Goodbye, Monroe:
Canadian short story writer and Nobel laureate Alice Munro died at home on the evening of May 13 at the age of 92. Monroe was born in Canada in 1931 and published her first collection of short stories in 1968, and her major works include "My Friend When I Was Young", "Escape", "Open Secrets", "Dear Life", "Rock Fort Landscape", etc., and her works have been translated into 13 languages. Monroe has received numerous awards, including the Governor-General of Canada Literary Award, the Booker International Award in the United Kingdom, and the National Book Critics Award in the United States. In 2013, Monroe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the Swedish Academy gave him the citation as "Master of Contemporary Short Story Fiction".
(2013 Nobel Prize in Literature Ceremony)
Dear life
Text | Alice. Monroe
As a child, I lived at the end of a road. It's been a long road, but maybe it's just a delusion. From elementary school to high school, when I walked home after school, I was surrounded by a lot of activity, sidewalks, and streetlights that lit up after dark. At the end of the town, there are two bridges across the Maitland River: one is a narrow iron bridge, and the cars on the bridge often wonder who should stop and who should go first; The other is a wooden bridge for pedestrians, and the deck is occasionally missing a plank, so you can see the cheerful rushing river below when you look down. I love the feeling, but there's always someone to fill it up. Then there is a small valley with a few crumbling houses that flood every spring, but there are always people — all kinds of people — who come to move in. Then there was another bridge, and under it was the mill aqueduct, narrow but deep enough to drown. After that, the road diverges, one heading south up the hill, then crossing the river again to become a real road, and the other turning westward, bypassing the old open-air playground. I took the road that led to the west. In addition, there is a road to the north, with a short but worthy sidewalk, and several houses close to each other, as if they also belonged to the town. In one of the houses, a sign reading "Salada Tea" was hung in the window, indicating that groceries were once sold there. There was also a school where I had been for two years, but I only hoped that I would never be able to do so. A few years later, my mother asked my father to buy an old shack in the town so that he could pay taxes in the town and I could go to the town school. It turned out that she didn't need to be like that at all, because the same year I went to school in town, that same month, Canada declared war on Germany. At the same time, the old school, where the bullies had snatched my lunch and threatened to beat me, and no one seemed to learn anything from the commotion, had ceased as if by magic. It didn't take long for the school to be left with only one classroom and one teacher, who didn't even lock the door during breaks. The same boys, who used to scare me with all the words and ask me if I wanted to be put to sleep, were now eager to work, just as their brother couldn't wait to join the army. I don't know if the condition of the toilets at that school had improved, but the toilets there were the worst they were. Although we don't use the outdoor toilet at home, the inside is clean and the floor is even covered with linoleum. And in that school, I don't know if it's out of disdain or for whatever reason, it seems that no one bothered to aim at the pit. As for life in town, I wasn't comfortable in many ways, as everyone else had been in class together since first grade, and there was a lot I hadn't learned, but I was comforted by looking at the spotless seats of the new school and listening to the decent flushing of the toilets in the city. When I was in my first school, I made a friend. The girl came in in the middle of my second year of school, and I called her Diana. She was about my age, and she lived in one of those houses with a sidewalk in front of her door. One day, she asked me if I could do Scottish Highland, and I said no, and she offered to teach me. With that in mind, we went to her house after school. Her mother had passed away, and she had come here to live with her grandparents. She told me that I had to wear tap shoes for Scottish Highland, and she did, but I obviously didn't, but we were about the same foot size, so she could change them when she taught me. Finally we jumped and got thirsty, so her grandmother brought us water to drink. But the water was drawn from a shallow well dug by hand, and it was hard to drink, just like the water in the school. I explained that the water I drink at home is from a deep well drilled with a drill bit, and that it is better to drink. Her grandmother was not surprised by this, and said that she hoped that they could drink that kind of water. But then, it wasn't long before my mother was outside. She had been to school and had found out where I was. She honked the horn of the car to call me, and even ignored the friendly wave of the grandmother. My mother doesn't drive a lot, so when she drives, there must be something important. On the way home, she told me that I was not allowed to enter the house again. (This proved to be no difficult task, as Diana disappeared from school a few days later — she was sent somewhere else.) I told my mother that Diana's mother was dead, and she said yes, she knew. I told her about Scottish Highland dancing and she said I could learn it systematically in the future, but not in that house. I didn't realize—and I don't know when—that Diana's mother was a prostitute and had died of a disease that seemed to be the only prostitute to suffer. She wanted to be