Kies (in the original Gravel ) is a short story by Alice Munro from 2011.
The story is about remembering important events in early youth, in this case in a family with a dog, a sister and a brother. The circumstances and course of an accident are described from the perspective of a first-person narrator. She wants an explanation that she can no longer get and that cannot be deduced from her own memory, even with the help of therapeutic support. In a number of other situations, something is also invisible or inaudible. The narrator looks back when she has just graduated from college and her partner advises her to contact the man her mother was living with at the time of the incident. Last but not least, this conversation is about the question of what material prosperity or its opposite can produce and what the basis for one's own happiness can be. In the course of the story, the narrator offers the narrator other variants of how the mother and the father lived in different phases of their lives. The title of the story is only helpful in a hint.
Ulrike Frenkel writes that Kies is a story about a daughter saying goodbye to a mother. Here Munro had a woman describe "how her then nine-year-old sister Cora jumped fully clothed into an ice-cold quarry in a mixture of lust for life and despair and drowned", and that the breakup in this case was accompanied by a catastrophe. Munro, however, does not give the readers more than the first-person narrator's guesses and questions, because she always leaves an open ending.
In Alice Munro's most recent collection, Dear Life (2012), the story is just under 18 pages long and available on the web. In the translation by Heidi Zerning, the work is included in the volume Liebes Leben (2013).
Individual evidence
↑ Ulrike Frenkel, Bildungsromane about mothers and daughters, Stuttgarter Zeitung , December 13, 2013, p. 29.
