2013 노벨 문학상 수상자 Alice Munro

 

카나다 작가 Alice Munro가 2013 노벨 문학상 수상자로 선정됐다.

 

우선 반가운 느낌이 들었다. 도서관 책 세일 같은 데서도 그녀의 단편집을 놓치지 않을까

유심히 살피던, 그런 작가니 말이다. 사실 그래서, 3년 전에 잃어버린 그녀의 단편집

'Runaway'(2004)를 얼마전에 덴버대 책 세일에서 다시 살 수 있기도 했다.

 

Alice Munro는 그녀의 이름을 처음 본 순간부터, 이름 글자의 인상 때문에, 기억에 남았다.

어느 해의 'The Best American Short Stories' 에서 였을 거다. 꽤 오래전 일이다.

 

아래에 뉴욕타임즈의 관련 기사에서 몇 구절 뽑아 적는다.

 

그에 앞서, 이 포스팅과 같은 제목으로 무척 풍부한 내용을 담고 있는 아주 좋은 포스팅을

소개한다: Helen 님의 포스팅. 그 포스팅의 내용을 'virtually' 이 포스팅의 알맹이로 여기

포함시키는 것이니, '메인 코스'가 그냥 지나쳐지지 않으면 좋겠다.

 

 

Alice Munro Wins Nobel Prize in Literature 

By Juli Bosman, NYT, Oct. 10, 2013.

 

   Alice Munro, the renowned Canadian short-story writer whose visceral work

   explores the tangled relationships between men and women, small-town

   existence and the fallibility of memory, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature

   on Thursday.

 

   Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy said that

   Ms. Munro, 82, who has written 14 story collections, was a “master of the

   contemporary short story.” She is the 13th woman to win the prize.

 

   She revolutionized the architecture of short stories, often beginning a story in

   an unexpected place then moving backward or forward in time, and brought a

   modesty and subtle wit to her work that admirers often traced to her

   background growing up in rural Canada.

 

   “For years and years, I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to

   write a novel,” she told The New Yorker in 2012. “Then I found that they were

   all I could do, and so I faced that. I suppose that my trying to get so much into

   stories has been a compensation.”

 

 

Master of the Intricacies of the Human Heart

Alice Munro, Nobel Winner, Mines the Inner Lives of Girls and Women

By Michiko Kakutani, NYT, Oct. 10, 2013.

 

   Alice Munro, named on Thursday as the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in

   Literature, once observed: “The complexity of things — the things within things

   — just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.”

 

   The highlights of that volume ['Dear Life'(2012)] were four final entries, which

   she described as “the first and last — and the closest — things I have to say

   about my own life,” a comment that cannot help but remind the reader of how

   closely many of Ms. Munro’s stories have followed the general contours of

   her life: from a hardscrabble childhood in an ontario farming community, to

   early marriage and a move to British Columbia, followed by divorce, a new

   marriage and a move back to rural ontario.

 

   In the last paragraph of the last of those semi-autobiographical pieces,

   Ms. Munro writes, “I did not go home for my mother’s last illness or for her

   funeral. I had two small children and nobody in Vancouver to leave them with.

   We could barely have afforded the trip, and my husband had a contempt for

   formal behavior, but why blame it on him? I felt the same. We say of some

   things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But

  we do — we do it all the time.”

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

'Runaway' 뒷표지 부분.