Dear Reader,
The first book by Alice Munro I read was her last: Dear Life. It jolted me, made me cry. After that, I read all her books one by one, her words buzzing like livewires in my head. The Romantic poet, John Keats, spoke of “negative capability”, the writer’s ability to completely empty out their own selves and inhabit the character they are describing—a gift that makes a writer great. Shakespeare had it. So had Munro. She pours herself into other lives—a housewife, a hotel cleaner, an unhinged old woman, a father who has murdered his children—becoming them for the length of the story.
Her writing is a possession—she possesses the characters, and they in turn possess the reader by being so alive, so true to their own selves. In the end, reading Munro, it is life which possesses you, making you exclaim, “Dear life!” as you ponder this fragile breath that you have been given without asking for it, which you cannot shake off no matter how tired or sad or disgusted you are, which you hate and yet cling on to, because, simply, it is all that you have on earth.
Munro is a humanist, a feminist, a satirist, without subscribing to any “ism”. As she said, “You learn to write, you learn what is useful to you, you learn what is truthful & what’s exciting, & maybe it’s that, in your writing, 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑠𝑡. You don’t necessarily want to grind any ax; if you do want to grind an ax, the writing suffers.” In this age of identity politics, when authors must swear allegiance to some category or the other to promote themselves all the better, can any of them write without having an axe to grind? In this sense, Munro’s writing is old-fashioned: it speaks of a time when authors just wrote, not with the aim of making promotional reels on Instagram or speaking at lit fests, but because they were dedicated to the art of writing.
Munro’s passing on May 13 inevitably turned my thoughts deathwards, reminding me of the abyss at the edge of which you find yourself standing every time a loved one goes away, never to return. Perhaps the elaborate religious rituals that accompany death are designed to keep one’s mind off that sudden, absolute absence. Minakshi Dewan examines these ceremonies in her moving book, The Final Farewell: Understanding the Last Rites & and Rituals of India’s Major Faiths. It is a book that needed to be written since we tend to shy away from dwelling on this dark inevitability of life. Read the review by Ravi Nandan Singh here.
Spots of time
Yuvan Aves’ Intertidal: A Coast and Marsh Diary is an unusual book in the sense that it is not just about the depredation nature is suffering but also about more personal losses—death of a younger sibling, death of childhood at the hands of domestic violence. These two strains merge into one, turning into grief for the harm being done to nature. And therein lies the book’s effectiveness—it will push you into taking action by making you feel in your bones the value of what we are destroying. Mohit Rao writes a superb and balanced review of the book—do read.
Aves talks of nature—even the fragmentary snapshots we get in cities—as a liminal presence, gesturing at something larger than our own little lives. In a godless world, only nature can offer revelations akin to a religious experience. In Munro’s stories, while life is presented as it is—stubborn in its refusal to throw up grand insights—there are spots of time when meaning congeals, whispering of a truth beyond the mundane. In the story, “Pride” (in Dear Life), for instance, amidst the wreckage of a home and a life soon to be left behind, skunks frolic in the backyard in the dusk light—a moment of amazing grace, of mercy that comes unbidden, like the rains.
I bid adieu on that note. We will meet again soon.
Till then,
Anusua Mukherjee
Photo caption: Alice Munro during an interview in Victoria, B.C. on December 10, 2013. Photo by Chad Hipolito/The Canadian Press via AP
