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Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
By the time of his early death in 1988, Raymond Carver had established himself as one of the greatest practitioners of the American short story, a writer who had not only found his own voice but imprinted it in the imaginations of thousands of readers.
'Where I'm Calling From', his last collection, encompasses classic stories from 'Cathedral', 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love' and earlier Carver volumes, along with seven new works previosly unpublished in book form.
Together, these 37 stories give us a superb overview of Carver's life work and show us why he was so widely imitated but never equaled.
'Where I'm Calling From', his last collection, encompasses classic stories from 'Cathedral', 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love' and earlier Carver volumes, along with seven new works previosly unpublished in book form.
Together, these 37 stories give us a superb overview of Carver's life work and show us why he was so widely imitated but never equaled.
544 pages, Paperback
First published May 31, 1988
988 people are currently reading
19.2k people want to read
About the author
Raymond Carver
336?books4,944?followersCarver was born into a poverty-stricken family at the tail-end of the Depression. He married at 19, started a series of menial jobs and his own career of 'full-time drinking as a serious pursuit', a career that would eventually kill him. Constantly struggling to support his wife and family, Carver enrolled in a writing programme under author John Gardner in 1958. He saw this opportunity as a turning point.
Rejecting the more experimental fiction of the 60s and 70s, he pioneered a precisionist realism reinventing the American short story during the eighties, heading the line of so-called 'dirty realists' or 'K-mart realists'. Set in trailer parks and shopping malls, they are stories of banal lives that turn on a seemingly insignificant detail. Carver writes with meticulous economy, suddenly bringing a life into focus in a similar way to the paintings of Edward Hopper. As well as being a master of the short story, he was an accomplished poet publishing several highly acclaimed volumes.
After the 'line of demarcation' in Carver's life - 2 June 1977, the day he stopped drinking - his stories become increasingly more redemptive and expansive. Alcohol had eventually shattered his health, his work and his family - his first marriage effectively ending in 1978. He finally married his long-term parter Tess Gallagher (they met ten years earlier at a writers' conference in Dallas) in Reno, Nevada, less than two months before he eventually lost his fight with cancer.
Rejecting the more experimental fiction of the 60s and 70s, he pioneered a precisionist realism reinventing the American short story during the eighties, heading the line of so-called 'dirty realists' or 'K-mart realists'. Set in trailer parks and shopping malls, they are stories of banal lives that turn on a seemingly insignificant detail. Carver writes with meticulous economy, suddenly bringing a life into focus in a similar way to the paintings of Edward Hopper. As well as being a master of the short story, he was an accomplished poet publishing several highly acclaimed volumes.
After the 'line of demarcation' in Carver's life - 2 June 1977, the day he stopped drinking - his stories become increasingly more redemptive and expansive. Alcohol had eventually shattered his health, his work and his family - his first marriage effectively ending in 1978. He finally married his long-term parter Tess Gallagher (they met ten years earlier at a writers' conference in Dallas) in Reno, Nevada, less than two months before he eventually lost his fight with cancer.
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November 15, 2024
The typical profile of an American adult reader of literature is a college-educated professional making a decent salary in a choice environment such as the publishing industry, law office, consulting firm or college or university. But how about the other America, populated by men and women worlds away from ever reading literary works, men and women living in the raw-boned land of work boots, crap jobs, hard liquor, chain smokes, trailer camps, hollering from foul mouths and breakdowns from beat-up cars?
Well, welcome to Carver country. There are 37 stories in this Raymond Carver collection. As way of providing a taste of what the reader unfamiliar with the author might expect, here is a short write-up on four stories, each story vintage Raymond Carver:
THEY'RE NOT YOUR HUSBAND
Earl is a salesman "between jobs." Earl goes to the diner where his wife Doreen works as a waitress on the night shift. He overhears two men at the counter make less than flattering remarks about his wife's overly large posterior. Then, when Doreen leans over to scoop out ice cream, we read: "The white skirt yanked against her hips and crawled up her legs. What showed was girdle, and it was pink, thighs that were rumpled and gray and a little hairy, and veins that spread in a berserk display. The two men sitting beside Early exchanged looks."
The next morning Earl asks Doreen to go on a diet and lose a few pounds. Doreen agrees and Earl buys a scale and, with paper and pencil in hand, keeps close track when Doreen steps on the scale. Doreen has minimal success initially but then loses nearly 20 pounds over the next few weeks. At this point Earl returns to the dinner but what happens as he sits at the counter does not fit in with his plans of redemption. Ah, to have a wife other men find attractive and desirable!
FAT
A fat man sits alone at a restaurant table for his evening meal. He is so fat he would qualify for what we 21st century readers would term "morbidly obese." Unlike everyone else working at the restaurant, the cook, the busboy, the other waitresses, the narrator of the story who waits on his table is touched by the fat man's humanity. And the more trips to his table, the greater her compassion and understanding. We feel a kind of kinship with the narrator as she tells the story and speaks of the fat man's fat fingers, his puffing as he sits at the table, his referring to himself as "we." And when she is in bed that night with her boyfriend, we are given the sense that she is at the beginning of a life transformation as a result of her contact with the fat man.
NEIGHBORS
Bookkeeper Bill and secretary Arlene feel isolated and see themselves as stick-in-the-muds compared to frequent flyer, on-the-go salesman Jim and wife Harriet. Jim and Harriet go away on one of their many trips and, as per usual, leave their apartment key with their across-the-hall neighbors so Bill and Arlene can feed the cat and water the plants. Reasonable request; the courtesy and community of neighbors.
However, this time across-the-hall neighbors Bill and Arlene break routine, their envy and jealousy runneth over. First time in the apartment, Bill raids the medicine chest and pockets Harriet's pills and then moves to the living room and helps himself to a couple of good swigs of Jim's Scotch. Next time in, Bill commits even more extreme invasions of privacy. And then Arlene takes her turn invading privacy, an invasion leading to ,ooh, a naughty discovery. The story ends with an unexpected twist, leaving the reader with no doubts as to the depth of the couple's alienation and sadness.
VITAMINS
The narrator waxes floors during the night at the local hospital and lives with out-of-work Patti who, in her quest for self-respect via employment, resorts to selling vitamins door-to-door. After her initial success, Patti is promoted, given a crew of girls to oversee and an office in the local mall. But the vitamin job takes over Patti's life and she hates it, telling the narrator she even dreams of pitching vitamins to customers. Shella, one of the vitamin salesgirls loves Patti. Shella gets drunk and passes out at Patti's Christmas party. The next morning an injured Shella wants Patti to drive her to the hospital but the narrator won't let Shella wake up Patti. A cursing Shella walks out, never to be seen again.
The story continues and we as readers are given a clear view of a world where the quest for love is never a happy one and people fall back into listening to their favorite sentimental music and hard drinking, lots of hard drinking, with dreams of escape to such places as Portland or Phoenix. In Carver country what people are really trying to escape from are their own lives. The author captures their humanity and their despair in telling detail.
June 4, 2014
¡®It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.¡¯
Life has a way of breaking even the strongest of hearts, of dashing families, friendships and lovers against the cold rocks of reality, leaving hopes and dreams to drown beneath the waves of approaching days.Through his short life¡ªthe chord of life severed by his own vices¡ªRaymond Carver (May 25, 1938 ¨C August 2, 1988) created a body of work that dives into the wreckage of such lives to bring their stories back to the surface, giving a voice to the red-rimmed eyes of divorce and the hollow cavities of loneliness, addiction and remorse. These voices sing out in sweet simplicity; stories pared down to the bones of reality without need of any slick mechanics, fantastical ingredients, or even, on occasion, any concrete plotlines, to deliver a walloping punch to the readers gut and soul.Through a style forged in the flames of his tutelage under and the controversial editing of , Carver gives only the bare necessities of story in a deceptively small package permeated with an infinitude of universal messages about life and love while giving voice to a lower-to-middle class being strangled by finance, booze, love, and their own undoings.
Raymond Carver lived a life not unlike many of his own characters¡ªthe over-educated sorts working blue collar jobs and returning home to a spiraling hell of alcohol and matrimonial disquiet. Coming from a poverty stricken family, Carver grew up with books being a small but important comfort in his life. Marrying 16-year old Maryann Burk when he himself was 19, and bearing their first child a year later, the family spent years criss-crossing the country as Ray enrolled in creative writing courses and worked in sawmills, as a delivery man and janitor (many stories in Carver¡¯s first collection, , were written during his night janitorial shifts at a hospital) while his wife waited tables to help support his literary aspirations. The struggles and strife of a working family are illuminated all throughout his stories, and carry with them the deep-felt understanding of someone who has truly witnessed the ugly underbelly of existence. Carver breathes life into his characters with voice and action devoid of artifice or affectation, making them feel so realistic that they often take space in memory as if they were someone you had the misfortune of being stuck conversing with on a late night bus or barstool.
¡®That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.¡¯
What truly sets Carver apart is his signature simplistic delivery, often labeled ¡®minimalism¡¯ compared to authors such as ?. Prescribing the notion of ¡®show, don¡¯t tell¡¯, these stories fructify fantastically without much need of plot to take root in or description to germinate meaning, leaving ample opportunity for the reader to deduce motives and context as seeds in their own mind. While these stories may initially seem like nearly empty, four-wall cell of realism, with just enough lamplight to find their way about, anything additional would feel as bloated adornment or decorative furniture when all is needed is a quiet place to ponder and reflect. Even the beating heart of each story remains relatively hidden from sight, visualized through the spaces left by its absence or seen in quick, shadowy flashed lurking among the forest of words. Similar to the suitcase in the film Pulp Fiction, everything revolves around something that the characters understand and hold like a thorn in the hearts, yet we the readers are left in camera angles carefully placed as to obscure the contents inside.
The story ¡®Why Don¡¯t You Dance¡¯ is a prime example of Carver¡¯s seeming magic making, in which a man has reassembled the layout of his home in the front yard.
¡®No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put at just the right place.
-
Despite purgatorial settings of life surrounded by crumbling manors of marriage and drowning pools of booze, Carver¡¯s stories aren¡¯t aiming to sink the reader in pit of despair but to capture a bittersweet solace as the characters find a new meaning and perspective caught in a fleeting glimpse during their darker hours. There are incredibly beautiful moments that flower all around, and Carver has the ability to kill with a solitary line or observation. Distance, my personal favorite, features a young man leave his wife and sick child to go fishing, despite her vitriolic pleas against this.
Subtlety is the key to the power of each story. Carver delivers such angles as to completely mesmerize and pulls the emotional punch as if he were a magician making doves appear out of thin air. Distance is a story centered around a moment of reconciliation and happiness between a young couple, being told by the man in the present before he stands to gaze solemnly out the window.
The style that Carver has become known and loved¡ªor even hated, seeing as we live in a world where almost everything must inevitably come under the knife of detractors?has an interesting story of development. As evinced in his collection , containing early versions of the stories that saw the light of day in the re-titled collection , Carver was much more wordy and descriptive in his drafts than the Carver typically read. His first published story, Furious Seasons, has been stylistically compared to that of , yet Carver is known for minimalism. While enrolled in John Gardner¡¯s writing courses, Gardner recommended to use fifteen words in place of anything said in twenty five, and Gordon Lish would later advise reducing anything said in fifteen words to a mere five. Lish¡¯s editing of Carver for publication is a highly discussed and controversial topic?, as many stories were edited down by nearly half and arrived on the other side of Lish with major scenes (particularly scenes of emotional closure) removed. This is a discussion better suited for an upcoming review of Beginners, however, it is the sparse and sharp style of Carver that really grabs me. His later stories, especially those under the ¡®New Stories¡¯ section of Where I¡¯m Calling From are slightly beefier and lengthier and proceed towards more of a conclusive feel than the earlier ones. Before knowing any of this, I had remarked that Carver¡¯s stories felt like perfect classroom examples of what makes a good short story, and perhaps it is because so much was removed as to leave much open to interpretation, and much of this may be attributed to Lish's keen insight into knowing exactly what is necessary and what is, while still great¡ªI'm sure to a writer each blessed word and mark of punctuation is like a child born from their blood and having someone else feel some are disposible¡ªpossibly extraneous in a story that could be made into a lean and deadly beast of literary perfection. Regardless of any opinions on the editing, the style of these stories is outright perfection (and, personally, I find Lish to be the White Knight of the editing pen). They are a stealthy knife through the ribs rather than a walloping punch to the face, and the vagueness is what keeps them haunting your mind like a ghost for days to come.
These are stories that really spoke to me, arriving seemingly as if just at the right time to properly ensnare my heart during a brutally snowy winter following a season of dismantling in my own life. It is stories like these that seem more like gifts of consolation from the world than a mere collection of pages between two covers, and the musing and soul searching perfectly combined with my own as I found out what it really was in life that mattered and the people I really wanted to spend it with. Having recently suffered the scars of divorce, many of the depravities and pain found in the stories of aborted loves spoke to me on a deep level. These stories should be court-ordered to anyone filing for divorce. Carver perfectly frames life in his fiction and each story rings true in the heart, since reading these I've often found moments where I think 'I wish Carver wrote this moment'. He captures the very basic human emotion and deftly details the hard moments we all feel at one time or another. These stories are the floor dropping out from under you, the moments when you realized the dream has ended, the realization that love has been lost, the blind eye towards your own undoings or the inability to accept your own addictions. Carver champions human nature in a crisp and clean style delivered with perfect nuance and subtlety and builds vast visions of understanding, realization and reflection. Carver is the writer for me, these are stories I hold dear in my heart and have changed me forever as a reader. These stories remind me why I fell in love with life and literature in the first place.
