Word: munro
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Reported by Ross H. Munro/ Washington and Donald Shapiro/ Taipei
Some writers have voices so distinctive that no matter how traditional the form they write in, the identity of the author can scarcely fail to be recognized after a brief passage. Alice Munro belongs in that rare company; from her naturalistic, classically composed short stories there rises a melodic line that catches at the heart with its freshness...
...Munro's originality is all the more striking because her subject is ordinariness. The stories in this collection and in earlier volumes of fiction (Lives of Girls and Women, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You) are situated in backwaters of Munro's native Canada, places from which any author might have fled long ago, literally and literarily. Instead, Munro still lives in Clinton, Ont, and, in her prose, dwells with contagious affection on the Saskatchewan plain and on the poky small towns and industrial cities of western Ontario. Hanratty, for instance, is "such a narrow...
...they were born, find that it has been uprooted to make way for a wildlife preserve. In a nursing home, two elderly widows who are lifelong friends become estranged, then reconciled. Still, only the surface of these characters may be viewed as plain. In her seemingly effortless prose style, Munro has etched portraits of people living underground dramas of high intensity...
Writing about ordinary life is hazardous; it may induce the boredom that is its subject. Munro defies the danger, and triumphs. -By Patricia Blake