Alice Munro
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Munro
the master of the modern short story
Munro began writing as a teenager, publishing her first
story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow," in 1950 while studying English
and journalism at the University
of Western Ontario under
a two-year scholarship
Munro's highly acclaimed first collection of stories, Dance
of the Happy Shades (1968), won the Governor General's Award, Canada's
highest literary prize.
Munro's stories have appeared frequently in publications
such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Grand Street, Mademoiselle, and The Paris
Review.
On 10 October 2013, Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature,
She is the first Canadian and the 13th woman to receive the
Nobel Prize in Literature
Alice Ann Munro,née Laidlaw; born 10 July 1931. is a
Canadian author writing in English. The recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in
Literature and the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of
work, she is also a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award
for fiction.
The focus of Munro's fiction is her native Huron County
in southwestern Ontario.
Her "accessible, moving stories" explore human complexities in a
seemingly effortless style. Munro's writing has established her as "one of
our greatest contemporary writers of fiction," or, as Cynthia Ozick put
it, "our Chekhov." In 2013, Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature for her work as "master of the modern short story"
A frequent theme of her work—particularly evident in her
early stories—has been the dilemmas of a girl coming of age and coming to terms
with her family and the small town she grew up in. In recent work such as
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) and Runaway (2004)
she has shifted her focus to the travails of middle age, of women alone and of
the elderly. It is a mark of her style for characters to experience a
revelation that sheds light on, and gives meaning to, an event.
As Robert Thacker notes:
"Munro's writing creates... an empathetic union among
readers, critics most apparent among them. We are drawn to her writing by its
verisimilitude – not of mimesis, so-called and... 'realism' – but rather the
feeling of being itself... of just being a human being."
photos
https://www.google.hr/search?q=alice+munro&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=R8FZUvHJNqqX5ATomoDwDg&ved=0CFQQsAQ&biw=1024&bih=651&dpr=1
Alice Munro
Reviews of Alice Munro's Books
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/books/author-munro.html
The Love of a Good Woman
Stories
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/munro-love.html
Kath and Sonje have a place of their own on the beach,
behind some large logs. They have chosen this not only for shelter from the
occasional sharp wind--they've got Kath's baby with them--but because they want
to be out of sight of a group of women who use the beach every day. They call
these women the Monicas.
The Monicas have
two or three or four children apiece. They are all under the leadership of the
real Monica, who walked down the beach and introduced herself when she first
spotted Kath and Sonje and the baby. She invited them to join the gang.
They followed her,
lugging the carry-cot between them. What else could they do? But since then
they lurk behind the logs.
The Monicas'
encampment is made up of beach umbrellas, towels, diaper bags, picnic hampers,
inflatable rafts and whales, toys, lotions, extra clothing, sun hats, Thermos
bottles of coffee, paper cups and plates, and Thermos tubs in which they carry
homemade fruit-juice Popsicles.
They are either
frankly pregnant or look as if they might be pregnant, because they have lost
their figures. They trudge down to the water's edge, hollering out the names of
their children who are riding and falling off logs or the inflatable whales.
"Where's your
hat? Where's your ball? You've been on that thing long enough now, let Sandy have a turn."
Even when they
talk to each other their voices have to be raised high, over the shouts and
squalls of their children.
"You can get
ground round as cheap as hamburger if you go to Woodward's."
"I tried zinc
ointment but it didn't work."
"Now he's got
an abscess in the groin."
"You can't
use baking powder, you have to use soda."
These women aren't
so much older than Kath and Sonje. But they've reached a stage in life that
Kath and Sonje dread. They turn the whole beach into a platform. Their burdens,
their strung-out progeny and maternal poundage, their authority, can annihilate
the bright water, the perfect small cove with the red-limbed arbutus trees, the
cedars, growing crookedly out of the high rocks. Kath feels their threat
particularly, since she's a mother now herself. When she nurses her baby she
often reads a book, sometimes smokes a cigarette, so as not to sink into a
sludge of animal function. And she's nursing so that she can shrink her uterus
and flatten her stomach, not just provide the baby--Noelle--with precious
maternal antibodies.
