Too much happiness

 When you read a story - a short story, you expect an event and the before and the after. There are some emotions, lot of feelings, some dialogues etc. At the end of it, you feel happy/sad/some other emotion  for a while and then you close the book/laptop and go about with your life. Most of these stories are really light reading.

But Alice Munro's stories from the book 'Too much Happiness' do not fall into this category. Each story has a depth, character depiction quite complex. Almost as complex as a novella. 

In the story 'Face', the narrator has a large purple colored birth mark almost covering half his face. First time his father saw him, he told his wife to not bring the child home. And his father dislikes and abhors him for the ugly face. But his mother loves and adores him. She says that the mark makes his eyes look even more beautiful. She brings him up in a way that he doesn't feel conscious. She home schools him for a few years. 

That changes because of an event. A family comes to live in their outhouse. The mother - Mrs. Suttles - is a widow, and works in his father's insurance office. And the daughter - Nancy is narrator's playmate. Mrs. Suttles is probably his father's mistress, which could be  the reason he has housed them in his house. She spends most part of her day lying on the couch and smoking, if she is not in her office. Nancy and the narrator run around the house and the garden, and play happily. 

One day, they come across old semi dried paint cans. Nancy paints her face in red paint and happily announces to him 'now I am like you'. He always thought his face had brown colored mark. When he sees red paint, he says 'my face is not like this' angrily. They have a huge fight.

When his mother sees little Nancy with red paint all over her face, she is infuriated. She starts a tirade against Nancy and her mother. For not being considerate, for not understanding the pain of others etc, etc. And not having taught good manners to her daughter. Mrs. Suttle is not the one to keep quiet. She retaliates and says narrator's mother is a loony and her son is deformed. 

The end result was Nancy and her mother  leave the house next day and go away for good. 

Later, many years later, his mother tells him  that, Nancy, after leaving their house tried to slash her face to make it look red like his.  

So it is an excellent book. By the way, an added bonus is, the author is a Nobel laureate.