5/5
¡®certain things around us will change, become easier or harder, one thing or the other, but nothing will ever really be any different. I believe that. We have made our decisions, our lives have been set in motion, and they will go on and on until they stop. But if that is true, then what?¡¯
?In the essay Fires, from the collection bearing the same name, Carver admits to having grown up being a fan of Hemingway and notes that Gardner advised him to ¡®Read all the Faulkner you can get your hands on, and then read all of Hemingway to clean the Faulkner out of your system¡¯. Carver, however, declines to consider either author as a particular influence, but only as authors that helped spur his desire to write. Interestingly enough, Carver¡¯s pre-Lish work (or manuscripts before reaching Lish), are often compared to Faulkner, whereas the final products that reached publication are compared to Hemingway. But that is a discussion for another day (and forthcoming [maybe] review of ).
?I have read a few accounts of critics rallying against what they considered a glorification of domestic violence and alcoholism, more so than that of his style. Though, like any notable author, many Carver imitators did arise (I can¡¯t quite place the reference, but I recall a poem(?) mentioning repulsion towards the dime-a-dozen Carver knock-offs littering the poets literary circle. I do not believe Carver was attempting to glorify or make light of domestic issues, but to give a voice to these moments as they are grim aspects of life.
? Stephen King wrote an for the New York Times taking a firm stance against Lish¡¯s editing, portraying Carver as a people-pleaser weakened by alcoholism being pushed around by a tyrannical Lish with his ¡®meat cleaver¡¯ editing.
Life has a way of breaking even the strongest of hearts, of dashing families, friendships and lovers against the cold rocks of reality, leaving hopes and dreams to drown beneath the waves of approaching days.Through his short life¡ªthe chord of life severed by his own vices¡ªRaymond Carver (May 25, 1938 ¨C August 2, 1988) created a body of work that dives into the wreckage of such lives to bring their stories back to the surface, giving a voice to the red-rimmed eyes of divorce and the hollow cavities of loneliness, addiction and remorse. These voices sing out in sweet simplicity; stories pared down to the bones of reality without need of any slick mechanics, fantastical ingredients, or even, on occasion, any concrete plotlines, to deliver a walloping punch to the readers gut and soul.Through a style forged in the flames of his tutelage under and the controversial editing of , Carver gives only the bare necessities of story in a deceptively small package permeated with an infinitude of universal messages about life and love while giving voice to a lower-to-middle class being strangled by finance, booze, love, and their own undoings.
Raymond Carver lived a life not unlike many of his own characters¡ªthe over-educated sorts working blue collar jobs and returning home to a spiraling hell of alcohol and matrimonial disquiet. Coming from a poverty stricken family, Carver grew up with books being a small but important comfort in his life. Marrying 16-year old Maryann Burk when he himself was 19, and bearing their first child a year later, the family spent years criss-crossing the country as Ray enrolled in creative writing courses and worked in sawmills, as a delivery man and janitor (many stories in Carver¡¯s first collection, , were written during his night janitorial shifts at a hospital) while his wife waited tables to help support his literary aspirations. The struggles and strife of a working family are illuminated all throughout his stories, and carry with them the deep-felt understanding of someone who has truly witnessed the ugly underbelly of existence. Carver breathes life into his characters with voice and action devoid of artifice or affectation, making them feel so realistic that they often take space in memory as if they were someone you had the misfortune of being stuck conversing with on a late night bus or barstool.
¡®That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.¡¯
What truly sets Carver apart is his signature simplistic delivery, often labeled ¡®minimalism¡¯ compared to authors such as ?. Prescribing the notion of ¡®show, don¡¯t tell¡¯, these stories fructify fantastically without much need of plot to take root in or description to germinate meaning, leaving ample opportunity for the reader to deduce motives and context as seeds in their own mind. While these stories may initially seem like nearly empty, four-wall cell of realism, with just enough lamplight to find their way about, anything additional would feel as bloated adornment or decorative furniture when all is needed is a quiet place to ponder and reflect. Even the beating heart of each story remains relatively hidden from sight, visualized through the spaces left by its absence or seen in quick, shadowy flashed lurking among the forest of words. Similar to the suitcase in the film Pulp Fiction, everything revolves around something that the characters understand and hold like a thorn in the hearts, yet we the readers are left in camera angles carefully placed as to obscure the contents inside.
The story ¡®Why Don¡¯t You Dance¡¯ is a prime example of Carver¡¯s seeming magic making, in which a man has reassembled the layout of his home in the front yard.
In the kitchen, he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard. The mattress was stripped and the candy-striped sheets lay beside two pillows on the chiffonier. Except for that, things looked much the way they had in the bedroom ¨C nightstand and reading lamp on his side of the bed, nightstand and reading lamp on her side.So much is said without having to draw attention to it. Especially after an offhanded comment by the man, sitting out getting drunk and selling his stuff to a young couple about to start their first place together, that the neighbors ¡®thought they had seen everything by now,¡¯ it can be inferred that there was a breakdown of marriage, but the details are nowhere to be found. Stories like this take hold on a reader through the hospitality of welcoming them into being an active participant and letting their imagination take Carver¡¯s by the waist and go dancing through his pages. Another impressive technique he often applies is to frame a smaller story within a larger story, such as in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love or Where I¡¯m Calling From (the latter included in a Best Stories of American fiction edited by ). The internal stories are told by characters of the external story as a sort of juxtaposition on way to make sense of the world around them. Neither the internal or external are fleshed out, but by pulling the subtly tied strings binding them together a potent portrait of life and love is created. It is his light touch and subtlety that makes for such a powerful and unforgettable read though so much is unsaid and unaccessed. ¡¯The final lines of Why Don¡¯t You Dance perfectly summarize the Carver experience:
His side, her side.
He considered this as he sipped the whiskey.
She kept talking, She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying.The girl tells everyone she knows about the events hoping to find something inside, something she knows is in there but can¡¯t quite reach. Resolution or emotional epiphany is not always present in the final lines, much like in reality. You often come away feeling vague sadness and a carrying a weight pregnant with meaning that you can¡¯t quite access but understand all the same.
¡®No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put at just the right place.
-
Despite purgatorial settings of life surrounded by crumbling manors of marriage and drowning pools of booze, Carver¡¯s stories aren¡¯t aiming to sink the reader in pit of despair but to capture a bittersweet solace as the characters find a new meaning and perspective caught in a fleeting glimpse during their darker hours. There are incredibly beautiful moments that flower all around, and Carver has the ability to kill with a solitary line or observation. Distance, my personal favorite, features a young man leave his wife and sick child to go fishing, despite her vitriolic pleas against this.
Driving, the boy looked out at the stars and was moved when he considered their distance.Such a simple observation at a key moment cracks open the floodgates of interpretation and causes the reader to look at humanity in a new light as well¡ªhow sad and strange the distance between human beings, even the ones who love each other dearly. Or take the closing moments of Cathedral, a staple on the college literature degree diet, when a man closes his eyes, allows the hand of a blind man to wrap around his own, and draws a cathedral by feel so the other can ¡®see¡¯ the metaphysical power of the structure. Both men are opened to a new understanding, yet it is the man that can see that feels a power so strong, yet one he cannot fully comprehend. Even the death of a child, as in A Small, Good Thing, one of those stories that reads as ¡®literature with a capital L¡¯ and makes me want to stand before a classroom and shout ¡®this is how you write, this is what a short story is all about,¡¯ is brought to it¡¯s knees by a simple act of humanity by a lonely baker.
Subtlety is the key to the power of each story. Carver delivers such angles as to completely mesmerize and pulls the emotional punch as if he were a magician making doves appear out of thin air. Distance is a story centered around a moment of reconciliation and happiness between a young couple, being told by the man in the present before he stands to gaze solemnly out the window.
But he stays by the window, remembering that life. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else¡ªthe cold and where he¡¯d go in it¡ªwas outside, for a while anyways.Carver breaks my heart. Without warning, we are reminded that relationships¡ªeven the ones doomed to nightmarish shouting matches under a torrential downpour of tears before severing the limbs of love¡ªhave their tender moments. That broken love was once love. That we are all human, all have needs, feelings, and hope, and that we succumb to pain, to vice, to selfishness and self-loathing. The human heart is what beats on each page. Carver delivers pure and true slices of life, where right and wrong are extraneous moralizing in a discussion on human nature. ¡®There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?¡¯ These are the moments in life that shape us forever, and though we may not understand what to do, we have to always keep on moving or perish.
The style that Carver has become known and loved¡ªor even hated, seeing as we live in a world where almost everything must inevitably come under the knife of detractors?has an interesting story of development. As evinced in his collection , containing early versions of the stories that saw the light of day in the re-titled collection , Carver was much more wordy and descriptive in his drafts than the Carver typically read. His first published story, Furious Seasons, has been stylistically compared to that of , yet Carver is known for minimalism. While enrolled in John Gardner¡¯s writing courses, Gardner recommended to use fifteen words in place of anything said in twenty five, and Gordon Lish would later advise reducing anything said in fifteen words to a mere five. Lish¡¯s editing of Carver for publication is a highly discussed and controversial topic?, as many stories were edited down by nearly half and arrived on the other side of Lish with major scenes (particularly scenes of emotional closure) removed. This is a discussion better suited for an upcoming review of Beginners, however, it is the sparse and sharp style of Carver that really grabs me. His later stories, especially those under the ¡®New Stories¡¯ section of Where I¡¯m Calling From are slightly beefier and lengthier and proceed towards more of a conclusive feel than the earlier ones. Before knowing any of this, I had remarked that Carver¡¯s stories felt like perfect classroom examples of what makes a good short story, and perhaps it is because so much was removed as to leave much open to interpretation, and much of this may be attributed to Lish's keen insight into knowing exactly what is necessary and what is, while still great¡ªI'm sure to a writer each blessed word and mark of punctuation is like a child born from their blood and having someone else feel some are disposible¡ªpossibly extraneous in a story that could be made into a lean and deadly beast of literary perfection. Regardless of any opinions on the editing, the style of these stories is outright perfection (and, personally, I find Lish to be the White Knight of the editing pen). They are a stealthy knife through the ribs rather than a walloping punch to the face, and the vagueness is what keeps them haunting your mind like a ghost for days to come.
These are stories that really spoke to me, arriving seemingly as if just at the right time to properly ensnare my heart during a brutally snowy winter following a season of dismantling in my own life. It is stories like these that seem more like gifts of consolation from the world than a mere collection of pages between two covers, and the musing and soul searching perfectly combined with my own as I found out what it really was in life that mattered and the people I really wanted to spend it with. Having recently suffered the scars of divorce, many of the depravities and pain found in the stories of aborted loves spoke to me on a deep level. These stories should be court-ordered to anyone filing for divorce. Carver perfectly frames life in his fiction and each story rings true in the heart, since reading these I've often found moments where I think 'I wish Carver wrote this moment'. He captures the very basic human emotion and deftly details the hard moments we all feel at one time or another. These stories are the floor dropping out from under you, the moments when you realized the dream has ended, the realization that love has been lost, the blind eye towards your own undoings or the inability to accept your own addictions. Carver champions human nature in a crisp and clean style delivered with perfect nuance and subtlety and builds vast visions of understanding, realization and reflection. Carver is the writer for me, these are stories I hold dear in my heart and have changed me forever as a reader. These stories remind me why I fell in love with life and literature in the first place.
5/5
¡®certain things around us will change, become easier or harder, one thing or the other, but nothing will ever really be any different. I believe that. We have made our decisions, our lives have been set in motion, and they will go on and on until they stop. But if that is true, then what?¡¯
?In the essay Fires, from the collection bearing the same name, Carver admits to having grown up being a fan of Hemingway and notes that Gardner advised him to ¡®Read all the Faulkner you can get your hands on, and then read all of Hemingway to clean the Faulkner out of your system¡¯. Carver, however, declines to consider either author as a particular influence, but only as authors that helped spur his desire to write. Interestingly enough, Carver¡¯s pre-Lish work (or manuscripts before reaching Lish), are often compared to Faulkner, whereas the final products that reached publication are compared to Hemingway. But that is a discussion for another day (and forthcoming [maybe] review of ).
?I have read a few accounts of critics rallying against what they considered a glorification of domestic violence and alcoholism, more so than that of his style. Though, like any notable author, many Carver imitators did arise (I can¡¯t quite place the reference, but I recall a poem(?) mentioning repulsion towards the dime-a-dozen Carver knock-offs littering the poets literary circle. I do not believe Carver was attempting to glorify or make light of domestic issues, but to give a voice to these moments as they are grim aspects of life.
? Stephen King wrote an for the New York Times taking a firm stance against Lish¡¯s editing, portraying Carver as a people-pleaser weakened by alcoholism being pushed around by a tyrannical Lish with his ¡®meat cleaver¡¯ editing.
April 9, 2022
SHOW, DON¡¯T TELL
Robert Altman e Tess Gallagher, la vedova di Raymond Carver, durante le riprese del film.
