So last night I was torn between Raymond Chandler and Alice Munro, as the used place next to my office sold me The Chandler Collection Volume One (Amazon.ca doesn't have it but that one looks good too) and Open Secrets for 50 cents each last week. I almost feel guilty for paying so little for such good books. But I guess there's a steady stream of departing Anglo expats who let their apartments get cleared by the store, and if they're willing to spare the books for so little I'm willing to accept them for so little.
Alice Munro won, and that was nice. She's such a great storyteller. About what I was saying yesterday in terms of narrative voices - her narration may not be as punchy, convincing or unsettling as Graham Greene's or Ishiguro's; it's very apparently Alice Munro Narration from story to story - but it doesn't matter. The illusion she creates when she writes isn't just an illusion of reality. The stories are little worlds in themselves, even to the most uneventful. And her omniscient third person narration from the perspective of a non-omniscient character or even her omniscient first person narration - not a type I usually enjoy - is absolutely fine, even beautiful.
Because the stories are so good. Their structure is so good. And building on such a solid structure, she doesn't need to ponce about with every adjective in the dictionary and clumsy, clumsy, CLUMSY attempts to shock (I'm thinking very hard of Martin Amis and Zadie Smith) while she still describes things perfectly and occasionally shockingly. Even the stings in her tail feel gently right . . . what I'm saying is, her all-knowing narrative voice might sound contrived but that's not a bad thing because she's a good enough storyteller that I can unquestioningly accept her as the god of those worlds.
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It so great to find a good gem at a used bookstore when abroad. I was lucky moving into a place in Japan with a good bookshelf. People moved in and out and left books for the next people. There is something comforing about that kind of an exchange.
So Alice Munro won out, eh? I love her - even more so since she's one of the very few (maybe the only one?) successful authors in the world who actually grew up in the same pocket of the world as me! There's such a nice familiarity for me...have you read Runaway?
Hello Mistress La Spliffe,
You certainly do find very interesting reading material.
I look forward to finding out the other wonderful things you come across in your travels....
.....hope to speak soon, appro
I have a question that has nothing to do with your post. I've read this: Quo Vadis, Belgium. What do you think about it? The relations between the Flemmish speaking Belgians and the French speaking ones is not something one hears much about...
Here you hear about it endlessly. I don't disagree with what she has to write, though the perspective I've seen this all from has been French as I've always been in French bits. And they are in the midst of a political crisis that wouldn't be allowed or possible in bilingual Canada. I'll write about it at length another time.
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