Alice Munro - Open Secrets

Read this in the period just before I left for Taiwan in Sep 08. My second shot at Munro after 'The Beggar Maid', which to this day is one of my favourite collection of short stories. 'Open Secrets' is a bit different, in that the stories aren't related to one another in any way. Munro is the same though, still understatedly hard-hitting, master of that striking moment of significance born of unflinching precision and a distant type of compassion. She is the type of writer you wouldn't be doing justice to by opening to any page and reading a random paragraph. Her tone is consistently firm and level, and she is never verbose, withholding that crucial, revealing judgement. Yet the way she structures her stories, manipulating chronology, making relatives of disparate anecdotes, awakens in the reader an awareness of a shadow passing in the background, always just out of sight.

There are 8 stories in this collection, each one almost startlingly original. 2 I will pass comment on, although I remember that while reading it, I managed to find something different to like about all 8. 'Real Life' tells of a marriage that almost did not happen, and when it did there was no putting it down to affection or romance, but almost an accidental affirmation of the efforts of misguided onlookers. She is not your feminine heroine, but a pudgy, dour-looking woman who has lived with her brother all her life and takes the greatest pleasure from shooting groundhogs and rabbits. And he, "it was the way that Dorrie used her knife and fork that captivated the man". Enough said. A rural, pastoral life described in utterly bland tones, dealing only in common and ordinary observations, yet building up to a dense, finely constructed complex of ambiguities and unsaid truths. Any sense of the ungainly is illusory.

'The Albanian Virgin' by contrast, by contrast, is wild and vivid and fantastical. The story of a civilised, Western-educated woman who is forced to live within the strict cultural confines of an Albanian mountain tribe in tandem with the far more pedestrian life of a Canadian woman, embroiled in a marriage and an affair which she seems to stumble on quite unknowingly. These separate lives, put together loosely and only by chance, swirl fleetingly around one another, never touching, yet hinting almost mystically at an intricate intimacy. It is such fleetingness that fuels Munro's stories and packs them with unexpected punch. The ultimate brevity, the refusal to engage in excessive sentimentality, only adds to the humanity that is at the centre of all her stories because the reader has not been persuaded. He simply finds the loose ends, puts two and two together and comes up with a great deal more.