Prima di morire, nel 1988, Carver selezion¨° proprio questi trentasette racconti per la sua ultima antologia in vita, presumibilmente quelli che lui considerava i suoi migliori.
Per me, il meglio del meglio. Non esiste nessuno come Carver. E se anche esistesse, Carver sarebbe meglio.
Foto locandina di ¡°Short Cuts¡±, 1993. Il film ¨¨ a colori, ma io ho preferito selezionare immagini in b&w.
Storie di gente comune, uomini e donne normali, dannatamente ordinari, in totale assenza di colpi di scena.
Brevi narrazioni tese come una corda di violino, sospese sul baratro abissale dell¡¯esistere, grondanti algida commozione.
Frammenti, tranche de vie, istantanee, fatti insignificanti. Con personaggi complessi, sfaccettati, pi¨´ reali della realt¨¤.
Solitudine, dolore, disperazione, impotenza, incomunicabilit¨¤, fine dell¡¯amore, violenza, vite senza scampo, insieme a tenerezza, condivisione (quella vera, ante internet), generosit¨¤ di sentimenti, pietas.
Robert Altman prepara una scena con Julianne Moore e Madeleine Stowe.
Impieghi umili, povert¨¤, difficolt¨¤ a tirare avanti, eccessi alcolici, coppie problematiche.
Molta autobiografia.
Narrazione e scrittura ridotta all¡¯osso (ma accidenti, no, non minimale), quotidianit¨¤ che diventa eccezionale, banalit¨¤ che si trasforma in straordinario, toni e colori neutri ma nitidi e indelebili.
Raymond non spinge sul pedale, non accelera, non calca la mano: immortala scene di vita ordinaria in istanti di luce senza scampo.
Come nei quadri di Edward Hopper.
Tom Waits e Lily Tomlin protagonisti dell¡¯episodio ¡°Loro non sono mica tuo marito¡±.
Alla fine del racconto intitolato Cattedrale l¡¯io narrante non riesce a descrivere una cattedrale al suo amico cieco. Allora il cieco gli chiede di disegnarla, e con la sua mano segue il movimento di quella del vedente che disegna, non si capisce qual ¨¨ la mano che guida effettivamente, quella che disegna: e improvvisamente sulla carta la cattedrale prende vita con archi, campanili e tutto il resto. A quel punto il cieco chiede al narratore di aggiungerci delle persone, e di continuare a disegnare ma a occhi chiusi. Robert lo fa: chiude gli occhi e disegna come non ha mai fatto in vita sua.
E impara dal cieco a vedere veramente, con gli occhi dell¡¯immaginazione.
Robert Altman in sala trucco con Robert Downey Jr.
Alcuni di questi racconti sono tra i nove (pi¨´ una poesia, ¡°Lemonade¡±) scelti da Robert Altman per il suo splendido film Short Cuts ¨C America oggi del 1993: Vicini, Loro non sono mica tuo marito, Creditori, Con tanta di quell¡¯acqua a due passi da casa, Vitamine, Una cosa piccola ma buona.
Un altro, ¡°Perch¨¦ non ballate¡± ¨¨ stato adattato da Dan Rush nel suo primo (e per ora unico) film del 2010 intitolato Everything Must Go.
Robert Altman spiega un¡¯inquadratura ad Andie MacDowell, Bruce Davison e Lyle Lovett, famoso cantautore country.
Robert Altman e Tess Gallagher, la vedova di Raymond Carver, durante le riprese del film.
Prima di morire, nel 1988, Carver selezion¨° proprio questi trentasette racconti per la sua ultima antologia in vita, presumibilmente quelli che lui considerava i suoi migliori.
Per me, il meglio del meglio. Non esiste nessuno come Carver. E se anche esistesse, Carver sarebbe meglio.
Foto locandina di ¡°Short Cuts¡±, 1993. Il film ¨¨ a colori, ma io ho preferito selezionare immagini in b&w.
Storie di gente comune, uomini e donne normali, dannatamente ordinari, in totale assenza di colpi di scena.
Brevi narrazioni tese come una corda di violino, sospese sul baratro abissale dell¡¯esistere, grondanti algida commozione.
Frammenti, tranche de vie, istantanee, fatti insignificanti. Con personaggi complessi, sfaccettati, pi¨´ reali della realt¨¤.
Solitudine, dolore, disperazione, impotenza, incomunicabilit¨¤, fine dell¡¯amore, violenza, vite senza scampo, insieme a tenerezza, condivisione (quella vera, ante internet), generosit¨¤ di sentimenti, pietas.
Robert Altman prepara una scena con Julianne Moore e Madeleine Stowe.
Impieghi umili, povert¨¤, difficolt¨¤ a tirare avanti, eccessi alcolici, coppie problematiche.
Molta autobiografia.
Narrazione e scrittura ridotta all¡¯osso (ma accidenti, no, non minimale), quotidianit¨¤ che diventa eccezionale, banalit¨¤ che si trasforma in straordinario, toni e colori neutri ma nitidi e indelebili.
Raymond non spinge sul pedale, non accelera, non calca la mano: immortala scene di vita ordinaria in istanti di luce senza scampo.
Come nei quadri di Edward Hopper.
Tom Waits e Lily Tomlin protagonisti dell¡¯episodio ¡°Loro non sono mica tuo marito¡±.
Alla fine del racconto intitolato Cattedrale l¡¯io narrante non riesce a descrivere una cattedrale al suo amico cieco. Allora il cieco gli chiede di disegnarla, e con la sua mano segue il movimento di quella del vedente che disegna, non si capisce qual ¨¨ la mano che guida effettivamente, quella che disegna: e improvvisamente sulla carta la cattedrale prende vita con archi, campanili e tutto il resto. A quel punto il cieco chiede al narratore di aggiungerci delle persone, e di continuare a disegnare ma a occhi chiusi. Robert lo fa: chiude gli occhi e disegna come non ha mai fatto in vita sua.
E impara dal cieco a vedere veramente, con gli occhi dell¡¯immaginazione.
Robert Altman in sala trucco con Robert Downey Jr.
Alcuni di questi racconti sono tra i nove (pi¨´ una poesia, ¡°Lemonade¡±) scelti da Robert Altman per il suo splendido film Short Cuts ¨C America oggi del 1993: Vicini, Loro non sono mica tuo marito, Creditori, Con tanta di quell¡¯acqua a due passi da casa, Vitamine, Una cosa piccola ma buona.
Un altro, ¡°Perch¨¦ non ballate¡± ¨¨ stato adattato da Dan Rush nel suo primo (e per ora unico) film del 2010 intitolato Everything Must Go.
Robert Altman spiega un¡¯inquadratura ad Andie MacDowell, Bruce Davison e Lyle Lovett, famoso cantautore country.
January 17, 2018
I wanted the first book I read in 2018 to be special, and this classic selection of stories by Raymond Carver ¨C the final book he published during his lifetime (he died in 1988 at the incredibly young age of 50) ¨C fit the bill.
Here, presented in chronological order, are 37 stories representing more than two decades¡¯ work. Some of them are among the most powerful and influential works of short fiction published in the late 20th century.
Most are written in a clear, unpretentious voice that¡¯s suffused with wisdom and hearty good humour but also a particular kind of pathos that Carver captured ¨C and knew ¨C so well.
His characters are ordinary people, often from the Pacific Northwest, struggling to get by and faced for the time of the story with a significant complication. A couple¡¯s child might be in a coma after being struck by a car on his birthday (¡°A Small, Good Thing¡±); a man might draw on his own history of violence to defend his son accused of stealing a bicycle (¡°Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes¡±); another man might worry about his restless, constantly dissatisfied elderly mother (¡°Boxes¡±).
Most of these stories are about marriages breaking up, slowly or suddenly. The marriage might have broken up already, and a man (it¡¯s usually a man) can¡¯t deal with it ¨C he drops by his ex-wife¡¯s home after he¡¯s trashed it in a jealous rage during the Christmas holidays (¡°A Serious Talk¡±); he¡¯s tasked with finding a babysitter/housekeeper for his two children (¡°Fever¡±); he¡¯s obsessed with a blockage in his ear while living on his own and constantly drinking champagne (¡°Careful¡±).
Several stories feature male protagonists who are out of work while their wives take on jobs (¡°They¡¯re Not Your Husband,¡± ¡°Put Yourself In My Shoes,¡± ¡°Are These Actual Miles?,¡± ¡°Vitamins¡±).
And, oh yeah, there are drinkers. Lots of drinkers. Many conversations take place in a boozy haze of distraction and false cheer.
One of the saddest stories I¡¯ve ever read is called ¡°Gazebo,¡± about a couple who have holed themselves up in a room at the motel where they work while they drink and hash out their marital problems, ignoring the customers at reception.
It contains the following paragraph about the couple¡¯s relationship to alcohol:
Drinking¡¯s funny. When I look back on it, all of our important decisions have been figured out when we were drinking. Even when we talked about having to cut back on our drinking, we¡¯d be sitting at the kitchen table or out at the picnic table with a six-pack or whiskey.
And this one line in the story simply yet profoundly captures their end-of-the-line desperation: "There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.¡± Wow.
Reading these stories in a short period of time made me sensitive to some of Carver¡¯s techniques:
* The faux epiphany: In my review of Carver¡¯s Cathedral, I already pointed out his sometimes contrived use of the narrator simply stumbling upon an epiphany. I noticed it here too. ¡°I don¡¯t know why, but it¡¯s then I recall the affectionate name my dad used sometimes when he was talking to my mother.¡± (¡°Boxes¡±); and ¡°I¡¯d like to say it was at this moment, as I stood in the fog watching her drive off, that I remembered a black-and-white photograph of my wife holding her wedding bouquet.¡± (¡°Blackbird Pie¡±) These passages are like the author nudging us to think: "Oh, here's the significance."
* The story within the story. Carver is excellent at having characters tell tales within tales. And sometimes, as in ¡°Whoever Was Using This Bed¡± and ¡°The Student¡¯s Wife,¡± the story will become a monologue. (Incidentally, both of these stories feature insomniacs.) As someone who watches a lot of plays, I¡¯m sad Carver didn¡¯t write for the theatre. His dialogue is so good. (Yes, I know the films Birdman and Short Cuts draw on his work.)
* The humour. I didn¡¯t appreciate just how funny Carver could be until I read ¡°What Do You Do In San Francisco?¡±, a story narrated by a postman who tells us about a ¡°beatnik¡± couple who move into the neighbourhood on his route. The man¡¯s nosiness and judgements on the young couple (perhaps modelled after the young Carver and his then wife/girlfriend?) are so amusing I literally laughed out loud while reading them.
* He shows, doesn't tell. Carver can describe a gesture that, in a few words, precisely captures what a person¡¯s thinking. He doesn¡¯t have to tell you someone¡¯s depressed or sad. By showing you what they¡¯re doing, you know that.
***
Sigh. Writing all this makes me a little dissatisfied. Picking apart Carver¡¯s stories like this takes away a bit of their magic. There¡¯s a mystery at the heart of stories like ¡°Fat,¡± ¡°Cathedral,¡± ¡°A Small, Good Thing,¡± ¡°Fever,¡± ¡°Why Don¡¯t You Dance?¡± and ¡°Are These Actual Miles?¡± that should stay mysteries. They suggest profound things about the human condition: our frailties, our contradictions, our attempts at redemption.
Much has been written about Carver's final published story, ¡°Errand,¡± a loose retelling of the death of Russian playwright and short story master Chekhov.
The setting, of course, is far removed from Carver¡¯s other fiction, and I¡¯m sure it was inspired by the author¡¯s feelings about his own impending death. But what you realize is that it¡¯s not the grand event itself that captures Carver¡¯s interest but the little things happening on the sidelines, the small moments that only an artist like this ¨C surely Chekhov's equal in his insight into human behaviour ¨C could capture, honour and make real and memorable.
April 28, 2023
Sometimes too much of a good thing turns into something else entirely.? Reading this book of short stories by Raymond Carver falls under that heading for me.? I usually love short stories, but these took a toll, mayhap my mindset was not right.? As it was, the stories almost started to blend and blur.??
The writing is good, there is no doubt about it.? In these 37 short stories, you will get an apt picture of life in the 1950's era.? Smoking and drinking are rife.? Infidelity and other indiscretions eroding worn-out marriages.? A resigned tiredness of life.? Wishing to be someone else, or wishing to be nothing at all.?
What is love, how is it shown?? A man who is morbidly obese, chowing down at a restaurant.? Old hippie neighbors with their hookah and their wonderfully delightful munchies.? Kleptomania, earwax, divorce, more drinking and smoking.
The writing is good, there is no doubt about it.? In these 37 short stories, you will get an apt picture of life in the 1950's era.? Smoking and drinking are rife.? Infidelity and other indiscretions eroding worn-out marriages.? A resigned tiredness of life.? Wishing to be someone else, or wishing to be nothing at all.?
What is love, how is it shown?? A man who is morbidly obese, chowing down at a restaurant.? Old hippie neighbors with their hookah and their wonderfully delightful munchies.? Kleptomania, earwax, divorce, more drinking and smoking.
