The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [1]
Manufactured in Canada.
ISBN-10: 0-14-305605-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-14-305605-8
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For Bob Weaver
Contents
Introduction by Lorrie Moore
The Stories
Chaddeleys and Flemings:
1. Connection
2. The Stone in the Field
Dulse
The Turkey Season
Accident
Bardon Bus
Prue
Labor Day Dinner
Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd
Hard-Luck Stories
Visitors
The Moons of Jupiter
Introduction
by Lorrie Moore
Jupiter was the first planet studied by Galileo, in whose telescope were discovered Jupiter’s four largest moons as well. Now there are over sixty known moons whose presences have revealed themselves (like Alice Munro’s work, shyly opening up over the years), but these first four moons are referred to as the Galilean ones, and they are named after mortals favoured by the great god Jupiter—Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto—whose lives are forever altered by the god’s love. The mortals are all feminine in their charms, if not entirely female, and in terms of whether love is fortunate for them or not (or even merely benign), they are batting close to .500, a figure that is excellent in baseball but dicier in other realms. Io, the victim of both love and jealousy, is turned into a starving, wandering heifer stung mad by a gadfly sent by Jupiter’s jealous wife. Europa is abducted to Crete (by Jupiter in the guise of a bull), and without too much extraordinary suffering she bears his royal children. Ganymede, a handsome young prince who catches Jupiter’s fancy, is delivered to Olympus by an eagle in order to become a sort of sommelier to the gods. Callisto, another victim of sexual jealousy, is turned into a bear then mercifully placed among the stars to avoid being shot by her own son.
In so many tales told of romantic love, beauty casts spells that are often greeted or countered by other spells. Jupiter’s mythic moons have lives of deformity and transplant, and the moons themselves are known for their erratic orbits. How like the characters of Alice Munro. Though her protagonists are not explicitly turned into animals or cupbearers or loved by any actual omnipotent, tempestuous god, the wanderings, transformations, mischief, and anguish of possessive love—the kind of love everyone really values, “the one nobody wants to have missed out on,” according to the narrator of “Hard-Luck Stories”—are her most abiding subjects. Like the ancient Greeks, Alice Munro has always known this is where the stories are. Fate, power (gender and class), human nature (mortal strength and divine frailty) all show up there to be negotiated and expressed.
“Life would be grand if it weren’t for the people,” says a Munro character in “Labor Day Dinner,” who also offers up the line perhaps most often quoted from this collection, that “love is not kind or honest and does not contribute to happiness in any reliable way.” It is an acerbic balance to the alkaline lilt of Corinthians 1:13, also quoted in this story, which informs us that “Love suffereth long, and is kind.” That both ideas can be held simultaneously within the same narrative is part of the reason Munro’s work endures—its wholeness of vision, its complexity of feeling, its tolerance of mind. For the storyteller, the failure of love is irresistible