Wood (short story)
Holz (in the original Wood ) is a story by Alice Munro from 1980 or 2009, which addresses how misjudgments and a sense of reality interact and also how what seems natural interacts with what seems incredible.
The story is about Roy and Lea who are married. Roy works with wood - and above all with great devotion when cutting wood outside, alone and on behalf of a farmer with a lot of property. The plot takes its course at a time in their relationship when Lea is ill. At first, the two seem to have diverged from each other due to the health disaster. In a second accident, which happens after a story told by old Percy and which seems to Roy believable, Lea and Roy master a situation together because, contrary to all appearances, one of the two has retained his sense of reality.
The story first appeared in 1980 in The New Yorker . Almost thirty years later, she was in a different version with a different conclusion in the collection Too Much Happiness added (2009), which the title in German translation to the best of luck carries and was published by S. Fischer 2011th The 2009 version of the work can be downloaded free of charge as a pdf in the New Haven Review .
Wood (2009) has 22 pages and consists of eight sections. Seven of the sections are two to four pages long, but the fifth section is particularly short and has only eight lines. It tells how Roy shares the story he heard from Percy with Lea, what she then says and how Roy assesses her comment before the second accident. This section does not exist in the 1980 version. The end of the first section is also new in the 2009 version, as is almost the entire last section of the work.
When Roy had an accident while making wood in winter, he decided to try on all fours in order to get back to the car as painlessly as possible. Here a verb is changed in a sentence at the beginning of a paragraph: "The situation, which seemed at first so unreal to him, is getting to feel more natural" (1980, section 3) or "The situation, which seemed at first so unreal to him, is getting to seem more natural ”(2009, section 7). At the end of the paragraph, one sentence is replaced by another. In the 1980 version it says “He has stopped believing in an order of things in which it couldn't happen”. In the 2009 version, the end of this paragraph reads as follows: “The whole thing no longer seems in the least unbelievable or unnatural”. This can serve as a revision example.
The literary scholar Lisa Dickler Awano has dealt with the design of the themes of Alice Munro's stories based on the version differences between Wood from 1980 and 2009. Among other things, Awano found out from Lea and Roy’s perspectives that the couple have grown older. Munro has largely revised the work. In addition to aspects such as characterization, themes and perspectives, poetic detail changes were made on the level of rhythmic syllables, conjunctions and punctuation. This makes the story more lyrical overall.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Alice Munro: "Wood" (2009) ( Memento from November 2, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Lisa Dickler Awano, Kindling The Creative Fire: Alice Munro's Two Versions of Wood , New Haven Review , May 30, 2012 issue.