Alice Munro RIP

 I was sorry to hear that the great Canadian short story writer Alice Munro has died, but glad to learn that she had reached the grand age of 92 – I had no idea she was that old. I came late to her work, by way of the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, which I wrote about here. Later I was bowled over again by Friend of My Youth, writing about it here. I have read many of her other stories too, but don't seem to have written about them. Unlike many writers, particularly of short stories, and particularly those not by nature inclined to self-publicity, Munro was rewarded with all the honours she deserved, up to and including the Nobel Prize for Literature. 'A story,' she wrote, '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. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself, of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.'
 And now I intend to read or reread more of Alice Munro.
 RIP.