Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (1999) — Short Story Discussion

Alice Munro is a Canadian writer who was dubbed a "master of the contemporary short story" when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. She is the recipient of many other literary accolades, including the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement and is a three-time winner of the Governor General's Award, Canada's highest literary honour. Much of Munro's work is set in Canada and concerns the lives of everyday people.

The British Council's directory of writers describes her work as follows: "One Alice Munro short story has the power of many novels. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is irrelevant. Every word glows. Munro is able to capture the shape and mood, the flavour of a life in 30 pages. She is wholly without cliché... Munro has talked about ‘the complexity of things, the things within things’. She teases the surface, until all that is hidden, all those tucked away pivots of a life, are revealed..."

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This is a series of occasional meetups to discuss Alice Munro's short stories (picking up from where we left off before the pandemic).

This time we will discuss "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" (1999), a story about an elderly man grappling with his wife's advancing Alzheimer's disease.

Please read the story in advance (around 50 pages — so not THAT short ⚠). A pdf copy is available here.

Stories by Munro we've previously discussed in this group:

• The Albanian Virgin (1995)
• A Wilderness Station (1992)
• Differently (1989)
• Miles City, Montana (1985)

(See Murno's bio on the Nobel Prize website for more background on the author.)