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January 08, 2007

alice munro

This past month, the Atlantic ran an article on the career of Alice Munro. The article touted her as "the living writer most likely to be read in a hundred years". This seemd quite a statement about a woman I'd never heard of before. The article asks the question as to how such a revered writer could be so unknown to the general public. When musing about this question, the article states, "The short story, Munro's preferred form, has been blamed... No one would ever sugget today that fiction helps sell any magazine, as stories did when Fitgerald and Faulkner churned them out to support their longer projects. Being a most unexotic Canadian probably hasn't helped, either."

This rang true to me. Until recently (with the help of another short story writer, Saul Bellows), my middle school mentality of "people who can't write novels, write short stories", prevailed. And I couldn't think of the name of any famous Canadians, let alone a contemporary Canadian writer. But with such praises, I thought her book was worth pursuing and I have to say I'm loving it. I just finished "Labor Day Dinner" and which may be my favorite so far. Here's a sample:

Roberta thought that after speaking in such a friendly way to the girls, and helping them into the truck, he might speak to her when he got into the cab, might even take her hand, brushing away her undisclosed crimes, but it did not happen. Shut up together, driving over the hot gravel roads at an almost funeral pace, they are pinned down by a murderous silence. On the edge of it, Roberta feels herself curling up like a jaundiced leaf. She knows this to be a hysterical image. Also hysterical is the notion of screaming and opening the door and throwing herself on the gravel. She ought to make an effort not to be hysterical, not to exaggerate."

processing | By charity | 12:27 AM

Comments

Posted by: Bryonie at January 16, 2007 11:13 AM

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