Practice IOC: Boys and Girls by Alice Munro

Don't judge too harshly...

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6ZfRT_ZZ7MbeGlKd01mUDdoc0k

Alice Munro: Capturing the subconscious struggle (of women?)

For a slow reader like me, trying to read through half a story of description only to get another 20 extra pages of actually interesting things, well... puts me to sleep most of the time frankly. But that usually happens to me with all books unless something interesting's happening. But when I really get into it it's very... interesting. It reminds me of the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. Something that probably has to do with the fact that they both choose rural settings (at least in the Márquez stories I've read). But something about their writing styles just feels very different... Maybe it's because Márquez is in Spanish and Munro in English, but Márquez is kind of like in sepia, while Munro is in a combination of dim and melancholic colors... still similar though, wouldn't you say? It probably has something to do with me perceiving the Canadian countryside to be much more lush, foresty green than the Latin American one, but well who knows. Point is I only just recently realized that and I found it interesting. Interesting that halfway through the Alice Munro stories that I've read I am subconsciously captured by the action of the story and the sleepiness no longer creeps in...

So how does that work? Well, my thought is that Munro (and I won't talk about Márquez anymore, because I haven't really read much of him anyway, much less analyzed his work) writes about the human subconscious. But she doesn't do so in a direct way. Instead she explores the human subconscious and perhaps more specifically, the female subconscious through her short stories of melancholic stories and seemingly uninteresting first halves that are spent mostly on descriptions and on some past event (jks, she gets creative with these descriptions and keeps it interesting. No way she would've gotten a Nobel prize with lousy half-half short stories). So back to the point I wanted to actually talk about in this paragraph: it would seem that (for me) halfway through the story some subconscious happening takes place within the universe of Munro's story that secretly captures me and makes me want to find out more. The passionate and often irrational decisions that the characters take without knowing why. The apparent suffering of not understanding why everyone behaves the way they do. I find it quite interesting, even if it's subconscious, to try to understand what on Earth is happening inside the heads of these characters Munro has created. Now that is real life complexity captured in a few thousand words. I take away any bad comment I might've said about Munro before this. 

Now then, since obviously this blogpost can't be all my personal experience and I have to eventually relate this back to the title and the foreshadowing of the theme of feminism I attempted to do on the last paragraph. Truth is, for some reason it seems that either men haven't realized that they are powerless before a woman or women haven't realized just how much power they actually have in their hands (sorry, I know , because it seems that when we talk about "Women's Literature" minds tend to be filled with the idea of the oppression of women by the more dominant male a-bit-less-than-half section of the population and the heroic story of Feminism and how it has helped women claim the position they deserve. But the thing is, all of this social oppression on women is something that has been recognized far and wide, and I mean, I never saw a single person in Venezuela tell a girl or woman to go to the kitchen or whatever if it wasn't to crack a joke and have a good time. Western society has caught on to the whole unfairness of the issue, and slowly but surely the entire world is making progress toward that so cherished social equality. But Munro shows us a different aspect of the picture. 

Alice Munro doesn't really write about Feminism, and if my memory is wirkin beter tahn my typing skills at this hour in the morning, she doesn't identify herself as a Feminist writer either. Alice Munro writes about humanity, about issues that we can all identify with. But her being a woman who grew up in the 20th century, she has a lot of views on the world that have been shaped by her experiences as a child. The expectations that people had of her and all other women. The inevitable ignorance of countryside folk. And as any good artist should do, she writes from her heart about the things that have happened in her own life. The things she knows the true emotions of and thus is able to so skillfully portray them. And included among all this is the subconscious struggle of women in society. And even though this struggle comes as a repercussion of the way women have been treated by society, these struggles stretch far deeper than simply trying to achieve equality in society. Alice Munro writes about those mental struggles. She writes about the incomprehensible, those impulses of the heart that we can't put into words but that she can put into stories. Short stories. The deep and complex realism of her stories is simply the perfect tool to convey the mental struggles that women go in their lives. Whether they are related to Feminism or not is, I believe, up to personal opinion. Then again, an author can easily convey meanings that weren't intended. After all as videogames (the type of "book" that I grew up with (some videogames have good stories, trust me (don't judge))) have taught me, you can never fully understand another human being. So in that sense it is impossible for us to ever fully grasp the full length meaning of Munro's stories with our souls. But there are things we can learn. About struggles. And even Feminism. Maybe. Maybe I should just generalize it and throw everything into that box popularly labeled "life." Because maybe, women's struggles are more related to life than female oppression... which is then again a part of life anyway... ok I'll just stop there.