I like Alice Munro to admire her style but don't get as much out of the stories themselves. The way she starts off Nettles is the kind of perfection that draws me to her writing:
In the summer of 1979, I walked into the kitchen of my friend Sunny’s house near Uxbridge, Ontario, and saw a man standing at the counter, making himself a ketchup sandwich.
There is so much to think about in that short and dense introduction. It was a summer (in my mind still daylight). Her visit is likely not one that Sunny had anticipated. But the star of the show is the ketchup sandwich. I have no idea what that is but ketchup has got to be the main feature and that makes it sound like a dish a person with limited access to ingredients, inexperienced with cooking and seeking a short-cut would do.
To a reader, a lot has been said about this yet unknown and unnamed man by placing him in the act of making said sandwich at Sunny's kitchen counter. I turned pre-disposed to believe that a romantic union between Sunny and this man would not be fruitful or enduring. To be able to achieve all that in the mind of a reader in an opening paragraph which runs a sentence and a half has got to be genius.
The next gem in the story that did at all not proceed in the way I that I imagined it would reading that opening was:
Lust that had given me shooting pains in the night was all chastened and trimmed back now into a tidy pilot flame, attentive, wifely.
Such a beautiful description of how a relationship might evolve into tidy, attentive reliable - spousal.
The story was nice enough but as with any and all of Munro's writing, I am there for the magnificent word play that to me is like watching someone make a watercolor painting with fireworks.
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