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NIKOLA TUTEK Algerian erroneous, but the notary public? goes even further expressing his doubt that Gjurdhi is a retired terrorist. Ihese false notions about Charlotte and Gjurdhi pretty much summarize the usual prejudice that westerners express towards immigrants from the east. Besides the false notions on Charlotte and Gjurdhi, Munro provides a complex set of hints that partially point towards that part of Charlotte’s, and especially Gjurdhi’s real attitude, which is opposed to total assimilation. For example, in several instances Gjurdhi is described as a bit of a nervous, energetic yet withdrawn old man with strong gesticulations and facial expressions, clearly pointing towards a southern European mentality. The most important, in that sense, is the instance when the narrator is invited for a dinner by Charlotte, and the couple which live, not by accident, on Pandora Street. Charlotte and Gjurdhi prepared a dinner typical of Albania, which they ate with their fingers. Furthermore, Gjurdhi sat on the floor and scooped the rice up with bread. Once more, Munro used clothing and food to point out some crucial features of her literary characters. In the end, Gjurdhi’s attempt to haggle with the narrator over the price of a book comes as the final, and somehwhat blunt proof of his cultural otherness. However, there is yet another example of assimilation in the story, namely that of the narrator. The narrator moved to Victoria, British Columbia just to be far away from Ontario, where the end of both her marriage and her love affair took place. In a way, the narrator was also assimilated in the new city, the new part of the country, a new job and lifestyle. Finally, the narrator was significantly influenced in her perception of culture by Charlotte’s story, adding to the complex mesh of cultural assimilation and appropriation presented in Munro’s story. Binary oppositions used in depictions of a culture By binary oppositions I consider couples of opposed semantic bundles referring to characters, places and culture created by Alice Munro to express differences in literary worlds and emotional gains/losses, which come as a result of the direct decisions of the characters or are part of their unavoidable destiny. This type of parallelism is typical of Munro’s writing, and is connected to what Loschnigg calls the deceitful “surface solidity” in the sense that almost every Munrovian plot provides several versions of itself, none of them presented or confirmed as the definite truth. Such binary oppositions in “The Albanian 42 Interestingly enough, the Notary Public gets attacked and beaten up but not robbed, as if from an act of revenge, by an unknown perpetrator. This leaves space for the readers to practice their own cultural prejudice and cast doubt on Gjurdhi. Maria Löschnigg, The Contemporary Canadian Short Story in English. Continuity and Change, Trier, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2014, 23. 43 + 92 +
