Antes do Nobel, Alice Munro entre o céu e o inferno

"There’s something confusing about the consensus around Alice Munro. It has to do with the way her critics begin by asserting her goodness, her greatness, her majorness or her bestness, and then quickly adopt a defensive tone, instructing us in ways of seeing as virtues the many things about her writing that might be considered shortcomings. So she writes only short stories, but the stories are richer than most novels. Over a career now in its sixth decade, she’s rehearsed the same themes again and again, but that’s because she’s a master of variation. She has preternatural powers of sympathy and empathy, but she’s never sentimental. She writes about and redeems ordinary life, ordinary people – ‘people people people’, as Jonathan Franzen puts it."
Christian Lorentzen detonando Alice Munro aqui.


"There are writers for whom reality seems a secret novelty; and there are writers for whom it seems a shared habit. In the first category-which would include Dostoevsky, Conrad, Svevo – nothing is entirely recognisable, everything seems to have been burned out of recognition by the difficulty of its entry into the world. This is the strangeness they offer, and which we enjoy. In the second category, reality is born in an open ward. It makes its appeal to a known world. It is not that the writer’s reality is necessarily familiar to the reader, but it is familiar to its characters. We learn to judge oddity by seeing it through them. In this category are Tolstoy, Chekhov; and in our age the late V.S. Pritchett and Alice Munro."
James Wood enchendo a bola de Alice Munro aqui.