Finale (short stories)
Finale consists of four stories by Alice Munro , The Eye , Night , Voices and Dear Life from the years 2011 and 2012. Three of the works have also appeared elsewhere: The Eye at times in The Guardian , Night in Granta magazine and Dear Life in The New Yorker , there as “Personal History” with the subtitle “A childhood visitation”.
Finale is the subtitle for the last four works in Munro's latest collection of short stories Dear Life (2012), published in German with the title Liebes Leben (2013). In three sentences Munro explains that these four works are not stories in the strict sense, that they form a self-contained unit that feels autobiographical, although sometimes it is not quite so, and that she believes that this is the first and the last - and the things that are closest to her - are things she has to say about her own life.
Louise Doughty diagnosed her review of the collection in The Guardian with an interesting change made up of delightful extras, simpler in style than the other works in the collection and a bit more bitter in tone . If Munro ever wrote her memoirs, Doughty said, these works would be a preview. In fact, Munro was the first to comment on her own life. In June 2013 in the London Review of Books, Christian Lorentzen expressed his amazement at the consensus that seemed to exist on Munro's work. He thinks that the sketches of the coda are explicitly presented as autobiographical and contain recognizable things from the earlier books: the house at the end of the street, being beaten, prudishness in village life and an appendectomy that also found a growth. Sex and cancer are two taboos that no longer exist, and there is probably not enough written about them. The time was longed for when there was greater innocence and more shame, and this apparently explains a lot about Munro's popularity, so Lorentzen's conclusion. Jane Smiley writes in the Guardian in July 2013 that Munro is shedding new light on earlier material in these four works and that she is doing so in a wiser and more accepting way.
The Eye
Feeling something different than what your mother says about you begins for the first-person narrator when her siblings are born and she befriends the housekeeper named Sadie. As a result of a tragic incident, something happens that the first-person narrator cannot get out of the head for a long time, but in the end it does because the distraction from the school was strong enough. The Eye consists of four sections and a total of 14 pages. In the shortest, second section, an interrogation takes place, which the first-person narrator, according to her own judgment, confidently ends with tactical calculation.
This work shows how reality gives way to imagination in the face of death, says Anne Enright in The Guardian . Here they talk about a five-year-old and about having a nanny as a caregiver because there are younger siblings. Between the lines, it is subtly about jealousy of the siblings and that the cord was cut off from the mother. With the mother, on the other hand, this bond between the oldest daughter and the nanny triggered envy and fear of loss, according to Elke Schröder.
Night
Two insomniacs in the same family share a few minutes of dialogue with each other after secret night outings on one side at dawn, after which one of the two can sleep again. The other was not surprised by the person who told him something serious. The first-person narrator says that he neither mocked her nor was he alarmed. The fact that the fourteen-year-old has taken on the role of a terrifying storyteller over the nine-year-old sister is an aspect of Munro's own development process. The work consists of three sections and a total of 15 pages. From the first to the third section, the length decreases significantly.
Voices
The narrator, around ten years old, is taken by her mother to a dance opportunity in town, and what she sees and hears she develops erotic fantasies. In one scene, uniformed young men are standing on a staircase around a crying woman of the same age and one of them tries to comfort her in a soft voice. Voices consists of three sections and a total of 13 pages. The last section consists of two short sentences and a reference to the question why the woman might have cried, which the narrator believes she only understands afterwards. It shows how real life brings up details that are too loud for fiction, such as the way a prostitute is dressed.
Dear Life
The first-person narrator tries to explain an incident from her childhood in which her mother hurriedly took her out of the pram into the house and hid there from unwanted visitors. When the narrator finds a clue after many years and investigates it, she wants to talk to her mother about her suspicions, which is not possible because she is no longer available. Dear Life consists of six sections and a total of 20 pages. The sixth section is the shortest and the narrator, who was not present at the mother's funeral, ends it in a conciliatory tone to herself. In life it happens that a detail like an unusual name leads nowhere, unlike in stories, according to the first-person narrator. The book version from 2012 has a new ending compared to the magazine version from 2011.
Individual evidence
- ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/nov/02/the-eye-alice-munro-short-story , November 2, 2012, the copyright has expired.
- ↑ Back cover in "First Vintage international open-market edition" by Dear Life , July 2013.
- ↑ Alice Munro: Dear Life , The New Yorker , September 19, 2011, free to read on the web; this is a less elaborate version than the one in the Dear Life collection (2012).
- ↑ "not quite stories"
- ↑ "though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact"
- ↑ "I believe they are the first and last - and the closest - things I have to say about my own life."
- ↑ Louise Doughty, lauded Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro gives tantalizing glimpses of life own her , theguardian.com , November 24 2012
- ↑ Christian Lorentzen, [Poor Rose. Dear Life by Alice Munro]. London Review of Books , Vol. 35 no. 11 6 June 2013, pp. 11-12.
- ↑ Jane Smiley, Farewell Alice Munro, and thanks for everything. Jane Smiley pays tribute to the Canadian writer Alice Munro, who has announced her retirement at the age of 82 , theguardian.com , July 5, 2013
- ^ A b c d Anne Enright, Dear Life by Alice Munro - review. Anne Enright on Alice Munro's collection of subtle short stories , theguardian.com , November 8, 2012
- ↑ Elke Schröder, volume of short stories "Liebes Leben" in German. Alice Munro's literary finale , Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung , December 6, 2013