Wednesday, May 27, 2009 3:45 PM
Go praise Alice
"Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little."
Thus Gore Vidal, who is nothing if not open about the nature of literary envy.
But I think it fairly safe to say that no one, in Canada and probably elsewhere, is dying a little at the news that Alice Munro has won the third edition of the Man Booker International Prize, awarded every two years, accompanied by a nifty cheque for 60,000 of the best (i.e. pounds sterling), to a living author of world distinction (in 2005 it was Albania's Ismail Kadare; in 2007, Nigeria's Chinua Achebe).
In fact, everyone I've spoken too has been overjoyed for Alice Munro, since she is all but universally, and properly (I allow for a few dissenters), regarded as a national treasure.
From her first collection, the Governor-General's Award-winning Dance of the Happy Shades, in 1968, to a new collection, Too Much Happiness, to be released in late summer, Munro has been a constant mistress of the short-story form. Somewhat miraculously, she consistently makes her readers see the large in the small, the universal in the local.
Reviewing Munro's Selected Stories in these pages in 1996, A.S. Byatt, herself no story-slouch, wrote:
Alice Munto is a great short story writer. She is the equal of Chekhov and de Maupassant and the Flaubert of the Trois Contes, as innovatory and as illuminating as they are. My discovery of her work has changed the way I think about short fiction, and the way I write, over the last decade or so.
Her stories are Canadian, rooted in a particular part of the earth and a particular society, full of precise details that make her world so lively that the foreign reader has the illusion of knowing exactly how those people and places were and are. (There are many good local writers who cannot perform this transfiguration.) She is a writer's writer -- I come back again and again to the felicity of particular sentences, particular narrative twists -- but anyone could read her and recognize something, and then be shocked by the unexpected.
The equal of de Maupassant... The equal of Flaubert... The equal (knock me down with a feather) of the supreme Chekhov.
Kudos to judges Jane Smiley, Amit Chadhuri and Andrey Kurkov for having chosen both wisely and well.
And to Alice Munro, if drinking were not verboten in the office, I would raise a glass to you, but will do so metaphorically and reserve the real pleasure for another time.
Now for the Nobel.
