The Swedes Tipped Their Hats to a Canajan Author!

“Grattis” to Alice Munro for winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, this year!  I once met a Nobel Prize-winning economist, during an awful winter snow storm. He was the patriarch of our next door neighbor’s family —  when we were mainlanders — and his 18 year old grand-daughter truly deserved a medal, too, for her exceptional kindness and  generosity, when she plodded through the snow and gave us the keys to her snow-ready car, so we could plow through the messy streets and refill our refrigerator.  Emily’s grandfather, Daniel McFadden, won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2000, and we all sat at a dinner table with him and his lovely wife, 13 years later, and asked lots of questions, after we dropped off the keys. Very  grateful for Emily’s epic neighborliness — and the chance to have dessert with a man who gave his proud family the best possible reason to fly to Stockholm.

I’ve never been to Sweden, but I sent faxes to my client/friend Maestro Sixten Ehrling when he flew home to collect his own honors and needed copies of this and that. And I’ve only read one Alice Munro short story, but I’m going to pick up one of her books after all the dead banana leaves get  picked up, to discover why she’s been dubbed “Chekhov reborn.”

Imagine what the Nobel Prize judges were saying as they threw around the options! Oh, to have heard all the possibilities, the arguments so carefully detailed —  almost as nerve-gasping as Alice Munro felt when they woke her up with the news!  “It just seems impossible,” she said. “It seems just so splendid a thing to happen, I can’t describe it. It’s more than I can say.” *

www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2000/mcfadden-bio.html

* www.nytimes.com/2013/10/11/books/alice-munro-wins-nobel-prize-in-literature.html