T
tomarin
Guest
Are there any fans of her work here? (She’s an octogenerian Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in 2013 and writes mostly about the constricted lives of seemingly ordinary people in small town Ontario.) For as long as I’ve been aware of her I’ve thought she was a genius. But I just picked up ‘Dear Life’ and I’ve read about half of it (I had read one of the longer stories, Leaving Maberly, in a short story collection a few years ago). I don’t normally read her stories one after the other, without letting some time pass in between to digest them, but this weekend for whatever reason - maybe I was just left to my own devices for too long - I did just that: consumed one after another as they were just too good and strange to stop reading, and I came to a conclusion I hadn’t before, which is that is it possible that Alice Munro is … a downer? I mean, none of these stories ever seem to result in a happy ending or anyone satisfied with how their life has turned out. There’s a kind of emotional bleakness to everyone’s life, to Life in general perhaps, in these stories. I’m not sure that makes her less of a stellar writer, and perhaps it’s more this collection than previous ones, but does anyone else who has read her think her work is dark and even depressing?
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