buried in her hometown, and the pastor of our town church presided over the funeral. The scriptures he quoted at the time were controversial. Some felt that he should have omitted it, but my mother was convinced that he had done the right thing. The penalty for sin is death. My mother told me this a long time later, or it seemed to me a long time later. At that stage of my upbringing, I hated a lot of what she said, especially when she said it in that unmistakable tone and in a voice that was trembling and even overly excited. Every now and then I bump into Diana's grandmother. She always smiled at me. She said it was great that I had been in school, and told me about Diana, who had been studying for quite some time, no matter where she was, though not as long as I was. According to her grandmother, she later got a job at a restaurant in Toronto, wearing glitter-encrusted overalls to work. I was old enough and mean enough to assume that the place was probably going to take off the glitter-studded clothes. Diana's grandmother wasn't the only one who thought I had been reading for a long time. On the way I was going back and forth, there were some houses that were far apart, more spaced apart than the houses in the town, but there was still not much space around them. One of them, perched on a hill, was owned by Wétley Sterlitz, a one-armed World War I veteran. He had several sheep and a wife, whom I had only seen once in those years, when she was pumping water into the bucket. Watley likes to joke about how many years I went to school, and how I always failed exams and never finished school, which was a shame. I also jokingly responded to him, pretending to be so. I'm not sure if he really thinks so. That's how you get to know each other with the people on the side of the road. You say hello, they say hello back, talk a little bit about the weather, and if they have a car and you're walking, they'll give you a ride. It's different from the real countryside, where people usually know everything about each family and their livelihoods are pretty much the same. It didn't take me any longer to finish high school than it did for others who completed all five grades. But few students have completed five years. At that time, no one expected all the students in the ninth grade to go to the thirteenth grade, and they would graduate with a full head of knowledge and correct grammar. Someone went to work part-time, and gradually part-time became full-time. Girls get married and have children, or marry children. By the thirteenth grade, only about a quarter of the original students remained, and there was an atmosphere of success in the class, a solemn sense of accomplishment, or perhaps just a sense of indifference that you were useless and a scholar, regardless of your future prospects. I felt like I was a lifetime away from most of the people I knew in ninth grade, let alone the people I knew at my first school. Whenever I take out my Electrolux vacuum cleaner to clean the floor, I am always startled by something in the corner of the dining room at home. I knew what it was – a brand new-looking golf bag with golf clubs and balls inside. I can't figure out what this thing is doing in our house. I know almost nothing about the sport, but I have my own opinion about those who play golf. They weren't the ones who wore cargo pants like their father, although they would change into better work pants when they went to town. I always had to wear a golf uniform, and I could imagine my mother wearing it to some extent, her slender hair tied with a silk scarf fluttering in the wind. However, she doesn't really try to hit the hole. Such pleasure was clearly beyond her ability. She must have wanted to be different at one point. She must have thought that she and her father would be a different kind of people, the kind of people who knew how to enjoy their leisure. Play golf and attend banquets. Perhaps she had convinced herself that there were no boundaries. She struggled to get herself out of a farm in the barren Canadian Shield — a much more hopeless farm than my father's farm — and became a teacher, often speaking in a way that made her relatives around her uncomfortable. She may have thought that after such a struggle, she would be welcomed wherever she went. My father thought differently. He didn't think the townspeople or anyone else might really be better off than he was. Although he believed that they probably thought so. And he'd rather never give them a chance to show off. In the matter of golf, it seems that the father is in charge. He wasn't content to live according to his parents' expectations and take over their decent farm. When he and his mother left friends and relatives to come to this strange town and buy the land at the end of one of its roads, it can almost be said that they definitely intended to make a fortune by raising silver foxes, and later mink. When his father was a young boy, he found that he was more willing to follow the trap in search of prey than to help out on the farm or in secondary school, which made him feel happier and richer than ever. The idea came to him, and as he had planned, he had put it into practice all his life. He put all his savings into it, and his mother took out all the money he had saved when he was a teacher. He built all the corrals and barns needed to keep the animals in it, and he also erected wire fences to keep the animals they caught inside. This 48,000-square-meter piece of land is not too big or small, and there is just a meadow field and enough pasture to feed our own cattle and old horses waiting to be fed to the foxes. The pasture stretches to the river, where twelve elm trees provide shade and shade. In retrospect, slaughtering