WOOHOO!!!

And the Nobel for Literature goes to...
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Alice Munro!!! :)
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First time the Nobel has gone to an author i already love (as opposed to my discovering the author because of the Nobel).
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Can't even remember now what made me pick up her work a couple of years ago. But i've been telling all my literary friends about her ever since. Amazing short stories. So much skill, and so much work, and so skillfully hidden too.
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Will gush more later. For the moment, here's something i wrote just 2 months ago about her work, and what it made me realise about Singapore:
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"I first lighted upon this theory about Singapore’s space issues, oddly enough, when reading Canadian writer Alice Munro last year. I like her writing, and admire it very much. But there was always something about it, a certain je nais se quoi, that I found alien to my experience, and that prevented me from identifying with her work. After thinking about it, I finally pinned it down – it was a spaciousness in her short stories, a sense of almost limitless possibility that found its metaphorical equivalent in the wide open spaces of the Canadian wilderness, the long train journeys that her characters took from one small town to the next. It was the sense that an individual could literally just walk out of her house, and disappear, uproot herself entirely, leave no trace, move somewhere else and start entirely anew, reinvent herself, find new friends, new family, new community. Things just happened in her stories: anything was possible, all kinds of weird shit, random irruptions in the plot, seemingly unconnected with anything else in the usual narrative sense – and yet it appeared all of a piece with that vast, implacable landscape across which her characters moved. There’s something frightening yet very liberating about it. It struck me then that we don’t have that luxurious freedom in Singapore – and that the absence of that luxury is entirely tied to our limitations of space. I think it was around that time that I finally stopped kicking against the goads of what this island is and can be, when I finally accepted that I could either take it on its terms, or move to another place elsewhere whose terms I find more congenial."

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