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A review by mainon
Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro
5.0
I started this book shortly after my husband died, because something about the misfortune implied by the phrase "too much happiness" struck a chord with me as I struggled with the feeling that perhaps I had been too happy, really, for it to be a sustainable happiness. I couldn't help feeling, for a time, that maybe I had inadvertently and indirectly brought about this crushing loss, because it is the natural order of the universe to balance itself, and maybe the proximate cause of my pain had been, well, an excess of happiness.
That may have been too personal a statement for a book review, but now, having finished this book, I am experiencing a faint echo of that feeling I just described. It took me more than a year to slowly finish this book, putting it away whenever the emotion was too much. In the meantime, of course, Ms. Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. But having read that Ms. Munro is not well enough to attend the Nobel ceremony in her honour, I can't help but feel that the universe is being forced to take her away from us to settle a cosmic imbalance of genius that has existed for too long. She's just too talented.
Fittingly, the last story in this collection is based on a true one, of Europe's first female mathematics professor, who in somewhat Alcottian style finds love and freedom but shortly thereafter dies of pneumonia. Hers is the title story; another instance of too much happiness resolved, apparently, by death.
Perhaps that's a more maudlin reading than Munro intended. Still, there's no denying that her stories drip with sentimental genius. Read her, if you haven't yet, and steel yourself for the rush of pleasure that must nevertheless be balanced by the disappointment of reaching the end.
That may have been too personal a statement for a book review, but now, having finished this book, I am experiencing a faint echo of that feeling I just described. It took me more than a year to slowly finish this book, putting it away whenever the emotion was too much. In the meantime, of course, Ms. Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. But having read that Ms. Munro is not well enough to attend the Nobel ceremony in her honour, I can't help but feel that the universe is being forced to take her away from us to settle a cosmic imbalance of genius that has existed for too long. She's just too talented.
Fittingly, the last story in this collection is based on a true one, of Europe's first female mathematics professor, who in somewhat Alcottian style finds love and freedom but shortly thereafter dies of pneumonia. Hers is the title story; another instance of too much happiness resolved, apparently, by death.
Perhaps that's a more maudlin reading than Munro intended. Still, there's no denying that her stories drip with sentimental genius. Read her, if you haven't yet, and steel yourself for the rush of pleasure that must nevertheless be balanced by the disappointment of reaching the end.