I love how Munro, in "Family Furnishings" and other stories, captures the spirit of being a young person immersed in and on the cusp of understanding the "adult world," particularly one's own family dynamics.
On dinner talk: There was hardly any idea of a general conversation, and in fact there was a feeling that conversation that passed beyond certain understood limits might be a disruption, a showing-off.
It was improper somehow to pay attention to anything that was not close at hand. (talking about books instead of the weather, for instance).
Alfrida not only accepted second helpings, she asked for them.
...she (Alfrida) was really there to talk, and make other people talk, and anything you wanted to talk about — almost anything — would be fine.
The aunts' husbands had opinions too, but theirs were brief and unvaried and expressed an everlasting distrust of all public figures and particularly all foreigners...
...and the aunts themselves seemed fairly proud of how much they didn't know or didn't have to pay attention to.
How like them, I thought, to toss aside Alfrida's wit and style and turn her teeth into a sorry problem.
flourishing under the banner of my own personality
And when Alfrida makes fun of the book in their house (and the narrator pretends to be less smart and bookish than she really is): That was the kind of lie that I hoped never to have to tell again, the contempt I hoped never to have to show, about the things that really mattered to me. And in order not to have to do that, I would pretty well have to stay clear of the people I used to know.
...usually I was affronted when people had anything to say about my appearance. Particularly when it was somebody like Alfrida — somebody who had lost all importance in my life. I believed that such people had no right to be looking at me, or forming any opinions about me, let alone stating them.
There too you could come upon a shabby male hideaway with its furtive yet insistent odors, its shamefaced but stubborn look of contradicting the female domain.
he did seem to carry around a history of defeat
The reason that I had nothing to say was not that I was rude or bored ... but that I did not understand that I should ask questions.
And in this description of her fiance, you can almost tell that their marriage will not last forever, that she will outgrow him: He admired opera and Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, but he had no time for tragedy — for the squalor of tragedy — in ordinary life.
the wearing out of attachments, that I understood so well in my own life but did not expect to happen in the lives of older people.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Good examples. I remember that feeling as a kid, evaluating the adults in the family and the way they related to each other. Munro knows just how to evoke that feeling.
As a kid, I judged the adults in my life, their motives and actions, in much the same way as Munro's younger characters do.
I also sometimes took sides when my parents would argue. Other times I thought they were each wrong, and just needed an impartial observer such as myself to explain to them the simple solution to their disagreement.
Post a Comment