Sofi Oksanen: What It’s Like To Write About Russia

 

Photo: Sofioksanen.com

Sofi Oksanen: What It’s Like To Write About Russia

by Sofi Oksanen

In 2003 I published my first novel in Finland, Stalin’s Cows, which dealt with the recent history of Estonia. I was confronted by journalists who called my book “anti-soviet”, at one time a very negative epithet, a word that belonged to the traditional vocabulary of Finlandized Finland. I was also confronted by leftist journalists whose knowledge of the Soviet Union was so flimsy that they asked in amazement why nothing had been written in the Soviet press about the deportations of Estonians, which discussed in my novel.

 

David Lodge

Books

David Lodge, Campus Trilogy novelist and academic, dies aged 89

The author of more than two dozen books is best known for his trio set in a fictionalised version of the University of Birmingham, where he worked from 1960 to 1987

Ella Creamer

Fri 3 Jan 2025 13.09 GMT

British author and critic David Lodge, best known for his Campus Trilogy of novels, has died aged 89.

Alice Munro was the writer’s writer

Photo by George Waldman 

Alice Munro was the writer’s writer

The Canadian author, who has died at the age of 92, changed literature with her domestic, expansive stories.

By Megan Gibson

“The stories of Alice Munro,” the American writer Ethan Canin is said to have once remarked, “make everyone else’s look like the work of babies.” It is not the highest praise the Canadian writer has ever received – over the course of her decades-long career she drew favourable comparisons to Chekov, Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver, and won innumerable prizes, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 – but Canin had a point. Munro, who died on 13 May at the age of 92, in a nursing home in Port Hope, Ontario, after suffering from dementia for more than a decade, was one of the greatest short-story writers to ever live.

 

 Photograph: Andrew Testa/Shutterstock

A life in quotes: Alice Munro

This article is more than 7 months old

Writer known as ‘Canadian Chekhov’ captured the desire and darkness of ordinary life in rural Canada, particularly for women

Adrian Horton

Tue 14 May 2024 19.16 BST

Alice Munro, the 2013 Nobel laureate considered one of the greatest short story writers in the English language, has died at the age of 92 at her care home in Ontario, after suffering dementia for more than a decade. Born and raised in south-western Ontario, the “Canadian Chekhov” captured the desire and darkness of ordinary life in rural Canada, particularly for women – subjects long out of focus for the mainstream, finally achieving recognition later in life.

 

Alice Munro

Five of the best Alice Munro short stories

The greatest examples of the late writer’s uncanny ability to capture the many complexities of life range from stories of sex to loneliness

Lisa Allardice

Tue 14 May 2024 16.45 EDT

It is almost impossible to recommend a handful of Munro short stories. Over a writing career that spanned decades and led to many accolades, including the Nobel prize for literature, she produced countless stories, often set in southern Ontario, where she grew up and to where she returned in later life. Few writers captured the lives of “ordinary” people with as much grace and empathy – not to mention technical genius – as Munro. Her stories are anything but ordinary.

“Her writing was more real than our lives,” Jenny said of her mother, Alice (above).Photograph by George Duncan

Alice Munro’s Passive Voice

The celebrated writer’s partner sexually abused her daughter Andrea. The abuse transformed Munro’s fiction, but she left it to Andrea to confront the true story.

By Rachel Aviv

December 23, 2024

“I am a writer or used to be a writer,” Alice Munro wrote in 2014, in one of the last stories she tried to compose. A year earlier, she had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But she had Alzheimer’s and had been in decline for several years. Her partner of four decades, Gerald (Gerry) Fremlin, had recently died, and she was living near her daughter Jenny, in Port Hope, east of Toronto. “I’m a writer, as I said, and I suppose that sticks for a while even though you don’t due do due it anymore,” she wrote, in shaky longhand. “I am going to write what happened yesterday, though at first I did not mean to, didn’t think of it, as I don’t anymore.”

Alice Munro / Covers

 

Alice Munro
COVERS

Why Alice Munro’s biographer left her daughter’s abuse out of his book?

