nettles荨麻

Nettles
Time：1979
Setting：Sunny’s
house in Uxbridge,
Ontario, Canada Characters: The narrator, Mike, Sunny, etc. The plot: the climax and the epiphany The theme?
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) No Love Lost (2003) Vintage Munro (2004) Runaway (2004) Carried Away: A Selection of Stories ( 2006) The View from Castle Rock (2006,memoir) Too Much Happiness (2009) （Man Booker International Prize ）
Writing style
In Munro stories, as in Chekov's, plot is secondary and "little happens." As with Chekov, Garan Holcombe notes: "All is based on the epiphanic moment, the sudden enlightenment, the concise, subtle, revelatory detail." Munro's work deals with "love and work, and the failings of both. She shares Chekov’s obsession with time and our much-lamented inability to delay or prevent its relentless movement forward.“ Alice Munro, Fiction, “Nettles,” The New Yorker, February 21, 2000, p. 254
Nettles



荨麻 【英文名】Nettle 【别名】蜇人草、咬人草、蝎子草，防盗草、无情草、 植物猫、咬人猫 【分类】荨麻科 Urticaceae，荨麻属 Urtica L. 【习性】喜阴植物，生命旺盛，生长迅速，对土壤要 求不严，喜温喜湿。 【生境分布】广泛分布于亚欧大陆，在我国分布在云 南中部、贵州、四川东南部、湖北和浙江。

About the story “ Nettles”
The
short story “ Nettles”, which first appeared in New Yorker in 2000, is included in this book. In this story, the author uses first person narration. The plot of story evolves around a middle-aged woman’s reunion with a childhood boy friend in 1979, but it moves back and forth between past and present. Like most other stories by Munro, the leading actor is a woman.
Nettles
Alice Munro
黄美、王佳迪、方雨娟、尹华华、 胡谦、徐傲
Alice Munro(1931-)

a Canadian short-story writer and three-time winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Award（加拿大 总督文学奖）for fiction. Her stories focus on human relationships looked at through the lens of daily life. While most of Munro’s fiction is set in Southwestern Ontario and the Canadian Pacific Northwest, her reputation as a short-story writer is international. Her "accessible, moving stories" explore human complexities in a seemingly effortless style. Munro's writing has established her as "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction," or, as Cynthia Ozick put it, "our Chekhov."
The
Progress of Love (1986) Friend of My Youth (1990) Open Secrets (1994) Good Selected Stories (1996) The Love of a Woman (1998)
Works by Alice Munro
Para
13. How all my own territory would be altered, as if a landside had gone through it and skimmed off all meaning except loss of Mike:
The
implied meaning of this sentence is that the impact of Mike’s leaving on my life was beyond my imagination. I didn’t expect that Mike’s leaving would have such a tremendous power that it would change the meaning of my existence completely. All my thoughts were about loss of Mike.
word “nettles” in the story has two meanings: Literary meaning: the plant with rough leaves that sting people. Figurative meaning: something to irritate and annoy people. The narrator is comparing subtlety and complexity of life, human relationships etc. to the effects of nettles.

Works by Alice Munro

Dance of the Happy Shades (1968)
《荫影之舞》，first collection of stories， Governor General‘s Award

Lives of Girls and Women (1971)
《姑娘们和妇Hale Waihona Puke 们》 Para91
is essential for understanding the meaning of the title of the story. While they were driving back, Mike and the narrator noticed an itch or burning on their bare forearms, the backs of their hands and around their ankles. She remembered the nettles . But those plants with big pinkish-purple flowers are not nettles. They are called joe-pye weeds.
加拿大总督文学奖堪称是加拿大最大的国家级文学奖，每年评选 一次，由评审从上千件的英语、法语作品中评选出入围作品与得主， 颁给小说、戏剧、非小说、儿童文学(文字和插图)、诗歌及翻译六大 奖项。 从1937年到现在，加拿大总督文学奖在奖项和奖金等方面都有 所不同。例如1937年的第一届得奖者是没有奖金的，1951年才开始 有250元美金的奖金鼓励，2000年之后则提高到15,000元美金；2005 年开始，除奖金之外，得奖作品经手工制作成皮革装版本后，颁赠给 得主；出版商也能得到3,000元美金作为推广作品的经费；入围者则 可获得1,000元美金。 因此，现在的奖金总额已经超过30万元美金。 在奖项范围方面，1937年仅限于用英语写作或从法语翻成英语 的小说、非小说、诗歌、戏剧，到1959年加拿大艺术委员会(Canada Council for the Arts)接掌此文学奖的运作后，在该年增加了以法语写 作作品之奖项；1987年又增加儿童文学(文字)和儿童文学(插图)等两 个奖项。
Cultural notes:
1.
Uxbridge, Ontario
Ontario
Ontario is Canada's second largest province, covering more than one million square kilometers, an area larger than France and Spain combined. More than 12 million people live in Ontario. The province is bounded by Quebec on the east, Manitoba on the west, Hudson Bay and James Bay on the north, and the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes on the south.