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  3. After the first 10 short stories in her new collection, Alice Munro inserts a single paragraph on an otherwise blank page, under

After the first 10 short stories in her new collection, Alice Munro inserts a single paragraph on an otherwise blank page, under

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问题     After the first 10 short stories in her new collection, Alice Munro inserts a single paragraph on an otherwise blank page, under the heading, Finale: "The final four works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last—and the closest—things I have to say about my own life. "
    What follows is a subversive (颠覆性的) challenge to the idea of autobiography: a purposeful melding of fact, fiction and feeling. Like Muriel Spark’s Curriculum Vitae and Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost, Munro’s "final four works" will loom like megaliths over all who pick up their pens to write about her in the future.
    "Dear Life" describes the house Munro lived in when she was growing up in Wingham, Ontario, where her mother was a schoolteacher and her father a fur and poultry farmer. "This is not a story, only life, " she notes, signalling the pathways, names, coincidences that might have been woven into her fiction, but here are present as memories.
    "Night" revisits Munro’s childhood insomnia. Sleeping on a bunk above her younger sister she became frightened of the thought that it would be quite easy to strangle her in the night. Caught walking outside on the porch by her father, also insomniac, Munro remembers confessing her disturbing vision of sororicide. "He said, ’People have those kinds of thoughts sometimes.’ He said this quite seriously and without any sort of alarm or jumpy surprise… People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life."
    "Voices" recalls a visit to a local dance with Munro’s mother that was cut short due to the presence of a mature local prostitute and one of her girls. Munro overheard two air force men from Port Albert comforting the girl on the stairs and stroking her thigh: "I had never in my life heard a man speak in that way, treating a woman as if she was so fine and valued a creature that whatever it was, whatever unkindness had come near her, was somehow a breach of a law, a sin."
    "The Eye" is the most majestic of Munro’s monuments to memory. She remembers being taken, the year she started school, to see the dead body of a young woman whom her mother had hired to help after the birth of Munro’s younger siblings. Encouraged to look into the coffin, she thought she saw the young woman slightly open one eye: a private signal to her alone. "Good for you, " her mother said, as they left the grieving household.
    It is fascinating to compare this with the end of the story "Amundsen" earlier in the collection. Two people who were lovers long ago meet unexpectedly crossing a Toronto street.
    The man opens one of his eyes slightly wider than the other and asks, "How are you?" "Happy, " she says. "Good for you, " he replies.
    In this book, Munro has laid bare the foundations of her fiction as never before. Lovers of her writing must hope this is not, in fact, her finale. But if it is, it’s spectacular.
What is the author’s attitude towards Munro’s book?
选项 A、Neutral.
B、Sarcastic.
C、Preferred.
D、Reserved.
答案C
解析
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