The translation of the title of the German edition of "Love Life" may be due to the pun: It is actually loved, to the extent where it would allow the circumstances of the time, but that's not what the stories connecting. Rather, it is the struggle of each of the characters - almost always women - to make life on his own terms, which in most cases is actually nothing more than to take advantage of the offers is the chance, often ruthless and selfish, but precisely because of deeply human ,
There are stories, usually with an open end, where one always has nevertheless feel that there is nothing to tell. What could follow, would be too banal and commonplace, as just generally in life. That's the beautiful, ballast-free on short stories: It is focused on the essentials.
The collection is divided into two parts. The first ten stories are fiction, the show the qualities that have Alice Munro probably entered the Nobel Prize. Here she manages to develop from the outset an extremely dense atmosphere. The reader is taken and slips inevitably into the role of the protagonists, be they children, adolescents or adults, even in the sometimes very strange milieu of autocratic family board members and submissive wives. And one also suspects with what boundless energy to Alice Munro must have pulled his own hair from the home province swamp.
By contrast, fall, in my opinion, the last four stories significantly from that is especially true for the last one, just "Dear Life". There are memories of their own childhood, and it is after her admission the first and last - and most honest - what she has to say about their own lives. Maybe has many hidden between the lines, but I had the feeling that they have learned a lot more about the Alice Munro in the first ten stories, and about the country and the time that have shaped them.