animals was a common occurrence at the time. The old horses had to be killed for meat, and a batch of fur-bearing animals had to be slaughtered every autumn, leaving only the breeders. But I'm not surprised by this, and I can easily ignore it. I create a purified scene for myself, as it appears in my favorite books, such as Anne of Green Gables or Bart of the Silver Forest. In addition, the elm trees that surround the pasture, the sparkling river, and the spring water from the riverbank on the pasture all spark my imagination. The water was a pleasant surprise, not only for the dying horses and cows, but also for the tin and iron cups that I had brought with me. Fresh feces were everywhere, but I turned a blind eye to them, like Anne in Green Gables. During those days, my younger brother was still young, so I often had to help my father with his work. I pumped clean water and walked through the rows of corrals to clean the animals' drinking tanks and refill them. I enjoy it. Not only is this work important, but it also helps me to be alone a lot, which I find very useful. Later, I had to stay in the house to help my mother, and I was full of resentment and my words were full of gunpowder. She called it "backtalking." She said I hurt her feelings, and as a result, she would go to the barn and complain to my father. Then he had to stop what he was doing and beat me with his belt. (This was a common punishment at the time.) After the beating, I threw myself on the bed and cried, thinking about running away from home. But that period passed, and by the time I was a teenager I became very docile, even likable, and everyone knew that I could tell hilarious stories about my experiences in town and school. Our house is quite big. We don't know exactly when the house was built, but it was probably less than a hundred years ago, because it wasn't until 1858 that the first settler of the place called Bodmin was brought to its place – now it is gone, and the man built himself a raft and went down the river, cutting down trees downstream, clearing out a piece of land, and then developing into a whole village. The earlier village soon had a sawmill, a hotel, three churches and a school, the first school that stood out to me. Then another bridge was built over the river, and it became clear that it would be much easier to live on the heights on the other side of the river, so the original settlement slowly shrank into the dilapidated and eccentric half of the village I just described. Our house should not belong to the first houses built in the early days, because its façade was brick, and those earliest houses were made of wood, but it may not have been much later. It has its back to the village, facing west, opposite slightly sloping farmland. The farmland extends to a sheltered bend where the river turns what is known as the "Great Bend". On the other side of the river is a dark green evergreen tree, probably a cedar, but it is too far away to determine. Farther on, on another hill, there was another house, which looked very small from a distance, and was directly opposite our house, which we had never visited and had never known before. To me, it's like the dwarf's house in the story. But we know what the name of the man who lived there, or that he once lived there, and may have died now. His name is Raleigh Gran, and his name sounds like the dwarf in the story, and he has no other purpose in this article that I am writing right now, because it's not a story, it's just life. My mother had had two miscarriages before giving birth to me, so when I was born in 1931, they must have been somewhat satisfied. But it was a time when the outlook was getting bleaker. In fact, my father's entry into the fur business was a little too late. He might have been as successful as he had hoped in the mid-twenties, when fur was just in vogue and people had some money on hand. But he didn't get into the business at that good time. Still, we survived until the outbreak of the war, and we survived the whole war, and the business must have been booming for a while at the end of the war, which was exciting, because it was in the summer that my father renovated the house and painted a layer of brown paint on the outside of the original red bricks. There is something wrong with the way the bricks and planks are assembled: they were meant to keep out the cold, but they don't work very well. Everyone thought that a coat of paint would be useful, but I can't remember what that coat of paint had done. In addition, we have built a new bathroom, the unused serving shelves have been turned into kitchen cabinets, and the large dining room with an open staircase has been converted into a normal room with an enclosed staircase. Somehow, this change was something I liked. Because the scene of my father's lecture was always played out in the restaurant, the pain and shame made me worse than death. And the current change in layout makes it hard to imagine such a thing happening. When I went to secondary school, my learning got better and better every year, embroidery and writing with the correct posture of holding a pen were a thing of the past, history classes replaced social studies classes, and I could learn Latin. However, the good times did not last long, and after the renovation, our business hit a low point again, and this time it never got better. The father skinned all the foxes, followed by mink, but in exchange for a pitiful amount of money. Later, he went to the foundry for the night shift from five o'clock, and during the day he buried himself in tearing down the barns that had witnessed the rise and fall of the business. Usually he doesn't get home until around 12 o'clock in the evening.
