The Progress of Love

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Alice Munro , Nobel Prize in Literature 2013

The Progress of Love (1985/1986) is a short story by Alice Munro , which, among other things, deals with changes in love relationships.

In this work, events from three generations are interwoven. In some cases, they only come up when the mother's sister, who lives far away, is visiting. New conversation situations result from a joint restaurant visit, which is donated by the guests. The two sisters, as well as the daughter of the one who is the narrator, notice that there can be two different versions of a remembered event that seem equally plausible. Two events are examined from different perspectives, with which in one case the mother of the narrator had to do as a child and the two sisters as observers and in the other case the narrator as a child as a supposed observer of the mother who does something of which she is will later tell a different version than the daughter thinks she can remember. The first event deals with the relationship between the maternal grandparents, the second with the relationship between the mother and her father and what she does with the inheritance that she does not want. The two men of the older generation, the mother's husband on the one hand and the sister's companion on the other, do not seem to play a major role in the course of the story. When the narrator's parents' house is supposed to change hands again in her adulthood, the narrator uses the opportunity to accompany a work colleague there who has the task of inspecting the object. Via erotically interpretable statements by the colleague about the murals of the Communards who last lived in the house, the narrator and her colleague hint at a progress in their relationship. The story ends with the narrator's amazement at couples who spend their time together so uncomfortably as if they would have to live forever.

Margaret Atwood quotes the following passage from this work in her tribute to Alice Munro's Nobel Prize in The Guardian : “How hard it is for me to believe that I made that up. It seems so much the truth it is the truth; it's what I believe about them. I haven't stopped believing it ”(Section 16). James Wood believes that in this work too, Alice Munro's keen eye for the comic in detail, especially the comedy of pampering, is quoted from the description of the companion of his mother's sister and how he loves his car.

Editions and versions

Alice Munro: "The Progress of Love" (1985/1986), version differences according to sections

The first version of the work appeared on October 7, 1985 in The New Yorker , the second version was included in the anthology The Progress of Love (1986). The volume was published in German in 1989 under the title The moon over the ice rink , with the story The growth of love . Since The Progress of Love then reappeared three times in collections, the work is one of the most frequently published stories from the phase before 2003. In the Alice Munro's Best. Selected stories collection (Toronto 2008), the story in English is 27 Pages.

In the 1985 version, the story consists of six, in the 1986 version of 16 sections. The third section is completely new. It describes the interior of the house in which the narrator grew up. The versions also differ in the following points: Instead of the third, the story is told in the first person. The (ex) husband is given a different first name. In the song that the mother sings, "I once had a sweetheart ...", it is not sung about a woman, but about a man.

literature

  • Mary Jarrett, Women's Bodies in Alice Munro's The Progress of Love , in: Recherches Anglaises et North Americaines , 1989; 22: 83-88.
  • Coral Ann Howells, Alice Munro's art of indeterminacy: The Progress of Love , in: Modes of narrative: approaches to American, Canadian and British fiction presented to Helmut Bonheim , Reingard M. Nischik, Barbara Korte (eds.), Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg, 1990, 141-152.
  • Charlotte Sturgess, Alice Munro's Progress of Love - secrets, continuity and closure, in: Études canadiennes / Canadian Studies (30) 1991, 105–112.

Individual evidence

  1. Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro: an appreciation by Margaret Atwood , theguardian.com , October 11, 2013
  2. James Wood, Things happen all the time , Review of Selected Stories , in: London Review of Books , May 8, 1997
  3. ^ Alice Munro / Walter Martin reference materials. Finding Aid: GA 85. Special Collections, University of Waterloo Library. Series 1.3: Works by Alice Munro: Published: Short Stories Published Separately
  4. ^ Carol L. Beran, The Luxury of Excellence: Alice Munro in the New Yorker , in: The rest of the story. Critical essays on Alice Munro , edited by Robert Thacker, ECW Press, Toronto 1999, ISBN 1-55022-392-5 , pp. 204-231, footnote 1, p. 227-228.
  5. German title in the Fischer pocket belly, see reading sample (PDF).
  6. On the effect of the works of Alice Munro