The point of storytelling,

as Munro practices it, is to rescue the literal facts from banality, from oblivion, and to preserve — to create — some sense of continuity in the hectic ebb and flow of experience. “We can’t resist this rifling around in the past,” she writes in an epilogue, “sifting the untrustworthy evidence, linking stray names and questionable dates and anecdotes together, hanging on to threads, insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore to life.”

A.O.Scott on Alice Munroe, NYTimes December 10, 2006