(Alice. Monroe) I cooked lunch for my father as soon as I got home from school. Fry two peasant meat rolls and drizzle with a thick tomato sauce. Fill his thermos with strong black tea. Top with a slice of wheat bran muffins with jam or a piece of homemade pancake pie with a thick base. On Saturdays, sometimes I make pancakes, sometimes my mother makes them, but her craft is becoming more and more unreliable. Little did we know then that what awaited us was more unexpected and more terrifying than the loss of income. It is early Parkinson's disease. At that time, my mother was only in her forties. At first, it wasn't too bad. She only occasionally rolled her eyes upwards in a trance, and the fluffy hairs on the side of her mouth that had grown from leaking saliva were just visible. In the mornings, she can get dressed with the help of others and do some household chores from time to time. For an astonishing period of time, she has maintained her energy. Maybe you think it couldn't be worse. The business is gone, and my mother is no longer healthy. There is no such plot in the novel. But strangely, I don't remember anything unhappy about those days. There was no particular sense of despair in the house. Maybe it was because we didn't think about my mother's health at that time, but only worse. As for his father, he had strength, and he was strong for a long time. He liked the foundry workers, most of who, like him, had gone down in some way or added an extra burden. In addition to the first half of the night patrol, he also likes to do challenging work. He had to pour molten molten metal into the mold. The foundry manufactures traditional stoves and sells them all over the world. It's a dangerous job, and you have to be careful, that's what my father said. And it pays well – it's a novelty for him. I think he's happy to take a break, even if it's to do this high-stakes drudgery. He happily left the house to be with the workers who were in trouble but were struggling to make a living. As soon as he left, I started preparing dinner. I make what I think is exotic, like pasta or omelette, as long as they're cheap. After washing the dishes, my sister had to dry the dishes, and my brother had to be nagged by me for a long time before he had to pour the water into the dark field outside (I could do it myself, but I like to call the shots). I sat down, put my feet in the warm stove that didn't even have a door, and read the tome I had borrowed from the town library: "The Independent People" is about life in Iceland, far more difficult than we are, but with a hopeless greatness; I couldn't understand what "Reminiscences" was about, but I didn't give up because of it; "The Magic Mountain" is about tuberculosis, and there is a profound debate in which one side seems to advocate the uplifting and positive side of life, and the other side argues that life is not only gloomy, but also inexplicably terrifying and despairing. I never do my homework during this precious time, but when exams are approaching, I study hard and stay up almost all night, cramming my head with all the things I should know. I have an amazing short-term memory, which is very useful for exams. Despite all the difficulties, I still consider myself a lucky man. My mother would talk to me sometimes, mostly reminiscing about her youthful years. At that time, I hardly objected to her way of looking at things anymore. Many times she told me a story in which a house appeared that now belonged to the old soldier named Witley Stirlitz – the man who was amazed at how long it took me to complete my studies. The story itself has nothing to do with him, but is about the man who lived in that house long before him, a mad old lady named Mrs. Netfield. Like all of us, this Mrs. Netfield calls to order groceries and has them delivered to your door. Mother said that one day the grocer forgot to put the butter in, maybe she forgot to order it herself, but anyway, when the delivery boy opened the truck box, she noticed the mistake and became angry. It can be said that she came prepared. She carried the axe with her, and she held it up as if to punish the lad - although, apparently, it was not his fault. The guy ran to the driver's seat and drove away, so anxious that he didn't even close the cargo door. There was something in the story that was puzzling, even though I didn't think about it at the time, and my mother didn't think much about it. How could the old lady be so sure that the butter wasn't in that pile of groceries? Why carry an axe with her before she realizes the omission? Had she always carried an axe with her to deal with all the things that were infuriating? It is said that Mrs. Netfield was a true lady in her youth. There is also a story about Mrs. Netfield. For me, this story is more interesting because it is not only related to me, but it also takes place near my home. It was a bright autumn day. My stroller was pushed onto that new lawn while I was asleep inside. That afternoon, when his father was not at home – probably to help his father on the old farm, he would help every now and then – his mother was washing clothes by the sink. To celebrate the birth of their first child, they prepared a whole bunch of knitwear, bows, and the like, all of which had to be carefully hand-washed in soft water. The sink she used to wash her laundry and wring it out didn't have a window next to it. To see outside, you have to go through the room to the north-facing window. From there you can see the driveway between the mailbox and the house. How could my mother have thought of putting down her work and looking at the driveway? She had nothing to wait for, and her father didn't come home late. Maybe she asked her father