Book: Dear Life
Autor: Alice Munro
Country: Canada
Format: Print
Pages: 336
Publication: 2011
It’s too sad that only started reading Alice Munro after she passed away this year. She is an icon of Canadian literature, being the only writer in the country to receive a Nobel Prize. And although some sad facts about her came to life after her passing, her body of work continues to be an important one.
Munro writes mainly (if not exclusively) in short stories since a lot of her early writing had to be done while caring for her children. This is a format that I had some resistance with, but I’m clearly learning to embrace this year. I was expecting something light and disengaged, but the suspense in her plots made eat devour many of the stories.
She writes about the lives of ordinary people who often have to endure difficult challenges and painful events. In one of the stories, a young girl accidentally lets her sister drown. In another, a man stays at a farm to rebuild it from the ground. In yet another one a man with a cleft lip holds on to his pride.
“An expert at losing, she might be called – himself a novice by comparison. And now he could not remember her name. (…)
Dear Life
He was going up his own steps when it came to him.
Leah.
A relief out of all proportion, to remember her.”
The setting is life in small Canadian towns around Lake Huron, Ontario, in the 1940s. It seems to me that life was simpler back then, less complicated. It was really interesting to have a glimpse into how people used to live their lives in this country back then, away from the big cities like Toronto, isolated in farms and little towns. Some compare Munro to rural American South writers.
“Then there was silence, the air like ice. Brittle-looking birch trees with black marks on their white bark, and some kind of small untidy evergreens rolled up like sleepy bears. The frozen lake not level but mounded along the shore, as if the waves had turned to ice in the act of falling.”
Dear Life
A lot of those stories are touched by the Second World War, and they show how it shaped the lives of young men who were drafted. But despite some dark episodes, there’s no heaviness to her stories, there’s more the sense that things just happen to people, it’s life.
Many stories are in first person, and it made me think of how an author builds a character that’s a narrator at the same time. This is one of the things that interested me in books like the Neapolitan Novels, for instance, by Elena Ferrante. How much of the thoughts and subtleties a character-narrator expresses in the story are actually the narrator, versus the original author?
Also, in light of the revelation of the fact that Alice Munro decided to stay with the man who sexually abused her daughter in childhood, I wonder how much of Munro’s own thoughts were in there.
“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.”
Dear Life
Although most of the stories are fictional, you can see that pieces of her own childhood ended up in it – she grew up in Wingham, in Huron County, southern Ontario and her dad was a fox and mink farmer. The last four stories are more autobiographical, according to her “in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact”. That displays how much feelings play a role in her stories.
In the end, this is a very interesting read if you want to know Canada deep down, especially the life of the small cities.
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