Alice Munro and Not Likely for the Last Time Either

 

"I read him the sports news and the municipal news and the world news and all about murders and robberies and bad weather."             -- from Cortese Island a short story in The Love of a Good Woman.

Cortese Island, like many of the other stories in this book by Alice Munro, takes my breath away. Leaves me stunned by the quality and humanity of it. Compels me to rest a day or two, or more before I can bring myself to read another one.

Often I encounter a sentence in this and in other stories here that I say, now that I have laboured awhile myself to write my own version of the truth in an entertaining way,  "Oh, look how she did that." And she has done it in a way that is not overly clever or "writerly", without flags and whistles. Take the sentence above for instance. It doesn't seem like much, perhaps, isolated here on this page. Yes, 'murders and robberies and bad weather' has a structure of three which we learn soon enough is likely to be the most impactful. And the little kicker of 'bad weather' at the end is, even here, mildly funny and surprising. In the story itself, though, it is a wonderful moment and reflects the humour and pathos of the story itself.

So, this blog is an account of my own experience, which may not be yours. But I do think it profits us all to read, or re-read, stories whose brilliance, before we tried it all ourselves, may have escaped us.