to go to the grocery store and buy something for dinner, and she was worried about whether he would be back in time. At the time, she was a very good cook—in fact, it was so good that her mother-in-law and the other women in her father's family didn't think it was necessary. Look at the cost, they'll say so. Maybe it had nothing to do with dinner, but maybe it was a piece of fabric that she wanted to make for herself a new dress. She never said afterwards why she did it. The conflict between the people in the father's family and the mother is not limited to cooking. They must have had a lot of complaints about her attire, too. I thought of how she used to put on her dress in the afternoon, even if it was just to wash something by the sink. After lunch, she would take a half-hour nap and always change into a different dress when she woke up. Later, when I looked at the photos, I always felt that the fashion of that period was not for her, and it was not for anyone. The skirt was shapeless, and the bob did not fit her plump and soft face. But that wouldn't be the reason why her father's female relatives were disgusted with her. They lived close to each other and watched her every move. The problem was that she was dressed in a way that didn't match who she was. She didn't look like she had grown up on a farm, or like someone who was going to stay on it forever. She didn't see her father's car coming down the road. Instead, she saw the old lady, Mrs. Netfield. She must have come from her house. Years later, I met the one-armed man who made fun of me in that house, and I saw his wife with a bob at the pump. The mad old lady came out of that house and chased the delivery boy with an axe about butter, and everything else about her was not known until much later. Mother saw Mrs. Netfield walking along the path in front of our house, and must have seen her many times before. Maybe they never spoke. But it may also have been said. The mother may have her own opinions, even if her father told her that it was not necessary. As he probably said, it was likely to get into trouble. Mother was sympathetic to people like Mrs. Netfield, provided they were decent people. But my mother wasn't thinking anything friendly or decent at this point. She ran out of the kitchen door and grabbed me out of the stroller. She left the stroller and blanket in place, carried me and ran home, trying to lock the kitchen door behind her. She didn't have to worry about the front door—it was always locked. But there was something wrong with the kitchen door. As far as I know, this door has never been properly locked. Usually we only hold a kitchen chair against the door at night and jam the back of the chair under the doorknob so that if someone pushes the door in, it will make a loud noise. In my opinion, this method of security is unruly, and it is not compatible with my father's practice of hiding a revolver in a desk drawer. As a man who needs to shoot horses regularly, it is natural that a rifle and a few shotguns are indispensable at home. Of course, the bullets were not loaded. Did the mother think of weapons after wedged the doorknob? Has she ever picked up a gun or loaded it in her life? The old lady might just be visiting the neighbor's house, did the thought come to her mind? I don't think so. The old lady must have walked in a strange way, showing a certain determination, not like a guest who came along the way, and she certainly had bad intentions as she walked along the path in front of our door. Maybe my mother prayed at the time, but she never mentioned it. She knew that the blanket in the stroller had been left untouched, because, when she lowered the blinds on the kitchen door, she saw a blanket thrown to the ground. After that, she didn't try to lower any of the blinds, but stood in a blind corner with me in her arms. There was no polite knock on the door. The chair was also not pushed. There is no thumping or rattling. The mother hid by the serving shelf, with a glimmer of hope, hoping that the silence would mean that the old lady had changed her mind and had gone home. But it backfired. She was walking around the house, unhurried, and every time she passed a window on the first floor, she had to stop and watch. It was summer, and the windows to protect it from the wind and snow were obviously not closed. She could put her face against each window pane and look in. It was a sunny day and all the blinds were tucked high high. So the old lady was not tall, but she didn't have to tiptoe to see inside. How does Mother know this? She didn't run around with me in her arms or hide behind furniture. She didn't peek out, she was terribly afraid, and she didn't meet those wide-eyed eyes and hear a strange grin. She stayed by the serving shelf. What else could she do? And, of course, the cellar. The windows were so small that no one could climb in. But the cellar door does not have a latch. If the woman had finally broken into the house and descended the cellar steps, it would have been more terrible to be trapped in the dark. There was also the upstairs room, but to go upstairs, my mother had to go through the big dining room, the room where I had been beaten when I grew up, but when it was converted into a closed staircase, the malice in that room disappeared. I don't remember when my mother first told me the story, but the earlier versions that sound to me only say that the mother hid in the house and that Mrs. Netfield pressed her face and hands against the windowpane. But in later versions, there was a follow-up to this action. She lost her patience, or rather, became angry, and rattled and thudded. But she didn't mention the shouting. Maybe the old lady didn't have the strength to