Alice Munro:
Authors and book lovers pick their favourite stories
Reflections on the Nobel Prize-winner’s stories, from the Dance of the
Happy Shades collection to the View from Castle Rock.
By: Compiled by Dianne Rinehart Book Reporter, Published on Sat Oct 12 2013
Margaret Atwood
Author, MaddAddam
I’m bad at picking
favourites, so I’ll talk about my earliest encounter with Alice’s stories. I
read her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, in 1968, in
freezing cold Edmonton, curled up beside a bar heater. The title story knocked
me out. “This is the real thing,” I thought. “Wow.” I later taught this story
in a course I invented called “Southern Ontario Gothic.” Two elderly piano teachers
with red eyes and witchy noses welcome children into their cottage for a
recital. But an unexpected group arrives, from what used to be called “an
institution.” One girl plays beautifully: the “The Dance of the Happy Shades”
has transformed her! But no, because afterwards she’s the same damaged child as
before. Nonetheless she lives partly in another country, the one with the music
in it. Like many of Munro’s stories, this one concerns the enchantments of art:
are they real or are they a lie? Both at once, it seems: the magic is in how
you do it. So there it is. The magic is in how she does it. You have to listen.
Joseph
Boyden
Author, The Orenda
I’ve said it before, and
I’ll say it again: Alice Munro is the bane of every creative writing teacher’s
existence. Allow me to explain. I used to urge my students to learn the rules
of writing short stories, rules like “Don’t rely on a lot of exposition, a lot
of telling in your stories. Short stories demand a singular protagonist’s point
of view, not an omniscient one. Keep stories to less than 6,000 words or else
you’ll have real difficulty publishing them.” And then along comes Alice Munro,
gleefully smashing every one of those rules, and many others, the end result
being some of the most brilliant fiction I’ve ever read. Because of the genius
of Alice Munro, these last years I’ve changed my teaching mantra to “Please
learn the rules of fiction before you decide to break them. And if you’re going
to try to mimic Alice Munro, good luck.”
Lisa Moore
Author, Caught
Alice Munro sends her
female characters into the world armed with a desire for escape — sometimes
through the rewards of higher education, or, say, the security of a good
marriage. But her female characters are not always good. They are often
derailed by errant and powerful female desire. The main character in “Wenlock
Edge” (one of my favourite Munro stories because it is so sinister, subversive
and eye-poppingly creepy) says about herself at the beginning of this
brilliantly torqued story: “I had a mean tongue. But I meant no harm. Or hardly
any harm.” What a narrative hook, dropped so casually in the second paragraph.
A character who hints that harm is coming, at least some harm, and maybe a
whole lot that wasn’t even intended! This young college girl will end up
stripping for an elderly, extremely wealthy stranger who sits at the other end
of a long, formal table laden with delicacies under silver domes. She will be
asked to read poetry. She will do it because she feels dared to do so, because
of a “pride or some shaky recklessness.” She will get undressed and get a
dressing down, all because of her ungovernable desire. A desire to know what
will unfold. And she will learn, and continue learning.
Anne Michaels
Author, Fugitive Pieces
One of my favourite stories
is “The Moons of Jupiter,” which I heard Alice Munro read almost 30 years ago.
Her reading held something extraordinary that night; as if she were taking in
the truth of it herself for the first time. An Alice Munro story always seems
to be an intimacy shared. She reveals the mystery of a situation or experience,
holds out to us the profound value of what is almost always overlooked. She
observes as if she simply cannot get enough of this extraordinary, ordinary
world; with a hunger for the common intricacies of our lives. And all is expressed
with an abiding compassion. “The Moons of Jupiter,” in a few short pages,
expresses such a penetrating portrait of what it means to be a daughter and the
mother of daughters, what it means to be a father, what it means to accept the
most common facts of love: we lose what we love most — to age, to death — and
the only way to defy this is to love even more. The last lines of the story
underline what Alice Munro wants us never to forget: the most profound moments
of our lives are the most common. This is her great theme. In Alice Munro’s
hands, a short story contains the span of a life.
Jane Urquhart
Author, The Stone Carvers
I have just finished
re-reading “The Albanian Virgin” from Open Secrets and, as always, I am
delighted and amazed by how much exquisite literary pleasure a much-visited
Alice Munro story can bring to an otherwise ordinary afternoon. “The Albanian
Virgin” is rife with everything we have come to expect from Munro; a woman at a
cross-road, a look at the new, uncertain life (she becomes a bookseller) she
has chosen for herself. But, as is often the wonderful case with Munro, there
is something else running alongside. Set in Albania in the early decades of the
last century, the parallel narrative involves a kidnapped woman from a Canadian
small town, banditry, blood feuds, and a primitive custom that allows a woman
to declare herself a “virgin,” in order to become — almost — a man. Only a
writer of Munro’s genius could make this brutally strange world so palpably
familiar to us. In the end, we feel we have been intimate with it all our
lives.