Kath and Sonje
have their own Thermos of coffee and their extra towels, with which they've
rigged up a shelter for Noelle. They have their cigarettes and their books.
Sonje has a book by Howard Fast. Her husband has told her that if she has to
read fiction that's who she should be reading. Kath is reading the short
stories of Katherine Mansfield and the short stories of D. H. Lawrence. Sonje
has got into the habit of putting down her own book and picking up whichever
book of Kath's that Kath is not reading at the moment. She limits herself to
one story and then goes back to Howard Fast.
When they get
hungry one of them makes the trek up a long flight of wooden steps. Houses ring
this cove, up on the rocks under the pine and cedar trees. They are all former
summer cottages, from the days before the Lions
Gate Bridge
was built, when people from Vancouver
would come across the water for their vacations. Some cottages--like Kath's and
Sonje's--are still quite primitive and cheap to rent. Others, like the real
Monica's, are much improved. But nobody intends to stay here; everybody's
planning to move on to a proper house. Except for Sonje and her husband, whose
plans seem more mysterious than anybody else's.
There is an
unpaved crescent road serving the houses, and joined at either end to Marine Drive. The
enclosed semicircle is full of tall trees and an undergrowth of ferns and
salmonberry bushes, and various intersecting paths, by which you can take a
shortcut out to the store on Marine
Drive. At the store Kath and Sonje will buy
takeout French fries for lunch. More often it's Kath who makes this expedition,
because it's a treat for her to walk under the trees--something she can't do
anymore with the baby carriage. When she first came here to live, before Noelle
was born, she would cut through the trees nearly every day, never thinking of
her freedom. One day she met Sonje. They had both worked at the Vancouver
Public Library a little while before this, though they had not been in the same
department and had never talked to each other. Kath had quit in the sixth month
of pregnancy as you were required to do, lest the sight of you should disturb
the patrons, and Sonje had quit because of a scandal.
Or, at least,
because of a story that had got into the newspapers. Her husband, Cottar, who
was a journalist working for a magazine that Kath had never heard of, had made
a trip to Red China. He was referred to in the paper as a left-wing writer.
Sonje's picture appeared beside his, along with the information that she worked
in the library. There was concern that in her job she might be promoting
Communist books and influencing children who used the library, so that they
might become Communists. Nobody said that she had done this--just that it was a
danger. Nor was it against the law for somebody from Canada
to visit China.
But it turned out that Cottar and Sonje were both Americans, which made their
behavior more alarming, perhaps more purposeful.
"I know that
girl," Kath had said to her husband, Kent, when she saw Sonje's picture.
"At least I know her to see her. She always seems kind of shy. She'll be
embarrassed about this."
"No she
won't," said Kent.
"Those types love to feel persecuted, it's what they live for."
The head librarian
was reported as saying that Sonje had nothing to do with choosing books or
influencing young people--she spent most of her time typing out lists.
"Which was
funny," Sonje said to Kath, after they had recognized each other, and
spoken and spent about half an hour talking on the path. The funny thing was
that she did not know how to type.
She wasn't fired,
but she had quit anyway. She thought she might as well, because she and Cottar
had some changes coming up in their future.
Kath wondered if
one change might be a baby. It seemed to her that life went on, after you
finished school, as a series of further examinations to be passed. The first
one was getting married. If you hadn't done that by the time you were
twenty-five, that examination had to all intents and purposes been failed. (She
always signed her name "Mrs. Kent Mayberry" with a sense of relief
and mild elation.) Then you thought about having the first baby. Waiting a year
before you got pregnant was a good idea. Waiting two years was a little more
prudent than necessary. And three years started people wondering. Then down the
road somewhere was the second baby. After that the progression got dimmer and
it was hard to be sure just when you had arrived at wherever it was you were
going.
Sonje was not the
sort of friend who would tell you that she was trying to have a baby and how
long she'd been trying and what techniques she was using. She never talked
about sex in that way, or about her periods or any behavior of her body--though
she soon told Kath things that most people would consider much more shocking.
