Alice Munro and her Drowning Women
Emily Bronte's 1847 classic "Wuthering Heights", released under the male pseudonym "Ellis Bell" is remembered for its complex protagonists, its gothic elements and the young age in which the author passed (she was thirty). But what caught Alice Munro's attention was Bronte's vivid descriptions of the farm, the house, the fields, the little brooks where the snow was melting more than the dark brooding Heathcliff or the sad eerie Cathy who caught mine. Canadian short story writer and Nobel prize winner Alice Munro passed away on 13th May this year aged 92, releasing 14 collection of short stories, most of them a staggering 40 page long. (A. Muthuligam in his interview with Munro quips that her stories hardly featured in Tamil since its magazines hesitated to publish lengthy works). Her works revolved around the lives of ordinary men, women and children, in rural or small town Canada, mirroring the regions where she grew up. ‘I don’t take up a story and fol...