Zu viel Glück

Zehn Erzählungen

paperback

Published May 16, 2013 by FISCHER Taschenbuch.

ISBN:
978-3-596-18686-0
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4 stars (4 reviews)

Ten superb new stories by one of our most beloved and admired writers--the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize. In the first story a young wife and mother receives release 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 emigre 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 …

20 editions

Review of 'Too much happiness' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

From what I remember, Jonathan Frantzen is a fan of Alice Munro. If you don't have enough time to read a novel, read a story by Alice Munro -- that's his advice as I understood it. And that's what I did and enjoyed. A story reads in three hours, ideal for a slow afternoon in the park at the weekend.

There is probably a deep analysis, or even several, to each story. I'm not going to try to analyse the stories here in this review now. What I like, what I admire, is how Munro manages to take me out of the role of reader. The stories touch me.

I read "Dear Life" and "Too Much Happiness" in parallel. Some stories I have read several times: "Train", "Dimensions", "In Sight of the Lake" (inside?).

These books will certainly stay on my shelf and I will pull them out from time …

Review of 'Too much happiness' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

From what I remember, Jonathan Frantzen is a fan of Alice Munro. If you don't have enough time to read a novel, read a story by Alice Munro -- that's his advice as I understood it. And that's what I did and enjoyed. A story reads in three hours, ideal for a slow afternoon in the park at the weekend.

There is probably a deep analysis, or even several, to each story. I'm not going to try to analyse the stories here in this review now. What I like, what I admire, is how Munro manages to take me out of the role of reader. The stories touch me.

I read "Dear Life" and "Too Much Happiness" in parallel. Some stories I have read several times: "Train", "Dimensions", "In Sight of the Lake" (inside?).

These books will certainly stay on my shelf and I will pull them out from time …

Review of 'Too much happiness' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I'm still not crazy about short stories, although this one certainly belongs to the better collections I read. There was a little bit of everything, from suspense - in 'Free Radicals" a retired woman faces a killer who tricked her into letting him into the house - to certain eroticism in a naked dinner in"Wenlock Edge," although the whole scene seems quite irrelevant for the rest of the story.
The only one I couldn't really get into was the title story "Too Much Happiness" about a female Russian mathematician/novelist. It was kind of an unfortunate hybrid between a short story and a biography, too long for a short story, and too short to be the real biographical piece. It didn't help that the story was read with a horrible "Russian" accent in the audiobook version. I prefer my audiobooks being read to me, not acted.

avatar for tommot

rated it

3 stars