Dan Vyleta
Author, The Crooked Maid.
I first read “Dulse” over
lunch. Pumpkin soup, I believe. It was winter and I was cold; home alone, picking
a book off the shelf almost at random. To keep me company, I suppose.
This is how I know it is
good. The soup grew cold. I had things to do and didn’t. And I woke up with
them the next morning, with Munro’s world and Munro’s people, and a sad sort of
yearning for the taste of seaweed for which the story is named.
Compositionally, it’s not
her most elegant story; is messy and indiscreet. I like this: it infuses
something generous into the story, an openness to life, and tempers its
unflinching clarity of vision.
It’s the ending that gets
me, the sudden, painful shift away from the protagonist, at whose shoulder we
have stood for 20-odd pages and whom we now behold at a distance, sensing her
fate and future with glum certainty. And our sadness resides precisely in this
sudden distance as we mourn the intimacy we have traded for knowledge, without
tallying the cost.
Charlotte Gray
Author, The Massey Murder
I arrived at the cottage
for Thanksgiving, still exhilarated by the Munro win. I knew there would be an early
Munro there — swollen after too many damp winters, but still on a prominent
bookshelf. Yes, The Moons of Jupiter was waiting for me, filled with
Alice Munro’s awkward, sensitive heroines groping their way towards autonomy. I
sat down to choose my favourite story — but it was impossible. Those looping
narratives … the ordinary made extraordinary … the conversations that flow so
naturally, and yet take surprising turns.
Reading the first sentence
in each story is like listening to the opening bars of a favourite symphony.
I’ve read these 12 stories many times. Each seems effortlessly straightforward,
yet radiates a painful intensity. (Rule 1 for a Munro piece: never think you’ve
got it if you’ve only read it once.) In the title story, which is ostensibly
about a woman writer visiting her father in hospital, parental relationships
are sketched with devastating economy. The father is dying; the daughter tries
to reassure him while feeling abandoned by her daughter. The old man resists
any impulse to express pride in his daughter’s successes. “The message I got
from him was simple: Fame must be striven for, then apologized for.”
Andrew Pyper
Author, The Demonologist
When I was 19 years old and
a waiter in Stratford, Ontario, I served Alice Munro dinner. It was the only
contact with a celebrity I’ve ever had that left me nervous and tongue-tied, so
that when, at the end of the meal, I ventured to compliment her on her latest
collection, The Progress of Love, I barely managed to get the words out.
“It’s your best yet,” I stammered idiotically. But she smiled and told me she
was so glad to hear me say that. “It’s important to know you’re getting
better,” she said. I’ve thought about that moment — and that book — many times
over the years since. And now, as a writer moving into mid-career myself, I
know what she said and how she responded to my comment was genuine. Because not
only is it important to believe you’re getting better, it’s even more important
to hear a living, breathing reader — a stranger connected not to you but to the
work — tell you.
Heather Reisman
Indigo Books and Music
founder
I could talk about what
Alice Munro means to me as a book seller, but I’d much rather talk about her
from my perspective as a booklover. I fell in love with Alice Munro decades ago
and remain a committed fan. For me, she is all about her characters. There is
an essential truth at the core of each character she shapes that makes them
endure. Lives of Girls and Women is now over 40 years old, but Del and
Addie’s relationship — that mother-daughter struggle — is as raw and relevant
today as it was when first written. And it is this incredible ability to create
insanely compelling, timeless characters that makes Munro so great. Every time
I read one of her stories I feel my life is touched by living, breathing
people.
Jane Pyper
City Librarian, Toronto
Public Library
Being from Southwestern
Ontario and with Scottish roots, the stories in The View from Castle Rock
speak right to my heart. In particular, the way Munro captures the stoicism and
self-denial and nuanced judgments of what is appropriate behaviour in that
particular time and place. The young girl in “Lying under the Apple Tree” who
is on the edge of her own life and the shape it will take, already knowing that
she needs to escape — for me, this is one of her most beautiful and classic
stories. And of course, what Munro explores in story after story is that we
never really leave behind where we began.
Janet E. Cameron
Author, Cinnamon Toast and
the End of the World
When I think of what Alice
Munro’s writing has meant to me over the years, one scene comes to mind. I was
22, reading in a cabin with a candle for light, in perfect silence. The book
was Who Do You Think You Are? and I was deep into the chapter called
“The Beggar Maid,” where Rose is about to make the disastrous decision to marry
her rich boyfriend, Patrick. “No, she can’t do that,” I said — out loud, to the
empty cabin. I’d forgotten where I was. I’d forgotten that this was a story I
was reading. Later I lent the book to my boyfriend and he said the same thing
had happened to him. “But she can’t. . . ,” he’d said — out loud on the bus.
