The Moons of Jupiter

"After Munro was announced as the Nobel Prize laureate, I excitedly went about obtaining a number of her books. I got her newest book and a collection of her best stories, but someone somewhere online suggested that this, <i>The Moons of Jupiter</i>, was her personal favorite. So, on that suggestion, I started with this book.<br/><br/>The opening stories were surprisingly brilliant, and Munro's ability to share momentous insights within a sentence or two continually impressed me. To read Munro is to see her characters--and by extension people at large--get dissected, in the most artful and conscientious of ways.<br/><br/>I felt that as the book progressed, it lost steam. I'm not sure if that was due to my fatigue (Munro, it must be admitted, is heavy if for no other reason than she is brilliant and it's hard to keep up with her) or to the nature of the collection, but I suspect the former. The first two stories were funny and clever and strangely dark introductions to her writing, and my favorite story in this collection was likely "The Turkey Season," a story about a teenage girl working in a turkey processing place. I laughed a good deal there and elsewhere.<br/><br/>If I have any solid critique of the collection, it would be this: While Munro has a first-rate, exceptional understanding of women--their motivations, desires, thoughts, feelings, the whole shebang--her understanding of men came off, perhaps intentionally, as superficial, slight, and empty. The men in this collection are either silly old farts, annoyances, bores, or mysteries never to be understood. Her characters constantly struggle to connect with men in meaningful ways, and at points I felt like the overall connecting motif of the work was simply the inability for women of a certain disposition to ever find love. Almost every woman in the collection has been divorced, which strikes a certain autobiographical resonance, but failed to interest me for more than two or three stories.<br/><br/>I have a number of friends in Southern Ontario, so I enjoyed (almost too much) knowing most of the place names and having someone to ask in case I didn't.<br/><br/>Overall, I enjoyed seeing Munro examine the female heart and respected the attention paid, historically, to seeing the struggle women have faced toward self-expression. Looking forward, I am excited to see what she's been up to for the last thirty years, and I am excited to read more of her short stories in the future.<br/><br/>It is now somewhat hackneyed to say how her short stories read as though they were self-contained novels--and there is some truth to that. However, I think it would be more accurate to acknowledge them for what they truly are: Some of the clearest, best shining, and most well-formed examples of the short story in the modern age. Short stories truly do have, and always have had, the ability to move us, and it is only recently that their power and worth have been systematically questioned. Works like Munro's help to dismantle that misconception, beautifully and artfully (perhaps the best term to use when discussing her writing).<br/><br/>Entertainment: 8/10 ; 12 out of 15<br/>Story: 8/10 ; 10 out of 12.5<br/>Writing’s Quality/Style: 9/10 ; 9 out of 10<br/>Characters: 7/10 ; 5.25 out of 7.5<br/>Resonance: 7/10 ; 3.5 out of 5<br/>Readability (5 being hardest): 4/5 <br/> <br/> Overall: 39.75 out of 50<br/><br/>"