Dear Life by Alice Munro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Alice Munro cuts her sentences as clear as diamonds. Each story is a treasure map pointing to the deepest depths and Munro has ripped the map in half. A ripped-in-half gold cloth, diamond-studded treasure map to the human soul. It ought to be an illuminated manuscript. Dragons and vikings doing battle in ruby red and arsenic green in the margins.
There’s almost always something that exists but is unspoken. In the few stories where she ends up feeling like she has to say the thing, it tends to drag on a bit. The best stories are like dominoes. She sets up a few jewel-encrusted dominoes so you can see just how they’ll fall, then she knocks over the first one. And then the story ends.
It’s a very tricky thing to do. Unless it’s done with great care, the magic of it won’t manifest. But when it works, you hit that last period and a whole future opens up in front of you. Or a whole past, or a whole different world.
I don’t know if she would appreciate this or not, but I really do think her use of language makes her a kind of successor to Hemingway. Like Raymond Carver, I guess.
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