Alice Munro Dies Aged 92

Hello Gentle Reader,

Few names are as lauded and admired in Canadian literature and the short story format as Alice Munro’s. There are few who are considered her contemporary or equal in master of the short story form, and those who are: pay tribute to their debt to Munro. Despite her gigantic status as literary icon, Munro, never appeared distant or celestial. There was no insistence that she was a regular and or normal person, she merely was, who also happened to be a magnificent writer. Munro’s warmth and graciousness are equally praised in addition to her literary achievement. As the “Master of the Contemporary Short Story,” as the Swedish Academy declared, when announcing Alice Munro as a Nobel Laureate in Literature (2013), Munro proved herself to be an incisive and psychological portraitist, whose narratives were less interested in parading fact and dissecting the narrative to its sequential events; instead, Munro evoked narratives and embedded them with a sense of joy undercut with an understanding of tragedy. Admired for her stories which celebrated the everyday and the common, Munro often seemed perplexed by this sometimes-unintended backhanded compliment. Her characters were housewives, chambermaids, civil servants, farmers. All in all, ordinary people; but their lives were extraordinary, full of personal heartbreaks, open secrets, private tragedies, moral hypocrisy (and decay), through the expansive and isolative Canadian landscape, and the often-puritanical Canadian small town, with its social scriptures and edifices. The short story structure also changed in Munro’s hands. Time, once reserved only for the novel, was employed in full in Munro’s work. Short stories were no longer limited in the temporal space in which they could cover, they were capable of moving decades into the future and backwards, providing a long view of the characters progressions through their lives, and all their successes and failings, providing a humanistic and extensive overview of a life. “The Love of a Good Woman,” opens with this narrative perfectly, providing a beautiful full circle portrait of a cast of characters and their private failings, misunderstandings, and even crimes. The extraordinary tragedy of the ordinary is also beautiful captured in Munro’s work. Infanticide, sexual exploitation, murder, domestic abuse, illness, these are no longer sensationalist themes or tropes, but are sculpted in beautiful and understated prose, completive void of ostentatious exaggeration, and are remarked with an almost blunt matter of fact recount. Having retired from writing in 2012 with her final collection “Dear Life,” the world has come to accept there will be no more Alice Munro stories in the future, but now with her death, its resounding clear that the world has lost one of its great psychological surveyors who celebrated and elevated the ordinary to extortionary heights. Who through hard work and dedication, with a strict adherence to form, finally ensure the short story got its overdue recognition as a literary form of equal respect.

Rest in Peace Alice Munro.

 
Thank You for Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 

M. Mary