Escribir relatos no es fácil. En pocas páginas han de caber el planteamiento, el nudo y el desenlace (aunque esta norma no se aplica necesariamente a según qué cuentos y qué escritores). El germen de una historia ha de estar presente. Ésto es algo, quizás al no ser escritor, que me resulta difícil de entender, el que tenga (el escritor) una idea que podría desarrollar y convertirla en novela, pero que al final decida cortar por lo sano y darle un fin en pocas páginas. Está claro que muchos cuentos son como pequeñas postales, perfectos en su longitud, y es mejor que se hayan quedado así; pero también es verdad que existen casos en los que un cuento podría haber dado para mucho más, o menos, que nunca se sabe. Y no es que esté minusvalorando el género del relato corto en favor de las tramas de larga distancia, únicamente es que me da pena que una gran historia y unos buenos personajes no sean más aprovechados.Y es en este género tan complicado donde destaca con nombre propio la canadiense Alice Munro, adorada por la gran mayoría de sus compañeros escritores. Si bien es verdad que la mayoría de escritores de cuentos buscan un final potente, lo más importante en los relatos de Alice Munro es el desarrollo. Su capacidad para ir hilvanando la trama es sencillamente prodigiosa. No sabría explicarlo, pero en pocas páginas es capaz de meterte en una gran historia, con vida propia. Te está contando un hecho o presentándote a un personaje, para pasar a continuación a explicarte otro hecho relacionado con el hecho o el personaje anterior. O también hace un inciso para seguir parte de la historia de un personaje que ha influido o influirá posteriormente en la vida del personaje protagonista. Casi es como si se tratasen de cuentos corales, si ésto puede ser. Hay que leer a Alice Munro para entenderlo.Los cuentos que se incluyen en 'Secretos a voces' son independientes, pero aun así hay nombres que se repiten, como el de Carstairs, Ontario, ciudad donde van a parar en un momento u otro algunos de los personajes, o los Doud, los potentados durante décadas en Carstairs. De esta manera, al final del libro da la impresión de que los relatos forman como un caleidoscopio.Estos son los ocho cuentos contenidos en 'Secretos a voces', aunque las sinopsis no les hacen justicia:- ENTUSIAMO (*****). La nueva bibliotecaria de Carstairs ha recibido una carta de un soldado que lucha en la gran guerra, vecino del pueblo, que quedó hechizado por ella, y a la que pedirá poder seguir manteniendo esta relación epistolar. Puede ser el mejor cuento que he leído en años, de verdad. Uno no puede sino quitarse el sombrero ante la inteligencia de Munro al plantear esta historia, que tras su lectura parece perseguirte durante días.- UNA VIDA DE VERDAD (*****). "Apareció un hombre que se enamoró de Dorrie Beck. Al menos, quería casarse con ella. Era verdad." Historia contada con cierto sentido del humor, narrada por Millicent, vecina de Dorrie, aunque deja un cierto regusto amargo.- LA VIRGEN ALBANESA (****). Por una parte tenemos a una turista que ha sido secuestrada en albania, donde tendrá que integrarse a la fuerza al pueblo campesino al que es llevada. Y por otra parte tenemos una librera que está escuchando una interesante historia ocurrida en Albania... Me gustó más esta parte.- SECRETOS A VOCES (*****). En este caso también tenemos trama y subtrama. La subtrama trata sobre la reciente desaparición de una chica cuando iba con sus compañeras y la señorita Johnstone de excursión. La trama nos habla de Maureen, antigua alumna y que también recuerda a la Johnstone, y de su marido, gran abogado, que vive retirado a medias debido a una parálisis. Imprescindible.- EL JACK RANDA HOTEL (*****). Gail está en un avión cuyo destino conoceremos más tarde. Will, su pareja, la ha dejado. Se trata de un gran relato donde prima la ambición de Gail por conseguir lo que desea, a toda costa.- ESTACIÓN DEL VÍA CRUCIS (*****). En 1852, dos hermanos de Hurón del Norte piden, con la ayuda de la recomendación de un sacerdote, les envíen dos muchachas casaderas. De nuevo la maestría de Munro brilla en este cuento a la hora de ir monstrándonos los acontecimientos.- HAN LLEGADO NAVES ESPACIALES (***). La historia cuenta cómo Rhea conoció a Eunie y se hieceron amigas. Ahora, con más edad, Rhea está con su novio Billy Doud y su amigo Wayne, novio de Lucille, en casa del contrabandista Monk, bebiendo y pasando el rato, justo la noche de la desaparición de Eunie.- VÁNDALOS (****). Bea y Ladner, Liza y Warren, son personajes que ocultan más de lo que se pueda apreciar en un primer momento. Todo empezó cuando Bea le pidió un pequeño favor a Liza...Este libro de Alice Munro me ha gustado mucho, y no cabe duda de que volveré a leer más cuentos suyos.
