Serena Dandini (photo by Gianmarco Chieregato).
CThere are literary jealousies stronger than many flesh-and-blood loves. Writers that we consider almost private, ours and no one else’s. It is a strange illness which, however, I discovered I have in common with other people, friends bewitched by certain bookish passions, to the point of not wanting to share this relationship with anyone, so intimate was the relationship with the authors who kept us company in sleepless nights or on long train journeys, or during sad vigils that unfortunately life sometimes forces us to do.
As if those volumes with which we shared such delicate moments of our existence had been written precisely and only for us, touching the most hidden chords of our solitude.
The queen of this strange effect of literary selfishness for me is undoubtedly Alice Munro one of the most famous contemporary authors of short stories who recently left us at the age of 93.
It was no coincidence that I felt a childish wave of jealousy when the Canadian writer won the well-deserved Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 thanks to this extraordinary talent of short narration. After an initial feeling of joy I immediately thought “So isn’t Alice Munro writing just for me?”.
Alice (Munro) of wonders
For years, I confess, I had carried on this almost clandestine relationship with his stories of women and girls, made up of sometimes infinitesimal details which however always resonated as an echo of my daily life, albeit so far from the Canadian province described in his books . Wonderful stories that tell everything by telling nothing.
Published in 1971, “The Lives of Girls and Women” is the only novel by Alice Munro, famous for her short stories
This is the magic of literature, the portentous effect of words that transport you to distant worlds, console and make you dream, and our Alice of wonders was an undisputed master in this saving transference that only good readings can operate. Today I am forced to admit it: luckily Alice Munro belongs to everyone!
The esteem, love and affection with which they have honored her since the day of her passing demonstrate how indispensable she was for generations of readers who I imagine, like me, had her as a travel and life companion at like a dear friend, one of those known in school and never abandoned again.
I come to terms with it and surrender to this group love, inviting those who don’t yet know her to devour her books: one is as good as the other, they are all beautiful.
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