In Munro's land

I was glad this morning when I heard that Canadian writer Alice Munro got the Nobel prize. I read one of her short stories books when I was taking quantitative courses in Ann Arbor in the US last summer. Especially, I was struck by a story that took place on a train in vast Canada. I got a feeling for the landscape and the mentality, the sea and the grass. I wanted to go somewhere similar. For the moment I am living in Canada's most densely populated area (Plateau Mont-Royal in Montreal), still, you have a sense of that something is going on out there, far away. There is space and place. In November I will get the chance to get a train through Ontario myself.

Like many others I am impressed by Alice Munro's effective style, and my experience from reading her is that you realize that something is going on but if you read too fast you may have missed a detail, or two, so you'd better go back, to confirm what you already knew by sentiment. The book I have read is "Runaway". I was not taken by all stories, but the three-part Chance to Silence got me.