Bits and Pieces

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Alice Munro,a Canadian writer,is not as well known (specially in India) as her compatriot,Margaret Atwood. Is this because Munro is a short story writer and Atwood a novelist? Short story writers themselves are only too aware that novelists have a greater cachet in the literary world. Alice Munro,in an interview,spoke of Katherine Mansfield calling her stories “bits and pieces”. Munro herself earlier regarded stories as “just practice,till I got to write a novel”. That never happened; in fact,Lives of Girls and Women,was intended to be a novel,but,Munro says,it didn’t work. “I had to pull it apart and put it in the story form.” Today,Munro’s body of work consists entirely of stories,and her reputation,as well as all the numerous honours,prizes and awards she has received,including the Man Booker International Prize,2009 — a lifetime achievement award — have been for her stories. Cynthia Ozick,an American writer,has called her “our own Chekov”.

Dear Life is her 13th collection and once again,most of the stories are located in rural and small-town southwestern Ontario,the region where Munro grew up and went back to later. In this rootedness of her work,as in her mastery over the short story form,Munro is like Eudora Welty,an American writer Munro much admires. Welty speaks of being able to work more by suggestion in a short story than in a novel. “Less is resolved,more is suggested,” she says. Munro’s stories are a great example of suggestion rather than resolution. There is also an elliptical quality to her stories,which leave it to readers to traverse the ellipses on their own. In ‘Amundsen’,for example,one of the best stories in this collection,a young girl,teaching children in a TB sanatorium,is seduced by the doctor. The story then abruptly moves from the excitement of the girl preparing for her wedding to the doctor to the knowledge that he is not going to marry her. (“Just leaving,” says Alister,the man sitting beside me,who was going to marry me but now is not going to marry me.)

Alice Munro once spoke of how women could write about the freakish and the marginal. She herself writes more about misfits. There is Leah in ‘Leaving Maverley’,“an expert at losing”,straying in and out of the life of a policeman,who has an idyllic relationship with his ailing wife,the physically handicapped woman in ‘Corrie’,cheated by her lover,the man in ‘Train’ who runs at the slightest hint of any close involvement with another human. ‘Gravel’ is a very powerful story of a child whose sister drowns herself. The surviving sister remains caught in that moment of time and,years later,she is still searching for the “why?” of it,waiting for her sister to explain,“waiting for the splash”.

Munro has a special skill with children’s voices and their memories,which bring back poignant moments with a new understanding. Four of the stories at the end of this collection,are,the author herself explains,“not quite stories” and “autobiographical in feeling,though not,sometimes,entirely so in fact.” They are all memories of childhood,the mother an important presence in three of the stories. ‘Voices’ is an exquisite story about a country dance a mother and daughter go to,which,for the mother,is spoilt by the presence of a woman of dubious reputation. But for the child,it is the memory of two British airmen consoling a weeping girl which remains with her for a long time. She is seduced by their voices,by the kindness in their voices. For long,those doomed men,who would soon be gone (it is the time of WWII) “inhabited my not yet quite erotic fantasies”.

‘Dear Life’ is the pick of the bunch,again a story of childhood,which flits from memory to memory,from incident to incident,and with a deft and admirable skill,coalesces in the girl’s feelings about her mother,about her regret that she did not go,either for her mother’s death,or for her funeral. “We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven,or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do,we do it all the time.”

Alice Munro considers herself lucky that she began writing at a time when,she says,the question was: Where is our Canadian literature? But she has transcended the boundaries of her country,in the best way a writer can — with her writing. And,paradoxically,by being strongly rooted in her region. Something which Indian English writers in search of international markets perhaps need to take note of.

Shashi Deshpande is a novelist