Truth and beauty

Almost 20 years ago, Alice Munro, the Canadian genius of the short story, was interviewed by the Paris Review. She recalled a time when she was having trouble with her writing, and found herself looking round the ‘great literature’ on the shelves of the bookshop she was then running with her first husband as if seeking help. All she could think was: ‘You fool. What are you doing here?’

She was admired then, but has gone on to huge acclaim. There was some early rudeness from nervous local newspapers in small- town Ontario, where she grew up and where her fiction is rooted, but nowadays, and for a long time, the waves of praise come steadily and grow with every new book.

Awed comparisons with Chekhov are routine. She has won many awards including, in 2009, the Man Booker International Prize. She is 81 and has had cancer, and has wondered if her creative energies would flag as she grew old. The answer is no. This new collection is as marvellous as ever. She is one of the very few contemporary writers whose work certainly belongs on the great literature shelf.

Although there has never been any doubt that all her work has had strong autobiographical elements, being concerned as it mostly is with the lives of women and children, usually daughters, often living hard lives in small rural communities as she did as a child, this time she has made the connection explicit. Of the 14 stories, the final four, she writes

form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last — and the closest — things I have to say about my own life.