The Late Mastery of Alice Munro
Victory in the Man Booker International Prize this year is at last beginning to bring the octogenarian Canadian author, Alice Munro, to a wider public in Europe. The title piece of her new collection of stories, Too Much Happiness, is the author's own break into the Old World, and unlike anything she has done before. Michael Gorra in the TLS hails Munro's late breakaway from rural Ontario into the life of a woman intellectual in Genoa, Nice, and Berlin. “Many great poets have lived and worked to a fine age,” writes Michael Gorra, but “few fiction-writers have.” Munro is joining an elite band of exceptions—Thomas Mann and John Updike perhaps among them.
Through Life with Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is branching out at a somewhat younger old age. Concerts by the 68-year-old Dylan, as TLS critic Wesley Stace discusses, are as common these days as those by the 28-year-old were not. Though seen more at the keyboard than on guitar, and often barely visible at all, he is winning laudatory reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, and a reputation which his admirers happily see as ever-changing. The master has “an eye on posterity” and is more prepared now “to meet the world halfway.” Stace reviews Revolution in the Air, a new book by one of Dylan's most fanatic fans, Clinton Heylin, and a set of poems from 1964 republished with their original Hollywood photographs by the creator of the Times They Are A-Changing cover, Barry Feinstein.
Samuel Johnson at 300
Any new biographer of Dr. Johnson has to deal with the Boswell version. Peter Martin has produced a new life to mark the 300th anniversary of the great man's birth. He is praised in the TLS for having “no axes to grind” and, unlike Boswell, not writing in competition with his subject. He does, however, apply a little correction to some famous stereotypes: less of the clubman, more of the man who admired women; less the Londoner, more the traveler; a literary hero who triumphs as much because of his old bodily infirmities as despite them.
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Peter Stothard is editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He was editor of The Times of London from 1992-2002. He writes about ancient and modern literature and is the author of Thirty Days, a Downing Street diary of his time with British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the Iraq war.