November 10, 2017
??? ?????? ???? ???? ?? ????? ?? ??? ????? ???? ? ???? ?? ???? ?????? ???? ???? ???? ?? ?? ??? ??? ????? ?? ?? ?????? ?? ???? ??? ?? ???? ! ????? ????? ???? ?? ???? ?? ?????? ??? ?? ??????? ??? ???? ??? ????? ?? ??? ??? ??? ???? ???? ????? ! ?? ????? ?? ??? ?? ? ????? ??? ???????? ????? ?? ?????? ???? ?? ? ?? ????? ?????? ???? ? ?? ??? ???? ????? ?? ?? ??? ??? ? ??? ??? ?? ????? ???? ?? ????? ???? ?????? ??? ? ???? ??? ????? ????? ?? ????? ???? ???? ??? ??? ???? ??? ? ...
November 24, 2015
Murakami on Carver
I've never read so many stories about divorcees, unhappy marriages or relationships, dysfunctional families and alcoholics. Carver's writing was incredibly real, and this collection will definitely stay in my memory - I'll be picking this up again down the track, and maybe I will connect with it on a deeper level as I catch up to the ages of the characters, whom are generally older than 30.
I'd been interested in reading Carver since Haruki Murakami had consistently praised him in his interviews. Murakami had translated Carver's collection over 14 years into Japanese, and discussed his personal and professional life and writing in great detail in a 40-page interview devoted to Carver from this book I'm lucky to be able to read as a Murakami fan. Here are some excerpts (my translation) from the interview in September 2004 (for the Japanese literary magazine, ÎÄŒW½ç Bungakukai) :
While Carver's prose was realist, his stories contained surprisingly strong anti-realism components. Things incredibly radical. However, there are some people who ignore those parts and just say, "What's new about his writing? All these stories are just plain realism", giving a simple, perfunctory assessment. On the other hand, others insistently praise his writing: "He portrays the everyday lives of American blue collar workers brilliantly", only gathering up what's on the surface. In this sort of context, I think Carver's true literary value was something difficult to ascertain. We should also keep in mind that because Carver was a writer who grew up inside academicism, he used to be entangled in rather fruitless debates such as "Are creative writing courses meaningful?". For such trivial matters to settle down and a proper assessment of Carver's writing to be reached, I think some more time is needed, but in any case, I believe a fair number of the 70-something short stories Carver left will be passed onto future generations as classics. (p.267)
What I think Carver did was utilise his own unique system in slicing up the aspects of a situation or the world and reconstructing them into the shape of a story. Of course, this is more or less something many authors attempt. In that kind of operation, the writing was not a ingredient that held an especially high importance for him. It's just that, going down that road of reconstruction, in other words tightening the screw on his own system of writing fiction, Carver's writing style surfaced into existence as a necessary product. In the cases of Fitzgerald and Capote, things sort of begin from the style of writing. Needless to say, that isn't everything, but there's a wide domain managed by the writing. However, with Carver, the writing style was satisfactory with being at a bare minimum. Using bicycles as an example, it would be a little crude to say a bike you'd use for shopping, but something like a ten-speed bike was not necessary. If the writing style was a truly necessary one, then even if it wasn't attractive, what mattered was that it did the job. For example, with such a simple sentence as "The telephone rang while he was running the vacuum cleaner.", just plonking it at the start of a story brings a mysteriously strong presence with it.
I still love translating Fitzgerald and Capote, but personally I don't really feel that I'd like to write such elegant prose. Just like with gazing at beautiful craftwork, you'd be impressed, thinking "this is wonderful", but you wouldn't want to copy it. Well okay, even if I wanted to I wouldn't be able to, and what I want to do is something very different anyway. If there's something I've learnt from Carver, it's not going to be something individual that can be picked out, such as the writing style, technique or storytelling. It would be something like a recognition of how an author establishes their own unique system of story composition, and an efficient yet earnest way of bringing that to fruition; or perhaps a readiness to vow to live life, carrying that recognition. (pp. 285-286)
For Raymond Carver, the moral bare minimum was to write with desperation, as if expending a piece of his own soul - thus, he couldn't stand people who didn't act on such morals. He was a kind, warm and gentle person, but in an essay he confessed that he couldn't feel affection as a friend should towards those who compromised on writing, or those he could only conclude must be compromising on writing. In such cases, his point is that he wouldn't say "He's a nice guy, but...", but the perspective of "a nice guy" disappears altogether. With someone like that near you, you really feel like you need to be serious and give your all. (p.297)
June 25, 2015
I've never read so many stories about divorcees, unhappy marriages or relationships, dysfunctional families and alcoholics. Carver's writing was incredibly real, and this collection will definitely stay in my memory - I'll be picking this up again down the track, and maybe I will connect with it on a deeper level as I catch up to the ages of the characters, whom are generally older than 30.
I'd been interested in reading Carver since Haruki Murakami had consistently praised him in his interviews. Murakami had translated Carver's collection over 14 years into Japanese, and discussed his personal and professional life and writing in great detail in a 40-page interview devoted to Carver from this book I'm lucky to be able to read as a Murakami fan. Here are some excerpts (my translation) from the interview in September 2004 (for the Japanese literary magazine, ÎÄŒW½ç Bungakukai) :
While Carver's prose was realist, his stories contained surprisingly strong anti-realism components. Things incredibly radical. However, there are some people who ignore those parts and just say, "What's new about his writing? All these stories are just plain realism", giving a simple, perfunctory assessment. On the other hand, others insistently praise his writing: "He portrays the everyday lives of American blue collar workers brilliantly", only gathering up what's on the surface. In this sort of context, I think Carver's true literary value was something difficult to ascertain. We should also keep in mind that because Carver was a writer who grew up inside academicism, he used to be entangled in rather fruitless debates such as "Are creative writing courses meaningful?". For such trivial matters to settle down and a proper assessment of Carver's writing to be reached, I think some more time is needed, but in any case, I believe a fair number of the 70-something short stories Carver left will be passed onto future generations as classics. (p.267)
What I think Carver did was utilise his own unique system in slicing up the aspects of a situation or the world and reconstructing them into the shape of a story. Of course, this is more or less something many authors attempt. In that kind of operation, the writing was not a ingredient that held an especially high importance for him. It's just that, going down that road of reconstruction, in other words tightening the screw on his own system of writing fiction, Carver's writing style surfaced into existence as a necessary product. In the cases of Fitzgerald and Capote, things sort of begin from the style of writing. Needless to say, that isn't everything, but there's a wide domain managed by the writing. However, with Carver, the writing style was satisfactory with being at a bare minimum. Using bicycles as an example, it would be a little crude to say a bike you'd use for shopping, but something like a ten-speed bike was not necessary. If the writing style was a truly necessary one, then even if it wasn't attractive, what mattered was that it did the job. For example, with such a simple sentence as "The telephone rang while he was running the vacuum cleaner.", just plonking it at the start of a story brings a mysteriously strong presence with it.
I still love translating Fitzgerald and Capote, but personally I don't really feel that I'd like to write such elegant prose. Just like with gazing at beautiful craftwork, you'd be impressed, thinking "this is wonderful", but you wouldn't want to copy it. Well okay, even if I wanted to I wouldn't be able to, and what I want to do is something very different anyway. If there's something I've learnt from Carver, it's not going to be something individual that can be picked out, such as the writing style, technique or storytelling. It would be something like a recognition of how an author establishes their own unique system of story composition, and an efficient yet earnest way of bringing that to fruition; or perhaps a readiness to vow to live life, carrying that recognition. (pp. 285-286)
For Raymond Carver, the moral bare minimum was to write with desperation, as if expending a piece of his own soul - thus, he couldn't stand people who didn't act on such morals. He was a kind, warm and gentle person, but in an essay he confessed that he couldn't feel affection as a friend should towards those who compromised on writing, or those he could only conclude must be compromising on writing. In such cases, his point is that he wouldn't say "He's a nice guy, but...", but the perspective of "a nice guy" disappears altogether. With someone like that near you, you really feel like you need to be serious and give your all. (p.297)
June 25, 2015
March 1, 2009
5 stars
In keeping with my ¡°study¡± of the short story, I figured it was about time I picked up Raymond Carver. (Call me a late-bloomer.) The only story I had previously read by him was Cathedral, which is excellent. This is basically a story about a skeptical, somewhat superficial man who is taught by a blind man how to ¡°see¡±.
The 37 stories in this 526 page collection are arranged chronologically. The final story, called Errand, unpublished at the time of Carver¡¯s untimely death, begins with the single word-sentence ¡°Chekhov¡±; Carver is often compared to Chekhov, who also died at a young age.
Carver has also often been described as a minimalist. I understand this description, but find it somewhat simplistic. Sure, he uses simple language, in short sentences; but when required, he gives plenty of time and space to establish the raw material he needs to make a character¡¯s growth believable. Carver¡¯s characters are often summed up as ordinary people; as any random person we might pass in the street ¨C at first glance. His genius was to use this superficial first impression, then to make great use of sub-text to reveal deep characterization.
Another oft-heard idea about Carver is that he employed trickery, and would throw the reader a ¡°curve ball¡± at the end. I would contend that Carver used technique to lull the reader ¨C like the ¡°sleeper¡± yo-yo move ¨C stringing the reader out, only to bring closure with a snap; with a quick flick, the meaning of the story is disclosed. In the case of A Small Good Thing, I cried. As for What¡¯s In Alaska, when I realized what was really going on in this couple¡¯s marriage, I abruptly stopped laughing. Carver had played me, as a reader, and I was left in awe at his skill.
It¡¯s worthwhile picking up this book even if you choose not to read every story. (This is the first time I¡¯ve read an entire collection of short stories without interruption.) But, do read, as well as the ones above, Elephant; So Much Water, So Close to Home; and the title story, Where I¡¯m Calling From.
These stories stay with you. They are uniquely Carver ¨C no one could possibly imitate him ¨C because I don¡¯t even believe they can be categorized. And the final seven stories, published after Carver¡¯s death, show that he was heading in a new direction. Even at that point, he had established himself as one of the best short story writers out there. How far and where he might have gone is anyone¡¯s guess.
In keeping with my ¡°study¡± of the short story, I figured it was about time I picked up Raymond Carver. (Call me a late-bloomer.) The only story I had previously read by him was Cathedral, which is excellent. This is basically a story about a skeptical, somewhat superficial man who is taught by a blind man how to ¡°see¡±.
The 37 stories in this 526 page collection are arranged chronologically. The final story, called Errand, unpublished at the time of Carver¡¯s untimely death, begins with the single word-sentence ¡°Chekhov¡±; Carver is often compared to Chekhov, who also died at a young age.
Carver has also often been described as a minimalist. I understand this description, but find it somewhat simplistic. Sure, he uses simple language, in short sentences; but when required, he gives plenty of time and space to establish the raw material he needs to make a character¡¯s growth believable. Carver¡¯s characters are often summed up as ordinary people; as any random person we might pass in the street ¨C at first glance. His genius was to use this superficial first impression, then to make great use of sub-text to reveal deep characterization.
Another oft-heard idea about Carver is that he employed trickery, and would throw the reader a ¡°curve ball¡± at the end. I would contend that Carver used technique to lull the reader ¨C like the ¡°sleeper¡± yo-yo move ¨C stringing the reader out, only to bring closure with a snap; with a quick flick, the meaning of the story is disclosed. In the case of A Small Good Thing, I cried. As for What¡¯s In Alaska, when I realized what was really going on in this couple¡¯s marriage, I abruptly stopped laughing. Carver had played me, as a reader, and I was left in awe at his skill.
It¡¯s worthwhile picking up this book even if you choose not to read every story. (This is the first time I¡¯ve read an entire collection of short stories without interruption.) But, do read, as well as the ones above, Elephant; So Much Water, So Close to Home; and the title story, Where I¡¯m Calling From.
These stories stay with you. They are uniquely Carver ¨C no one could possibly imitate him ¨C because I don¡¯t even believe they can be categorized. And the final seven stories, published after Carver¡¯s death, show that he was heading in a new direction. Even at that point, he had established himself as one of the best short story writers out there. How far and where he might have gone is anyone¡¯s guess.
February 25, 2018
[Impressioni scritte prima del 15 febbraio 2018]
L¡¯altro pomeriggio sabato, ferma ad un semaforo in attesa della freccia di svolta a sinistra, occhio nello specchietto retrovisore che mi restituisce un¡¯immagine nitidamente perfetta non accecata dalla luce di una giornate di sole n¨¦ oscurata dal buio notturno.
Come fosse lo schermo rettangolare di un cinema in un contrasto di bianco e nero vedo una coppia perfettamente a fuoco nell¡¯auto che mi sta dietro.
Sono di mezza et¨¤ n¨¦ brutti n¨¦ belli, vestiti in maniera ordinaria ma non trascurata.
Stanno parlando di qualcosa, senza fervore con calma privi di particolare trasporto o enfasi: forse la spesa da fare o i figli piccoli, magari il film da decidere; lui dice qualcosa brevemente, dal labiale non posso capire, stanno zitti qualche secondo, poi lei sposta lo sguardo prima rivolto verso il finestrino di una ventina di gradi verso il marito gli risponde o comunque dice a sua volta qualcosa, poi ancora silenzio.
La freccia di svolta a sinistra diventa verde, inserisco la marcia e le strade che si sono sfiorate per lo spazio di un semaforo si dividono per sempre, senza epilogo, non sapr¨° mai pi¨´ nulla di loro.
