A writer of Munro''s ilk hardly needs a hook like the intriguing title of her 10th collection to pull readers into her orbit. Serving as a teasing introduction to these nine brilliantly executed tales, the range of mentioned relationships merely suggests a few of the nuances of human behavior that Munro evokes with the skill of a psychological magician. Johanna Parry, the protagonist of the title story, stands alone among her fictional sisters in achieving her goal by force of will. A rough, uned
內容簡介：
Readers know what they are going to get when they pick up an unfamiliar Alice Munro collection, and yet almost every page carries a bounty of unexpected action, feeling, language, and detail. Her stories are always unique, blazing an invigorating originality out of her seemingly commonplace subjects. Each collection develops her oeuvre in increments, subtly expanding her range.
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is, of course, no exception. It is a fairly conservative collection of nine stories, none of which move far beyond Munro''s favored settings: the tiny towns and burgeoning cities of southern Ontario and British Columbia. There are glimpses of youth here--in the title story, an epistolary prank by two teenage girls leads to a one-sided cross country elopement and, seemingly, a happy marriage, and in "Nettles," disrupted childhood affection fleetingly returns through a chance meeting--but most of these pieces are stories of aging women and men, confronting the twin travails of death and late love. As is always the case with Munro, their plots are too elegantly elaborate to summarize, and their unsentimental power is a given; baroque praise would be futile. Read these stories--it is the only way to really understand the miracles that Munro so regularly performs. --Jack Illingworth --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
關於作者：
Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published eleven new collections of stories-Dance of the Happy Shades; Something I''ve Been Meaning to Tell You; The Beggar Maid; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway; and a volume of Selected Stories-as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the Man Booker International Prize, three of Canada''s Governor General''s Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England''s W. H. Smith Book Award, the United States'' National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Edward MacDowell Medal in literature. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages.Alice Munro divides her time between Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron, and Comox, British Columbia.
內容試閱：
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Years ago, before the trains stopped running on so many of the branch lines, a woman with a high, freckled forehead and a frizz of reddish hair came into the railway station and inquired about shipping furniture.
The station agent often tried a little teasing with women, especially the plain ones who seemed to appreciate it.
"Furniture?" he said, as if nobody had ever had such an idea before. "Well. Now. What kind of furniture are we talking about?"
A dining-room table and six chairs. A full bedroom suite, a sofa, a coffee table, end tables, a floor lamp. Also a china cabinet and a buffet.
"Whoa there. You mean a houseful."
"It shouldn''t count as that much," she said. "There''s no kitchen things and only enough for one bedroom."
Her teeth were crowded to the front of her mouth as if they were ready for an argument.
"You''ll be needing the truck," he said.
"No. I want to send it on the train. It''s going out west, to Saskatchewan."
She spoke to him in a loud voice as if he was deaf or stupid, and there was something wrong with the way she pronounced her words. An accent. He thought of Dutch--the Dutch were moving in around here--but she didn''t have the heft of the Dutch women or the nice pink skin or the fair hair. She might have been under forty, but what did it matter? No beauty queen, ever.
He turned all business.
"First you''ll need the truck to get it to here from wherever you got it. And we better see if it''s a place in Saskatchewan where the train goes through. Otherways you''d have to arrange to get it picked up, say, in Regina."
"It''s Gdynia," she said. "The train goes through."
He took down a greasy-covered directory that was hanging from a nail and asked how she would spell that. She helped herself to the pencil that was also on a string and wrote on a piece of paper from her purse: G D Y N I A.
"What kind of nationality would that be?"
She said she didn''t know.
He took back the pencil to follow from line to line.
"A lot of places out there it''s all Czechs or Hungarians or Ukrainians," he said. It came to him as he said this that she might be one of those. But so what, he was only stating a fact.
"Here it is, all right, it''s on the line."
"Yes," she said. "I want to ship it Friday--can you do that?"
"We can ship it, but I can''t promise what day it''ll get there," he said. "It all depends on the priorities. Somebody going to be on the lookout for it when it comes in?"
"Yes."
"It''s a mixed train Friday, two-eighteen p.m. Truck picks it up Friday morning. You live here in town?"
She nodded, writing down the address. 106 Exhibition Road.
It was only recently that the houses in town had been numbered, and he couldn''t picture the place, though he knew where Exhibition Road was. If she''d said the name McCauley at that time he might have taken more of an interest, and things might have turned out differently. There were new houses out there, built since the war, though they were called "wartime houses." He supposed it must be one of those.
"Pay when you ship," he told her.
"Also, I want a ticket for myself on the same train. Friday afternoon."
"Going same place?"
"Yes."
"You can travel on the same train to Toronto, but then you have to wait for the Transcontinental, goes out ten-thirty at night. You want sleeper or coach? Sleeper you get a berth, coach you sit up in the day car."
She said she would sit up.
