By Margaret Sweatman
One morning when I was drinking a third cup of coffee and life seemed banal and arduous, there was suddenly this rare event: truly good news on the radio. Alice Munro had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Alice Munro might have, in the lonely light of her writing studio, captured (and released) a vision of an indeterminate people called Canadians. Her stories seem to grow out of the gothic cornfields of southern Ontario, or in the rubbery kelp on our western shore. Despite the “Harper Government,” Canada might actually have a chance to be a country now.
When I first read her collection called The Moons of Jupiter, I was sitting in the car with the heat on, while my kids’ father was taking our kids on a sleigh ride on a bitter day, and as I read the stories I was thinking that they were bland as the light that lay dead on the ice surrounding our car. It took me awhile to get the hang of her. The Progress of Love did it for me. There’s living mystery in that book. And the title story of her collection The Love of a Good Woman is a long thready masterpiece. She might always have been a good writer but she earned her greatness; she worked at it and matured and insisted on it.
Tonight while I write this, Mike Duffy is attacking Stephen Harper on TV, having in the Senate today accused our prime minister of extortion and obstruction of justice. My mother told me never to say hate. I distrust and urgently dislike Stephen Harper’s ambitions to re-vision our country. I strongly distrust and viscerally dislike “the Harper Government” because it fosters, it tries to construct a national amnesia, because it is interested in power for its own sake, because it’s a government that would make our country brutal and reactionary.
Steve Harper will try to cut off the tongue and balls of Mike Duffy tomorrow morning. But tonight, Chantal Hébert is offering us her ugly mug and her aged wisdom on the CBC News, offering her breadth of vision gained not through bullying but through decades of lucid attention to the details of Canadian life. Munro is better looking but they do seem like sisters.
This is partly what makes Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize so wonderful. It took Munro many decades to learn how to write so very, very well. And her stories aren’t short; they’re wide and slow. With Munro’s prize, I feel that I might yet live in a country that will honour the place of art and the long journey it takes to get there.
The Long Story of Alice Munro
Articles
By Margaret Sweatman
One morning when I was drinking a third cup of coffee and life seemed banal and arduous, there was suddenly this rare event: truly good news on the radio. Alice Munro had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Alice Munro might have, in the lonely light of her writing studio, captured (and released) a vision of an indeterminate people called Canadians. Her stories seem to grow out of the gothic cornfields of southern Ontario, or in the rubbery kelp on our western shore. Despite the “Harper Government,” Canada might actually have a chance to be a country now.
Tonight while I write this, Mike Duffy is attacking Stephen Harper on TV, having in the Senate today accused our prime minister of extortion and obstruction of justice. My mother told me never to say hate. I distrust and urgently dislike Stephen Harper’s ambitions to re-vision our country. I strongly distrust and viscerally dislike “the Harper Government” because it fosters, it tries to construct a national amnesia, because it is interested in power for its own sake, because it’s a government that would make our country brutal and reactionary.
Steve Harper will try to cut off the tongue and balls of Mike Duffy tomorrow morning. But tonight, Chantal Hébert is offering us her ugly mug and her aged wisdom on the CBC News, offering her breadth of vision gained not through bullying but through decades of lucid attention to the details of Canadian life. Munro is better looking but they do seem like sisters.
This is partly what makes Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize so wonderful. It took Munro many decades to learn how to write so very, very well. And her stories aren’t short; they’re wide and slow. With Munro’s prize, I feel that I might yet live in a country that will honour the place of art and the long journey it takes to get there.