The story and the story finally achieved their well-deserved literary summit in 2013. When the Nobel Prize in Literature of that year he gave himself to Alice Munro, all those short stories, halfway between reality and fiction depending on their tendency to be greater than the story itself or the story, had just won that consideration so necessary for all these synthesized stories that, in that abbreviation capacity, they acquire the magic of a universe reached to its last limits, thanks to the mastery of the author.
To write a story or story is to suggest and dispose the reader towards a meditation after the last page or paragraph ..., they well knew it from Chekhov but also Poe o Cortázar.
But going back to this Canadian writer, in addition to this magic of synthesis that lasts like a transcendental echo at the end of the reading, she contributes an invaluable human theme fragmented into so many short compositions. Any anthology by this author ends up becoming a philosophical essay with the lightness of the story, the fleeting characters, the tasty dialogues ...
Top 3 best Alice Munro novels
shadow dance
In short distances we discover the ultimate will of each author. In the shortness of time, the entire repertoire, the sample of interests and even impulses that move the writer Alice Munro in this case are extended paradoxically. The reasons to start writing branch out to infinity.
From the youngest age in which everything erupts from fantasy to the most existential of the stories that makes its way like nausea, what would I say Sartre, when one has already traveled a good stretch of life. The thing is that in this volume, as happens on so many other occasions, different moments embodied in characters peeking into life between their lights and shadows are collected...
The magic of Alice Munro, who has been invoked by so many writers and literary critics, with which she has filled everyday lives, feelings and dialogues with light, and which has made her the best short-story writer in contemporary literature, winner of the Nobel and the Booker, was already fully entrenched in the first of his fourteen storybooks: Dance of Shadows.
Fifteen stories —some of them markedly autobiographical— that reveal the multiple nuances of human nature: a young woman discovers how much she doesn't know about her father when she accompanies him on his delivery route as a salesman for Walker Brothers; a married woman returns home after her mother's death and tries to make it up to her sister for the time she's spent caring for her; the audience at a children's piano recital gets a surprising lesson when a "rare" student conveys an unexpected emotion. when performing a piece.
A key book in Munro's work, unpublished until today in Spanish, which won the Governor General's Award and consecrated her as the great storyteller she was destined to be.
The view from Castle Rock
Perhaps this is not the story most valued by critics. A more personal aspect floods this set of stories. But it is always worth meeting the author who goes out for a walk through his own fictions to face any subsequent work with full knowledge.
Alice is undoubtedly a child who happens to live in the imposing Edinburgh Castle. Between the boy's fantasies and the illusions of his parents, that shared space of who we always are is discovered, children who are carrying more and more time.
In a later development that reaches the level of the dreamlike, new parallel stories are opened that tell us about many other dreams shared on one side and the other of the ocean, dreams that can be seen from Castle Rock on days when the sky is clear.
The progress of love
Love, our most necessary feeling and yet the most unstable of all our possible emotions. Characters that move between love with all its power, the lack of love as a result of that fragility of the most beautiful.
The forms of love are not just romantic traditions of lovers without shared space. The love that is most condensed is the one that arises as the only solution to the conflict.
All the characters in this novel share that feeling of love as the confusing feeling that time will eventually take it away. Immortality would be the only solution to be able to open ourselves completely to love without conditions, in the meantime we can only enjoy the moments of love, abstracting that nothing of it will remain sooner or later.
Other recommended books by Alice Munro…
Jupiter's moons
Or the strangeness of not belonging at all to this world. Alice Munro brings in her stories that strange depersonalizing sensation that sometimes occurs when we look at a photo of what we were.
Our memories are those sepia photographs, where a child was smiling frankly while now it seems to show a melancholic touch. In this book we look at the souls of characters who are confronted with their past. Reflecting on what we were can end up offering a glimpse of what happened between idealized and distorted.
There is disenchantment in the thinking of these characters, but there is also much of a necessary universal empathy. The past is the same for everyone in the end, a sum of subjective memories that accumulate in a library without space for so many old books and photo albums.
