So Alice Munro has won the Nobel Prize for Literature 2013, and everybody is content as they should be because: the first Canadian, a woman with grey hair and bright eyes, a “master of the short form” is something to be content about. A good thing. Well, I was bored. I read two stories of her collection Too Much Happiness, and it was a bit like listening to a middle school teacher sitting around the supper table with a few friends, most of them middle school teachers or wifes of middle school teachers, and telling them about this woman Doree, what a story, listen to this, the poor gal, but listen closely, this is literature, so you better pay attention. There is so much going on, there is so much hidden. Did you catch my magic trick? I know that a lot of writers admire Alice Munro, even some writers that I admire, and that is all fine. She is good at what she is doing. Like there are people who are really good at wood carving. Or gardening. Or cooking. The strange thing about her prose is that I felt better knowing that she writes good books than actually reading these stories. They are very traditional in the sense that they pretend that life is something that can or should be described, brick after brick, that’s how you build a life, and even if it crumbles you can tell that it crumbles, because you see the debris, the ashes, the ruin – then you pick up the stones and bricks and go on building. It is the realism of the mid-fifties. Nice. Fine. But why today? Is this the way we see the world today? Is this the way the world works? Or is this the way that newspapers for example suggest us the world works? That you have a name and a fate and the things that you do are the things that you do and that is it? I guess writers that I admire like David Foster Wallace or George Saunders just have gone so much further in treating the short story as something of a weapon against the world, a transgressive instrument, a cruel little thing, a fling, there is so much aggressiveness in what they do or did, so much openess, so much strenght of the form that comes from the doubt of what they are doing – and Munro still and stubbornly believes in the power of Literature, the unique position of the writer, the healing of the hurt. This is what she got the price for. Make believe.