Alice Munro-RUNAWAY

• Alice Ann Munro is a Canadian author. The winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work, she is also a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction, ... Wikipedia

• Born: July 10, 1931 (age 82), Wingham, Ontario, Canada

  Nationality: Canadian

  Awards: Man Booker International Prize, More

  Children: Sheila Munro, Catherine Munro, Jenny Munro, Andrea Munro

  Spouse: Gerald Fremlin (m. 1976–2013), James Munro (m. 1951–1972)
  
  
  

   “女人談論生老病死”

    門羅出生在渥太華，大部分時間都在這個安靜的城市度過。她的小說寫得也都是這個城市郊區小鎮上演的平民中的愛情、家庭日常生活，而涉及的卻都是和生老病死相關的嚴肅主題。這個女作家的筆觸簡單樸素，但卻細膩地刻畫出生活平淡真實的麵貌，給人帶來很真摯深沉的情感，簡單的文字帶來豐厚的情感，這恰好顯示了文學最本質的能量。很多人把她和寫美國南方生活的福克納和奧康納相比，而美國猶太作家辛西婭·奧齊克甚至將門羅稱為“當代契訶夫”，而在很多歐美媒體的評論中，都毫不吝嗇地給了她“當代最偉大小說家”的稱號。

    門羅寫的大部分是女人的故事，她的早期創作中，是一些剛剛進入家庭生活的女孩子，為愛情、性、背叛、孩子等苦惱；到後期，則是在中年危機和瑣碎生活中掙紮的女性，但她們都有著欲望和遺憾，有著強大和軟弱之處。

    門羅的小說並不特別重視情節，更多是利用時空轉換，將記憶和現實生活打碎重新組合，這也表現了她想表現的觀點：看世界，或許有新的角度，文學就可以幫助人們重新認識世界。她曾經在一篇散文中介紹讀小說的方式：“小說不像一條道路，它更像一座房子。你走進裏麵，待一小會兒，這邊走走，那邊轉轉，觀察房間和走廊間的關聯，然後再望向窗外，看看從這個角度看，外麵的世界發生了什麽變化。”

    講述平凡女性的命運

    《逃離》(RUNAWAY)是愛麗絲·門羅2004年的作品，全書由8個短篇小說組成，其中的3篇互有關聯。該書將於近期由北京十月文藝出版社出版，著名翻譯家李文俊翻譯，本文為該書譯後記。

    近年來，在美國的重要文學刊物如《紐約客》、《大西洋月刊》、《巴黎評論》上，都可以經常讀到愛麗絲·門羅的作品。美國一年一度出版的《××××年最佳短篇小說集》中，也多會收入她的作品。她幾乎每隔兩三年便有新的小說集出版，曾三次獲得加拿大最重要的總督獎，兩次獲得吉勒獎。2004年第二次獲吉勒獎即是因為這本《逃離》，評委們對此書的讚語是“故事令人難忘，語言精確而有獨到之處，樸實而優美，讀後令人回味無窮。” 我國的《世界文學》等刊物也多次對她的作品有過翻譯與評介。可以說，門羅在英語小說界的地位已經得到確立，在英語短篇小說創作方麵可稱得上“力拔頭籌”，已經有人在稱呼她是“我們的契訶夫”(美國女作家辛西婭·奧齊克語)。英國女作家A.S。拜厄特亦讚譽她為“在世的最偉大的短篇小說作家”。

http://domestic.kankanews.com/c/2013-10-10/0042927734.shtml

[20090909]

Quotes:

“The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.”
― Alice Munro, Runaway
1,135 people liked it like
“There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can't know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you've reached it. I believe this.”
― Alice Munro
184 people liked it like
“Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.”
― Alice Munro
123 people liked it like
“Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again. ”
― Alice Munro, Away from Her
72 people liked it like
“A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.”
― Alice Munro
tags: books 70 people liked it like
“Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.”
― Alice Munro
tags: kindness, reconciliation 57 people liked it like
“Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?”
― Alice Munro
52 people liked it like
“You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.”
― Alice Munro, Open Secrets
tags: parents, secrets, shame 49 people liked it like
“In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness
47 people liked it like
“Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness
47 people liked it like
“This is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don't think about it at all.

The thing that was your bright treasure. You don't think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember.

This is what happens.

...

Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.”
― Alice Munro, Runaway
40 people liked it like
“If I decided to send this to you, where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope I am paralyzed. It's too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don't know where that is, is worse.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman
34 people liked it like
“I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.
”
― Alice Munro
tags: writing 33 people liked it like
“Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.”
― Alice Munro, The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose
32 people liked it like
“His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women
tags: first-impressions, love 30 people liked it like
“For we did makeup. But we didn't forgive each other. And we didn't take steps. And it got to be too late and we saw that each of us had invested too much in being in the right and we walked away and it was a relief. ”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman
26 people liked it like
“He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life. ”
― Alice Munro, Away from Her
24 people liked it like
“The constant happiness is curiosity.”
― Alice Munro
23 people liked it like
“People are curious. A few people are. ... They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.”
― Alice Munro, Friend of My Youth
19 people liked it like
“My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness
19 people liked it like
“Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.”
― Alice Munro, Runaway
17 people liked it like
“There were people whom you positively ached to please. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could kee you and have contempt for you forever.”
― Alice Munro
17 people liked it like
“I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else.”
― Alice Munro
tags: life 16 people liked it like
“We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do-we do it all the time.”
― Alice Munro, Dear Life: Stories
tags: forgiveness 15 people liked it like
“People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women
14 people liked it like
“He loved her for her wit, her cynicism, her deceptions. Less than lovable these seem to me now. They are both sly, Hugh and Margaret, they are socially awkward, easily embarrassed. But cold underneath, you may be sure, colder than us easy flirts with our charms and conquests. They do not reveal themselves. They will never admit to anything, never have to talk about anything, no, I could claw their skin and it would be my own fingers that would bleed. I could scream at them till my throat bursts and never alter their self-possession, change the look of their sly averted faces. Both blond, both easy blushers, both cold mockers. They have contempt for me. That is rubbish of course. Nothing for me. All for each other. Love.”
― Alice Munro
14 people liked it like
“What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given.”
― Alice Munro
13 people liked it like
“The unhappiest moment I could never tell you. All our fights blend into each other and are in fact re-enactments of the same fight, in which we punish each other--I with words, Hugh with silence--for being each other. We never needed any more than that.”
― Alice Munro, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You: 13 Stories
13 people liked it like
“As soon as a man and woman of almost any age are alone together within four walls it is assumed that anything may happen. Spontaneous combustion, instant fornication, triumph of the senses. What possibilities men and women must see in each other to infer such dangers. Or, believing in the dangers, how often they must think about the possibilities.”
― Alice Munro
12 people liked it like
“Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.”
― Alice Munro