Alice

Alice Munro was just nominated for the Man Booker International Prize. It's a fairly new award, the first one being handed out in 2005, but it's in the same vein as the Nobel in that it's supposed to honour an author's body of work and their cumulative literary contribution.

I resisted Alice Munro for years and years. I remember when Open Secrets was published around 1993 or 1994 and I made my mom buy it for me at the Coles in the Pickering Town Centre. I wanted to read "real" novels, novels that were talked about on the CBC (which is what I listened along with Tarzan Dan on AM 680. What a range. A dramatization of The Stone Diaries then...an interview with Marky Mark and Funky Bunch on whether he can handle his duty as the Calvin Klein underwear model while his burning up the music charts. Shikes. I was so weird). Anyhow, I couldnt get into it. What is this woman talking about? Her stories made no sense. They were written like a neighbour you only said hi to at the Beckers now talking to you over a cup of coffee at some passably clean diner before she had to catch the streetcar home. I couldnt get, and it bothered me in an unexplainable way, that her author pictures had her wearing this headband type of accessory I thought was reserved for young girls or Junior Leaguers. She was an older woman but there was this relic of youth, it seemed to me, this insistent headband.

Then something happened this fall. In my usual wanderings and strollings around London (I lived in Bayswater but what's in Bayswater other than Paddington Station?), Id go next door to Notting Hill. There's this real cramped bookstore, sorta next door to this place where you could remit money to the Philippines (where I often thought, if my mother hadnt immigrated or if my mother hadnt washed one more dish or made one more bed in some Park Avenue apartment with a view of the actual park so that the trees looked like islands rather than just a view of the trees), I could be remitting money to the Philippines. Instead, I was killing time. I stumbled upon a copy of "Something Ive Been Meaning to Tell You" and I loved the biography of Alice Munro on the first inside page that said the usual (books shed written) and ended with something like "...and she is considered one of the finest writers in her native Canada."

I laughed and got a bit sad. Next to Margaret Atwood and Margaret Laurence, she's a foundation of Canadian literature, those books about the bush (and how it was tamed) and Natives (and how they were tamed) or sad women in the prairies or sad Quebecers we were made to read in high school. And here she is, being talked about with an air of condescension, kinda patronizingly. In England, the centre of Empire, she's a provincial writer, someone from the colonies, the Dominion and nothing more. The book was a £1 and I bought it. I went through every single story in the next 2 days, reading in my tiny living room, reading in the park, rushing to get to the British Library so I could put in my request for books that I ended up not opening but using to rest my elbows on as I read Alice Munro until the library closed. I became intimate with a lot of second hand bookshops in Zone 1 looking for Alice Munro. Found The Progress of Love, which I think is my favourite collection, at the OxFam bookshop on Portobello Road. (I made the mistake of going on a Saturday when the market was on and I ducked inside to look for an Alice Munro book as much as to save myself from the traffic of people on the street.)

As for her actual work...what? What can I say? Her stories are simple. There's people. They do bad things. Sometimes they dont. Bad things happen to them. They grow old. Sometimes there are moments of redemption, even recognition (of where they had gone wrong, what they had done wrong). Sometimes not. They die. There are moments of happiness and cruelty in between. She writes from multiple points of view. She writes about couples, she writes about women. Stupid women who fall in love with even dumber men, smart women who go to schools and make good choices. City life, farm life, turkey farmers, alcoholics, homosexuals, unionists, politicians. All in there. Best thing I can say is to read her. Read Alice Munro. Truest thing I can say is that she is the best fiction writer I have ever read. Her writing is exhilarating, breath quickening.

(Oh ya. Other nominess are Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje (both Canadians), John Banville (Ireland), Peter Carey (Australia), Don DeLillo and Philip Roth (U.S.), Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie (Great Britain), Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Carlos Fuentes (Mexico), Harry Mulisch (the Netherlands), Amos Oz (Israel) and Michel Tournier (France). Interestingly amongst these nominees, she's the only one who writes short fiction. The others are, primarily by and large, novelists. Alice Munro's stature has continued to grow, and deservedly so, since the 70s but I think that she's still not as famous as she could be because of the lesser place and prestige given to short stories as a form and genre. The novel is still king.The prize should go to Alice.)

Dinner calls. Ya. You know where. Where else?