The narrative fabric into which this horrible event is woven is tight with a sense of time and place, a solid realism that allows even the bizarre to appear normal.Īnd, as it turns out, decapitation isn't the final twist in the story, or even the most bizarre. In an instant the unfortunate young man's head was separated from his body.'įew writers would dare such a move, and fewer still could make it work. His head in consequence was brought inĬontact with the circular saw. Some five years later, an accident occurs in the sawmillĪt the local piano factory, 'a particularly ghastly and tragic accident' in which the librarian's soldier 'had the misfortune to have his sleeve caught by a setscrew. Munro never to be satisfied with a premature ending. The story, already 20 pages long, would indeed show how women make fools of themselves. It's all just the way it looks on the surface.' Then the salesmanįor many writers, that would be enough. After she confesses the details to the salesman and asks, 'Do you think it was all a joke on me? Do you think a manĬould be so diabolical?' the salesman says, 'No, no. The librarian, for instance, tells of the soldier who wooed her by mail during World War I, then came home and married another girl. Seems almost revealed, the story changes, veers, steps off a cliff. And none of these eight stories are easy to predict. 'Carried Away' isn't really about women making fools of themselves. Sometimes even the characters themselves have only a fuzzy notion of what their own stories mean.

Munro's work hasĪlways been ambitious and risky precisely because it dares to teach, and by the hardest, best method: without giving answers. And in fact, all the stories in 'Open Secrets' are lessons. The story, aptly entitled 'Carried Away,' is the first in Alice Munro's new collection, 'Open Secrets,' her eighth work of fiction. 'It'sĪ lesson in what fools women can make of themselves.' 'It's a lesson, this story,' the librarian says. ON a winter night in 1919, in a hotel dining room in Carstairs, Ontario, a librarian who's had a few drinks begins to tell her darkest secrets to a salesman she barely knows. September 11, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

Open secrets alice munro analysis