Alice Munro is a Canadian short story writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 for her 14 short story collections.  Cynthia Ozick has referred to her as ‘our Chekhov’.  I’ve read a number of her collections but had not read this one,  her eighth published nearly 30 years ago.  I read this volume because a sorority sister of my wife had on several occasions recommended one particular story, The Albanian Virgin, piquing my curiosity.

I must say that despite all the accolades, I found this book to be less than satisfying.  Munro can almost instantly draw the reader into a story, create memorable, life-like characters, and keep one turning the pages (as Alice McDermott defined good writing), but each of these eight stories felt weird and incomplete.

All situated in the small town of Carstairs in Western Ontario near Lake Huron, the stories are tied together by the organ/piano factory in town and the family that owned it over several generations, the Dauds.  Each story has the central narrative element of a disappearance of a woman, from Louisa who appears to die after a visit to her heart doctor to Eunie who claims to have been kidnapped by aliens.  Munro runs this thread of time through Carstairs with great skill.  Bea Daud, for example, appears as a young child in the first story and as an elderly woman in the last, but at the end of each story, I was left with a feeling of “Duh?  What just happened?”.  This could be the sign of great writing, but for me, it was a bit off-putting.

I do find Munro’s quiet, insightful, and in depth stories about women, Ontario, and the quotidian to be excellent, but this particular volume with its eponymous open secrets, didn’t do it for me.  Try another one.