How could we both have felt so connected to a fictional character? This is more
than good writing. It’s really something of a miracle.
Brian Francis
Author, Natural Order.
One of my favourite Munro
stories is “Carried Away,” from Open Secrets. The story has everything
you want and expect from Munro: a lonely librarian, misguided love, lost
virginity, London’s Victoria Park, Tolpuddle Martyrs and a beheading (don’t
assume her stories can’t be gruesome at times). But it’s also the detail through
which Munro paints her canvas that brings the story to life. The smell of
oilcloth covering a restaurant table. Water drops sizzling on a radiator.
Sawdust soaking up blood. “Carried Away” is dense and heartbreaking and comes
full circle at the end in a way that continues to take my breath away, even
after all my repeated readings. Munro makes us realize how many unfulfilled
dreams we harbour inside, even if we sometimes forget they were ever there in
the first place.
Ken McGoogan
Author, 50 Canadians Who Changed
the World
In Scotland, we drove north
out of Robbie Burns country and then made a detour to visit the graves of the
paternal ancestors of Alice Munro. In The View From Castle Rock, Munro
had written of visiting these graves in a churchyard 80 kilometres south of
Edinburgh. We followed a winding, one-lane road through rolling hills and
sheep-dotted fields into the Ettrick Valley, and then took direction from the
locals. One of Munro’s relatives is related to James Hogg, an early friend of
Walter Scott. Hogg remains famous throughout Scotland as the “Ettrick
shepherd.” In The View from Castle Rock, Munro relates how, as a young
man, he introduced Scott to his mother. Later, in a collection of ballads,
Scott included several of that woman’s contributions. Published in 2007, and
more overtly autobiographical than most of her works, Castle Rock is not
Munro’s best book. But I vividly remember reading gravestones in that Ettrick
churchyard, knowing that the author had done the same not long before, and that
experience makes this book my favorite.
Marina Endicott
Author, Good to a Fault
Like all the other women
writers I know, I have watched the progress of Alice Munro’s writing all my
life, not only for pleasure but as something to measure my own against. Her
sustained diligence is remarkable; but it’s the subversive, elusive, mercurial
beauty of the work that makes us all so joyful at the awarding of the Nobel
Prize. Only the 13th woman to be named in a 100 years — what a steady genius it
takes, as a woman writer, to be so utterly undeniable. Munro is sometimes
spoken of as a writer with a small canvas, but I’ve never seen that: to me the
shock of her gift is the breadth and scale of it — into a small cup she
compacts worlds of experience; into the possibly pallid form of the short story
she packs the bravest, most perturbing emotional investigation. The most
astonishing thing is how Munro has continued to grow bolder and more demanding
of her form and herself, into what is now the most graceful old age.
Shaena Lambert
Author, Oh My Darling
When I heard the news that
Alice Munro had won the Nobel Prize, I felt delight of course, but I also felt
a pull at my heart (oh God — now I’m really going to have to share her). I felt
possessive, because my relationship to Munro’s writing has always been so
personal. I think lots of readers and writers carry ‘a personal Alice’ inside:
she is so emotionally brave, so truthful about our lives. But for short-story
writers she is like a North Star. Her stories, by their intellectual
brilliance, their ability to reveal the mystery of human behaviour, have given
me something to aspire to. And she herself, with her lack of pomposity and
bombast, has a talismanic force to her — standing for true modesty in the face
of pursing a complex craft. She is the sort of writer other writers carry in
their hearts. I know I
carry her in mine.
Krista Bridge
Author, The Eliot Girls
When I was about 20 years
old, I read Alice Munro for the first time. It was a Friday night, that
opportunity for most university students to release the week’s stresses in a
frenzy of drunken socializing. I was at home with “Who Do You Think You Are?”,
following Rose from her royal beatings and the thin-walled bathroom in the
corner of her Hanratty kitchen to her marriage to the nervously pompous
birthmarked Patrick and their later divorce. What piercing wit in those
stories, provided with perfect understatement, as an incidental joy. I’d never
read anything that felt real to me in quite that way — the cruelties, the
erotic longings, the ambitions, the pretensions, the shifting secrets of whole
lives. Even now her stories occupy a place in me as important as my own
experiences. That Friday night, I was reading Alice Munro, and I was not lonely
anymore.
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2013/10/12/alice_munro_authors_and_book_lovers_pick_their_favourite_stories.html
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