Appreciations for the work of newly-Nobel’d Alice Munro continue to pour forth. From David Lynn:
For many writers, the short story remains a genre of apprenticeship. It is cultivated in workshops because it is, well, short. … Most writers are eager to graduate to novels (or screenplays) where the hope of glory and even rare lucre flutters ever bright. How different to read and savor the stories of Alice Munro. Like Anton Chekhov or Frank O’Connor, Peter Taylor or Flannery O’Connor, they reveal vast spaces within a small sphere, deep resonances in a few deft images, sweeping lines. Think of many of the greatest authors, generally known for their novels, whose short stories are, in fact, often superior. D. H. Lawrence an obvious case in point.
All of this simply by way of a shout of joy. This is splendid news indeed.
Sasha Weiss agrees:
It’s often said of Munro that her stories are so packed with emotion and incident that they are like novels—generations playing out their compulsions and longings across a few pages. Other writers study her work with devotion, trying to figure out how so much can happen in so little space. With Munro, it’s easy to pick out examples of miraculous economy: there are many, many stories and most of them are perfect.
James Wood says the news came as a surprise:
The announcement that this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Alice Munro probably strikes many readers and writers as deliriously incredible. Few contemporary writers are more admired, and with good reason. Everyone gets called “our Chekhov.” All you have to do nowadays is write a few half-decent stories and you are “our Chekhov.” But Alice Munro really is our Chekhov—which is to say, the English language’s Chekhov.
(In Munro’s great story, “The Beggar Maid,” an ambitious man sees that a friend of the woman he is courting “mispronounced Metternich,” and says indignantly to her: “How can you be friends with people like that?” I’m put in mind of Chekhov’s story “The Russian Master,” which has a character who repeatedly torments a young teacher by asking him why he has “never read Lessing.”)
Yet many of Munro’s readers had sadly concluded that she was not, somehow, the kind of writer that the Nobel committee seemed to like; I had decided that she would join the list of noble non-Nobelists, a distinguished category that includes Tolstoy, Nabokov, Borges, Hrabal, Sebald, Bernhard, Ingmar Bergman—and Chekhov, as it happens.
Many more Munro appreciations are here. In a 1994 interview, the writer shared the sources of her inspiration:
Reading was my life really until I was thirty. I was living in books. The writers of the American South were the first writers who really moved me because they showed me that you could write about small towns, rural people, and that kind of life I knew very well. But the thing about the Southern writers that interested me, without my being really aware of it, was that all the Southern writers whom I really loved were women. I didn’t really like Faulkner that much. I loved Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Ann Porter, Carson McCullers. There was a feeling that women could write about the freakish, the marginal.
For the uninitiated, C. Max Magee recommends “A Beginner’s Guide to Alice Munro.” The New Yorker‘s archives have many of her stories to explore. Previous Dish on Munro here. You can purchase a few of her collections here and here.
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