Friday, March 29, 2013

My hero / Alice Munro by Nell Freudenberger




Alice Munro
by Triunfo Arciniegas

My hero: Alice Munro 
by Nell Freudenberger

I don't think Alice Munro would care to be called my hero, or anyone's. And yet she is the writer whose female characters I feel the most kinship with

Nell Freudenberger
The Guardian, Friday 29 March 2013 


Alice Munro
Photograph by Kim Stallknecht

I don't think Alice Munro would care to be called my hero, or anyone's. And yet she is the writer whose female characters I feel the most kinship with. Whether she is a feminist writer or not, Munro has said: "I never think about being a feminist writer, but of course I wouldn't know. I don't see things all put together that way."

No fiction writer sees things "all put together", and a fiction that intended to do something in the world, such as raise consciousness, wouldn't in one sense be fiction at all. A story begins as a blind groping in the dark – for something, anything, both resonant and concrete. And so in Munro's fiction you find a feminism of objects. When Rose in The Beggar Maid brings her fiance home to meet her father and stepfather, she discovers with a sinking heart a new centrepiece, "especially for the occasion. A plastic swan, lime green in colour, with slits in the wings, in which were stuck folded, colored paper napkins." The myriad inequalities between Rose and her fiance – in sex, wealth, education, speech and manners – and in class, a thing we pretend not to understand in North America – inheres in that napkin holder.

But there's a difference between admiring a great writer's artistry and calling her your hero. I recently reread Munro's work in order to write about her new book, Dear Life, and for the first time I recognised what makes me feel so much at home in her world. Munro's mother, as she appears in the author's work, escapes a desperately poor and unhappy childhood; she is bright and bookish, but often an embarrassment to her daughter, especially in the way she calls attention to herself. In the brilliant title story, Munro remembers a time "when I was at the stage of hating a good many things she said". Everyone must go through this stage with their parents, but the final, unflinching revelation ofDear Life, which I won't spoil, shows the everlasting regret that can follow a failure of empathy inside a family. Which is, of course, one thing that fiction can do in the world.

THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016



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