Below are selections from the work of Alice Munro, who was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. They are reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf.
From the story “Royal Beatings,” which appeared in “The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose”:
Royal Beating. That was Flo’s promise. You are going to get one Royal Beating.
The word Royal lolled on Flo’s tongue, took on trappings. Rose had a need to picture things, to pursue absurdities, that was stronger than the need to stay out of trouble, and instead of taking this threat to heart she pondered: how is a beating royal? She came up with a tree-lined avenue, a crowd of formal spectators, some white horses and black slaves. Someone knelt, and the blood came leaping out like banners. An occasion both savage and splendid. In real life they didn’t approach such dignity, and it was only Flo who tried to supply the event with such high air of necessity and regret. Rose and her father soon got beyond anything presentable.
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From “Too Much Happiness,” which appeared in the book of the same name:
She has not, of course, reminded him that her work was on the Theory of Partial Differential Equations, and that it was completed some time ago. She spends the first hour or so of her solitary journey as she usually spends some time after a parting from him — balancing signs of affection against those of impatience, and indifference against a certain qualified passion.
“Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind,” her friend Marie Mendelson has told her. “When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.”
At least she has time now to discover that she has a sore throat. If he has caught it she hopes he won’t suspect her. Being a bachelor in robust health he regards any slight contagion as an insult, bad ventilation or tainted breath as personal attacks. In certain ways he is really quite spoiled.
Spoiled and envious, actually. A while ago he wrote to her that certain writings of his own had begun to be attributed to her, because of the accident of the names. He had received a letter from a literary agent in Paris, starting off by addressing him as Dear Madam.
Alas, he had forgotten, he said, that she was a novelist as well as a mathematician. What a disappointment for the Parisian that he was neither. Merely a scholar, and a man.
Indeed a great joke.
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From “Amundsen,” which appeared in “Dear Life”:
Patricia Wall/The New York Times
For years I thought I might run into him. I lived, and still live, in Toronto. It seemed to me that everybody ended up in Toronto at least for a little while. Of course that hardly means that you will get to see that person, provided that you should in any way want to.
It finally happened. Crossing a crowded street where you could not even slow down. Going in opposite directions. Staring, at the same time, a bare shock on our time-damaged faces.
He called out, “How are you?” And I answered, “Fine.” Then added for good measure, “Happy.”
At the moment this was only generally true. I was having some kind of dragged-out row with my husband, about our paying a debt run up by one of his children. I had gone that afternoon to a show at an art gallery, to get myself into a more comfortable frame of mind.
He called back to me once more:
“Good for you.”
It still seemed as if we could make our way out of that crowd, that in a moment we would be together. But just as certain that we would carry on in the way we were going. And so we did. No breathless cry, no hand on my shoulder when I reached the sidewalk. Just that flash, that I had seen in an instant, when one of his eyes opened wider. It was the left eye, always the left, as I remembered. And it always looked so strange, alert and wondering, as if some whole impossibility had occurred to him, one that almost made him laugh.
For me, I was feeling something the same as when I left Amundsen, the train carrying me still dazed and full of disbelief.
Nothing changes really about love.