In my previous post on Alice Munro’s book (7 February 2024), I called her “arguably the greatest living short story master”.
Munro died on 13 May.
Dear Life, published in 2012, was her last book. Most of the stories there were published before. Yet I’ve noticed that the author changed them for this collection. For example, In Sight of the Lake differs significantly from the Granta version.
There are common threads: loss (Gravel, Leaving Maverley, Train), betrayal — real or imagined — by a lover (Amundsen, Corrie, Dolly), aging (Dolly, In Sight of the Lake, Pride), echoes of the WW2 (many). Several stories feature trains: Amundsen, To Reach Japan and, as could have been expected, Train. Too Much Happiness had them too. I like that. Trains are cool.
I love the way Munro’s humour shines through even in the saddest and darkest of the stories here. Such as In Sight of the Lake, a frightening premonition of the author’s own slippage into dementia.
The final four stories, according to Munro, “are not quite stories”:
I believe they are the first and the last — and the closest — things I have to say about my own life.
Autobiographical or not, they still are stories. Beautiful stories. Thank you, Alice, for telling them.
There was a burst of shouting from across the street and the doors of a dark-shingled flat roofed building opened, letting loose several men who were jamming caps on their heads and banging lunch buckets against their thighs. By the noise they were making you would think the car was going to run away from them at any minute. But when they settled on board nothing happened. The car sat while they counted each other and said who was missing and told the driver he couldn’t go yet. Then somebody remembered that it was the missing man’s day off. The car started, though you couldn’t tell if the driver had been listening to any of this, or cared.
I’m not sure about the order in which they were mentioned except that her husband was the final one and he was dead.
“Last year. Except he wasn’t my husband officially. You know.”
“Mine wasn’t either,” I said. “Isn’t, I mean.”
“Is that right? There’s so many doing that now, isn’t there? It used to be, oh my, isn’t it awful, and now it’s just, what the hell? And then there’s the ones that live together year after year and finally it’s, oh, we’re getting married. You think then, whatever for? For the presents, is it, or just the thought of getting dolled up in the white dress. Makes you laugh, I could die.”
She said she had a daughter who went through the whole fancy-dancy that way and much good it did her because she was now in jail for trafficking. Stupid.
Dolly
Then one day, on the street in Toronto, he ran into a friend who was on his way to try out for a summer job with a new small-town theater company. He went along, having nothing better to do, and ended up getting the job, while the other fellow didn’t. He would play Banquo. Sometimes they make Banquo’s Ghost visible, sometimes not. This time they wanted a visible version and Neal was the right size.
My uncle started off by teasing me about grace. About not saying grace. I was thirteen years old, living with him and my aunt for the year that my parents were in Africa. I had never bowed my head over a plate of food in my life.
“Lord bless this food to our use and us to thy service,” Uncle Jasper said, while I held my fork in midair and refrained from chewing the meat and potatoes that were already in my mouth.
“Surprised?” he said, after “for Jesus’ sake. Amen.” He wanted to know if my parents said a different prayer, perhaps at the end of the meal.
“They don’t say anything,” I told him.
Another idea. Isn’t it quite possible that this person — the crazy-doctor, as she has chosen to call him in her head — isn’t it quite possible that he (or she — like most people of her age she does not automatically allow for that possibility) that he or she does operate out of a house? It would make sense and be cheaper. You don’t need a lot of apparatus for the crazy doctoring.
Ray had joined up for the war as soon as he was eighteen. He chose the Air Force, which promised, as was said, the most adventure and the quickest death. He had been a mid-upper gunner — a position that Isabel could never get straight in her head — and he had survived. Close to the end of the war, he’d been transferred to a new crew, and within a couple of weeks his old crew, the men he’d flown with so many times, were shot down and lost. He came home with a vague idea that he had to do something meaningful with the life that had so inexplicably been left to him, but he didn’t know what.
So I lay, minus my appendix, for some days, looking out a hospital window at the snow sifting in a somber way through some evergreens.
When I was five years old my parents all of a sudden produced a baby boy, which my mother said was what I had always wanted. Where she got this idea I did not know. She did quite a bit of elaborating on it, all fictitious but hard to counter.
The Eye
She looked for the more important man to help her, but he wasn’t there. Now she remembered what he’d written. A play about Doukhobors that had caused a big row because the Doukhobors were going to have to be naked. Of course they weren’t real Doukhobors, they were actors. And they were not allowed to be naked after all.
To Reach Japan
An exception was the young couple named Candace and Quincy, who never settled their rent and skipped out in the middle of the night. The owner happened to have been in charge when they came looking for a room, and he excused himself for his bad choice by saying that a fresh face was needed around the place. Candace’s face, not the boyfriend’s. The boyfriend was a jerk.
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