and mathematician named Sofia Kovalevskaya. In a series of short snapshots, it traces her struggle against men who couldn’t recognize her brilliance, or who were threatened by it. She reached for the things she wanted – work, love – but, as an extraordinary woman, she wasn’t allowed the satisfactions of an ordinary one.

    Most of these subtle, well-written stories are about the relationships between men and women. The women are sometimes too passive, sometimes too forgiving, but they are survivors. They carve out lives for themselves in spite of both the small injustices and the larger outrages. Some of the stories are about family relationships, about people who spiral out from the center and don’t come back.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a collection of short stories with most of stories having women protagonists. There is no central theme or a connection between the stories. The best stories are "Dimensions", "Fiction" and "Too much happiness".The language and presentation of the stories is brilliant. It's a must read book.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Slow and boring, this anthology is the same story of small-town longing and hope amongst heartache told over and over with amateurish verve. Stories by a late-middle-aged woman for other late-middle-aged women, delivered with the skilled panache of a community college workshop.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Alice Munro has a propensity for diving into the seedy underbelly of the human condition with her writing; exploring our addictions to love, to abuse, to our own insecurities and to other various parts of life that seem unimportant to those around us. This was my first foray into reading collections of short stories and with only one story in the collection that I genuinely disliked I was not disappointed. I plan on checking out more of her work in the future.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I've always admired the author's ability to play with nonlinear timelines, reveal characters in a simple gesture, capture those moments in life that have the power to change destiny. The title story is a dip into historical fiction. It contains this great line: "She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood - that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements." (p. 283)
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I've always loved Alice Munro's stories and this collection was no exception. She is a masterful writer who draws you into the characters' lives, then presents a shift of perspective or a single event (not necessarily a big event) that makes the reader suddenly rethink what has been happening. The main message in this collection seems to be that life has a way of going on no matter what. Sometimes, a major event brings you in a new direction; other times, it's just the passage of time that changes your perspectives about your life.Alice Munro is a master of the short story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I have to admit that I am struggling with short stories in general. Alice Monro´s, however, are more readable than most, but it is still difficult for me to get into a character, a situation, and then being asked to leave. Still, the short stories in Too Much Happiness are memorable, some of them make quite an impact, and I can see Munro is doing something to the short story tradition that I have never seen before: She manages to tell stories in the here and now, but during the course of the short story, this story is put into the perspective of a long life. In most of these short stories she is making huge time leaps - but it still feels very intimate. I am left with a feeling of the transparence of life, how we tend to see everything with blinders, not recognizing the perpective in which an important event in our lives have to our whole life. Monro writesabout both men and women, but it is our female characters she understands the best. I liked the fictional characters better than the real character in the title short story, but I can still see why Monro is fascinated with the character of Sophia Kovalevsky -also because her life demonstrates the leaps made since her death in women´s roles, lives and position.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Beautifully written, finely crafted and emotionally engaging short stories - nine of which are about modern day Canada, but the last, title story, is about the last days of a Russian mathematician, with her story told in flash back. I particularly enjoyed "Wood".
