In 1968, at the age of 38, Alice Munro More than forty years later, he embarked on a writing career that would lead him to the Nobel Prize and worldwide recognition as the best short story writer. 1968, which was very important for the future of Europe and the world because of its events, was also very important for Munro and literature. now comes for the first time in Spanish by Lumen publishing house.
From the deep gaze of the years, this Shadow Dance looks like nothing more than the first book. Its success was immediate; It won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, one of Canada’s highest literary awards (an honor Munro received twice more on his way to the Nobel Prize in 2013). The stories are as complex and wonderful as her best-known works and are tied together in an ongoing exploration of women’s lives. It makes it possible and legitimate to focus on women’s stories without the guilt of excluding men from the centre, something Munro has done ever since.
The setting for these tales is rural southwestern Ontario, in the 1950s and 1960s, when many homes had no electricity or running water, many men still lived off the land, and many housewives had to have their own sanctuary.
A feature of Munro’s narrative strategies is, in fact, his extensive use of first-person narrators, usually girls or young women, commenting on a story from the family setting. The purpose of this strategy for the narrator is to reveal a deep and extraordinary meaning of his life, a meaning hitherto hidden from his consciousness.
Munro’s final take on reality consists not in transforming and illuminating it with a magic wand, but by showing how art emerges in the most natural way, or how reality magically turns into myth when characters are led to see it differently. the result of an important event.
ordinary people
As in his later stories, Munro writes about so-called ordinary people, without boring his readers in everyday life and boringness, because his intelligence and surprising perceptive powers allow them to add a remarkable dimension and dignity to their lives. The reality that Munro paints is the reality of ordinary people and their ordinary lives in an ordinary environment. Written with such emotional honesty that it prompts readers to recognize themselves in these stories.
Munro displays genius and ingenuity to depict, decipher, explore, transform and illuminate his characters’ daily lives and their sometimes disillusioned visions of the order of their lives.
There are two stories that stand out above the others. The Dance of the Shadows collection is named after a teenager who was a student of Miss Marsalles, her piano teacher. All teachers are preparing for a recital that will bring their students together with their parents as audience, with a wonderful performance. While the children’s parents may not seem enthusiastic about the idea, Miss Marsalles is truly proud of her students and musical talents. During the recital, one of her mentally retarded students plays a piece of music called Shadow Dance and does it skillfully, after which the parents sit in awkward silence in amazement. They are surprised to learn that the “stupid boy” has more musical talent than their normal child, and they are disappointed by saying that this talent was wasted on someone with such a disability. Mothers do not tolerate a mentally retarded girl learning to play the piano, but Miss Marsalles disagrees.
He distills genius and ingenuity to depict, decipher, illuminate and transform the daily life of his characters.
Munro admitted that the Peace of Utrecht had many autobiographies and therefore it was difficult to write. The narrator Helen travels to Jubilee, the small town where she grew up with her two children, to visit her sister Maddy, who now lives alone in the family home after her mother’s death. Helen wants to talk about this and the sacrifice of her sister who stayed at home to care for her, but Maddy doesn’t want to talk about it and prevents her sister from doing atonement exercise. In the closing lines, Helen urges her sister to forget the past and finally take charge of her own life. Maddy tells him she will do it, but something stops her.
A third story stands out. The office where a writer – perhaps even herself – struggles to find time and space to do her work at home with her husband and family in the background. She expresses her desire for a room of her own that reflects the common feminist mentality of the time. She deviates from the norms of women who are expected to care for their children and husbands, without being too concerned about anything else.
The stories are complex and wonderful and tied together in an ongoing exploration of women’s lives.
Munro describes the deeply rooted social and cultural attitudes of the 1960s and earlier years, when a man was more privileged than a woman to work uninterruptedly, both inside and outside the home. The landlord, Mr. Malley, does not respect the boundaries of his tenant’s professional workspace. He never leaves her alone, constantly trying to occupy her space. The Office is a story based on her own experience of renting a workspace and being blocked from moving forward by a landlord who doesn’t respect the boundaries of that workspace.