Where to start

It does not matter.

You can start anywhere.

This is what Alice Munro says about reading stories.

When she picks up a work by a colleague, she sometimes starts reading it at the beginning, sometimes at the end, but most often somewhere in the middle.

Everyone says this method is surprising, but to her it seems perfectly reasonable.

Patrick Bahners

Features correspondent in Cologne and responsible for “humanities”.

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    It is surprising that this process should also be the right one for the products of their own work, stories whose genre is defined by their brevity. With novels you may be familiar with the practice of jumping right into the middle of the text to be able to assess whether you want to confide in the author for a long time. But you can read through a short story in one go without putting the book down. Shouldn't you then start at the beginning so that nothing escapes you and you can see how covers are made step by step until you have a whole in which all parts are on top of each other? Because therein lies the challenge of the genre, the opportunity of the economy: every detail can be concise.

    Alice Munro works quite a lot with the epic art device of anticipation, the advance notification of a chronologically later event.

    It happens, for example, in "Pictures of the Ice" in the volume "Friend of My Youth" ("Do you think it was love?") From 1990 that she is already in the first sentence of a story announces that the main character will suddenly die within a certain period of time.

    But apparently you don't even have to notice that, at least not yet, in order to read such a story and find your way around it. 

    Jumps in time force vigilance

    Actions have consequences. No, one has to be more precise: actions are attributed to consequences. Anyone who talks about actions has already started to tell. And this is where needs and expectations come into play, for which trivial placeholder words such as meaning stand. A short story in the classic sense of the profession whose master Alice Munro received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 is a causality machine, an ad hoc device for sorting actions and consequences. While the cogs in the well-constructed story purr, the narrated events are stamped with meanings. A short story approaches the poem, since every detail can also be understood figuratively.

    The most striking characteristic of Alice Munro's narrative style is the leaps in time. One has to be careful to get an idea of ​​what happened; it has something of a thriller about it, to which the small-town backdrop of the Ontario hinterland fits, a generic landscape peppered with English place names, so to speak, which even its own residents deny any picturesque charm. While following Munro's narrator characters through their nested flashbacks, one will also make sense of what has been heard beyond the context of the plot. What does it all mean? This question arises particularly early on in a short story. As in a crime thriller, preliminary answers can be found by combinatorics, by collecting clues.