Some readers have difficulty with relating to a short-story format. Alice Munro is recommended to those readers. Her eloquent and flowing style is enough to entrance even the most critical readers. Open the pages and fall into the stream of stories provided by Nobel Prize-winning author, Alice Munro.

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 Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is not the average sweet-coated love story you will encounter in the best-selling list. Munro portrays love through nine different stories that encompass all aspects of life. The book may not play dazzling literary tricks, but you certainly will be entranced in the seemingly ordinary stories of middle-class men and women so intricately woven to show love in its essence.

One of the greatest writers of contemporary fiction, Alice Munro is known as a revolutionary writer in the field of short stories. Her short stories are famous for moving back and forth in time and place. Such mastery of the modern short story has awarded Munro the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage does not follow Munro’s usual quick changes in time, but fits her usual expertise in short stories. The main story is about a tough-minded housekeeper throwing away the habits of a lifetime because of a teenager’s practical joke. The teenager, along with her friend, sends the housekeeper forged love letters. As the prank turns out to be much more influential than the wicked teenagers thought, the story progresses into a touching aspect.

Other stories are about an unconventional and bizarre aunt stumbling upon an astonishing secret and its importance in her life, an incorrigible and aged playboy’s funny accounts of his reaction to the nursing home romance of his wife, a young mother who has married an older man and is beginning to hate his radical ways, and many more.

One story titled “The Bear Came Over the Mountains” was made into a movie called Away From Her. The story is much favored by readers, even more than the main story. It is about an aging former college professor, Grant, who must put his wife, Fiona, into a long-term care facility after her memory fails. They meet different people during Fiona’s stay and figure out what their love was about.

Each story has its own originality, but what they have in common is that they come from a special ability to note small details that echo throughout our life. We may pass by those comparatively small parts in our lives, but this book aims to capture such small moments and find humble meaning in them. After all, many drops make a shower. That was what happened to the characters in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. The same can be for our lives.

Alice Munro’s characters discover that the past is not made up of only what is remembered, but also of what is not. Memories are usually stored away, forgotten until a certain event triggers it. To one character, that trigger was the hospitalization of his wife and for another character, the event was a forged love letter. This process also encourages the readers to look back at their memories and dare to try to go beyond what is remembered.

All of this was able to be clearly conveyed to readers thanks to Munro’s sentences that are not overly decorated. They seem to be simple but hold a certain level of irony that penetrates the little aspects of people’s mundane life. What is truly attractive about this book is that the sentences flow so elegantly that readers will be able to completely dive into the book.

Love is truly all around us, all we have to do is look around. This book shows how powerful the mounting of small kindnesses is throughout our life. The author agrees that love is not a faraway thing. Rather, it is enrooted deep inside our everyday life.

Book Information

Title: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Author: Alice Munro

Publication: Vintage Books USA

Pages: 323 pages