The Guardian today reports that Canadian author and renowned short-story master Alice Munro has been awarded the 2009 Man Booker International Prize: 'Munro's spare, quiet stories of small-town life have won her a host of literary awards, although the Nobel prize for literature, for which she is a perennial contender, still eludes her. But she has nonetheless spoken of her desire to write a great novel. "I'm always trying. Between every book I think, well now, it's time to get down to the serious stuff," she told the Guardian in 2003. But Smiley said that Munro managed to do more in the 30 pages of her short stories than some novelists do in an entire book.'
I picked up Dance of the Happy Shades: And Other Stories, her 1968 debut story collection, on a whim at a used bookstore quite a while ago, having very little idea of what kind of writer Munro is but having heard her mentioned as a great contemporary author. Of course, once one is looking for stories from Munro, they're abundant — it's been easy to keep up with her career. Her writing is lucid, her stories human; they are sometimes memorable but almost never failing, and if there is a true flaw to her writing it is that she seems to ever err on the side of simplicity. I've enjoyed just about every story I've read by Munro though: many congratulations to her.
2 comments:
A very fine writer. My mother's favorite author actually.
My impression is that she is a writer of family life, and I think that focus is broadly appealing; it's remarkable, actually. Her writing is crafted and stylish but not dense, and she avoids the sort of text-as-material tricks that dominate so much literary fiction today.
Happy Shades reminds me of Updike's Olinger stories, as I think about it a bit. Their styles are different, certainly, as are their personae, but both shoot for clarity in the telling of the story itself, and both have similarly high reputations paired with truly general readerships.
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