This marks an
important moment in this blog’s history; it is the moment I actually respond to
the news of a new Nobel Prize Winner.
This year it is Alice Munro and what makes it interesting is that
firstly she is Canadian, the first Canadian to win the Prize much to Margaret
Atwood’s chagrin, and secondarily she is primarily a short story writer. The academy is making a bold statement
by choosing Munro as a winner highlighting the value and importance of the
short story. Munro has been, I
think, working quietly in the backwaters of literature honing her craft to
no-one’s particular attention. One
reason why they might have chosen Munro over Atwood is that Atwood, at the
moment, is a very obvious choice.
Munro is a surprise.
Here it is my job to sharpen my
scepticism and take a close look at the writings of Munro to see whether she
does deserve to be better known and whether she does write the most ideal
literature in an ideal direction.
I am using the Vintage version of Selected Stories which is big enough
to give a good idea of what Munro is like as a writer in her early, middle and
mature periods.
I have read ten stories by Munro so far
and for nine of those stories I liked and thought were good but it was the
tenth that made me understand why she had won the Nobel Prize. The story in question is ‘The Beggar
Maid’, which is about a woman’s conflicting feelings towards a man who loves
her. It is a story whose
characters are drawn out with the utmost skill and precision where you can have
a huge range of emotions towards them from being sympathetic to outright
dislike and many, many grey shades in between.
What I really like about her stories is
that she packs whole worlds of experience and personal journeys that takes for
other writers a whole novel to achieve.
It helps that they are also very readable as well as being very
subtle. These are highly
sophisticated and polished stories that readers will get a lot out of. This is what the ‘ideal direction’ for
literature should be as the Nobel Prize Committee sees it.
I am reminded of Italo Calvino’s idea
of the future of literature, that literature should have ‘lightness’, and
though Munro deals with big emotions she does do it in the small form with
lightness of touch. The committee
could be saying that the ideal direction for literature at the moment should
deal with the local, the details of small town life with the significances that
the people have in their lives. It
should be not exactly minimalist but cut back, not simplified but refined. Comparable winners to Munro would be,
to my mind, Henrich Böll and Ernst Hemingway with, perhaps, a bit of Isaac
Bashievis Singer without quite so much religion.
There we go, no controversy here, just
a reaffirmation of the committee’s decision but it’s an honest opinion, as
honest as I can make it. Of course
this does not make her the greatest writer in history or even the greatest
living writer, if there can be such a thing, the giving of the Prize is mostly
symbolic of people’s (and by people I mean those who can suggest their chosen
writer, Professors of Literature and the like, to the Nobel Prize Committee)
prejudices at that particular time.
This is not to suggest that the winner is chosen on a whim as the
decision is made methodically and communally with much, I imagine, discussion
and argument over the better part of a year. Munro is simply another writer whom for people wishing to
know what the ‘experts’ of literature believe to be an example of ‘great
literature’ for their benefit, education and enjoyment. She also gives me another reason to put
up a post on a blog.
In conducting the predictions I am
surprised at just how much interest Umberto Eco has got, who has way, way more
page views then any other writer I have written about. However it was always going to go to
the writers who don’t shout their names too loudly, or have too much press time
and media coverage. It is
disappointing that the winner was not one of my predictions, though there were
many writers I thought about afterwards whom I did not mention who could have
won it just as well as Munro. Next
year I will start my predictions about two months before it is announced but I
will not repeat any writers that I have predicted this year. Instead I will be looking at the other
writers that I did not get round to this year as well as writers new to me that
I might discover between now and then.
