The Master’s Voice

Alice Munro (2000), The Love of a Good Woman, Vintage, London, pp. 340

‘The Love of a Good Woman’ is an anthology of eight stories by Nobel Laureate Alice Munro. The stories bring out her native country Canada in its full splendor. Set in different time periods, seasons and moods, these stories plumb the Canadian life through the slow, pendulous prose that swings back and forth between memory, love, loss and longing of its characters. The terrain of Munro’s narrative is like the peat bogs that are ubiquitous to her landscape, it is slippery and difficult to navigate, but buries within something precious and clarifying. You journey to the end of the story and wait for the story to reappear in its entirety, illuminating parts that you did not know existed in the first reading. That is part of the delectable satisfaction in entering Munro’s beguiling world.

Truth and Illusion

The book begins with the story ‘the love of a good woman’. The good woman has cocooned herself in a role that she plays to perfection. Just when it seems life is invariant; a small opening comes into sight. There is a road that could lead to new beginnings, but her rite of passage is through a test of truth that could make or break her life. We leave her at the beginning of this crossroad. Similarly, the story ‘Jakarta’ is a man’s journey to understand what he truly lost four decades ago. In the search for clarity, he meets with an old friend’s narrative that could either be the very truth or a tragic delusion of a broken heart. We leave such protagonists in the middle of their journey where new beginnings are just a corner away, shielded by a wall so deliberate and vile that we fear the outcome even as we know the inevitable has to happen.

A characteristic that simmers in this quiet cauldron is the echo in the narrative that ricochets and threatens the fragile worlds of our characters. A daughter visits her father’s clinic after aborting her child only to assist in another for a stranger. A grandmother plays the same silly game she used to entertain her daughter with, only to enter a dangerous territory with her grandchildren. Reverberating through this story is her own adolescent wanderlust, her daughter’s careful separation and the reunion with the next generation. There is always this echo from the past that spirals into something more tangible and intends to wreck the future.

A Woman’s World

Finally, there is the delicious perspective of women, forever becoming more of themselves, no matter what. They push through dreams and hopes, erotic fantasies and dangerous liaisons, adventures and wanderlust, nightmares and confounding labyrinth of their lives and memories, to emerge at new beginnings. It is in the stunning voices of these women that the world opens out and shuts down in unexpected ways in these stories.

This book is an excellent introduction to the master of short stories that Munro is. If difficult pleasures are what you are looking for, you have arrived home as a quiet winter sets in!

The Steppe

The Steppe, Anton Chekhov from The Chekhov Omnibus, Translated by Constance Garnett, Everyman Publishers

Nothing could be seen near the house, and nothing could be heard but the Steppe.

 If Anton Chekhov is the undisputable father of the modern drama whose unintended revolution in theatre produced Beckett, Pinter, Ionesco and an array of intellectual successors; in Russia, his reputation as a playwright was once taken as a misunderstanding of incompetence for genius. The key to the Chekhovian world is his short stories and his contribution to narrative prose is thought of as unassailable.  The understated narration, the economy of words, the refusal to preach- all the virtues of a style that is in Maupaussant’s vein is undoubtedly Chekhovian and was outrageously modern for his time. As an observation goes, ‘What Tolstoy took nine hundred pages to resolve in Annan Karenina is distilled into twenty pages in The Lady with the Dog.’   Maybe, it is unfair to compare the rambling prose of Tolstoy with the epigrammatic style of Chekhov, but the contrast appears remarkable to a student of literature since, to found a formidable style variant in the same age as that of Tolstoy or Turgenev is nothing less than revolutionary.

Chekhov was a medical man by profession and a conscience keeper of his time and his country; indeed his very circumstance seemed to have conspired to produce the artist as he metamorphosed. A family in perpetual turbulence, loss of brothers and friends to disease or suicide, the untimely deaths and unhappy love life produced in him a morality daringly modern and a world view refreshingly subversive. The three most important themes of his fiction--family, disease, love-- were the connecting link between the fast changing real world where he worked and the incorruptible inner life from which his prose originated. He did not read systematically as Tolstoy did, but he did read exhaustively, the major French writers of his time. He did not cultivate any intellectual godfather, but he studied the prose of his preferred writers laboriously. In his work, he deftly combines the brevity of Guy de Maupaussant with a journalistic pithiness, never breaches the sceptical objectivity and allows the reader to face the full ambiguity of human thoughts that defy a sturdy conclusion. His stories often end at a blank point in the middle of the narration; the assault on human curiosity is complete and forceful. Yet his languid sentences linger and limp, falter and crack, the complications and reservations of a complex mind is presented without hesitation. This is the endearing quality about his narrative prose filled with his dual attitude to human beings- one of impatience at human follies and a deep sympathy at their vulnerability to exploitation.

The Steppe is a story that rumbles like the moors in the Wuthering Heights. Young Yegorushka is being taken to the city, where he would board with his mother’s old friend and continue school. His uncle and Father Khristopher accompany him in a cart all the way across the steppe to negotiate business and in the end, bring Yegorushka to his new home. What the young boy sees as he steps out of his home from the arms of his mother, her sweet poppy cakes and lazy evening tea, to a world dominated by the endless steppe where men negotiate their place and positions, forms the story.   The dull monotony of the journey is relieved by a beautiful sunrise where the first green rays of the sun sends a warmth through the boy’s entire being. A black kite flies, a swarm of petrels pass through the sky, a lone horseman arrives and the two adults argue pointlessly. Yegor finds a moment of epiphany in a peasant woman’s song in the oppressive heat when all the adults take a nap. He is taken to a dull miser’s house where he becomes sensitive to an aristocratic presence for the first time. He is then traded to continue his journey with a cart of young rough boys. The terror of a thunderstorm coincides with the culmination of a favourable business deal in the adult world. Yegor understands and experiences slowly, the politics of the world around, the place of men in the scheme of things, the unpredictability of life in the vast steppe, love and lovely women, their warm kindness.  A beautiful read filled with the rich imagery of an unseen land through the uncorrupted eyes of a helpless child.