Published 1/8/19
Too Much Happiness (2009)
by Alice Munro One of my major Audiobook "fill" categories is Nobel Prize winners. I thought that all the Nobel Prize in Literature winners would automatically have all their books available in Audiobook format, or at least those who won in the past twenty years. Just to take recent winners- there are no available Audiobooks for 2014 winner Patrick Modiano (French.) This is despite the fact that Modiano's works are typically translated into English and remain in print (they were all on the shelf at a recent visit to Foyle's Books in London.)
BUT- Alice Munro- Canadian Apostle of the Short Story- she won in 2013 (which I did not even know) and ALL of her books are available as Audiobooks. She's got 14 volumes of short stories published between 1968 and 2012, and then there are a handful of separate compilations. I selected
Too Much Happiness, more or less randomly, because it was published shortly before she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and I'm of the opinion that the Nobel Prize prefers to give the award to Authors who are still doing their best work.
I think the Audiobook and the short story go well together, in the same way that the novel really fits the paperback/hardback physical book format. It's easy to dip in and out of an Audiobook, vs when I read a physical book, I don't like to reset my attention frame every half hour. Munro's Wikipedia tag line is that
she revolutionized the architecture of the short story, especially the tendency to move backward and forward in time. That last clause really resonates with me, "the tendency to move backward and forward in time," which has to be one of the techniques of writers that I most frequently call out after reading an entry on the 1001 Books list. It's a technique I associate with the novel, specifically with the high modernists, though by mid century it was making it's way in the mainline literature.
It strikes me that Munro has an incredibly low profile for the first North American to win the Nobel in Literature since Toni Morrison won a decade earlier. I guess that win is reflected in the availability of her books in Audiobook format, but I'd be hard pressed to name a single person I've ever met who has read her, let alone would name Munro as one of their favorite authors.
Of course, I'm not going to trash a collection of Munro short stories, but like all short story collections I'm left grasping at a sold critical approach. Talk about themes? Individual stories? All of the stories are set in contemporary Canada except for the title story, about an 19th century Russian mathematician who was the first woman to teach in Sweden (Nobel Prize committee catnip, no doubt.)
I listened to
Too Much Happiness in a variety of circumstances- it took me 40 days to get through the 11 hours. Some of Munro's protagonists are men, most are women. Domestic relationships gone wrong feature strongly in several of the stories in this collection.
Too Much Happiness is another beast entirely- I wonder if it could be a novella, it seemed long enough on it's own. I happened to be flying back from Iceland when I listened to most of
Too Much Happiness, and I thought the Russian/Scandinavian angle was particularly well thought out and clever.
Published 3/28/19
Runaway (2004)
by Alice Munro I like these characteristics of Canadian author Alice Munro, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2013: First, all her Audiobooks are available without a wait in the Public Library Libby Audiobook app. Second, all her books are short stories, so listening to one of her books never requires a huge listening effort. What I don't like about Munro would be her limited range, at least from what I've seen in two books, as described by the Wikipedia page for this book:
There are eight short stories in the book. Three of the stories ("Chance", "Soon", and "Silence") are about a single character named "Juliet Henderson".
"Runaway" – a woman is trapped in a bad marriage.
"Chance" – Juliet takes a train trip which leads to an affair.
"Soon" – Juliet visits her parents with her child Penelope.
"Silence" – Juliet hopes for news from her adult estranged daughter Penelope.
"Passion" – A lonely small town girl flees a passionless relationship with an outsider.
"Trespasses" – Lauren, a young girl, meets an older woman, Delphine, who is too interested in her.
"Tricks" – Robin, a lonely girl, lives life alone due to bad luck and misinterpretation.
I mean there you have it, Alice Munro in a nutshell. Every story is about women on the margins of society for various reasons, isolated by domestic violence, mental illness or just plain bad luck.
Published 12/2/19
The Beggar Maid (1978)
by Alice Munro
Replaces: A Maggot by John Fowles
Canadian short-story specialist Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in 2013, five years after the first revision of the 1001 Books list, where she was included (2 books) for the first time. Her omission from the original edition is a minor embarrassment- especially when you look at the over representation of other recent Nobel winners like J.M. Coetzee. Munro was awarded her Nobel for being a "contemporary master of the short story," but The Beggar Maid is as close as she gets to a Novel. Indeed, a reader could be forgiven for thinking (as I did while listening to the Audiobook) that The Beggar Maid is a novel, since every story is about the same woman- Rose, and the episodes proceed in largely chronological order over the course of her lifetime.
Like many of Munro's protagonists, Rose is a woman from a disadvantaged socio-economic background in rural Canada who transcends her origins but faces difficult choices along the way. The Beggar Maid replaces A Maggot by John Fowles- a post-modernist metahistorical fiction that confuses as much as it entertains, and Fowles himself is a marginally canonical figure if you look at 21st literary trends. He scores a fat zero for diversity purposes, and his literary reputation is less secure then his (strong) sales record and continued presence in international book stores.
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