Cathleen Schine
by Alice Munro
The New York Review of Books January 10, 2013
Derek Shapton Alice Munro in her backyard, Clinton, Ontario, circa 2004
Alice Munro is not only revered, she is cherished, her stories
handled lovingly, turned over and over, gazed at and studied and
breathed in with something approaching awe. She has never, over the
years, written the way any of her contemporaries have. Her stories are
open, overflowing with life, unlike the curt and obscure minimalist
stories so fashionable in the Seventies and Eighties. But no one could
accuse her of being traditional, either. With all their fullness of
narrative and character, her stories are elegant and sharp, pared
down—sometimes shockingly so. Her new collection, Dear Life, is as rich and astonishing as anything she has done before.
Munro’s stories, in this book as in her earlier work, tend to be
geographically concentrated, often based in a small town in Huron
County, Ontario, or, sometimes, in Vancouver, British Columbia. They
can, on the other hand, cover a vast expanse of temporal ground, passing
through years, decades, eras, in a paragraph, even in a sentence. There
are dramatic events: sudden deaths, disappearances, reappearances,
beatings, misunderstandings, and improbable coincidences—but the stories
do not often revolve around them.
Alice Munro,
the renowned Canadian short-story writer whose visceral work explores
the tangled relationships between men and women, small-town existence
and the fallibility of memory, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature on
Thursday.
Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy said that Ms.
Munro, 82, who has written 14 story collections, was a “master of the
contemporary short story.” She is the 13th woman to win the prize.
The selection of Ms. Munro was greeted with an outpouring of enthusiasm
in the English-speaking world, a temporary relief from recent years when
the Swedish Academy chose winners who were obscure, difficult to
comprehend or overtly political.
by CHARLES McGRATH
The New York Times : July 1, 2013
CLINTON, Ontario — Accepting a literary prize
in Toronto last month, Alice Munro, the acclaimed short-story writer —
“our Chekhov,” as Cynthia Ozick has called her — winner of the Man Booker International Prize
and just about every important North American literary award for which
she is eligible, told a newspaper interviewer, “I’m probably not going
to write anymore.”
Ian Willms for The New York Times
Alice Munro near her bungalow in Clinton, Ontario, a
small town like those in her renowned works of short fiction.
Ms. Munro, who will turn 82 next week, has talked this way before. In 2006 she told a writer
from The Toronto Globe and Mail, “I don’t know if I have the energy to
do this anymore.” She then went on to publish yet another story
collection, her 14th, called “Dear Life.”
It came out last fall, and reviewers, as usual, remarked on her
insightful handling of themes like the bleakness of small-town life; the
eruptive, transforming power of sex; and the trouble women have making
their way in a world run by men.
The New York Times, October 10, 2013
By JOHN WILLIAMS
Most of us are lucky to get a gold pen when we retire. Alice Munro got the Nobel Prize.
Ian Willms for The New York Times
Alice Munro
The Canadian short-story writer announced this year that she was done
writing fiction. “What I feel now is that I don’t have the energy
anymore,” she told The Times’s Charles McGrath in July.
Ms. Munro’s notices in The Times started on an inauspicious note. A brief 1973 review
by Martin Levin was positive, comparing the stories to “fresh winds
from the North,” but the review got the book’s title wrong: It was
“Dance of the Happy Shades,” not “Dance of the Happy Hours.”
Writing about the collection “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You”
in 1974, Frederick Busch said the stories seemed “formulaic,” their
tone “sycophantic.” In 1983, forming a much different opinion of “Moons of Jupiter,”
Benjamin De Mott wrote, “The freshness of Ms. Munro’s literary
performance has little to do with situation, everything to do with
character.” He called those characters “shrewd, amused, self-aware,”
“risk takers at heart, plucky, independent, sexually vibrant.”
Alice Munro, named on Thursday as the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in
Literature, once observed: “The complexity of things — the things within
things — just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is
simple.”
Alice Munro earlier this year.
Alice Munro’s home in Clinton, Ontario, Canada.
That is also a perfect description of Ms. Munro’s quietly radiant short
stories — stories that have established her as one of the foremost
practitioners of the form. Set largely in small-town and rural Canada
and often focused on the lives of girls and women, her tales have the
swoop and density of big, intimate novels, mapping the crevices of
characters’ hearts with cleareyed Chekhovian empathy and wisdom.
Fluent and deceptively artless on the page, these stories are actually
amazingly intricate constructions that move back and forth in time, back
and forth between reality and memory, opening out, magically, to
disclose the long panoramic vistas in these people’s lives (the starts,
stops and reversals that stand out as hinge moments in their personal
histories) and the homely details of their day-to-day routines: the dull
coping with “food and mess and houses” that can take up so much of
their heroines’ time.
