Alice Munro Dear Life
In an effort to focus my reading on the Masters course I am doing, I have started to read this collection of Alice Munro's short stories, and though I'm only halfway through, I felt I had to write about it here. Munro is a Canadian author who won the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, and she is generally considered to be one of the finest writers of short stories in her generation. Dear Life was published by Vintage in 2013, though several stories in it were first published elsewhere.
In an effort to focus my reading on the Masters course I am doing, I have started to read this collection of Alice Munro's short stories, and though I'm only halfway through, I felt I had to write about it here. Munro is a Canadian author who won the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, and she is generally considered to be one of the finest writers of short stories in her generation. Dear Life was published by Vintage in 2013, though several stories in it were first published elsewhere.
I had never read any Alice Munro stories before I began Dear Life, though she had been recommended to me as a brilliant short story writer several times. What I have discovered is that I wish I'd started sooner. There must be something in Canada's atmosphere that produces terrific women writers: Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, etc. She reminds me a little of Carol Shields and Anne Tyler in her style, though she has her own distinctive way of writing.
What struck me immediately was how 'old-fashioned' her writing is. She breaks many of the 'rules' we have been advised to follow on the Masters course. For one thing, many of her stories are characterised by having omniscient narrators who have an overview of events, but who don't take it upon themselves to comment too much on what is happening. There is a certain psychic distance established between reader and characters that might be off-putting in a lesser writer. She does a great deal of telling, whole pages passing by with barely any showing, but her telling is so astute and sensitive that it just doesn't matter. It didn't matter to me, anyway. When she does use dialogue, it is spot-on; when she tells us what characters are thinking, she tells us just enough. There is a lot left out of her stories; they are pared down to their essentials and nothing much happens in terms of 'plot'. They focus on the epiphanic moment, and are informed by the narrator's awareness of time passing, time wasting, time running out - the limited nature of human existence.
This all sounds deep and therefore potentially dull, but I haven't found the stories I have read so far to be at all dull. They have been quiet, thoughtful and psychologically insightful. The characters, particularly the women, are vividly drawn, each an individual, and she doesn't try to tell us everything about them. She has the courage to step back and tell us just the things we need to know, leaving the epiphany to resonate with us long after the story ends. These aren't flashy tales; there has been so far no twist-in-the-tail, no whizz-bang experimentation with tenses, viewpoints, peculiar imagery or unconventional forms. The stories do jump between viewpoints sometimes, often briefly. 'To Reach Japan', for instance, appears to be from the pov of the husband Peter at the beginning, and it slips into the child Katy's pov at the end, but the majority of the story is told from Greta's viewpoint. 'Amundsen' is told in the first person, but somehow even this narrator seems omniscient, like someone recalling a past event from a position of superior knowledge and experience. But despite the potentially distancing effect of this narrative voice, Munro's characters leap off the page. Even minor characters are utterly believable, their dialogue accurate and convincing, their behaviour plausible and acutely drawn.
If you like fast-moving plots with lots happening, you probably won't like these stories. They eschew the supernatural and fantastical (as far as I can tell so far!), and focus on small stories that could happen in the real world we all recognise. There is a powerful sense of place in them too - most of them set in and around Ontario in Canada. They are simultaneously universal and particular. There is a vein of quiet humour running through some of them, and an occasional hint of satire, but they don't provoke belly-laughs. There is a poignancy about many of them, though they make you think about life rather than becoming depressed about life. If I could write a story half as good as Alice Munro's, I would consider myself to have achieved something worthwhile, whatever mark it was awarded by my tutors on the Masters course.
What struck me immediately was how 'old-fashioned' her writing is. She breaks many of the 'rules' we have been advised to follow on the Masters course. For one thing, many of her stories are characterised by having omniscient narrators who have an overview of events, but who don't take it upon themselves to comment too much on what is happening. There is a certain psychic distance established between reader and characters that might be off-putting in a lesser writer. She does a great deal of telling, whole pages passing by with barely any showing, but her telling is so astute and sensitive that it just doesn't matter. It didn't matter to me, anyway. When she does use dialogue, it is spot-on; when she tells us what characters are thinking, she tells us just enough. There is a lot left out of her stories; they are pared down to their essentials and nothing much happens in terms of 'plot'. They focus on the epiphanic moment, and are informed by the narrator's awareness of time passing, time wasting, time running out - the limited nature of human existence.
This all sounds deep and therefore potentially dull, but I haven't found the stories I have read so far to be at all dull. They have been quiet, thoughtful and psychologically insightful. The characters, particularly the women, are vividly drawn, each an individual, and she doesn't try to tell us everything about them. She has the courage to step back and tell us just the things we need to know, leaving the epiphany to resonate with us long after the story ends. These aren't flashy tales; there has been so far no twist-in-the-tail, no whizz-bang experimentation with tenses, viewpoints, peculiar imagery or unconventional forms. The stories do jump between viewpoints sometimes, often briefly. 'To Reach Japan', for instance, appears to be from the pov of the husband Peter at the beginning, and it slips into the child Katy's pov at the end, but the majority of the story is told from Greta's viewpoint. 'Amundsen' is told in the first person, but somehow even this narrator seems omniscient, like someone recalling a past event from a position of superior knowledge and experience. But despite the potentially distancing effect of this narrative voice, Munro's characters leap off the page. Even minor characters are utterly believable, their dialogue accurate and convincing, their behaviour plausible and acutely drawn.
If you like fast-moving plots with lots happening, you probably won't like these stories. They eschew the supernatural and fantastical (as far as I can tell so far!), and focus on small stories that could happen in the real world we all recognise. There is a powerful sense of place in them too - most of them set in and around Ontario in Canada. They are simultaneously universal and particular. There is a vein of quiet humour running through some of them, and an occasional hint of satire, but they don't provoke belly-laughs. There is a poignancy about many of them, though they make you think about life rather than becoming depressed about life. If I could write a story half as good as Alice Munro's, I would consider myself to have achieved something worthwhile, whatever mark it was awarded by my tutors on the Masters course.
RATING:
Dear Life
Dear Life
*****
Key:
***** highly recommended - a 'must-read'
**** good - well worth taking the time to read
*** ok - will help to pass the time in a boring situation
** not very good - just about readable but flawed
* not recommended - boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way
***** highly recommended - a 'must-read'
**** good - well worth taking the time to read
*** ok - will help to pass the time in a boring situation
** not very good - just about readable but flawed
* not recommended - boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way
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