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    "It is not physical harm that is feared--or that I feared in Verna's case--so much as some spell, or dark intention. It is a feeling you can have when you are very young even about certain house faces, or tree trunks, or very much about moldy cellars or deep closets."With Munro, you're always in for a smooth, expert ride. I think this collection may have been better titled Evil Children or Bad Seeds, however. Munro isn't really a diehard cynic; she just acknowledges that we all have some nasty impulses inside--even, or especially, children, pretty young things and sweet old ladies.There seems to be an emphasis here on the very old (looking back, mulling over a youthful error) or the very young. Not her usual preoccupations with youthful lust, adulteries or marriage gone out of whack. Child's Play is a good example of the twin emphases: a woman named Marlene, perhaps of late middle-age, called (too late) to the deathbed of a childhood friend who she hasn't seen in decades. Which brings us back, eventually, to the two of them at camp when the narrator' s Marlene's nemesis, a disturbed or retarded girl called Verna, shows up. How Munro gets back to Verna's first appearance, how she grated on Marlene, sets up the era (1940s) and the familial circumstances ... it's classic Munro roundabout method but, you know, you don't even notice because your so absorbed in the sketching of the lives at the forefront.This collection is also notable for two stories that don't take place in Canada. "Dimensions," the opening story, could be present day, takes place in England. The evil seed in this case is the jealous, emotionally abusive husband married to a young girl; they have three very little children when ...Then there's the final story, :Too Much Happiness," about the last days of Sophia Kovlesky, a real, late 19th-century Russian mathematician. (Thanks goodness there's nonfiction book about her.) She was allowed by her family to study in Germany by getting married--a so-called White Marriage at first because her parents wouldn't have allowed her to go as an unmarried girl.. She also wrote a novel, had a daughter and led a frivolous life for a while in Russia, but with her husband's suicide and economic straits, she took up studying math again. Her fatherly German mentor secured a professorial position for her in Sweden--incredible at the time and then she won an important prize (which may be why there is a crater on the moon named after her.)In these last cold winter days, suffering from the first signs of pneumonia, she meets her Russian lover (an exiled Liberal, professor) in Genoa and Nice and they decide to marry; visits the husband of her dazzling dead sister in Paris, an impoverished veteran of the Commune, and then on to the home of her mentor in Berlin. Maybe it's the ferry boat journey on the way to Stockholm that was the final toll. You could write a book about it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Dimensions?Going to meet Lloyd... she had felt no guilt, only a sense of destiny, submission.?Fiction?It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness -however temporary, however flimsy- of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another.?Wenlock Edge?On their way to deeds they didn?t yet know they had in them.? last lineDeep-Holes?And it was possible, too, that age could be her ally, turning her into somebody she didn?t know yet.?Free Radicals?Now she knows what it is to really miss him. Like the air sucked out of the sky.?Face?You think that would have changed things?The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.?Some Women?I am amazed sometimes to think how old I am.? 1st line?I grew up, and old.? last lineChild?s Play?Every year, when you?re a child, you become a different person.?Wood?It?s a tall word that seems ominous but indifferent.?Too Much Happiness?She was too full of glowing and exceptional ideas to speak to people any longer.?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Alice Munro is my favourite living short story writer, and this collection does not disappoint except, strangely for the long title story. Unlike the other contemporary pieces, this one is set in the nineteenth century and centres on the real-life Sophia Kovalevsky, a Russian mathematician and novelist. The story simply did not come to life for me, and it seems out of place among the rest of the collection, though Munro clearly wants to draw attention to it through the title. Other readers may be entirely captivated by the romantic complications Sophia faces; I am perfectly ready to accept that the fault is my own, but all criticism is subjective. The other stories are set in familiar Munro territory - in and around Ontario, focusing on small lives - but nothing is ever quite familiar with this writer, who has the unerring ability to unsettle us, often by examining the brittleness of relationships, sometimes by the placing of quirky incidents in seemingly ordinary circumstancess, as here in the story 'Wenlock Edge' where a student takes her friend's usual place as a solitary guest in a wealthy man's home and is invited, quite coolly and charmingly, to dine with him completely naked. Equally oddly, she complies, without knowing why, and nothing happens - the man continues conversational and correct throughout the meal. The perverse strangeness of it reminded me of Pip's visits to Miss Havisham in 'Great Expectations'.I believe Miss Munro has said this will be her last book. She is 75, but I do hope there's more to come from her yet. As readers of her work, we can't have too much happiness.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I’m impressed with this woman’s ability to make the impossible and misunderstood decisions of her characters seem almost relatable. Details changed or not we all tend to make similar decisions in our lives that seem like madness to those on the outside. Alice Munro has a propensity for diving into the seedy underbelly of the human condition with her writing; exploring our addictions to love, to abuse, to our own insecurities and to other various parts of life that seem unimportant to those around us. This was my first foray into reading collections of short stories and with only one story in the collection that I genuinely disliked I was not disappointed. I plan on checking out more of her work in the future.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Too much happiness : stories is a collection of nine new stories by Alice Munro. Good stories, with fair narration, (except for Kimberly Farr who is terrific as ever!) but a disappointment after the richness of her other works. I would recommend this collection only to those who are true Munro fans.