Paul Auster, Bernard Pivot and now Alice Munro. For two weeks, this column has become a literary obituary, but it is not my fault if a generation is dying, and I absolutely cannot miss the monument that is Alice Munro, in Canada and in the world, even if she is not widely read in Quebec, despite her Nobel Prize for Literature.
And let’s talk about this Nobel, awarded in 2013, when she announced her retirement from writing. The first given to a Canadian writer (if we omit Saul Bellow, born in Montreal, and naturalized American quite young), the 13e only woman to receive it in 112 years at that time, but above all the first writer celebrated by the Swedish Academy for a work entirely devoted to the short story, a literary form which does not usually lead to celebrity, despite big names like Poe, Carver, O’Connor or Chekhov, to whom she has often been compared.
We liked to say that she was the “Canadian Chekhov”, but like all major writers, she was a category in her own right.
I can tell you that in 2013, when the Nobel Prize was announced, which we can never know in advance, which could help us prepare (as for death, sometimes), many cultural journalists in Quebec were badly caught, in this persistence of the two solitudes. Faced with Munro’s Nobel, we had to turn around on a dime.
Alice Munro was a very discreet woman, like her characters, not at all a media writer and publicly engaged like Margaret Atwood, whom we know better, a bit like her inverted mirror. Besides, it’s very funny when I think about it, but Margaret Atwood wrote on Twitter: “Alice, come out from behind the shed and answer the phone!” » because no one could reach her, not even the Nobel jury who had to leave her a message on the answering machine. It was her daughter who told her the good news and, “overwhelmed with gratitude and joy”, she granted very few interviews, as usual.
I learned, by reading the articles that came out on her death at age 92, that she had been battling dementia for around ten years, which probably explains her retirement from writing, she who had always lived in the background. of the literary world, after a life devoted to doing the only thing she knew how to do: write. The same family as Ducharme or Blais, in short.
Read “Canadian author Alice Munro has passed away”
His latest collection, entitled Dear Lifepublished in 2012 and translated in 2014 by Jacqueline Huet and Jean-Pierre Carasso under the title Nothing but life, ended in the last pages with a sort of humble and succinct testament, like her short stories, where she spoke of her parents. Of this father who “entered gently into the exchanges of conversation – he understood that one should never say anything too particular”. From his mother, who was “the exact opposite.” With her, everything was clear, loud, and designed to attract attention.”
She may have retained the approach of the father, and the aspirations of the mother, “forever inaccessible”, the one to whom she would have wanted to speak when she was young and whose funeral she missed, according to this text. “Of certain things we say that they are unforgivable, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But that’s what we do – we do it all the time. »
“It’s not a tale that I’m writing, it’s nothing but life,” we can read in this final short story, which, like all those I have read, succeeded each time with great economy. of words to hit the target, not without a touch of humor or irony, which refined the precision. In pain or revelation, often both.
“She didn’t need to burden herself with the big machine of the novel, she had that gift,” the writer Dominique Fortier told me, contacted in Paris.
“It wasn’t her character that was attractive, she was a very quiet lady, who spent her life in the Ontario countryside, and who wrote for 50 years. A work that lasts over five decades, never obsolete or outdated, and that we will read in 50 years. One of those writers in whom it strikes me, this constant concern to talk about the lives of women, a priori characters who are not great tragic heroines, or rebels. We have the impression that it could be our neighbors who are experiencing drama, suffering or flashes. »
Dominique Fortier discovered Alice Munro in a course at McGill by Yvon Rivard, who explained that “the smallest contains the largest”. “Alice Munro is a perfect example of that. In his short stories, it seems that on the surface, almost nothing happens when in fact, these are crucial moments in the lives of the characters, tipping points, but it will manifest itself a bit like on the surface of a pond, by three or four ripples, while under the surface, it is like a shipwreck that is happening, or something that is being born. »
For Nadine Bismuth, Alice Munro is a great short story writer, “because for each character, for each story, she could have written a novel,” says the author of the collection. Loyal people don’t make the news. “And yet, in 30 pages, everything fits, everything is contained, everything is there. »
Upon learning of his death, she contacted director Podz, with whom she worked about 15 years ago on the film adaptation of a Munro short story, a project that never came to fruition, one regrets of his life now that Munro is no more.
“These women who are not going to shout anything very demanding, they also represent her generation,” she believes. They leave, but they leave in silence. They are capable of making gestures that will bring them a certain freedom. Everything is experienced from the inside instead of being gestures of brilliance. »
“They have impulses and thirsts that are universal,” summarizes Dominique Fortier. And I have the impression of hearing Marie-Claire Blais, who was of the same generation as Munro, to whom I so wished the Nobel.
These women still have so much to teach us. We realize this as they disappear, after wanting to write what the women before them could not say. They embody, in late praise, the fact that writing is not a competition, but a conquest.