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Journey With Alice Munro

Marzia Rahman
I came across the magical, phenomenal world of Alice Munro during my early teens, when my perception of life, love and destiny was stubbornly naive. I discovered her quite accidently while fishing for another fiction in a bookstore. The unique title - "Lives of Girls and Women" caught my interest. Standing there, forgetting my preferred book, I turned a few pages, read a few lines and immediately bought it. Thus my journey with Alice Munro began.
At that phase of my life, puzzled with the work of Karma, I was trying to comprehend the dubious play of fate, while searching for the ultimate love. It's a tragic irony that I achieved nothing. Instead, I stumbled across
Alice Munro who was equally fascinated with fate, time and love.
Two things about Munro were of most interest to me. Firstly, this Canadian author of fourteen books of short stories and the recipient of many literary accolades, including the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, started writing in the sixties when fiction writing by women was not a common phenomenon. Secondly, she brought women to the forefront by depicting the extraordinary experiences of ordinary women -housewives, small town girls, stay-at-home mothers, middle-aged divorced women, solitary widows. She showed the world how such women were heroes in their own lives, experiencing the supreme drama called Life.
Munro's work is often compared
with the great short-story writers. She shares Chekhov's obsession with time and peoples' inability to delay or prevent its relentless movement forward. Likening her stories to a house, she said: “A story is not like a road to follow...it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows."
Munro's stories reveal the ambiguities of life: "ironic and serious at the same time". Like Frost, her fiction has layers of meaning, exploring human complexities, the mystery of human relationships. In her own words: "The complexity of things—the things within the
things—just seem to be endless. I mean nothing is easy...nothing is simple."
When I first read Munro, it felt avant-garde, revolutionary. As an adult, rereading the stories; I have a deeper sense of her magic like revisiting some childhood fantasy with deeper, better meaning and wisdom. With time, so many changes take place; so many things are discarded, forgotten. But one thing has remained unchanged: my fascination for Alice Munro. I have effectively grown older and wiser with her books. Through her creation, she has given me the greatest gift - a magical world. And for that I will treasure her.
Marzia Rahman has an MA in English Literature from the University of Dhaka.