Alice Munro

Monday, December 08, 2008

Funny how quickly six weeks can pass without an update; I’ve been meaning to finish my series on e-­mail deliv­ery, and maybe write more about some of the music and books I’ve been appre­ci­ating lately.

This passage from The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro caught me today:

She still says this every once in awhile.

“What I remember most is that I could­n’t touch you and wondering if you under­stood.”

Karin says yes. She under­stood. What she does­n’t bother to say is that back then she thought Rose­mary’s sorrow was absurd. It was as if she was complaining about not being able to reach across a conti­nent. For that was what Karin had felt she had become—­some­thing immense and shim­mering and suffi­cient, ridged up in pain in some places and flat­tened out, other­wise, into long dull distances. Away off at the edge of this was Rose­mary, and Karin could reduce her, any time she liked, into a config­u­ra­tion of noisy black dots. And she herself—Kar­in—­could be stretched out like this and at the same time shrunk into the middle of her terri­tory, as tidy as a bead or a lady­bug.

I find myself returning to Munro’s stories even though I’m in the middle of reading a couple of other books right now, both for their emotional imme­diacy and how well their length and struc­ture lends itself to my current sched­ule.