Congratulations Alice Munro on winning the Nobel Prize for Literature!
‘There’s nothing much to write about here except go read Alice Munro – go now – read her . It’s true. She must be experienced. She kept me up at night well past my bedtime pulling me line by line into each word and sentence, into each complete world she creates in every single one of her stories. Wow. And yet the stories she tells is the stuff of every day life and I have to insert ‘and yet’ in here again because there is an unexpectedness of where these stories travel and take us to, their breadth, their depth, their ability to capture an entire world and still draw you into some lurking darkness of life’s ordinariness, the incremental blocks that build a life’s arc, a character’s failure or their greatest moment. Wow. Did I say that already? Read “Child’s Play” and see the twists and turns she takes us on or the story of a young woman who sits nude reading poetry for an older man – nothing happens yet everything happens. Does Alice Munro write with that beautiful turn of phrase that great literature often seduces with? No, not really. She doesn’t actually have to. She builds her stories more surgically than that – that is her master craft. Have I said ‘wow’ already? Wow, go read Too Much Happiness. Go read any one of her collections.
Not surprisingly this weekend’s Globe and Mail did a story on Alice Munro: 10 Telling Details Behind the Genius of Alice Munro.
Related articles
- Farewell Alice Munro, and thanks for everything (guardian.co.uk)
- ‘Dear Life’ by Alice Munro (or, ‘Why Everyone Should Read CanLit. Right Now.’) (thoughtsonmybookshelf.wordpress.com)
- The Work of a Good Woman (themillions.com)
- Exploring the genius of Alice Munro (theglobeandmail.com)
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