The single bad thing about Alice Munro's Nobel win is that, at 82, after a coronary-bypass and treatment for cancer, she's too frail to travel to Stockholm. Instead, her daughter Jenny is there for the weekend celebrations and Tuesday's ceremony, but we won't get the traditional lecture. (Still worth seeking out: Toni Morrison's 1993 speech, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Solitude of Latin America, and Orhan Pamuk's My Father's Suitcase.)
Instead, the Swedish Academy has just released this 29-minute video with the worst questions ever from a man who assumes only women read her books and tells her she has a simple view of life. Luckily, they've also posted this much smarter and more graceful 44-minute phone conversation recorded over two days.
After the initial announcement of her award, Colm Tóibín, who knows his way around a short story, said: "Alice Munro's genius is in the construction of the story. She has a way of suggesting, both in the cadences and the circumstances, that nothing much is going to happen, that her world is ordinary and her scope is small. And then in a story such as Runaway
, she manages to suggest a fierce loneliness, and begins to dramatise the most unusual motives and actions. Slowly, there is nothing ordinary at all. I would love to see her drafts, or the inside of her mind as she works, because my feeling is that this takes a great deal of erasing, adding, taking risks, pulling back, taking time. Her stories can be shocking and unnerving. I remember a few years ago arriving in Halifax and being told, as though it were hot news, that there was a new story by Munro in a magazine. A friend photocopied it for me and told me not to read it until I was in a comfort zone. This story was Child's Play, which is forensic in its tone, at ease with cruelty and guilt, and tough, tough, but yet written using sentences of the most ordinary kind, and constructed with slow Chekhovian care."
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