Too much happiness: stories
by Alice Munro
In the first story a young wife and mother receivesrelease from the unbearable pain of losing her three children from a most
surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual
and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion.
Other stories uncover the “deep-holes” in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty
of children, and how a boy’s disfigured face provides both the good things in
his life and the bad. And in the long title story, we accompany Sophia Kovalevsky—a
late-nineteenth-century Russian émigré and mathematician—on a winter journey
that takes her from the Riviera, where she visits her lover, to Paris, Germany,
and, Denmark, where she has a fateful meeting with a local doctor, and finally
to Sweden, where she teaches at the only university in Europe willing to employ a female mathematician.
With clarity and ease, Alice Munro once again renders complex, difficult events
and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which
men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.
