Nobel Prize 2013: Alice Munro's lifetime of perfectionism
The Nobel Prize for Literature is a fitting end to Alice Munro's career in fiction
Nobel winner Alice Munro Photo: Kim Stallknecht
Earlier this year, the Canadian short story writer Alice Munro announced her
retirement, at the age of 82: “It’s
nice to go out with a bang,” she said when she won a Canadian book
award for Dear Life. Now she has won the 2013 Nobel Prize for
Literature. The dramatic and unexpected coincidence – “I knew I was in the
running, yes, but I never thought I would win” – is like the plot of one of
Munro’s own stories: understated and elegantly structured. The Nobel is a
bang by anyone’s standards.
Munro was born in 1931 and grew up in Wingham, Ontario, where her mother was a
schoolteacher and her father a fur and poultry farmer. Her early compulsion
to write is captured in the story “Cortes Island” from the collection The
Love of a Good Woman (1998):
It seemed that I had to be a writer as well as a reader. I bought a school
notebook and tried to write – did write, pages that started off
authoritatively and then went dry, so that I had to tear them out and twist
them up in hard punishment and put them in the garbage can. I did this over
and over again until I had only the notebook cover left. Then I bought
another notebook and started the whole process once more. The same cycle –
excitement and despair, excitement and despair.
There was excitement when her first story, “The Dimensions of a Shadow”, was
published in 1950, followed by despair when she struggled with writer’s
block in the early Sixties, around the time The Vancouver Sun
published an article about her with the headline: “Housewife Finds Time To
Write Short Stories”. (Munro is the 13th woman to win the prize since it was
founded in 1901.)
Her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, appeared in 1968, and
won Canada’s highest literary prize, the Governor General’s Award. There has
been excitement and prizes ever since, including the International Man
Booker in 2009, which brought Munro to the attention of an even wider
readership.
But plenty of genuine writerly despair too: Munro is a perfectionist who works
for months and months on each of her stories, with little time to spare for
literary festivals or parties. More time for a social life – less time alone
with words – was one of her reasons for retiring.
Munro is not an overtly political writer in the sense sometimes associated with the Nobel Prize. She is, however, subtly political in her celebration of the human spirit and its need for freedom. Her stories are intricate explorations of the way human beings impose on one another – through language, habit and desire. They are also celebrations of love and hope in the face of everything that corrodes them. Typically set somewhere in the second half of the 20th century in the small towns or countryside surrounding London, Ontario, Munro’s stories are about ordinary people living limited lives, but through them it is possible to glimpse the eternal truths of human nature.
Read an exclusive short story from Alice Munro
Munro is not an overtly political writer in the sense sometimes associated with the Nobel Prize. She is, however, subtly political in her celebration of the human spirit and its need for freedom. Her stories are intricate explorations of the way human beings impose on one another – through language, habit and desire. They are also celebrations of love and hope in the face of everything that corrodes them. Typically set somewhere in the second half of the 20th century in the small towns or countryside surrounding London, Ontario, Munro’s stories are about ordinary people living limited lives, but through them it is possible to glimpse the eternal truths of human nature.
Read an exclusive short story from Alice Munro
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário