I’m almost finished with a collection of stories by Alice Munro. They – or at least those people who take it upon themselves to decide these things – describe her as a writer of short stories but I think they are wrong. The words on the page, collected under one title, may not be many but the stories are not short. They are just a piece of a much larger whole. It is as though she has baked a large, entire cake or pie, but she keeps her baked goods back in the kitchen, only just cutting you a thin slice and laying it out for you in the dining room. Just that slice from the larger cake. Her stories are just slices of entire novels and after you have finished reading them you come away knowing everything about the people in the stories – their entire lives described in just one slice. I can understand why she won the Nobel prize – to be able to write like that!

I usually choose to read science fiction – novels about other places, often in outer space, on other planets, sometimes even on our own planet. But no matter what the setting or even the species being written about, the stories are actually about the human condition, if they are any good that is. Alice Monro writes science fiction (though perhaps without the science part). I usually sit on the subway, on my way to work when I read and that is where I’ve been reading most of this particular book. As I approach my subway stop, I turn down the corner of the page to save my place. I stuff the book back in my carryall and then I look up. For a moment, I don’t know where I am. It takes me awhile to orient myself back to the Universitet subway station, to the opening car doors, to the mass of people standing up and exiting the train. Because I have been up till that point, far away, inhabiting one of the small worlds of Alice Monro’s creation and it takes me some time to come back to my own world.