Word: munro
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Short stories from Alice Munro demonstrate a fine mastery...
...black belts were awarded for writing short stories, Canada's Alice Munro would have one with bells on. Open Secrets (Knopf; 294 pages; $23) is another stunning victory over one of the toughest of literary forms. The eight stories in this volume are about women uneasily balanced between their conventional past and a present that tips them in new and strange directions...
...stubbing subtexts are hidden here. Munro's gender agenda is neatly buried in her quietly daring art. An Albanian Virgin, for example, spans half a century and half the globe to join vastly different lives. A Canadian tourist who changes her itinerary in the mountains of southeastern Europe is captured by tribal Ghegs and put to work. Village routines induce a hypnotic adjustment that virtually erases her former self. The ways of these isolated Christians are bloody and strict. A woman can dodge her tribal fate as breeder and toiler only by renouncing sex, living alone and dressing...
...passivity of the character is barely credible, which is what Munro intends. The Gheg encounter, said to have occurred in the 1920s, is told to the narrator of a larger, more encompassing story by a woman whose reliability the reader is encouraged to suspect. Fact, fiction or a little of both, the exotic adventure mirrors changes in the life of the narrator, a Victoria, British Columbia, bookshop owner...
...Munro's sure touch with uncertainty guides her other stories as well. A small-town Ontario librarian feels betrayed when the World War I soldier she corresponds with comes home to marry another woman. Yet personal embarrassment is only a starting point in Carried Away. The story extends over many years and contains enough twists, including an accidental beheading, to lead the woman to see her life eventually as "a devouring muddle" full of "sudden holes and impromptu tricks and radiant vanishing consolations...