Alice Munro doesn't write much about her writing: there are only a few interviews, hardly any essays or journalistic pieces, and we don't catch her holding forth about her literary likes and dislikes. But here in her new collection, The View from Castle Rock, she speaks to us directly, first in a brief introduction explaining the way the book has been put together, and then in a piece, 'No Advantages', in which she describes in her own person the researches into her family history that have resulted in some of the stories that follow. Unsurprisingly, in a writer as conscious of the equivocal authority of storytelling as Munro, even these introductory pieces are not quite transparently transactional. Without ever losing her focus on these other, past lives, she also seems to be giving us a magical account of her own life in writing, tracing a history for her imagination.

LRB 25 January 2007 | PDF Download