Una scena che avrebbe potuto infilarsi in un racconto di Carver che d¨¤ la percezione di ci¨° che si prova al termine di ogni racconto di Carver.
Persone ordinarie che fanno lavori ordinari, che vivono in case ordinarie, che mangiano pasti ordinari, fanno discorsi ordinari e si amano in maniera ordinaria, litigano, come stanno facendo in questo esatto istante altre mille coppie nel mondo, telefonano a qualcuno, o lavano con cura posate e bicchieri e nel frattempo pensano che hanno voglia di scappare, gente che si lascia o ritorna sui propri passi, o spinge avanti e indietro meticolosa il battitappeto nella stanza.
Io, tu, lui, noi, voi.
Niente brilla, niente colpisce, tutto si confonde nei 35 racconti: dialoghi, persone, ambienti, situazioni, ¨¨ la coppia della porta accanto, ¨¨ l¡¯avventore che sfiori col gomito al bancone del bar solo che tu bevi un caff¨¨ mentre, dentro le storie di Carver laggi¨´ dall¡¯altra parte dell¡¯oceano, lui avr¨¤ un bicchiere di whisky o un boccale di birra davanti, o un marito seduto sul divano, o una donna che trasloca, anonimi antieroi in cui ci si pu¨° facilmente immedesimare.
Si ¨¨ detto e scritto tanto sulla scrittura di Raymond Carver che non usa una parola in pi¨´ n¨¨ una di meno, soppesa vocaboli in maniera maniacale con l¡¯esattezza del bisturi del chirurgo che non vuole incidere un millimetro in pi¨´ di pelle di quella che gli necessita per riparare un tessuto malato.
Un artista del racconto e quanto ¨¨ vero che la definizione di m i n i m a l i s t a non gli ¨¨ davvero per nulla congeniale.
S¨¬ vero ci lascia spesso con epiloghi di racconti troncati che lasciano attoniti e talvolta frustrati ma questo non significa essere minimalista, e nemmeno l¡¯uso calibrato delle parole che soppesa come l¡¯orafo le sue pagliuzze d¡¯oro, lavorando per sottrazione senza mai sprecarne due laddove fosse possibile usarne una sola significa essere minimalista; perch¨¦ nonostante tutto questo lavoro di limatura riesce a non farci mai mancare nulla pi¨´ del necessario, una lezione che ¨¨ di ausilio anche nello stordimento di parole a volte vacue e a cascata che in ogni istante ci bombardano da ovunque.
Che poi io per antitesi possa amare anche molto (di pi¨´?) altri scrittori di racconti completamente differenti, che so un Cechov che sa dipingere quadri di natura meravigliosi (La steppa?) o un DWF con le sue storie lunghe e strutturate su cui ti devi affaticare e spremere le meningi come su una equazione di terzo grado, oppure immaginifici e pieni di mito e di passione come La sirena di Giovanni Tomasi di Lampedusa, non rende minore il mio apprezzamento verso l¡¯apparente pochezza di Raymond Carver.
Non tutti i 35 racconti raggiungono lo stesso vertice di bellezza e quelli che ho preferito, oltre ai famosissimi e bellissimi Di cosa parliamo quando parliamo d¡¯amore e Cattedrale, sono raggruppati verso la fine della raccolta:
Con tanta di quell'acqua a due passi da casa
Febbre
±õ²Ô³Ù¾±³¾¾±³Ù¨¤
Menudo
Una cosa piccola ma buona
Elefante
Pasticcio di merli
³¢¡¯¾±²Ô³¦²¹°ù¾±³¦´Ç
L¡¯altro pomeriggio sabato, ferma ad un semaforo in attesa della freccia di svolta a sinistra, occhio nello specchietto retrovisore che mi restituisce un¡¯immagine nitidamente perfetta non accecata dalla luce di una giornate di sole n¨¦ oscurata dal buio notturno.
Come fosse lo schermo rettangolare di un cinema in un contrasto di bianco e nero vedo una coppia perfettamente a fuoco nell¡¯auto che mi sta dietro.
Sono di mezza et¨¤ n¨¦ brutti n¨¦ belli, vestiti in maniera ordinaria ma non trascurata.
Stanno parlando di qualcosa, senza fervore con calma privi di particolare trasporto o enfasi: forse la spesa da fare o i figli piccoli, magari il film da decidere; lui dice qualcosa brevemente, dal labiale non posso capire, stanno zitti qualche secondo, poi lei sposta lo sguardo prima rivolto verso il finestrino di una ventina di gradi verso il marito gli risponde o comunque dice a sua volta qualcosa, poi ancora silenzio.
La freccia di svolta a sinistra diventa verde, inserisco la marcia e le strade che si sono sfiorate per lo spazio di un semaforo si dividono per sempre, senza epilogo, non sapr¨° mai pi¨´ nulla di loro.
Una scena che avrebbe potuto infilarsi in un racconto di Carver che d¨¤ la percezione di ci¨° che si prova al termine di ogni racconto di Carver.
Persone ordinarie che fanno lavori ordinari, che vivono in case ordinarie, che mangiano pasti ordinari, fanno discorsi ordinari e si amano in maniera ordinaria, litigano, come stanno facendo in questo esatto istante altre mille coppie nel mondo, telefonano a qualcuno, o lavano con cura posate e bicchieri e nel frattempo pensano che hanno voglia di scappare, gente che si lascia o ritorna sui propri passi, o spinge avanti e indietro meticolosa il battitappeto nella stanza.
Io, tu, lui, noi, voi.
Niente brilla, niente colpisce, tutto si confonde nei 35 racconti: dialoghi, persone, ambienti, situazioni, ¨¨ la coppia della porta accanto, ¨¨ l¡¯avventore che sfiori col gomito al bancone del bar solo che tu bevi un caff¨¨ mentre, dentro le storie di Carver laggi¨´ dall¡¯altra parte dell¡¯oceano, lui avr¨¤ un bicchiere di whisky o un boccale di birra davanti, o un marito seduto sul divano, o una donna che trasloca, anonimi antieroi in cui ci si pu¨° facilmente immedesimare.
Si ¨¨ detto e scritto tanto sulla scrittura di Raymond Carver che non usa una parola in pi¨´ n¨¨ una di meno, soppesa vocaboli in maniera maniacale con l¡¯esattezza del bisturi del chirurgo che non vuole incidere un millimetro in pi¨´ di pelle di quella che gli necessita per riparare un tessuto malato.
Un artista del racconto e quanto ¨¨ vero che la definizione di m i n i m a l i s t a non gli ¨¨ davvero per nulla congeniale.
S¨¬ vero ci lascia spesso con epiloghi di racconti troncati che lasciano attoniti e talvolta frustrati ma questo non significa essere minimalista, e nemmeno l¡¯uso calibrato delle parole che soppesa come l¡¯orafo le sue pagliuzze d¡¯oro, lavorando per sottrazione senza mai sprecarne due laddove fosse possibile usarne una sola significa essere minimalista; perch¨¦ nonostante tutto questo lavoro di limatura riesce a non farci mai mancare nulla pi¨´ del necessario, una lezione che ¨¨ di ausilio anche nello stordimento di parole a volte vacue e a cascata che in ogni istante ci bombardano da ovunque.
Che poi io per antitesi possa amare anche molto (di pi¨´?) altri scrittori di racconti completamente differenti, che so un Cechov che sa dipingere quadri di natura meravigliosi (La steppa?) o un DWF con le sue storie lunghe e strutturate su cui ti devi affaticare e spremere le meningi come su una equazione di terzo grado, oppure immaginifici e pieni di mito e di passione come La sirena di Giovanni Tomasi di Lampedusa, non rende minore il mio apprezzamento verso l¡¯apparente pochezza di Raymond Carver.
Non tutti i 35 racconti raggiungono lo stesso vertice di bellezza e quelli che ho preferito, oltre ai famosissimi e bellissimi Di cosa parliamo quando parliamo d¡¯amore e Cattedrale, sono raggruppati verso la fine della raccolta:
Con tanta di quell'acqua a due passi da casa
Febbre
±õ²Ô³Ù¾±³¾¾±³Ù¨¤
Menudo
Una cosa piccola ma buona
Elefante
Pasticcio di merli
³¢¡¯¾±²Ô³¦²¹°ù¾±³¦´Ç
February 9, 2023
Miles Davis once said, when asked why he played such minimalist, modal melodies when his contemporaries were going for the more fevered, manic sound of be-bop, "I try to only play the notes that matter."
That's Raymond Carver. Sparse, deceptively simple, and capable of tearing your soul out by hitting the right notes, consistently, and with purity.
Some of these stories didn't even strike me as I read them. I'd put the book down, walk away, and hours later, not be able to shake the images. Other times, I'd read a line, and feel ashamed for my abuse of adjectives and hyperbole as a writer, right then and there. Carver cuts through it all, and delivers the literary version of "Kind of Blue" in the process.
That's Raymond Carver. Sparse, deceptively simple, and capable of tearing your soul out by hitting the right notes, consistently, and with purity.
Some of these stories didn't even strike me as I read them. I'd put the book down, walk away, and hours later, not be able to shake the images. Other times, I'd read a line, and feel ashamed for my abuse of adjectives and hyperbole as a writer, right then and there. Carver cuts through it all, and delivers the literary version of "Kind of Blue" in the process.
February 17, 2015
A collection of short stories from a writer considered by many to be one the master of the modern short story. Many of the stories have a flavor of the author¡¯s youth (let¡¯s say the 1940¡¯s and 50¡¯s since Carver was born in 1938 and died at age 50) even though they were written in the 1970¡¯s and 1980¡¯s. The stories have acquired a patina of quaintness from that era: boys on bikes going fishing in the local creek; door-to-door salesmen; everyone smokes; everyone drinks scotch; the mailman knows everyone on his route; people call their neighbor ¡°Mr. Johnson.¡± But these are stories of modern life, usually with a raw edge: divorce; alcoholism; infidelity; nasty neighbors. Great stories.
June 21, 2019
[2.75] This book includes "the best" stories from other collections including What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Choosing this sweeping collection of over 3 dozen stories as an introduction to Carver was a mistake. Carver is known for his minimalism - the ¡°less is more¡± school. The flip of that was certainly true for me. The more I read, the less I liked the stories. After the first few stories, I would have rated the book a solid 4 stars. By the end, my rating was hovering around 2 stars.
The stories are skillfully drawn. With a few strokes, Carver outlines a boozy, sad world of despair, infidelity and bursts of violence. The problem for me is that after a while, the stories start blending, with an oppressive sameness, like grayscale sketches that need to be filled in.
The stories are skillfully drawn. With a few strokes, Carver outlines a boozy, sad world of despair, infidelity and bursts of violence. The problem for me is that after a while, the stories start blending, with an oppressive sameness, like grayscale sketches that need to be filled in.
August 28, 2022
Nearly every story an absolute gem. A Small, Good Thing, my god, so heartbreaking, moving, and humane.
February 10, 2018
Devo dire che con nessun altro autore l'effetto sorpresa ¨¨ stato pi¨´ violento che con Carver. Le tre ore senza interruzioni in cui mi spazzolai da cima a fondo ¡°Di cosa parliamo quando parliamo d¡¯amore¡± rimarranno una delle mie esperienze pi¨´ significative di lettore, le paragonai ad una donna incontrata in vacanza. Se quella stessa donna te la porti a casa la magia finisce; inizia qualcos¡¯altro, ma la magia va persa. Alcuni racconti sono la versione extended di quelli pubblicati in altre raccolte. A rischio di esser accusato di blasfemia, scriver¨° che io ho preferito quelli Lish-ati per benino dall'editor pi¨´ famoso del secolo scorso.
Il partito degli anti-baricchiani conta pi¨´ iscritti del PD, invito, chi ne avesse voglia, a leggere questo bell'articolo, dimenticando la tessera che ha in tasca
La prima volta l¡¯ho letto in una recensione su Anobii. Mi sono messo sulle tracce del pittore ed ho riscontrato un¡¯effettiva affinit¨¤ fra Edward e Raymond.
Mantengo le 5 stelle per il ricordo di quella donna incontrata in vacanza. Quando crediamo di parlare d¡¯amore, spesso, stiamo parlando d¡¯innamoramento.
1 Nessuno diceva niente
> adolescenziale come la prima fantasia sessuale
2 Biciclette, muscoli, sigarette
> verticale
Poi disse: ?Babbo? Penserai che sono proprio matto, ma vorrei tanto averti conosciuto quando eri piccolo, cio¨¨ quando avevi suppergi¨´ la mia et¨¤ di ora. Non so spiegartelo, ma mi manca tanto. ? come se... come se sentissi gi¨¤ la tua mancanza quando ci penso adesso.
*2 verticale:
Me lo fece leggere quando ancora non lo conoscevo [8 lettere]
(Grazie ancora a lei e a Philibert Commerson)
3 La moglie dello studente
> insonne
4 Loro non sono mica tuo marito
> dietetico e disoccupato
5 Che cosa si combina a San Francisco?
> pettegolo
6 Grasso
> l'obesit¨¤ dei sogni
7 Che ci sar¨¤ mai in Alaska?
> obnubilante
8 Vicini
> scopofilo
9 Provi a mettersi nei miei panni
> allusivo
10 Creditori
> tentata (quanto inutile) vendita
11 Perch¨¦, tesoro mio?
> il bisogno di credere nonostante la consapevolezza non lo consentirebbe
Un figlio degenere che diventa (manco a dirlo) un politico influente
12 I chilometri sono effettivi?
>indegno
13 Gazebo
> L'alcol ¨¨ strano. Se ci ripenso, tutte le nostre decisioni pi¨´ importanti sono state prese bevendo.
