The Albanian Virgin

Alice Munro , Nobel Prize in Literature 2013

The Albanian Virgin (originally The Albanian Virgin ) is a short story by Alice Munro from 1994 in which various narratives are interwoven. The Albanian Virgin is one of the author's most published works. Munro said in an interview on the subject in the title of the short story in 2006 that she was interested in how women live.

In the 1920s, the story takes place about a tourist involuntarily extending a vacation trip that she begins by ship on the western Balkan coast. After an accident in the border region between Montenegro and Albania, she lived with the inhabitants of the country for more than a year and took on certain tasks that were assigned to her. Until she is taken out of the country by a Franciscan. Telling this story should provide a draft for a script. The story is heard in a hospital in Vancouver in the mid-1960s, where the first-person narrator visits this customer of her bookstore on three afternoons. A second story is told about the background and motivation for these visits, which has to do with the bookstore as well as with the past and the future of the narrator. The first and second stories as well as further episodes are connected with each other by means of flashbacks and entanglement of a thematic nature. The end suggests the solution of a biographical riddle regarding the customer and her partner.

Interpretations

Renate Schostack sees Munro's discrete art at work, which is characterized by the smallest elements of tension. Schostack cites a sentence as an example that lets what has been told before appear in a new light. With Munro, the only thing that is exciting is what is only hinted at. In this case, for example, it is the contrasting representation of the lives of younger and older people.

In her analysis of the work Georgiana MM Colvile argues that the text has a cinematic structure because it is a montage of two stories that are told partly alternately and partly in parallel. Of nine sequences , five belong to the Lottar story, including the first and last sequence, and Colvile assigns the other four to the Claire story. While Lottar's episodes progress largely chronologically, Claire's episodes are not told chronologically. At the beginning those by Lottar predominate and from the fourth, the longest sequence at 21 pages, Claire's story takes the lead until the end of the story. The Lottar episodes are getting shorter and shorter. Lottar's adventures mirror those of Claire, Colvile said. The unreliable narrator is extradiegetic and homodiegetic and a short poem on the penultimate page makes it clear that the story is told in retrospect. Albania as a region functions like Illyria in Shakespeare's comedy of crossdressing and the doppelganger , What you want , insofar as the country remains far enough away to be able to decorate it fictionally as you like.

Editions and versions

• "The Albanian Virgin" was first published in the double edition of The New Yorker on June 27 / July 4, 1994.
• A more elaborated version of the story is contained in Open Secrets (1994). She was also included in Selected Stories (1996), No Love Lost (2003), Vintage Munro (2004) and Alice Munro's Best: A Selection of Stories (2006).
• In German, the story is part of the Open Secrets collection in a translation by Karen Nölle-Fischer, first published by Klett-Cotta in Stuttgart in 1996.

The versions are largely identical. In the third section, the sentence “Back when I was young” was deleted, but added that a story from the 1920s was told. In the fifteenth section, which takes place on the third afternoon of the visit, a sentence was inserted that supplements the bookseller's wandering thoughts by considering how something seems to be becoming more normal for her and yet it is less understandable. Nineteen become eighteen sections by bringing a section forward from the previous version and integrating it into an existing section as an imaginary preview. The last section is identical in both versions and consists of a single sentence. In the anthology Alice Munro's Best (2006) the work has a length of 40 pages.

literature

• Georgiana MM Colvile, Relating (to) the Spec (tac) ular Other: Alice Munro's The Albanian Virgin , in: Commonwealth Essays and Studies , 1998 Autumn; 21 (1): 83-91.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See the list in the “Effect” section of the article on the author
2. ↑ Annette and Guido Mingels, "I am the Mick Jagger of literature". Alice Munro on writing, her childhood and the functions of sex. ( Memento of the original from December 14, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Section “Do you see yourself as a feminist author?”, Tagesanzeiger.ch , 2006, in “Magazin”, updated on October 10, 2013. 
3. ↑ Renate Schostack, couple, passers-by. Alice Munro interprets the mysterious horrors of existence , faznet.de , November 4, 1996.
4. ↑ Georgiana MM Colvile, Relating (to) the Spec (tac) ular Other: Alice Munro's The Albanian Virgin , in: Commonwealth Essays and Studies , 1998 Autumn; 21 (1): 83-91.
5. ^ "Melodrama and confusion made this place seem more ordinary to me, but less within my grasp." (Supplemented sentence in the book version from 1994, at the end of the first third in section 15)
6. ↑ Alice Munro: Alice Munro's Best: A Selection of Stories. With an introduction by Margaret Atwood , XVIII, 509 pp., McClelland & Stewart, Toronto 2006, ISBN 978-0-7710-6520-0 , pp. 255-294.