Munro - a shame-busting, truth-telling pioneer

FE Team | Published: October 13, 2013 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00

Alice Munro

Masum Billah Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature for the year 2013. A Canadian, Munro well-acclaimed for her short-stories is the thirteenth woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature. The last woman to receive it was Herta Muller of Germany in 2009. She became the second Canadian-born writer to win the prize, although she is the first winner with a distinctly Canadian identity. Saul Bellow, who won the award in 1976, was born in Quebec, but raised in Chicago and is widely considered an American writer. The Swedish Academy described Munro 82, as a 'master of the contemporary short story' a genre that has only rarely been honoured with the world's most prestigious literary prize. Munro said that she was just ' terribly surprised' and delighted to learn that she had won the Nobel after being woken up by her daughter with the news. 'I knew I was in the running, yes but I never thought I would win', she said Her short story collections began with 1968's Dance of the Happy Shades. Swedish Academy hailed her 'finely tuned storytelling, which is characterised by clarity and psychological realism". Some critics consider her a Canadian Chekhov. Her stories are often set in small town environments, where the struggle for a socially acceptable existence often results in strained relationships and moral conflicts -- problems that stem from generational differences and colliding life ambitions. She told the Wall Street Journal in 2009, after winning the Man Booker prize, that she used to attempt to write novels but "didn't get anywhere." "The novel would always break down about halfway through and I would lose interest in it, and it didn't seem any good and I wouldn't persist," she told. She was largely ignored early in her career by international audiences, but began building a reputation when her stories started getting published in the New Yorker magazine in the 1970s. Her noted works include Lives of Girls and Women (1973), The Love of a Good Woman (1998) and Runaway (2004). A collection of her work, Too Much Happiness: Stories was published in 2009. Her first collection was published when she was 37; a local paper ran the headline "Local Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories." Her other works are: Who Do You Think You Are? (1978), The Moon of Jupiter (2004), The View from Castle Rock (2006) and Too Much Happiness (2009). Her most recent collection Dear Life was published in 2012. Munro was born Alice Laidlaw to a hard-pressed farming family of Scottish and Irish origins in rural Huron County, Ontario. She studied at the University of Western Ontario. She married James Munro, later a bookseller, while still a student and did not complete a degree. The couple had four daughters but divorced in 1976. She married her second husband, geographer Gerald Fremlin, in 1977. In an interview with the Paris Review, Munro described the effect that having been married at 20 and having a child at 21 had on her work habits. 'I was writing desperately all the time I was pregnant because I thought I would never be able to write afterwards. Each pregnancy spurred me to get something big done before the baby was born. Actually I didn't get anything big done. The year I wrote my second book, Lives of Girls and Women, I was enormously productive. I had four kids because one of the girls' friends was living with us, and I worked in the store two days a week. I used to work until maybe one o'clock in the morning and then get up at six. And I remember thinking, You know, maybe I'll die, this is terrible, I'll have a heart attack. I was only about thirty-nine or so, but I was thinking this; then I thought, well even if I do, I've got that many pages written now. They can see how it's going to come out. It was a kind of desperate, desperate race. I don't have that kind of energy now." Alice Munro published her first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968 and her 14th, Dear Life, in 2012. .She underwent heart surgery in 2001 but the new millennium ushered in some of her boldest works, in collections such as Runaway and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. In 2009, she won the biennial Man Booker International Prize for career-long achievement. After her husband's death, she announced that Dear Life would be her final book. In response, American novelist Jane Smiley wrote: "Thank you for your unembarrassed woman's perspective on the lives of girls and women, but also the lives of boys and men. Thank you for your cruelty as well as your kindness, because the one plus the other is the essence of truthfulness." Fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood, who acknowledges Munro as a shame-busting, truth-telling pioneer, has stressed the broad life-spanning perspective in her tales: "She writes about the difficulties faced by people who are bigger or smaller than they are expected to be. When her protagonists look backâ€¦ the older people they have become possess within them all of the people that they have been. She's very good on what people expect, and then on the letdown." In a 2003 interview with the Guardian, Munro observed, "I really grew up in the nineteenth centuryâ€¦The ways lives were lived, their values, were very much of the nineteenth century and things hadn't changed for a long time. So there was a kind of stability, and something about that life that a writer could grasp pretty easily." Alice Munro had already won every other big prize, from the Booker's newish international edition to the two big Canadian gongs, the Giller and the Governor-General's Award. Yet, it was still an unexpected delight when the Swedish Academy named Alice Munro, the "master of the contemporary short story," as the newest laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature. With the possible exception of Mario Vargas Llosa, she is the most popular writer to get the Nobel in a decade. The writer is programme manager, BRAC education programme and vice-president, Bangladesh English Language Teachers Association (BELTA). masumbillah65@gmail.com