14 Un'altra cosa
> fallimentare
15 Piccole cose
> fallimentare e nocivo per chi sicuramente non ha colpa alcuna
16 Perch¨¦ non ballate?
> cinematografico
17 Un discorso serio
> il recipiente che contiene ci¨° che ¨¨ rimasto della coppia consumatasi con gli anni
18 Di cosa parliamo quando parliamo d'amore
> gin-epraio
Ognuno di noi parla di una cosa diversa quando parla d'amore. Tutti per¨° passiamo la vita a cercare la forma che ci si addice.
19 Distanza
> neonatale
20 La terza cosa che ha ammazzato mio padre
> ittico
21 Con tanta di quell'acqua a due passi da casa
> tri-ittico + 1
22 Con tanta di quell'acqua a due passi da casa (continuazione)
> l'aspetto ittico lascia campo esclusivo a quello angoscioso
23 La calma
> epifanico
24 Vitamine
> vitaminico
25 Attento
> oleoso
26 Da dove sto chiamando
> infognato
27 La casa di Chef
> l¡¯ombra della bottiglia
28 Febbre
> rassegnato
29 Penne
> pavoneggiante
Il cambiamento si pavoneggia di s¨¦, ma un giorno ci lascer¨¤ soli a contare le nostre penne cadute sulla veranda
30 Cattedrale
> tattile
31 Una cosa piccola ma buona
> scott(y)ante
32 Scatole
> materno
33 Chiunque abbia usato questo letto
> mortale
34 ±õ²Ô³Ù¾±³¾¾±³Ù¨¤
> divorzievole (l'ennesimo)
35 Menudo
> (a)normale
36 Elefante
> economia domestica a pro altrui
37 Pasticcio di merli
> calligrafico
38 L'incarico
> stappato
Il partito degli anti-baricchiani conta pi¨´ iscritti del PD, invito, chi ne avesse voglia, a leggere questo bell'articolo, dimenticando la tessera che ha in tasca
La prima volta l¡¯ho letto in una recensione su Anobii. Mi sono messo sulle tracce del pittore ed ho riscontrato un¡¯effettiva affinit¨¤ fra Edward e Raymond.
Mantengo le 5 stelle per il ricordo di quella donna incontrata in vacanza. Quando crediamo di parlare d¡¯amore, spesso, stiamo parlando d¡¯innamoramento.
1 Nessuno diceva niente
> adolescenziale come la prima fantasia sessuale
2 Biciclette, muscoli, sigarette
> verticale
Poi disse: ?Babbo? Penserai che sono proprio matto, ma vorrei tanto averti conosciuto quando eri piccolo, cio¨¨ quando avevi suppergi¨´ la mia et¨¤ di ora. Non so spiegartelo, ma mi manca tanto. ? come se... come se sentissi gi¨¤ la tua mancanza quando ci penso adesso.
*2 verticale:
Me lo fece leggere quando ancora non lo conoscevo [8 lettere]
(Grazie ancora a lei e a Philibert Commerson)
3 La moglie dello studente
> insonne
4 Loro non sono mica tuo marito
> dietetico e disoccupato
5 Che cosa si combina a San Francisco?
> pettegolo
6 Grasso
> l'obesit¨¤ dei sogni
7 Che ci sar¨¤ mai in Alaska?
> obnubilante
8 Vicini
> scopofilo
9 Provi a mettersi nei miei panni
> allusivo
10 Creditori
> tentata (quanto inutile) vendita
11 Perch¨¦, tesoro mio?
> il bisogno di credere nonostante la consapevolezza non lo consentirebbe
Un figlio degenere che diventa (manco a dirlo) un politico influente
12 I chilometri sono effettivi?
>indegno
13 Gazebo
> L'alcol ¨¨ strano. Se ci ripenso, tutte le nostre decisioni pi¨´ importanti sono state prese bevendo.
14 Un'altra cosa
> fallimentare
15 Piccole cose
> fallimentare e nocivo per chi sicuramente non ha colpa alcuna
16 Perch¨¦ non ballate?
> cinematografico
17 Un discorso serio
> il recipiente che contiene ci¨° che ¨¨ rimasto della coppia consumatasi con gli anni
18 Di cosa parliamo quando parliamo d'amore
> gin-epraio
Ognuno di noi parla di una cosa diversa quando parla d'amore. Tutti per¨° passiamo la vita a cercare la forma che ci si addice.
19 Distanza
> neonatale
20 La terza cosa che ha ammazzato mio padre
> ittico
21 Con tanta di quell'acqua a due passi da casa
> tri-ittico + 1
22 Con tanta di quell'acqua a due passi da casa (continuazione)
> l'aspetto ittico lascia campo esclusivo a quello angoscioso
23 La calma
> epifanico
24 Vitamine
> vitaminico
25 Attento
> oleoso
26 Da dove sto chiamando
> infognato
27 La casa di Chef
> l¡¯ombra della bottiglia
28 Febbre
> rassegnato
29 Penne
> pavoneggiante
Il cambiamento si pavoneggia di s¨¦, ma un giorno ci lascer¨¤ soli a contare le nostre penne cadute sulla veranda
30 Cattedrale
> tattile
31 Una cosa piccola ma buona
> scott(y)ante
32 Scatole
> materno
33 Chiunque abbia usato questo letto
> mortale
34 ±õ²Ô³Ù¾±³¾¾±³Ù¨¤
> divorzievole (l'ennesimo)
35 Menudo
> (a)normale
36 Elefante
> economia domestica a pro altrui
37 Pasticcio di merli
> calligrafico
38 L'incarico
> stappato
July 5, 2016
I'm Callin' From Where?
"And everything you love starts to disappear,
The devil takes your hand and says no fear,
'Have another shot, just one more beer.'
Yeah I've been there,
That's why I'm here."
Kenny Chesney, That's Why I'm Here, 1997
The Hoff, Hammered
Upon starting my own literary renaissance, as part of a mid-life identity crisis, about 9 years ago, I hadn't heard of Raymond Carver. On the New Yorker's monthly fiction podcast, I heard a reading of Carver's short story, "Chef's House." I was moved by this short, short story about a guy named Chef who cleans up temporarily and resumes his relationship with his long-time girlfriend, but then got back to digging his hole. A familiar story if you're close to an alcoholic or addict. Lord knows Carver was, each morning he saw one in the mirror.
Carver and Cheever wrote alcoholics better and more realistic than anyone because, as they came to admit, they were so afflicted. I think that's a big reason why their stories are so melancholy, about boozers and bad relationships; they always had the feeling that they couldn't live with alcohol nor could they really live without it. "Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you're going to do a good job with it.¡± Carver, "Chef's House."
"Cathedral" is one of my 3 personal favorite short stories. It's the perfect illustration of why one should reserve judgment on others, be more tolerant, and one could well be changed in the most dramatic, cathartic ways--by those our prejudice tells us seem least likely capable of doing so.
This is the last collection of short stories by Carver, who died from lung cancer in 1988 at the age of 50.
The stories primarily revolve around 2 related traumas: a collapsed or collapsing marriage or long-term relationship and alcoholism. He survived both. He surely wrote what he knew. It's not a collection that I'd recommend to someone suffering clinical depression. 4.3 stars.
"And everything you love starts to disappear,
The devil takes your hand and says no fear,
'Have another shot, just one more beer.'
Yeah I've been there,
That's why I'm here."
Kenny Chesney, That's Why I'm Here, 1997
The Hoff, Hammered
Upon starting my own literary renaissance, as part of a mid-life identity crisis, about 9 years ago, I hadn't heard of Raymond Carver. On the New Yorker's monthly fiction podcast, I heard a reading of Carver's short story, "Chef's House." I was moved by this short, short story about a guy named Chef who cleans up temporarily and resumes his relationship with his long-time girlfriend, but then got back to digging his hole. A familiar story if you're close to an alcoholic or addict. Lord knows Carver was, each morning he saw one in the mirror.
Carver and Cheever wrote alcoholics better and more realistic than anyone because, as they came to admit, they were so afflicted. I think that's a big reason why their stories are so melancholy, about boozers and bad relationships; they always had the feeling that they couldn't live with alcohol nor could they really live without it. "Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you're going to do a good job with it.¡± Carver, "Chef's House."
"Cathedral" is one of my 3 personal favorite short stories. It's the perfect illustration of why one should reserve judgment on others, be more tolerant, and one could well be changed in the most dramatic, cathartic ways--by those our prejudice tells us seem least likely capable of doing so.
This is the last collection of short stories by Carver, who died from lung cancer in 1988 at the age of 50.
The stories primarily revolve around 2 related traumas: a collapsed or collapsing marriage or long-term relationship and alcoholism. He survived both. He surely wrote what he knew. It's not a collection that I'd recommend to someone suffering clinical depression. 4.3 stars.
May 14, 2015
Obliquity & ellipses define Carver's minimal prose. It's a threadbare style that doesn't give you much to chew on but somehow it captures the threadbare lives scattered across these stories perfectly. There's sadness & desolation here that would numb you to the point of oblivion, the coiling despair tightening & tightening around you like a python's grip till you are swallowed whole into its blackness. Carver takes the ephemera and flotsam of non-descript, everyday life that no one would stop to consider let alone turn into subject for writing & he makes it work because into these scattered shards of truth you'll perhaps glimpse a moment or two from your own experience when life was threatening to go off the rails, lurching from one drink to another, one meaningless relationship to another, one jaded conversation to another, with you there laughing at it all because if you didn't laugh you would probably break down & lose yourself to the ever approaching madness, to the simmering violence that was just itching to let loose. Carver's characters grapple with loneliness, guilt, heartbreak, infidelity, broken marriages, alcoholism, job loss, bankruptcy, a sense of ennui & disconnect from their once joyous core & a hopeless striving to recover that, a desire to escape from their own lives¡ªquite a smorgasbord of woes on their existential platter really! There are some things that give them company¡ªa few run-down records, books on makeshift bookshelves, fishing trip with buddies, chain smoking, cream sodas and hard liquor, always the liquor. There's some genuinely moving stuff here, best enjoyed when you are feeling down because when you hit the rock bottom with these stories; there's no way to go but up¡ªchaos bringing back order, madness leading to sanity.
This four stars rating is being given on the overall effect of this collection. As is with any short story collection, it's a mixed bunch.
Here are the ones I liked:
'Why Don't You Dance?' : my favourite story- overwhelming sadness here. With the privacy of his life thrown out into the front yard for the whole neighborhood to snicker at, a broken man indulges a young couple who assume it must be a yard sale.
'Where I'm Calling From' : the story which gives this collection its name is remarkable as a textbook example of Carver's indirect style where the horrors of a relapsed alcoholic's life is presented via the recounting of secondary characters' lives at the dry out facility.
'Nobody Said Anything' : a story that broaches the effect of a messy parental fight on the two sons, focusing most of the time on a fishing trip instead.
'Gazebo' : a married couple having a meltdown after the husband's affair is discovered.
This story was referred to in Gass' essay, 'A Failing Grade for the Present Tense'¡ª needless to say Gass is no fan of minimalism unless the writer happened to the great Beckett.
'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love' : "it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we¡¯re talking about when we talk about love.¡± The old couple in this story¡ª yeah, that was love.
'Neighbors' : a young couple in charge of a financially better off couple's house during the latter's holidays, tries to impersonate their lives.
'So Much Water So Close to Home' : this story made it to Altman's Short Cuts (1993), the one about couple of guys on a fishing trip who discover a girl's dead body in the river & carry on with their camping holiday. "Two things are certain: people no longer care what happens to other people; and 2) nothing makes any real difference any longer."
'A Small, Good Thing' : another one that made it to the Altman movie¡ª a couple coping with the sudden loss of their little child on the day of his 8th b'day & a grumpy baker who keeps crank calling them for the uncollected cake: "He was a baker. He was glad he wasn¡¯t a florist. It was better to be feeding people. This was a better smell anytime than flowers."
'The Collectors' : the face of desperation¡ª the vacuum cleaner salesman here reminded me of Jack Lemmon's visit to a potential client's house in Glengarry Glen Ross.
'Boxes' : a son's guilt over his mother's manic house shifting¡ª there's no peace anywhere 'cause no matter where you go, how do you escape from yourself!
'Fever' : a harried father trying to look after his two young children, manage his job & household after his wife leaves him for his colleague.
I was hoping the story featuring Jennifer Jason Leigh's portion in Short Cuts would be here¡ªit was a perfect example of the absurdity & irony underlying Carver's humour, but it wasn't here.
This four stars rating is being given on the overall effect of this collection. As is with any short story collection, it's a mixed bunch.
Here are the ones I liked:
'Why Don't You Dance?' : my favourite story- overwhelming sadness here. With the privacy of his life thrown out into the front yard for the whole neighborhood to snicker at, a broken man indulges a young couple who assume it must be a yard sale.
