Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine.
For decades, Alice Munro has been publishing collection after collection of beautiful, utterly masterful short stories. Often revolving around the lives of women in rural Canada, her fiction takes a close look at ordinary people dealing with beginnings, endings, confusions, frustrations and betrayals. Now, the 82-year-old writer has been recognised for her lifetime body of work with the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature – the first Canadian winner and just the 13th woman to be awarded the prize in its 112-year history.
Dear Life, her latest collection, is classic Munro. A suite of 14 fluid, empathetic stories about the moments when a life shifts or is shaped, this book is an engaging entry point for anyone wanting to delve into Munro’s oevre, and a beautiful capstone for those already well versed in her previous collections. Like much of her work, many of the stories in Dear Life take place in the rural towns around Lake Huron in Ontario around the time of the second world war. The restless energy of smalltown life saturates the pages, and themes of aging and interrupted love take you deep into each richly-created world.
Munro begins her stories in surprising places, often in the middle of action. Several stories in Dear Life open on trains, in moments of transition that often lead to confusing permutations of love, or not-quite-love. ‘Amundsen’, one of the most memorable pieces in the collection, begins with a young woman travelling out to a tuberculosis sanitarium, where she has taken a job as a teacher for the sick girls in the home. When she meets the austere medic in charge, it becomes a love story – but one that is strangely cold and full of tension, with a sense of loneliness heightened by the stark icy environment of the remote Northern Canadian town.
In these deceptively simple narratives, it’s the small moments that devastate, that set lives on a different path from the one planned and make things unravel. in ‘Train’, a returning soldier leaps from the tracks close to his hometown where his lover is waiting for him, and starts walking in the opposite direction. In ‘Leaving Maverly’, a man is strangely shocked by the death of his terminally ill wife, though has been preparing for it for years: “He’d thought that it had happened long before… but it hadn’t. Not until now. She had existed and now she did not.” And in the astonishingly affecting ‘Gravel’, a women remembers a moment of childhood play with her older sister at a gravel pit that leaves her haunted for life.
The four final works of the book swerve in a different direction, away from pure fiction and into the murky waters of creative memoir. Munro prefaces this section with a note saying that they “are not quite stories” because they are “autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, in fact.” Beginning with the birth of her younger brother, ending with the funeral of her mother, Munro recalls moments of change, illness and death, all expressed with her characteristic blend of stoicism and warmth. These pieces are a treasure for those who have long-admired her work, offering a rare glimpse into the enigmatic writer’s inner world.