Culture

Alice Munro

The English language's Chekhov

The Nobel prizewinning short-story writer has died, aged 92.

“Promise me you'll boil the water you drink. And you won't marry a farmer," says a character in“The Love of a Good Woman".

Instantly, the reader is in Alice Munro territory: spinsters with lingering illnesses and stifled passions, jealous married women scrubbing floors, inky veins protruding from their legs.

Light falls constantly on the domestic: a gas stove in the kitchen fed with quarters, a dining-room table with a lace cloth on it, a ceramic swan reflected in an octagonal mirror.

But there is always something savage lurking beneath the veneer of gentility.

Certain themes recur -- of drowning, regret, longing and the cruelty of lovers.

The daughter of a silver-fox and mink farmer, Ms Munro was brought up in rural Ontario.

As a girl, she was told that the worst thing you could do was to “call attention to yourself” or “think you were smart”.

She enrolled at the University of Western Ontario to study journalism but dropped out when her scholarship money dried up.

Ms Munro married young and moved to Vancouver, where her husband worked as a manager in a department store.

She had four daughters.

One, born with defective kidneys, died in infancy.

It was not the housework that dragged her down; it was the assumption that women who tried to do something as challenging as writing were unseemly.

She wrote while her daughters napped.

It was in those stories that she tried to fathom the bargains people make“for lust”, recording the cycle of excitement and despair and the bitterness of those who fear they have missed the boat.

For years she thought short stories were practice.

Deep in domesticity in suburban Vancouver, she dreamed up plots.

She was as consumed by the minutiae of daily life -- cooking, cleaning, taking care of her children -- as by the stories she was writing in her head in the deadness of early afternoon.

Each story has layers, from the mundane (embroidered napkins, liquorice drops, bus depots) to the sublime (a man touching a woman's waist, a look of recognition and encouragement, daydreams that wear themselves out with the passage of time).

Her characters do anything to avoid confronting their pain.

“That's the trouble with linen,” says a woman at a funeral reception in “What is Remembered”, noting that another woman's dress has wrinkled up.

In 1977 “Royal Beatings” was her first story to be published in the New Yorker; it was followed by many more.

Her first book, “Dance of the Happy Shades”, won the Governor General's Award -- one of Canada's highest literary accolades -- yet still she was dismissed by many as a shy housewife.

In 2013 she became the first Canadian woman to win the Nobel prize in literature, but was too unwell to travel to Stockholm for the ceremony.

Instead the Nobel Foundation visited her at her daughter's home in Victoria, British Columbia, and recorded an interview.

In it she said she wanted her stories to move people.

She wanted you to“feel you are a different person when you finish” reading.

Fellow writers were some of her most devoted readers.

Cynthia Ozick, an American author, called Ms Munro “our Chekhov” and predicted she is “going to outlast most of her contemporaries”.

Like Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, she evoked Canada but transcended it.

Her greatest gift was probably her economy of style; she moved forwards and backwards in time and distilled multiple narratives into 30 pages.

In“Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You”, a jilted woman tries unsuccessfully to kill herself by drinking laundry detergent.

Decades later, her sister is checking whether the level of rat poison on the kitchen shelf is going down, as her brother-in-law is withering away.

Is he being slowly poisoned?

Ms Munro leaves the reader guessing.

The Swedish Academy praised her ability to show “how much of the extraordinary can fit into that jam-packed emptiness called The Ordinary.”

Ms Munro's short stories -- the opposite of provincial despite their settings -- have the emotional depth of novels.

She wrote about the clamour of desire, the self-deception and destruction, without ever being sentimental.

Sexual attraction is omnipresent in her writing, driving people to extremes, teasing them with the possibility of happiness.

As she wrote in “The Beggar Maid”, “What made you wanted was nothing you did, it was something you had, and how could you ever tell whether you had it?”