'Where I'm Calling From' : the story which gives this collection its name is remarkable as a textbook example of Carver's indirect style where the horrors of a relapsed alcoholic's life is presented via the recounting of secondary characters' lives at the dry out facility.
'Nobody Said Anything' : a story that broaches the effect of a messy parental fight on the two sons, focusing most of the time on a fishing trip instead.
'Gazebo' : a married couple having a meltdown after the husband's affair is discovered.
This story was referred to in Gass' essay, 'A Failing Grade for the Present Tense'¡ª needless to say Gass is no fan of minimalism unless the writer happened to the great Beckett.
'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love' : "it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we¡¯re talking about when we talk about love.¡± The old couple in this story¡ª yeah, that was love.
'Neighbors' : a young couple in charge of a financially better off couple's house during the latter's holidays, tries to impersonate their lives.
'So Much Water So Close to Home' : this story made it to Altman's Short Cuts (1993), the one about couple of guys on a fishing trip who discover a girl's dead body in the river & carry on with their camping holiday. "Two things are certain: people no longer care what happens to other people; and 2) nothing makes any real difference any longer."
'A Small, Good Thing' : another one that made it to the Altman movie¡ª a couple coping with the sudden loss of their little child on the day of his 8th b'day & a grumpy baker who keeps crank calling them for the uncollected cake: "He was a baker. He was glad he wasn¡¯t a florist. It was better to be feeding people. This was a better smell anytime than flowers."
'The Collectors' : the face of desperation¡ª the vacuum cleaner salesman here reminded me of Jack Lemmon's visit to a potential client's house in Glengarry Glen Ross.
'Boxes' : a son's guilt over his mother's manic house shifting¡ª there's no peace anywhere 'cause no matter where you go, how do you escape from yourself!
'Fever' : a harried father trying to look after his two young children, manage his job & household after his wife leaves him for his colleague.
I was hoping the story featuring Jennifer Jason Leigh's portion in Short Cuts would be here¡ªit was a perfect example of the absurdity & irony underlying Carver's humour, but it wasn't here.
August 4, 2023
Ciao Ray,
stasera pensavo a te. Ho preso la tua raccolta di racconti preferiti e ne ho riletti alcuni. Non capisco perch¨¦ alcuni miei amici, pur apprezzandoti, ritengano che tu sia deprimente. Io trovo forza nelle tue storie, anche disperazione, ma nessuno dei tuoi personaggi si compiange e non fa nulla, anzi. C'¨¨ un' accecante passione verso la vita, il fare, il ripromettersi che la prossima volta non commetteranno lo stesso errore, anche se sbagliano ancora e ancora. Ma Dio, siamo esseri umani, no? Che avranno mai da raccontare quelli che non sbagliano mai? La storia che preferisco ¨¨ Elefante. Mi viene da piangere se penso a quante volte l'ho riletto in questi anni trovandoci sempre sollievo. Diedi due esami universitari su questo racconto. Il momento in cui il protagonista sogna il padre, mi stringe ogni volta il cuore. Quando lui ¨¨ un bimbo e ha paura di cadere dalle spalle del genitore e si sente dire:"Lascia pure. Ti reggo io. Non caschi mica" e a quel punto allarga le braccia in fuori e si scioglie e pensa di essere a cavalcioni di un elefante. Sicuro e libero. Il mio corpo serba ancora il ricordo sulla pelle delle mani di mio padre che mi sollevano da terra per prendermi in braccio e la dolce sensazione di abbandono. L'idea del sogno catartico ha una potenza unica e il finale, a cui prepara, ¨¨ tra i pi¨´ belli che abbia mai letto, l'ho fatto mio Ray. Credimi. Ancora adesso quando mi sembra di soccombere guardo il cielo, le nuvole tra i rumori della citt¨¤ e penso al finale. Lo traduco nel presente e mi dico: "Non penso che me ne andr¨° da qui. Cos¨¬ come non andr¨° a lavorare a Timbuctu, sulla Luna o al Polo Nord. Non ho chiuso la porta di casa a chiave, ma non c'¨¨ oggetto di cui non possa fare a meno. ? una bella giornata e tutto considerato mi sento tranquilla. Andr¨¤ tutto bene. Le persone che amo sono in vita. Questa ¨¨ gi¨¤ una bella notizia e ce la faranno anche loro. Certo, le cose ora non vanno bene per nessuno, ma presto cambieranno. C'¨¨ tanto in cui sperare." E mi metto a fischiettare la mia canzone preferita. Mi pare di avere il diritto di fischiettare se ne ho voglia, no? Alla fine, prendo la bicicletta e vado a tutta velocit¨¤, senza meta. Anche se ¨¨ arrugginita.
Grazie,
V.
stasera pensavo a te. Ho preso la tua raccolta di racconti preferiti e ne ho riletti alcuni. Non capisco perch¨¦ alcuni miei amici, pur apprezzandoti, ritengano che tu sia deprimente. Io trovo forza nelle tue storie, anche disperazione, ma nessuno dei tuoi personaggi si compiange e non fa nulla, anzi. C'¨¨ un' accecante passione verso la vita, il fare, il ripromettersi che la prossima volta non commetteranno lo stesso errore, anche se sbagliano ancora e ancora. Ma Dio, siamo esseri umani, no? Che avranno mai da raccontare quelli che non sbagliano mai? La storia che preferisco ¨¨ Elefante. Mi viene da piangere se penso a quante volte l'ho riletto in questi anni trovandoci sempre sollievo. Diedi due esami universitari su questo racconto. Il momento in cui il protagonista sogna il padre, mi stringe ogni volta il cuore. Quando lui ¨¨ un bimbo e ha paura di cadere dalle spalle del genitore e si sente dire:"Lascia pure. Ti reggo io. Non caschi mica" e a quel punto allarga le braccia in fuori e si scioglie e pensa di essere a cavalcioni di un elefante. Sicuro e libero. Il mio corpo serba ancora il ricordo sulla pelle delle mani di mio padre che mi sollevano da terra per prendermi in braccio e la dolce sensazione di abbandono. L'idea del sogno catartico ha una potenza unica e il finale, a cui prepara, ¨¨ tra i pi¨´ belli che abbia mai letto, l'ho fatto mio Ray. Credimi. Ancora adesso quando mi sembra di soccombere guardo il cielo, le nuvole tra i rumori della citt¨¤ e penso al finale. Lo traduco nel presente e mi dico: "Non penso che me ne andr¨° da qui. Cos¨¬ come non andr¨° a lavorare a Timbuctu, sulla Luna o al Polo Nord. Non ho chiuso la porta di casa a chiave, ma non c'¨¨ oggetto di cui non possa fare a meno. ? una bella giornata e tutto considerato mi sento tranquilla. Andr¨¤ tutto bene. Le persone che amo sono in vita. Questa ¨¨ gi¨¤ una bella notizia e ce la faranno anche loro. Certo, le cose ora non vanno bene per nessuno, ma presto cambieranno. C'¨¨ tanto in cui sperare." E mi metto a fischiettare la mia canzone preferita. Mi pare di avere il diritto di fischiettare se ne ho voglia, no? Alla fine, prendo la bicicletta e vado a tutta velocit¨¤, senza meta. Anche se ¨¨ arrugginita.
Grazie,
V.
October 29, 2017
21 novembre 2011
Ieri SKY+qualcosa ha dedicato la serata alla regia di Altman. Inizio a guardare America Oggi e dopo pochi minuti sono un po¡¯ confusa ¨C so di non aver mai visto il film, ma lo conosco - mi informo e realizzo che ¨¨ basato sui racconti di Raymond Carver. Dopo essermi detta: quanto ignori, ragazza mia, me ne sono fatta una ragione e ho voluto ben predispormi alla visione, nella volont¨¤ di rettificare la mia opinione su Carver che, come ho scritto precedentemente ma qui sotto ¨C non aveva fatto suonare le mie corde.
Purtroppo devo dire che non sono riuscita a guardarlo ¨C ho preferito continuare nella lettura di Furore ¨C. Carver mi agghiaccia, letteralmente. E¡¯ un grande scrittore, anzi direi che ¨¨ un ancor pi¨´ grande osservatore, ma mi distrugge. Mi deprime troppo osservare lo svuotamento dell¡¯uomo, il percorso della sua involuzione. Qui non si parla di uomini bestia mai assurti allo stato di pieni esseri umani, qui si parla di uomini che erano tali, ma si sono dimenticati di esserlo, schiacciati dalla disillusione e dal fallimento. Questa ¨¨ una lettura che per me non ¨¨ salutare, mi soffoca, mi mette ansia. Mi era gi¨¤ successo con Oblio di Wallace¡
Primo commento a caldo
Quattro stelle, ma non mi ha conquistata. Ne riconosco senz'altro il valore - grandissima la sensibilit¨¤ e la capacit¨¤ di Carver di cogliere l'animo umano - ma il mio gradimento non decolla. Sono racconti veramente mono-toni, troppi i fallimenti descritti e tutti dello stesso tipo. So bene che proprio questo era il suo scopo, che voleva descrivere il momento in cui l'uomo apre gli occhi e si rende conto che il luccichio che aveva sognato di raggiungere non regala tanta luce e soprattutto non ¨¨ duraturo, ma durante la lettura mi sono spesso distratta, mi ritrovavo a vagare altrove con lo sguardo. E mi spiace dirlo. E poi, alla fine di tutto, dopo aver letto anche l'ultimo racconto, mi chiedo: "Ma quanto bevevano 'sti americani?"
Ieri SKY+qualcosa ha dedicato la serata alla regia di Altman. Inizio a guardare America Oggi e dopo pochi minuti sono un po¡¯ confusa ¨C so di non aver mai visto il film, ma lo conosco - mi informo e realizzo che ¨¨ basato sui racconti di Raymond Carver. Dopo essermi detta: quanto ignori, ragazza mia, me ne sono fatta una ragione e ho voluto ben predispormi alla visione, nella volont¨¤ di rettificare la mia opinione su Carver che, come ho scritto precedentemente ma qui sotto ¨C non aveva fatto suonare le mie corde.
Purtroppo devo dire che non sono riuscita a guardarlo ¨C ho preferito continuare nella lettura di Furore ¨C. Carver mi agghiaccia, letteralmente. E¡¯ un grande scrittore, anzi direi che ¨¨ un ancor pi¨´ grande osservatore, ma mi distrugge. Mi deprime troppo osservare lo svuotamento dell¡¯uomo, il percorso della sua involuzione. Qui non si parla di uomini bestia mai assurti allo stato di pieni esseri umani, qui si parla di uomini che erano tali, ma si sono dimenticati di esserlo, schiacciati dalla disillusione e dal fallimento. Questa ¨¨ una lettura che per me non ¨¨ salutare, mi soffoca, mi mette ansia. Mi era gi¨¤ successo con Oblio di Wallace¡
Primo commento a caldo
Quattro stelle, ma non mi ha conquistata. Ne riconosco senz'altro il valore - grandissima la sensibilit¨¤ e la capacit¨¤ di Carver di cogliere l'animo umano - ma il mio gradimento non decolla. Sono racconti veramente mono-toni, troppi i fallimenti descritti e tutti dello stesso tipo. So bene che proprio questo era il suo scopo, che voleva descrivere il momento in cui l'uomo apre gli occhi e si rende conto che il luccichio che aveva sognato di raggiungere non regala tanta luce e soprattutto non ¨¨ duraturo, ma durante la lettura mi sono spesso distratta, mi ritrovavo a vagare altrove con lo sguardo. E mi spiace dirlo. E poi, alla fine di tutto, dopo aver letto anche l'ultimo racconto, mi chiedo: "Ma quanto bevevano 'sti americani?"
June 5, 2018
It's been an absolute pleasure over the past two months to read through this life-spanning collection of Raymond Carver short stories. I was turned onto Where I'm Calling From after reading Glenn Sumi's glowing review, and I'm more than happy to report that he didn't lead me astray!
Carver's stories all share the ability to convey powerful emotion with stunning linguistic economy. The language is always easy to read, even if the content is not. Over the course of the 37 stories in this collection, Carver's scope widens as he begins to incorporate increasingly large casts and tackle new themes with the same keen eye of his early stories. One of my favourite experiences of the collection was seeing Carver's evolution throughout time. It makes it all the more difficult when you consider the "New Stories" section of this book seem to suggest even more exciting avenues were to be investigated before his untimely death at 50.
As for the stories themselves, they feel linked by broken homes, collapsing marriages, one-too-many bourbon, infidelity, tragedy, and the mercurial nature of human existence. If that seems too ponderous or needlessly cynical, you need not worry. Carver manages to draw humour from unexpected sources, like in his early story, Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes, where the physical violence is as funny as it is unexpected. Indeed, Feathers is quite possibly the funniest short story I've ever read and my laughter drew the glare of studious, silent coffee-drinkers. Then, just as I would finish a hilarious story, I'd be thrown into a heart-rending tale of loss in A Small, Good Thing.
There's a lot of range on display in this collection (more towards the back half than the front), but there's something that makes these stories feel distinctly Carverian. That one story does not feel out of sync with the other is a testament to the humanistic, almost-universal nature of Carver's writing. Even though the tone and intent of each story can be quite different, I had the sense that two characters from different stories could meet in a diner and nothing would feel out of place. Of course, it does help that just about every character would be more than happy to have that discussion over a few drinks.
