Henry Bailey suffered from bronchial troubles. He would cough and cough until his narrow face turned scarlet, and his light blue, derisive eyes filled up with tears; then he took the lid off the stove, and, standing well back, shot out a great clot of phlegm – hss – straight into the heart of the flames. We admired his for this performance and for his ability to make his stomach growl at will, and for his laughter, which was full of high whistlings and gurglings and involved the whole faulty machinery of his chest. It was sometimes hard to tell what he was laughing at, and always possible that it might be us.I've been late to the Alice Munro train, but stories like 'Boys and Girls' are everything I want in a short story. It's the brutality and the romance of farm life rolled into this glimmer of a story. A snapshot of domestic rural life, but so much more than that too. Munro has such a wonderful manner of description and grounded horror, of disappointment and of compelling and evocative characters. This left me with all the feelings, which is a pretty perfect way to start a Sunday.
You can read 'Boys and Girls' over on the Women in Lit website.
No comments:
Post a Comment