The Incomparable Alice Munro 1931-2024
Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories — and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
– Alice Munro
The incomparable literary titan Alice Munro passed away yesterday at the age of 92. This renowned Canadian author created groundbreaking literary works of the 20th and 21st century and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.
Alice Munro’s subtle and complex stories serve as a beacon, framing and illuminating the sometimes hopelessly opaque muddle of personal existence.
Many of Munro’s stories focus on seminal moments that explode like long-concealed ordnance in the minefield of a lifetime. Frequently, these key events take the form of accidents that define one’s future and rearrange one’s past, triggering epiphanies whose truth may recede or evanesce in the fullness of time.
The universe that Munro describes in her southwestern Ontario stories is chillingly familiar to products of that culture, but also to readers from the world over: a realm of repressed sexuality, sinister subtext, unacknowledged aggressions, and corrosive bigotry. A fabric of secrets and lies.
Alice Munro’s work can also be extremely funny. Her work reflects the dictum of the great playwright Harold Pinter:
Everything is funny; the greatest earnestness is funny; even tragedy is funny. And I think what I try and do in my [writing] is to get this recognizable reality of the absurdity of what we do and how we behave and how we speak.
Her subtle sense of irony never ceases to tickle, as evidenced in her story The Beggar Maid:
Billy Pope worked in Tyde’s Butcher Shop. What he talked about most frequently now was the D.P., the Belgian, who had come to work there, and got on Billy Pope’s nerves with his impudent singing of French songs and his naive notions of getting on in this country, buying a butcher shop of his own.
“Don’t you think you can come over here and get yourself ideas,” Billy Pope said to the D.P. “It’s youse workin’ for us, and don’t think that’ll change into us workin’ for youse.” That shut him up, Billy Pope said.
The loss of Alice Munro is devastating. But her work will live on and inspire writers and readers everywhere for eons to come.
To read an earlier tribute to Alice Munro, please click on the link below:
Alice Munro Blog – Robert McBryde (robertmcbrydeauthor.com)
Your friend,
Robert
https://robertmcbrydeauthor.com/
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