A great storyteller
Photo: dpa/epa/Derek Shapman
She was the mother of four daughters, one of whom died shortly after birth. Alice Munro had to wrest time from her feminine duties to write. Instead of extensive novels, she wrote “only” short stories, but in the long run she became so famous that she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Earlier, in the same year, the man she had lived with since 1976 died after her marriage to James Munro broke up.
From childhood she was not spoiled by happiness. Born in 1931 on a silver fox farm in the small town of Wingham, Ontario, she was the oldest of three siblings. When she was ten years old, an additional burden came: her mother became ill with Parkinson’s disease. She later confessed that she liked to make up stories on the long way to school. She had to stop studying due to lack of money. She didn’t publish her first volume of short stories until she was forty. She knew everything that can happen to people from her own experience. And none of it, not even the most bizarre things, was alien to her. How can one understand that a woman cannot get away from the man who killed her children? How can you be jealous if you don’t actually like the person? Or that a student agrees to dine completely naked with an old man – what does she think of that?
Munro’s stories often live from such breaking of taboos, from the courage of confession, which contains an invitation to us who read them: accept it as something possible, don’t make fun of yourself. What can’t happen that may seem strange to us at first glance. The inner world – a whole universe. In Alice Munro’s work, the strange and the ordinary intertwine in such a natural way that you yourself become involved. We are gripped by tension and can’t stop reading because we have to listen to ourselves.
Alice Munro left behind 14 volumes with more than 150 short stories. Almost all of it was translated into German. No one will be able to imitate the way the author explores the subtlest emotions of the soul. Her focus was primarily on women in small Canadian towns. Putting herself into strange female worlds of experience may have been a stimulus for her when she was writing. She avoided everything sweet, pleasing and dissolute. She was often compared to Chekhov. At times almost laconic, she describes with great precision what is happening and we have to make sense of it. “She has such mastery that I would still believe her even if she thought of reporting about her life after death in the first person,” says American author Polly Shulman . However, the world-famous Canadian writer was unable to escape dementia in the final years of her life and withdrew from the public eye. The short story collection “Dear Life,” published in Germany in 2013 under the title “Liebes Leben,” was her last. But topicality doesn’t count for her at all. What she may now reprint – one can only hope so – will appear as if it had just been written. And even in a hundred years: paradoxes in life will exist forever.
Alice Munro died on Monday at the age of 92.
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