 

ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy Live News

Books

Why Alice Munro’s Biographer Left Her Daughter’s Abuse Out of His Book

An exclusive interview with Robert Thacker on the secret he carried for twenty years

BY CARMINE STARNINOUpdated 8:06, Jan. 3, 2025 | Published 6:30, Jan. 3, 2025

AST JULY, the Toronto Star published Andrea Robin Skinner’s account of her sexual abuse, as a child, by Alice Munro’s husband, Gerald Fremlin—abuse that Munro, her mother, ultimately chose to overlook in her decision to stay with Fremlin. In the days and weeks after that revelation, one other name was added to the ledger of people who had betrayed Skinner: Robert Thacker.

Alice Munro Was Bigger than Canada

 

The Walrus / Chad Hipolito / The Walrus

Alice Munro Was Bigger than Canada

Here artists are celebrated by virtue of their nationality. Munro showed me I could escape those tropes

BY TAJJA ISENUpdated 10:31, Jul. 4, 2024 | Published 8:14, Jul. 4, 

IN HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH CLASS, I saw no connection between literature and nation. An author’s place of origin was a trifling bit of biography that rarely seemed relevant to their work: This is Will, he writes plays, his story’s set in Denmark, but he’s from England; this is Margaret, she writes about the horrors of the feminine experience, her novel’s set in dystopian New England, but she’s from Canada. Here’s another Will, who also hails from England. He has a book about a bunch of boys trying to kill one another on an unnamed island in the Pacific. And finally, Franz, from Prague. He writes about the nightmares of bureaucracy, and his fiction isn’t really set anywhere at all.

“Home” by Alice Munro / Review

 

Alice Munro

“Home”

by Alice Munro

from The View from Castle Rock

To consider “Home,” I return to Munro’s “Foreword.”

I put myself in the center and wrote about that self, as searchingly as I could.

Although this story is about her father, it is also, or really, about a daughter’s acceptance of a new reality regarding her father and regarding herself.

The daughter is living in the east now, about a hundred miles from her father. Unlike the past, when years could pass before she returned home, she now visits every few months or so. She takes a series of busses. The time it takes to get “home” is emblematic of reality. Things have changed so much that it takes real time to catch up to all the changes that make up her father’s home now. So, the beginning of the story sets us up for that – for the time it takes for a person to reach a destination, especially if the person is looking for the truth or looking to go “home.”

The scenes that begin and end the story both address the issue of time. But it is the story’s the ending that tells us we have finally arrived at the story’s original destination.

The last scene is a memory, one that she says is her first memory. She’s three or four and she’s out in the barn with her father, who is milking a cow. It’s dark. It’s cold. The milk hitting the pail sounds like “tiny hailstones.” This is the cow that will die of pneumonia the following year.

Alice Munro / Hired Girl / Review

Alice Munro

 “Hired Girl”

by Alice Munro

from The View from Castle Rock

In “Hired Girl” we see the casual contempt that people often have for their hired help. Alice is maybe seventeen and has been hired to do housework at the big summer cottage on a private island at Pointe au Baril.

The entire story concerns itself with how Alice reacts to being classed as lower than the people she works for, or, even, invisible. Several times she naively doesn’t realize that she is not an equal, that she doesn’t eat lunch with them, that she eats in the other room, that she is the one being talked about when her employer says:

So you just make allowances . . . . You do the best with them you can.

This story covers familiar ground to me. My West Virginia grandmother was a hired girl to an oil widow in the next town and learned some fancy ways that may have not been good for her in the end. But just like Munro says, everybody had hired girls in those days. My grandmother had hired girls herself when she had small children. It wasn’t that my grandparents had money — they didn’t — it was: what were families going to do when their daughters finished eighth grade? The girls were too old to hang around the house and too young to get married. So they were traded up and down the country side.

I was several times a baby-sitter for families whose means were spectacular. And yet, like Alice, I sometimes had trouble knowing my place. After all, I thought myself their equal or better, given how I did in school and what my ambitions were.

Alice Munro / The Beggar Maid / Review

Alice Munro

“The Beggar Maid”
by Alice Munro

Trevor

In the United States, “The Beggar Maid,” the sad story in which Rose goes to college and meets and courts, and then marries and divorces the wealthy Patrick, had its title taken to represent the book of linked stories as a whole. Outside of the United States, though, this book is not called The Beggar Maid; rather, the book takes its title from the final story: Who Do You Think You Are? At this point in the book, about halfway through, I think it makes sense to stop and look at each title as they work with this particular story and then with the book as a whole.