The View from Castle Rock: Stories

The beauty of Munro's writing is greatly enhanced by audio. Farr is a fine reader in every respect but one—her precise pronunciation of each syllable of every word is often distracting and impedes the flow of Munro's conversational prose, so integral a part of her literary achievement. Otherwise, Farr is an intelligent and expressive reader admirably able to handle a variety of characters and accents. Munro's characters and settings have always come out of her rural Canadian upbringing, but this time she fuses autobiography with fiction. The form arises from a conscious search for roots, for family history derived from journals, letters, town records, cemeteries, distant relatives and close neighbors in Scotland, Canada and the U.S. Each selected story is unabridged, and most of the exclusions are the more biographical ones, though the book is not so long that any needed to be cut. As always, Munro's remarkable insights and exquisite storyteller's voice come through, echoing our need to discover and connect to our own dead people, and therefore to life. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 25). (Dec.)