My first Munro. A good thing? A bad thing? I acquired her books before the Nobel Prize pronouncement, but only got around to reading them after. I'm the sort that often needs to be led by the nose like that.I'm reiterating a common complaint when I say that reviewing short story collections is difficult, but still. I thought my luck with finding my way through O'Connor's The Complete Stories heralded a new found ability to transition between varying lengths, but whereas O'Connor drives you into a corner again and again until you either get out or go insane, Munro floats.Or slides. I found myself looking thorough beginnings and middles and ends, trying to orient around what exactly I thought of each, wondering if my speed of reading had impacted my understanding more than I thought. But no, it's all there, especially here, in a story titled The Albanian Virgin: We have been very happy.I have often felt completely alone.There is always in this life something to discover.The days and the years have gone by in some sort of blur.On the whole, I am satisfied.Most of the people in Munro's world don't know what they want. They'll write letters and marry others that they'll most certainly cheat on and live on in a summary after the facts of the matter are through. It's not so simple as all that, though, as here it is my "show, not tell" spiel come back to bite me as Munro leads me through each and every story without ever really giving up the ghost. Several oddities of event and character that both entertained and sent my thinking into a frenzy, a few literature references that I latched onto like a lighthouse, but otherwise I left off each ending with a "Well." You could look up from your life of the moment and feel the world crackling beyond the walls.I'd say that they're peaceful, but they're not. I'd say that they're the small town honings as Munro is so often characterized by, but it's not, or at least is far more sedate and uncanny and lush. It's that crackle that I'm trying to find the words for, but have the feeling that it'll take me a few more collections to pin it down to the count. In the meantime, I'll leave behind the idea that the music of Ludovico Einaudi goes a fair way in evoking the same theme of emotion, and send you on your way. Often these sentences seemed so satisfying to me, or so elusive and lovely, that I could not help abandoning all the surrounding words and giving myself up to a peculiar state.
What do You think about Open Secrets (1995)?
Great collection of stories. So intimate, and familiar. I am always seeing my own life in her characters, settings, descriptions. Most of her stories are set in Canada, and I am in New England, and I've found the 'sentiments' of the two locales are very similar. And perhaps someone in Texas or Florida would feel the same way. She takes a simple character or situation and enlarges it so; it's like using a microscope - the kind called a binocular microscope used to view larger small things like crystals or a butterfly's head - and draws everything in so real, sharp and close. It's uncanny how she does it. I adore her stories and I will be reading more of her until I've read it all.
—Jaksen
Some spoilers here, beware...It's hard to know what to say about the work of Alice Munro simply because it is so astonishing and distinctive. As one of the blurbs on _The Love of a Good Woman_ says, she has her own, particular magic. Often during my reading of _Open Secrets_ I would stop and stare out the window, trying to wrap my mind around her method. She definitely does proceed by a method. It allows her to make web-like stories in which events unfold here and then there, out of traditional narrative sequence, as little or big surprises. Some of the surprises, like the escape of the Albanian virgin, are material; others are revelations or changes of heart, as Enid has in "The Love of a Good Woman," toward Rupert. We often learn why people have behaved in a certain way, or get a hint about why, after the fact, as in "The Vandals." New characters emerge from the narrative mist and gain outlines and connections to others through memory, back story, travel. There are Salinger-like, period or regional behaviors--lots of drinking, infidelity, but crafted with more womanly understanding and disdain than Salinger's sometimes glaring and unified light bares. Her descriptions of characters' appearances are often unflattering or cold-hearted, but to realism's benefit, they mirror how we judge one another.Some of the blurbs and so on that I've read about Munro's work mention that she writes about ordinary people or reveals our human nature somehow. One of them said that in her stories, nothing much happens. But in fact, her characters are extraordinary, they are almost alien, and _plenty_ happens. "Spaceships Have Landed" is a kind of allegory for this weirdness. And it's not that her worlds are alien to ours, but that they show ours and us to be alien. I'm in the middle of "Jakarta," in _The Love of a Good Woman_ now. Did Cottar really die? It's literary soap opera of the highest order. And highly recommended.
—Stephanie
Open Secrets by Alice Munro is a collection of her stories published in 1994 that I had not read before, which was something of a surprise to me since I’ve read so much of her work with so much pleasure.Here she continues to achieve her almost novelistic effects in the most deceptively simple way: she often sticks to one location in rural Canada, a mill town on the way down, she builds significant changes in time into her narratives, and she manages to conclude her stories with a sense that the fullness of a life has now been revealed.One story, “The Albanian Virgin,” is a classic captivity story that almost seduces the captive—a woman—into accepting her fate but for the intervention of a Franciscan priest, who, one speculates, connects with her in freedom later on.Another story, “The Jack Randa Hotel,” plays a game of hide-and-seek between a separated couple who have to travel from Canada to Australia to reach one another. Or maybe it’s a game of tag . . . could be.Munro writes with specificity about faces, moods, landscapes, and characteristics. Her subjects have not yet found the homogenizing effect of Prozac and other hi-tech drugs that squeeze the weirdness out of them. A girl from an orphanage is married to a young man setting out in the wilds to build a farm with his brother, but as the story unfolds, great uncertainty develops as to how the young married man actually died. At the end, we know, although the girl from the orphanage still keeps many secrets to herself.I particularly like two tricks Munro plays with time: Sometimes she shifts into the present tense without explanation, only to return to the past tense, also without explanation. No explanation is necessary, of course. The present tense, when used judiciously, intensifies a story. Munro also occasionally drops a piece of a narrative in a spot that is chronologically all wrong but creates an out-of-time fulness and completion, even though it suggests the same story, the one that has just been told, is now going to be told all over again.Without a doubt, Munro is a lady, meaning a gentlewoman, but her writing can be earthy and spicy and quite realistic about old men who want their younger wives to talk dirty to them or boys who want to jump girls so bad they call them ugly first, as if to drive them away, not embrace them.Not infrequently Munro flashes forward toward the end of a story to show how things turned out decades after the main events. Two things stand out about this: the characters have gotten old and feeble and suffered many losses . . . and hypocrites usually receive what they always had coming to them.Perhaps Munro’s effectiveness in deploying all these techniques lies in the humbleness and unpretentiousness of her principal characters and settings and her straightforward, clean style.She goes to the heart of the matter—how life grabs you there and makes your pulse race or seize up. She’s not a writer who blinks at joy or misery. She lets each have its due.
—Robert
