The world's best story writer

Canadian Alice Munro has written only one novel, "Lives of Girls and Women", but her 11 collections of short stories have roused other writers to compare her to Tolstoy and Chekhov.

She has revolutionised the form. Short stories were originally written for magazines, but hers can go on for 60 or 70 pages. She has an intense sense of place, mostly western Ontario and Vancouver, and she loves to play with time: A story might start with a middle-aged woman reflecting on childhood memories, flash forward to an old-age home, spin back to her teenage prime.

In her latest collection of stories, "The View from Castle Rock", she's added another innovative twist, combining family history, personal memoir and fiction.

She began collecting information about her Scottish ancestors, the Laidlaws, and how they immigrated to the wilds of Canada in 1818.

"I put all this material together over the years, and almost without my noticing what was happening, it began to shape itself, here and there, into something like stories," she writes in her introduction.

Meanwhile, there were other stories she had not included in other collections because they were closer to personal memoir than fiction.

"I was doing something closer to what a memoir does - exploring a life, my own life, but not in an austere or rigorously factual way. I put myself in the center and wrote about that self, as searchingly as I could. But the figures around this self took on their own life and color and did things they had not done in reality...

"These are stories.

"You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on."     

  The tale opens with Munro searching a cemetery in rural Scotland for the gravestone of her great-great-great-great grandfather, born at the end of the 17th century.

William Laidlaw was known as Will O'Phaup, from the name of the farm he took over in hardscrabble Ettrick Valley. He was a man of great local fame for feats of running and strength. Descended from him were noted preacher Thomas Boston and poet James Hogg, a friend of Robert Burns.

Various family members wrote diaries and memoirs that help Munro follow their progress across the Atlantic and into the wilderness of Canada.

A third of the way through the book we come to "Working for a Living", the story of her father who left high school, abandoned farming and turned to trapping as a way of life. Later with his enterprising wife he set up a mink and fox farm that got them through the Depression but would eventually fail.

In the end he settled happily for a night watchman's job in a local foundry and set down his own memoirs of the family. By this time his daughter had become a famous writer.

In "Fathers", she reflects: "My father did not swear. He was a man of honor and competence and humor, and he was the parent I sorely wanted to please. I did not hate him, could not consider hating him. Instead, I saw what he hated in me. A shaky arrogance in my nature, something brazen yet cowardly, that woke in him this fury." 

Halfway through the book, the story shifts to Alice Munro. She's 60 and driving with her husband past a boarded-up rural store when she remembers eating an ice-cream cone while driving with her father to a lakeside hotel, where her mother had spent the summer of 1941 selling fox and mink furs to American tourists.

In "Lying Under the Apple Tree", we get the story of her first love, a stable boy who would become a soldier in World War II and a successful construction contractor afterward, last glimpsed at a high-school reunion many years later. 

There is the summer of 1951 in "Hired Girl", when she's in her last year of high school and hired as a maid at a rich family's summer home, where she's introduced to a stern and sophisticated class system.

And at the end of the book, a false cancer scare prompts her to ponder:

"Such frights will come and go.

"Then there will be one that won't. One that won't go.

"But for now, the corn is in tassel, the height of summer passing, time opening out with room again for tiffs and trivialities. No more hard edges on the days, no sense of fate buzzing around in your veins like a swarm of tiny and relentless insects. Back to where no great change seems to be promised beyond the change of seasons. Some raggedness, carelessness, even a casual possibility of boredom again in the reaches of earth and sky."

Alice Munro is 75 now and has recently said that this may be her last book. All we can do is pray it ain't so.