Alice Munro and Short Stories
How the author turned stories of failure and angst of ordinary people into remarkable short stories that won readers’ hearts
Alice Munro, the Canadian writer of short stories and Nobel laureate passed away early this week at the age of 92. While short stories are not a darling for the publishers of fiction, Munro gave her stories a new dimension of depth, character, and above all — failure in life. “Munro chronicles failure much more often than she chronicles success, because the task of the writer has failure built-in”, says Margaret Atwood, a famous Canadian novelist. In today’s success-driven world, presenting stories of failure and tribulations of small-town girls and women is not only up against the wind but also a remarkable achievement.
The popular perception of short stories is that it is somewhat inferior to full-scale novels. Either the writer is unable to conjure up an expansive plot or his/her characters are not as complicated as one expects from a novel. While that view is widely debatable, short stories still make their presence felt across the centuries. From Chekhov to Hemingway to Maupassant to Roald Dahl, and Ruskin Bond, they delight readers through generations.
The short story, a style more popular in the 19th and early 20th century, has long taken a back seat to the novel in popular tastes — and to attracting awards, an article on Munro in Hindustan Times says. In fact, Munro herself wrote: “For years and years, I thought the stories were just practice till I got time to write a novel. Then I found that they were all I could do and so I faced that. I suppose that my trying to get so much into stories has been a compensation”.
Munro wrote stories of girls and women quite often who led ordinary lives but struggled with tribulations and angst, ranging from sexual abuse to stifling marriages. From repressed love to ravages of aging — challenges of lives found voice in her writing that touches readers’ hearts.
Despite being from a small town in Ontario, Munro is Canada’s second Nobel laureate in literature. Her popularity and literary success indicate that short stories are not driftwood. They are not practice rounds; on the contrary, it is a thriving medium of literary expression that is more relevant in today’s fast-paced existence with little time to enjoy a good piece of literature.
Author’s Notes:
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