"Wait in Sudbury for the Montreal train, but you won''t get off there, they''ll just shunt you around and hitch on the Montreal cars. Then on to Port Arthur and then to Kenora. You don''t get off till Regina, and there you have to get off and catch the branch-line train."
She nodded as if he should just get on and give her the ticket.
Slowing down, he said, "But I won''t promise your furniture''ll arrive when you do, I wouldn''t think it would get in till a day or two after. It''s all the priorities. Somebody coming to meet you?"
"Yes."
"Good. Because it won''t likely be much of a station. Towns out there, they''re not like here. They''re mostly pretty rudimentary affairs."
She paid for the passenger ticket now, from a roll of bills in a cloth bag in her purse. Like an old lady. She counted her change, too. But not the way an old lady would count it--she held it in her hand and flicked her eyes over it, but you could tell she didn''t miss a penny. Then she turned away rudely, without a good-bye.
"See you Friday," he called out.
She wore a long, drab coat on this warm September day, also a pair of clunky laced-up shoes, and ankle socks.
He was getting a coffee out of his thermos when she came back and rapped on the wicket.
"The furniture I''m sending," she said. "It''s all good furniture, it''s like new. I wouldn''t want it to get scratched or banged up or in any way damaged. I don''t want it to smell like livestock, either."
"Oh, well," he said. "The railway''s pretty used to shipping things. And they don''t use the same cars for shipping furniture they use for shipping pigs."
"I''m concerned that it gets there in just as good a shape as it leaves here."
"Well, you know, when you buy your furniture, it''s in the store, right? But did you ever think how it got there? It wasn''t made in the store, was it? No. It was made in some factory someplace, and it got shipped to the store, and that was done quite possibly by train. So that being the case, doesn''t it stand to reason the railway knows how to look after it?"
She continued to look at him without a smile or any admission of her female foolishness.
"I hope so," she said. "I hope they do."
The station agent would have said, without thinking about it, that he knew everybody in town. Which meant that he knew about half of them. And most of those he knew were the core people, the ones who really were "in town" in the sense that they had not arrived yesterday and had no plans to move on. He did not know the woman who was going to Saskatchewan because she did not go to his church or teach his children in school or work in any store or restaurant or office that he went into. Nor was she married to any of the men he knew in the Elks or the Oddfellows or the Lions Club or the Legion. A look at her left hand while she was getting the money out had told him--and he was not surprised--that she was not married to anybody. With those shoes, and ankle socks instead of stockings, and no hat or gloves in the afternoon, she might have been a farm woman. But she didn''t have the hesitation they generally had, the embarrassment. She didn''t have country manners--in fact, she had no manners at all. She had treated him as if he was an information machine. Besides, she had written a town address--Exhibition Road. The person she really reminded him of was a plainclothes nun he had seen on television, talking about the missionary work she did somewhere in the jungle--probably they had got out of their nuns'' clothes there because it made it easier for them to clamber around. This nun had smiled once in a while to show that her religion was supposed to make people happy, but most of the time she looked out at her audience as if she believed that other people were mainly in the world for her to boss around.
One more thing Johanna meant to do she had been putting off doing. She had to go into the dress shop called Milady''s and buy herself an outfit. She had never been inside that shop--when she had to buy anything, like socks, she went to Callaghans Mens Ladies and Childrens Wear. She had lots of clothes inherited from Mrs. Willets, things like this coat that would never wear out. And Sabitha--the girl she looked after, in Mr. McCauley''s house--was showered with costly hand-me-downs from her cousins.
In Milady''s window there were two mannequins wearing suits with quite short skirts and boxy jackets. One suit was a rusty-gold color and the other a soft deep green. Big gaudy paper maple leaves were scattered round the mannequins'' feet and pasted here and there on the window. At the time of year when most people''s concern was to rake up leaves and burn them, here they were the chosen thing. A sign written in flowing black script was stuck diagonally across the glass. It said: Simple Elegance, the Mode for Fall.
She opened the door and went inside.
Right ahead of her, a full-length mirror showed her in Mrs. Willets''s high-quality but shapeless long coat, with a few inches of lumpy bare legs above the ankle socks.
They did that on purpose, of course. They set the mirror there so you could get a proper notion of your deficiencies, right away, and then--they hoped--you would jump to the conclusion that you had to buy something to alter the picture. Such a transparent trick that it would have made her walk out, if she had not come in determined, knowing what she had to get.
Along one wall was a rack of evening dresses, all fit for belles of the ball with their net and taffeta, their dreamy colors. And beyond them, in a glass case so no profane fingers could get at them, half a dozen wedding gowns, pure white froth or vanilla satin or ivory lace, embroidered in silver beads or seed pearls. Tiny bodices, scalloped necklines, lavish skirts. Even when she was younger she could never have contemplated such extravagance, not just in the matter of money but in expectations, in the preposterous hope of transformation, and bliss.
It was two or three minutes before anybody came. Maybe they had a peephole and were eyeing her, thinking she wasn''t their kind...
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