scream, or maybe she had exhausted her strength and forgot what she was coming from. In any case, she gave up; She didn't do anything more. After inspecting all the doors and windows, she left. Mother finally summoned her courage to look around in silence, and then concluded that Mrs. Netfield had gone somewhere else. However, it wasn't until her father got home that she moved the chair from under the doorknob. I don't mean to imply that my mother kept talking about it. It's not usually something I find interesting after listening to it. I'm interested in how she barely made it to middle school. It was the same school she taught in Alberta, where the children rode horses to school. And her friends at the normal school, and their childish pranks. Even though others often couldn't understand what she was saying after her voice became indistinct, I was always able to figure it out. I became her interpreter, and I was often in agony when I had to repeat the complicated expressions or the things she thought were funny, and I could see that the good Samaritans who had stopped to talk to her were eager to leave. She never asked me to talk about it, what she called "Old Lady Netfield's visit." But I've known about this for a long time. I remember when I asked her what had happened to the old lady. "They took her away," she said, "oh, I think so." She wasn't left there and died alone. "After I got married, I moved to Vancouver, but I still get a weekly newspaper from the town where I grew up. I think someone, maybe my father and his current wife, ordered this newspaper for me. Usually I don't read it, but one time I read the name Netfield when I read the newspaper. The person who went by that name doesn't currently live in town, it's apparently the maiden name of a woman who lives in Portland, Oregon, who wrote a letter to the newspaper. This lady, like me, also subscribes to the newspaper of her hometown. She wrote a poem describing her childhood spent in her hometown. I remember that green hillside, clear river at the foot of the mountain, a place of tranquility and joy, memories so precious - there are several verses in this poem, and as I read it, I gradually understood that she was talking about the river beach, the place I once thought belonged only to me. "The lines of poetry attached to the letter are about the former hillside that I remember," she wrote, "and I would be grateful for the publication of your newspaper with such a long history." "The sun shines on the river, the water is playing, not only on the other side, but the colorful flowers are blooming so unbridled – that's our riverbank. My riverbank. The other verse is about a maple forest, but I think she misremembered it - those were elms, and they all died of Dutch elm disease. The rest of the letter clarified the cause and effect. The woman said her father—née Netfield—had bought a plot of land from the government in 1883, in what would later be known as "Downtown." The land was on the Maitland River. The maple trees spread the shade between the irises on both banks, and on the moist pastures on the riverbank, the white geese were enjoying lunch, and she did not mention that the spring water was sometimes muddy and stained by horses' hooves. I wouldn't have mentioned it anyway. Of course, there will be no mention of feces. In fact, I've written a few poems that are very similar to hers, but they are nowhere to be found right now, or I have never resorted to writing. Lines of poetry in praise of nature are always difficult to end. The day I wrote those poems was probably the time when I was extremely repulsive to my mother, and my father would beat me up so that he could teach me a hard lesson. Or, according to the more cheerful parlance of the time, my father would beat me flat. The woman said she was born in 1876. Before marriage, she lived in her father's house, where she spent her youth. The house was at the end of the town, at the beginning of an open field. You can see the sunset from the house. That's exactly what our house is. Could it be that Mother never knew this, that our house was where the Netfield family used to live, and that the old lady was actually looking through the window at her former home? There is a possibility. As I got older, I became interested in archival records, and I would not bother to do some boring research. I found out that several families had bought the house after the Netfield family sold it and before my parents moved in. You may wonder why the old lady sold her house for so many years to live. Could it be that she has lost her husband and is strapped for money? Who knows? Her mother said that someone came and took her away, but who was that person? Maybe it's her daughter, the same woman who lives in Oregon and writes poetry. Perhaps what she was looking for in the stroller was the daughter who had grown up and was thousands of miles away. After my mother picked me up, she did her best to keep me safe, as she said. As an adult, I lived not too far from that daughter for a while. If I hadn't been bothered by my newly formed family and my always unsatisfying writing, I could have written to her or visited her. But my mother was the one I really wanted to talk to at that time, but she and I were already separated by heaven and earth. I didn't go home when my mother last fell ill, and I didn't go back to her funeral. My two children were young at the time, and there was no one in Vancouver to take care of them. We couldn't afford the journey, and my husband was very disdainful of the rituals. But why blame him? I think so myself. We will say that there are things that are unforgivable, or that we can never forgive ourselves. But we forgave — we forgave all along.
