Ulf Olsson reviews Alice Munro's "Women's Life."

RECENSION | NOVEL. A book about a world populated by people "who did not need to say or do anything remarkable"? Alice Munro Created in the "Women's Life" such a world, but it does so that people's lives seem to be "sad, simple, astonishing and incomprehensible" – to quote Munro's own summary.

It's existence, in the form of a Canadian hook, as it appears before the middle class empties it, lava it and disinfects it. Here, you crush small frogs in your hand, fix the eye of the dead cow floating in the water, a world of trash and garbage, work and wrecks. "Well-prepared girls have scared my life," as the narrator says.

In fact, the book, like the original, should be called "Girls and Women's Life": the narrator Del Jordan is barely an adult at the end of the book. She saw the girl's life and, as she says about her mother: "alert but ignored, as an anthropologist who noted the appearance of a primitive tribe". It's a world where men are like "tree trunks to cross", where the border between men's and women's work is rocky and where women's conversations can be "like a river that never dried up. Part of life in a women's world: Father and brother live in another house and in a different but parallel world.

READ MORE – Amanda Svensson: Alice Munro is a woman who writes about women

The road of the subclass

This is the only novel and other book by Munro, Nobel laureate (but actually a sequel to novels). But it is already characterized by the championship capable of turning a glance into exact language. What makes this language create a world of touch and body. And like Rose-Marie Nielsens The soft translation allows us to enjoy.

And since it is a source of growth, the body and sexuality are crucial. It's a day when boys start calling girls for "whores" and "fitters": "They told those who denied freedom to be what they wanted to be, which reduced them to what they thought they were, and what they were disguised. "Munro describes the trafficking of sexuality and desire, always influenced by issues of power and class.

"The life of women" traces the path of the underclass to an intellectual life in reading and writing. Throughout life, everything changes. As the mother tells Del, the life of women changes, the life of the animal is over. But "it depends on us for the change to be taken into account".

Alice Munro does not carry this ideological ideology, but stems from life unnoticed as an unshakable force. But there is no direct development, but a constant struggle for and for love, a struggle for the flesh, the body, for the right to define oneself. The very keyword suggests how the fight unfolds: "Yes, I said instead of thanking."

Ulf Olsson is a professor of literary science and cultural critic of Expressen.