Why it’s brilliant: This story has all of Munro’s classic themes: provincial prejudice (After the narrator describes what she’s learning at university, Alfrida responds, “You couldn’t get me to read that stuff for a million dollars”), youthful pretention, the budding writer who is ruthless in a way she can barely admit…. But this doesn’t stop her from using details from Alfrida’s life years later in her fiction. Then she goes to university in Alfrida’s town and hangs out with the kind of people who have seen Les Enfants du Paradis.
When the narrator was a child living in the country, visits from her father’s town-dwelling cousin Alfrida were thrilling. Family Furnishings ( Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Marriage): And since you must start somewhere, I will now provide my top 5 Alice Munro stories… complete with snappy blurbs about why each story is great. That feeling is not easy to get across in a few snappy sentences – and it has to be the reason why so many of her fans admit to thinking they were going to hate her in the beginning.
I guess it makes you feel like freaky shit could possibly happen everywhere, all the time. Somehow she creates a space in which the complexity of life is enacted – just how weird it is that one thing happens because of another thing – and from which you can emerge at the end to see your own life anew, like it has just been through the car wash. This is because what she does better than anyone is to capture the unexpectedness of life.
And maybe 30% of the reason is that some people just don’t like short stories (this can be overcome, in the same way that a person can gradually start to like spicy food with more exposure), and 10% of the reason is because her work can be violent (this is just a matter of adjusting expectations: people expect something more soothing from a supposedly “regional” writer who often sets her stories in the past).īut the main problem, when it comes to getting started with Munro, is that it’s hard to pick her up based on some article you read, or recommendation from a friend, because it’s really difficult to sum up what makes Alice Munro great in an enthusiastic blurb. I’ve come to the realization that Alice Munro is surprisingly difficult to get started on. What is this about? Why is Munro remarkably popular for a Nobel prize winner, yet so many of her fans have admitted to not liking her in the beginning? Later, they often sheepishly admit that they “haven’t started her yet” or “couldn’t get into her.” Alice Munro’s daughter recently accepted the Nobel Prize on her behalf, and as one of the author’s fans and students (I wrote my graduate thesis on her), I have recommended Munro to several people over the years.
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