Some women
Some Women (in the original "Some Women", 2008/2009) is a short story by Alice Munro . The story is about a sick man who has no prospect of recovery and how four women behave around him, including the young narrator.
action
In The New Yorker states in history, remember a woman at their first teenage job where she had to take care of a sick elderly man.
At first, the first-person narrator is surprised that she sometimes feels old and how times have changed; how in their youth, for example, leukemia patients had no chance of survival. Then she looks back on what she experienced in her first teenage job as a substitute carer and tells the story of how Bruce Crozier, who survived the war, graduated, married and now had leukemia from his sickbed got to do with four women: with his working wife, with his stepmother, to whom the couple had now moved, with the stepmother's masseuse, Roxanne Hoy, who also works as a nurse in his room, and with the narrator, who was then young who seems to be the least problematic figure. It is told how she witnesses certain violent scenarios of the stepmother and the masseuse and soon tries to escape them, among other things by locking the door from the outside at the request of the patient and later giving the key to his wife without knowledge of the other two women, as soon as she has returned from work. At the end the narrator sums up the progress of the life of the other three women and the sick person and ends with: "I grew up, and old."
Interpretations
In this narrative, Munro problematizes the giving and receiving of care services, in particular Munro dissolves the boundaries between the positions of giving and taking, according to Amelia DeFalco (2012).
Jonathan Penner reviewed Some Women as part of Too Much Luck for the Washington Post and believes that it is a disadvantage not to find out about the thematic connection to the narrator today and that the conclusion is therefore too succinct for him. Munro would wonderfully evoke the peculiarities of the people involved, be sensitive like a spider to the twitching and swaying in its web, and yet the story captivates you and that in a pleasant way.
expenditure
Some Women was first published in The New Yorker magazine on December 22, 2008. The book version is included in the author's thirteenth volume of short stories, Too Much Happiness , which was published in German in 2011 under the title Zu much Glück .
Individual evidence
- ^ "Short story about a woman remembering her first job as a teen-ager taking care of an elderly sick man."
- ↑ Problematic care services are also discussed in: " Friend of My Youth " (1990), "Cortes Island" (1998), "My Mother's Dream" (1998) and " Runaway " (2003/2004)
- ↑ Amelia DeFalco, "Caretakers / Caregivers: Economies of Affection in Alice Munro", in: Twentieth Century Literature , 2012 Fall; 58 (3): 377-398.
- ↑ "... there's no connection with who the narrator is now"; Jonathan Penner, Alice Munro's 'Too Much Happiness,' reviewed by Jonathan Penner , washingtonpost.com , November 21, 2009
- ↑ See the list of works by Alice Munro in the English language Wikipedia