She had a graceful dignity--she had wanted to be a ballet dancer until she got
too tall, and she didn't stop regretting that until she met Cottar, who said,
"Oh, another little bourgeois girl hoping she'll turn into a dying
swan." Her face was broad, calm, pink skinned--she never wore any makeup,
Cottar was against makeup--and her thick fair hair was pinned up in a bushy
chignon. Kath thought she was wonderful looking--both seraphic and intelligent.
Eating their
French fries on the beach, Kath and Sonje discuss characters in the stories
they've been reading. How is it that no woman could love Stanley Burnell? What
is it about Stanley?
He is such a boy, with his pushy love, his greed at the table, his
self-satisfaction. Whereas Jonathan Trout--oh, Stanley's
wife, Linda, should have married Jonathan Trout, Jonathan who glided through
the water while Stanley
splashed and snorted. "Greetings, my celestial peach blossom," says
Jonathan in his velvety bass voice. He is full of irony, he is subtle and
weary. "The shortness of life, the shortness of life," he says. And Stanley's brash world
crumbles, discredited.
Something bothers
Kath. She can't mention it or think about it. Is Kent
something like Stanley?
One day they have
an argument. Kath and Sonje have an unexpected and disturbing argument about a
story by D. H. Lawrence. The story is called "The Fox."
At the end of that
story the lovers--a soldier and a woman named March--are sitting on the sea
cliffs looking out on the Atlantic, towards their future home in Canada. They
are going to leave England,
to start a new life. They are committed to each other, but they are not truly
happy. Not yet.
The soldier knows
that they will not be truly happy until the woman gives her life over to him,
in a way that she has not done so far. March is still struggling against him,
to hold herself separate from him, she is making them both obscurely miserable
by her efforts to hang on to her woman's soul, her woman's mind. She must stop
this--she must stop thinking and stop wanting and let her consciousness go
under, until it is submerged in his. Like the reeds that wave below the surface
of the water. Look down, look down--see how the reeds wave in the water, they
are alive but they never break the surface. And that is how her female nature
must live within his male nature. Then she will be happy and he will be strong
and content. Then they will have achieved a true marriage.
Kath says that she
thinks this is stupid.
She begins to make
her case. "He's talking about sex, right?"
"Not
just," says Sonje. "About their whole life."
"Yes, but
sex. Sex leads to getting pregnant. I mean in the normal course of events. So
March has a baby. She probably has more than one. And she has to look after
them. How can you do that if your mind is waving around under the surface of
the sea?"
"That's
taking it very literally," says Sonje in a slightly superior tone.
"You can
either have thoughts and make decisions or you can't," says Kath.
"For instance--the baby is going to pick up a razor blade. What do you do?
Do you just say, Oh, I think I'll just float around here till my husband comes
home and he can make up his mind, that is our mind, about whether this is a
good idea?"
Sonje said,
"That's taking it to extremes."
Each of their
voices has hardened. Kath is brisk and scornful, Sonje grave and stubborn.
"Lawrence didn't want to
have children," Kath says. "He was jealous of the ones Frieda had
from being married before."
Sonje is looking
down between her knees, letting sand fall through her fingers. "I just
think it would be beautiful," she says. "I think it would be beautiful,
if a woman could."
Kath knows that
something has gone wrong. Something is wrong with her own argument. Why is she
so angry and excited? And why did she shift over to talking about babies, about
children? Because she has a baby and Sonje doesn't? Did she say that about
Lawrence and Frieda because she suspects that it is partly the same story with
Cottar and Sonje?
When you make the
argument on the basis of the children, about the woman having to look after the
children, you're in the clear. You can't be blamed. But when Kath does that she
is covering up. She can't stand that part about the reeds and the water, she
feels bloated and suffocated with incoherent protest. So it is herself she is
thinking of, not of any children. She herself is the very woman that Lawrence is railing
about. And she can't reveal that straight out because it might make Sonje
suspect--it might make Kath herself suspect--an impoverishment in Kath's life.
Sonje who has
said, during another alarming conversation, "My happiness depends on
Cottar."
My happiness
depends on Cottar.
That statement
shook Kath. She would never have said it about Kent. She didn't want it to be true
of herself.
But she didn't
want Sonje to think that she was a woman who had missed out on love. Who had
not considered, who had not been offered, the prostration of love.
(C) 1998 Alice Munro
All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-375-40395-7