Alice Munro (1931.07.10~) is a Canadian female writer. His representative works include the short story collections "Happy Shadow Dance" and "Escape".
Munro (real name Alice Ann Ledlaw) was born in July 1931 in Vinheim, Huron County, Ontario, Canada. [1] In 1968, he published his first collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, which won the Governor-General's Literary Award of Canada, and later wrote 14 works that won many awards, and his works were translated into 13 languages and distributed around the world. On October 10, 2013, Alice Munro was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. The award from the Swedish Academy was: "Master of Contemporary Short Story Fiction". As a result, Alice Munro also became the 13th woman in the history of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Chronology
Chronology
1931
Monroe was born on July 10 in the town of Winheim, Huron County, Ontario, Canada, to a family of ranchers who raised foxes and poultry. His father was Robert Eric Laidlaw and his mother was a school teacher named Anne Clarke Laidlaw. Alice began writing as a teenager and published her first essay in 1950 while studying at the University of Western Ontario, The Dimensions of Shadows.
1949
He majored in English at the University of Western Ontario and worked as a restaurant waiter, tobacco picker and librarian.
1951
He left college to marry James Monroe and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. Her daughters, Sheila, Catherine and Jenny, were born in 1953, 1955 and 1957 respectively, and Catherine died 15 hours after birth.
1963
The Monroes moved to Victoria, where they founded the Monroe Book Company.
1966
Their daughter Andrea was born.
1968
Alice Munro's first published collection of novels, The Dance of the Happy Shadows, was highly acclaimed, winning that year's Governor-General's Award, Canada's highest literary award. She followed this with The Life of a Girl and a Woman, a set of interrelated stories that together make up a novel.
1972
Alice Monroe and James Monroe divorced. Alice returned to Ontario and became a writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario.
1976
Alice married geographer Gerald Fremlin, and the couple moved to a farm outside of Clintontown, Ontario, and later from the farm to Clintontown, where they have lived ever since.
1978
Alice Munro's collection of novels, Who Do You Think You Are? , which is also a set of interrelated stories, was published in the United States under the title "The Beggar Girl: The Story of Frow and Rose." The book earned her a second Governor's Award.
1979-1982
Monroe traveled to Australia, China, and Scandinavia.
1980
She is also a writer-in-residence at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Queensland.
2002
Monroe's daughter, Sheila, published a memoir from her childhood: A Mother's Life with Her Daughter: Growing Up with Alice Munro. Alice Munro's story has been featured in publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Grand Street, Madame and The Paris Review.
2004
Monroe's masterpiece "Escape" was published, which won the Giller Literary Award in Canada that year and was selected as the New York Times Book of the Year. In 2009
In May, Monroe won the 3rd Booker International Prize for Literature.
2012
After the publication of his latest collection of novels, Dear Life, Monroe announced that he would close his pen.
2013
At 7 p.m. on October 10, the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature was announced, and Canadian writer Alice Munro was honored. According to CNN, Alice Munro is the first Canadian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. (Winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature and born in Quebec, Canada, Saul Bellow is considered an American writer because he moved to the United States as a child.) ）
2013
On December 10, the Nobel Prize ceremony was held in Stockholm, Sweden. Alice Munro, 82, was unable to travel to Sweden due to health reasons, and her daughter Jenny attended the ceremony and accepted the award on her behalf.