“-Oh, don’t get so excited,” Flo says and after a second: – Who do you think you are? – Rose contradicts him and responds with poisonous sensitivity and phlegm. (p.27). That’s what Rose thinks almost all the time throughout the ten stories that make up the book (I don’t know if it’s a novel, but I think it is.) Who do you think you are? (Penguin Random House, 2019) Written by Canadian Alice Munro, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature.
In all these stories, we will learn about Rose’s life from childhood to maturity in fragments, without a specific chronology, contrasting with the figure of her stepmother (“People of today could not fit into the past” p. 19). Flo is a character who sometimes appears in the plot and is always present in Rose’s mind and actions.
I think one of the most characteristic elements of Alice Munro’s style is her use of a third-person narrator, always completely outside the scene, presenting everything with overwhelming objectivity and distance; who turns out to be very intelligent and demands that readers be too; A story that accumulates successive actions from the memory of what happened in Rose’s past, presenting in each title a metonym for the content of the story.
From the first story, the author describes the relationship between these two women, Rose and Flo, and their experiences in their socially depressed neighborhood in Hanratty, Ontario (Canada); Here the father, who is always in the background, the man rules. their lives. It is a domestic violence setting where these two characters are perfectly constructed physically and psychologically through the writing of two portraits that allow the reader to perfectly identify them and equate them not only in the actions described, but certainly with people they know. but in her attitudes and actions on the other side of life, one of the defining characteristics of Alice Munro’s style is her excellent portrayal of the past of exactly normal people.
The stories then continue in a naturalistic vein, recreating the worst of that miserable pre-war existence and the evaluation of some children who were subjected to it in every way. Piercing. This is how we know Rose, with her school, high school, university, social class differences, men, her job, her marriage to a rich kid, her subsequent lovers, her friendships between adult women… Perhaps because of her origins, the way she learned to see the world and those around her, she had to live through it all. can never adapt to life; It was as if he was boycotting himself, as if he was preventing himself from being happy (“He felt condemned to wander around the edges of things, judging himself”, (p.231).
Never again falling into authorial melodrama or justification, Alice Munro composes her stories with impeccable syntactic precision, with simple or coordinated sentences and only the essential subordinate clauses necessary for the characterization of what she is describing; and further, to the point where it can be said, with very selective lexical precision, that not a single word is left and, of course, not missing. This precision is complemented by an apparent uncertainty in the selection of events described and the arrangement of them all. It doesn’t define the beginning or end of the anecdotes, everything seems to be described in a title, but themes and actions are added all the time, so much so that it’s quite difficult to summarize the stories without being able to extract the emotion. They transmit. This creates a global vision of what he really wants to express: a sexist society (“There were still rigid and solvent barriers then; between artists and businessmen; between men and women”, p. 150), a violent and non-existent society. society. of modernity. This is why the experiential classification of the hero is removed.
So why should you read this story/novel series? Because these are stories that develop by tying thematic knots together, like a necklace of beads whose bottom fits neatly into a red velvet box, only to get exciting when someone breaks it and all those beads scatter on the floor.