Well, it's now a dead heat: 14-Governor Generals, 14-Pulitzers. The weight is definitely going to be shifting over to the GG's for a while, though, since I'm sitting on far more of those from the Seattle Public Library than Pulitzers...So, I just finished Alice Munro's Dance of the Happy Shades...actually I finished it yesterday(Monday), but I didn't have time to make a posting since I had my employee party for work tonight. What a bizarre yet fun evening...I spent hours hanging out with people who I hardly ever see outside of work! I think we did fairly well on the bowling...I was impressed with myself and my teammates called me "The Dark Horse," but I also heard that people were cheating when they gave their scores to the woman in charge, so who knows what will happen. I met one of my friend's/co-worker's girlfriend, who was rad...we spent forever talking about the symbolic nature of cannibalism and how Hannibal Lector is one of the sexiest characters in all of literature and film...he is, I'm not kidding...I must figure out a way to make a female/lesbian version of him for a short story or something...She also knew about snooker and got excited when I told her my parents have a table and also knew about my parents' strange espresso machine(which we just found out is super rare)...a kindred spirit. I also got a chance to talk more with Bryan's wife(who finished CIA a few monthes before me), she was super cool too. Anyway, back to the book... ALICE MUNRO. She is an author that I must confess I've done a fair amount of running away from. I'm not exactly sure why, probably in part because she's one of the Canadian greats, according to those who are "in the know" and I have mixed feelings about two of the other "greats" Margaret Ondaatje as I like to call them...I feel when I read those two that I'm "supposed" to like them. I hate it when I'm "supposed" to like something...Cream cheese, Bjork and having sex with boys all fall into a category like that...I really want to like them, I just don't. Now, I do like Margaret Ondaatje(wink wink) all right but not as much as I feel I'm "supposed" to, though I must admit, it's probably due to Canadian literary society pressure to like them that I feel I must rebel or something. I read a short story by Alice Munro for my Poetics class at McGill, and wasn't really feeling it. It was oh-kay, and I just never felt an overwhelming desire to read her. Well, someone obviously likes her quite a bit, she's won the GG three times for collections of her short stories. So, if anything, I'm FORCED to read her. Well, I was very pleasantly surprised. She IS a pretty good short story writer. Sometimes I found her stories to be a bit tedious(maybe her descriptions didn't grab me or something, but my brain wandered a bit), but there were a few in this collection that I quite enjoyed. I particularly liked the title story, which was actually the last story in the collection, which had a great, albeit it short quote: "people who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one" (Munro 223). I also liked "The Peace of Utrecht," in which a woman goes back to "release" her sister from the shackles of caring for a mother who is now deceased. A great quote from that is "Is this the last function of old women, beyond making rag rugs and giving us five-dollar bills--making sure the haunts we have contracted for are with us, not one gone without" (Munro 209)?
"Red Dress--1946" reminded me a lot of myself as a young adolescent and my insecurities towards others, including my shyness in social situations. It had a possible lesbian scenario occur, but it was shot down before it could be consummated at all, which was slightly disappointing, but I reminded myself this book was first published in 1968 and Alice Munro, though a good writer, is also considered by many to be mainstream and even today, lesbians still aren't mainstream. I also liked the story "The Office," which made that The Doors song flash through my brain "People are strange, when you're a stranger..." because the antagonist in that was FUCKED up.
Alice Munro, like Richards, who I also just read, is a great observer of people. I guess that's what makes the great ones great. One of the first stories ("The Shining Houses")I read in the collection just had a passage that hit the nail on the head for me...I've thought that way, felt that way...the story itself was oh-kay, but the observation was dead on. "Oh, wasn't it strange, how in your imagination, when you stood up for something, your voice rang, people started, abashed; but in real life they all smiled in a rather special way and you saw that what you had really done was serve yourself up as a conversational delight for the next coffee party" (Munro 28). A woman who makes a comment like that is definitely in my favor. I still feel like I'm "supposed" to like Alice Munro, but lo! and behold! I actually do.:)