I've been reading a lot of short story collections this year and reading Carver has been a great contrast to some of the other authors I've read. Carver does a splendid job of telling the reader a lot with a little bit of story. Some of these characters and the situations they find themselves in seem familiar in part because they are related to the reader in a way that feels very similar to everyday life. You can feel the tension between two characters from their body language or a change in their dialogue instead of outright exposition. That type of writing is a rare treat.
This is a longer short story collection, but one well worth your time. I picked up the collection whenever the mood struck me before barrelling through the last 150 pages over a couple days. Carver's stories provided a much-needed break from dense, challenging reads and helped ground me in really good, unadorned prose. So, it is my hope that my review will prompt your reading of this collection, much like Glenn's review did for me. Thanks, Glenn!
Carver's stories all share the ability to convey powerful emotion with stunning linguistic economy. The language is always easy to read, even if the content is not. Over the course of the 37 stories in this collection, Carver's scope widens as he begins to incorporate increasingly large casts and tackle new themes with the same keen eye of his early stories. One of my favourite experiences of the collection was seeing Carver's evolution throughout time. It makes it all the more difficult when you consider the "New Stories" section of this book seem to suggest even more exciting avenues were to be investigated before his untimely death at 50.
As for the stories themselves, they feel linked by broken homes, collapsing marriages, one-too-many bourbon, infidelity, tragedy, and the mercurial nature of human existence. If that seems too ponderous or needlessly cynical, you need not worry. Carver manages to draw humour from unexpected sources, like in his early story, Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes, where the physical violence is as funny as it is unexpected. Indeed, Feathers is quite possibly the funniest short story I've ever read and my laughter drew the glare of studious, silent coffee-drinkers. Then, just as I would finish a hilarious story, I'd be thrown into a heart-rending tale of loss in A Small, Good Thing.
There's a lot of range on display in this collection (more towards the back half than the front), but there's something that makes these stories feel distinctly Carverian. That one story does not feel out of sync with the other is a testament to the humanistic, almost-universal nature of Carver's writing. Even though the tone and intent of each story can be quite different, I had the sense that two characters from different stories could meet in a diner and nothing would feel out of place. Of course, it does help that just about every character would be more than happy to have that discussion over a few drinks.
I've been reading a lot of short story collections this year and reading Carver has been a great contrast to some of the other authors I've read. Carver does a splendid job of telling the reader a lot with a little bit of story. Some of these characters and the situations they find themselves in seem familiar in part because they are related to the reader in a way that feels very similar to everyday life. You can feel the tension between two characters from their body language or a change in their dialogue instead of outright exposition. That type of writing is a rare treat.
This is a longer short story collection, but one well worth your time. I picked up the collection whenever the mood struck me before barrelling through the last 150 pages over a couple days. Carver's stories provided a much-needed break from dense, challenging reads and helped ground me in really good, unadorned prose. So, it is my hope that my review will prompt your reading of this collection, much like Glenn's review did for me. Thanks, Glenn!
November 3, 2014
A band I loved in high school -- Peter Parker, of course -- had a song named "Where I'm Calling From," which was based on the title of this book, so I was implored to pick it up.
I started read it there and then, and while I think some of the brilliance was hard for my young mind to grasp, there was plenty of it that I could appreciate, despite my naivete. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is one of my runaway favorites - I tried to do my own short story tribute to it (but failed miserably), but I think "Cathedral" might reign supreme. Then again, everything in this is amazing, and there's plenty in here that I need to re-read and reinterpret - the two above are just the two I've read most recently (because I loved them so much even then).
I can't explain what it is about Carver that makes him so magnificent - possibly how well he can escalate one situation. Many of the stories focus around one incident, one time frame, so plot-wise they're not very complex, but as far as characters, there are so many layers as you watch people unravel around one event. It all feels very true to life.
In that Headley book I read a couple months ago, she made some joke about how a man carrying a Carver book isn't a good sign, and she's probably right. The stories, by and large, revolve around men while the women are generally secondary characters. Not that the women are perfect, but their flaws are just not put center stage as often as that of the men. The centerpiece of each story tends to be about some fucked up aspect of the man's character - alcoholism, insensitivity, ignorance, stubbornness, jealousy, etc. It's good insight, though, and women can still relate.
I started read it there and then, and while I think some of the brilliance was hard for my young mind to grasp, there was plenty of it that I could appreciate, despite my naivete. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is one of my runaway favorites - I tried to do my own short story tribute to it (but failed miserably), but I think "Cathedral" might reign supreme. Then again, everything in this is amazing, and there's plenty in here that I need to re-read and reinterpret - the two above are just the two I've read most recently (because I loved them so much even then).
I can't explain what it is about Carver that makes him so magnificent - possibly how well he can escalate one situation. Many of the stories focus around one incident, one time frame, so plot-wise they're not very complex, but as far as characters, there are so many layers as you watch people unravel around one event. It all feels very true to life.
In that Headley book I read a couple months ago, she made some joke about how a man carrying a Carver book isn't a good sign, and she's probably right. The stories, by and large, revolve around men while the women are generally secondary characters. Not that the women are perfect, but their flaws are just not put center stage as often as that of the men. The centerpiece of each story tends to be about some fucked up aspect of the man's character - alcoholism, insensitivity, ignorance, stubbornness, jealousy, etc. It's good insight, though, and women can still relate.
December 18, 2014
The Stories included here are:
Nobody Said Anything
Bicycles,Muscles,Cigarettes
The Student's Wife
They're not your Husband
What do you do in San Fransico?
Fat
What's in Alaska?
Neighbors
Put Yourself in My Shoes
Collectors
Why,Honey?
Are these actual Miles?
Gazebo
One More Thing
Little Things
Why Don't you Dance?
A Serious Talk
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Distance
The Third Thing That Killed my Father Off
So Much water so close to Home
The Calm
Vitamins
Careful
Where I'm Calling From
Chef's House
Fever
Feathers
Cathedral
A Small,Good Thing
Boxes
Whoever was using this Bed
Initmacy
Menudo
Elephant
Blackbird Pie
Errand
Just the vastness of this collection makes me want to rate it highly, add to that the fact it has some excellent stories. Stories that felt like tablets, small doses of medicine called reality. Reality in all its bitterness, which you carry on your back like a burden you keep on accumulating without being aware of it. Until one day it shows, in the way you live your life, the emptiness of growing older, parting children, abandoned love.
Changing perspectives, changing people. And you at the center of it all, all alone.
Nobody Said Anything
Bicycles,Muscles,Cigarettes
The Student's Wife
They're not your Husband
What do you do in San Fransico?
Fat
What's in Alaska?
Neighbors
Put Yourself in My Shoes
Collectors
Why,Honey?
Are these actual Miles?
Gazebo
One More Thing
Little Things
Why Don't you Dance?
A Serious Talk
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Distance
The Third Thing That Killed my Father Off
So Much water so close to Home
The Calm
Vitamins
Careful
Where I'm Calling From
Chef's House
Fever
Feathers
Cathedral
A Small,Good Thing
Boxes
Whoever was using this Bed
Initmacy
Menudo
Elephant
Blackbird Pie
Errand
Just the vastness of this collection makes me want to rate it highly, add to that the fact it has some excellent stories. Stories that felt like tablets, small doses of medicine called reality. Reality in all its bitterness, which you carry on your back like a burden you keep on accumulating without being aware of it. Until one day it shows, in the way you live your life, the emptiness of growing older, parting children, abandoned love.
Changing perspectives, changing people. And you at the center of it all, all alone.
September 4, 2009
I seem to be one of the few people who managed to read this before seeing the Altman film Short Cuts, which is based on nine of the stories. I also like Short Cuts more than most of my friends. Possibly there's some connection.
November 14, 2008
Suffice it to say that Carver is universally recognized as one of the leading lights of Modern American Fiction.Admired by college professors as well as more casual readers, Carver is as enjoyable a read as you will find.Choosing his heroes from everyday life, Carver is that rare writer who is both well respected yet easy to read.
With Carver, it's difficult to choose a favorite.Each story is of the highest quality , a reflection of just how consistent a fine writer Carver is.While this collection is not quite up to the standards of his other collection,Cathedral,you will find few that are better.Treat yourself to some time with one of the masters.
With Carver, it's difficult to choose a favorite.Each story is of the highest quality , a reflection of just how consistent a fine writer Carver is.While this collection is not quite up to the standards of his other collection,Cathedral,you will find few that are better.Treat yourself to some time with one of the masters.
April 8, 2024
How do the working poor experience anomie? What does it mean to be underemployed, rudderless, inarticulate, and utterly stuck? How does it feel to be one missed paycheck away from having to move the family to yet another shabby rented room in a new town? Would you respond by lashing out at loved ones, or would you decline into a kind of learned helplessness whose only escape is into the deeper prison of the bottle? (It is all illusory: there is no escape from yourself.) Raymond Carver was dedicated to getting it all down; it was his through line, his vocation, his and his characters¡¯ lives blighted alike by the same precarity. We believe in the reality of these people, the wreckage of their adulteries and their no-chance dreams, and we believe that stasis and self-sabotage are overwhelmingly their lot. For these people, we are reminded many times that things don¡¯t change¡ªuntil they sometimes and ambiguously do. Their speech is the vocabulary of those who have no relief from the daily struggle for security and shelter. They yearn for an enduring identity separate from consuming material concerns. Plain and blunt, they use the first word that comes to hand¡ªnaked, graceless words that fail to disguise an urgent, gnawing want. ¡°I did the drinks¡± (not poured) and ¡°We have sandwich stuff¡± are two mundane examples of what I mean. Speech fills the silence or dispels a need, and particularly in the early stories, eloquence as a means of naming and so transcending problems is a sad impossibility. An inability to voice the mechanisms of entrapment is central to their predicaments. Their best hope is vicarious escape into another life (¡°Neighbors¡±), an empathetic epiphany (¡°Fat,¡± and many, many more: it is a favorite Carver device for ending stories resonantly), or the sudden discovery of a spouse or lover¡¯s true nature (the magnificent ¡°So Much Water So Close to Home,¡± which I¡¯ll touch on in greater detail). We use each other tragically, cruelly. Only in humility, through acts of moral imagination, is humane growth and the deliverance of a better life possible. The deck is stacked against them, a Carver character might say, but the author¡¯s clear belief in goodness and compassion is what makes the stories mostly satisfactory and occasionally more than that.
Having addressed Carver¡¯s aesthetic commitments, I will now lay out some reservations, such as Carver¡¯s adherence to a straightforward slice-of-life telling. One consequence of this broad unanimity of scope is a broad unanimity of tone: an amorously involved male and female, usually white and working class, arguing in a room over work, sex, or life aspirations and struggling toward resolution. This thoroughgoing focus on ennui, stagnation, and the characters¡¯ futile efforts to effect change can, at its best, lead to surprise moral realignments (¡°They¡¯re Not Your Husband¡±). More often, such tales fail to transcend realistic portraits of deprivation (¡°The Student¡¯s Wife,¡± ¡°One More Thing,¡± ¡°What¡¯s in Alaska?¡±): they are ¡°true¡± as depictions of longing and dysfunction but lack the finer details and broader contexts consistent with the world-in-miniature quality of the best short fiction. They, indeed, may not take you farther than ¡°the sofa to the junk room and back¡± (Tolstoy¡¯s ironic remark about Chekhov¡¯s plays in ¡°Errand¡±). (Sidenote: I only recently learned about the term ¡°Kmart realism,¡± the paladin of which was Carver¡¯s longtime editor, Gordon Lish. The abiding controversy about who deserves the most credit, Carver or Lish, for the trademark spare ¡°Carver style¡± doesn¡¯t interest me much. Besides, Hemingway long ago demonstrated minimalism¡¯s capacity to produce the sublime, which should be the goal of any story, whatever its brand name.) This is one kind of Carver story, terse and domestic, and happily not the only one. And even within this limited stratum, he has the talent to strike home. I think of ¡°Neighbors,¡± which ends on a note of elliptical dread that works because the couple¡¯s small, sad life can hardly withstand another loss. Too, Carver¡¯s command of mystery and ambiguous danger in ¡°Why, Honey?¡± is remarkable, containing in seven pages a mother¡¯s fear of her possibly sociopathic son, addressed to an anonymous recipient whose very identity (the mother¡¯s address is unlisted) is a secondary cause of anxiety. In general, though, I prefer Carver in a different mode. The writer of ¡°Cathedral,¡± ¡°A Small, Good Thing,¡± and, above all, ¡°So Much Water So Close to Home,¡± sees into deeper truths.
Let me explain, if I can, why I thought ¡°So Much Water¡¡± separated so much from the pack. Claire, the first-person narrator, is the wife of a man named Stuart who ignores a young woman¡¯s waterlogged corpse in order to prolong a fishing trip. When she learns of his breathtaking selfishness, she indeed changes; haunted by his evident disregard, she sees women imperiled everywhere. Her voice turns, to an unusual and harrowing degree, on moral reassessment and horror. The truth of her situation becomes clear: the world of male violence has come to her door, and it is here to stay. Suddenly, she remembers a high-school classmate¡¯s brutal rape and murder, she is leered at (she perceives) by a filling-station attendant, and she is tailed by an overly inquisitive male driver on the way to the girl¡¯s funeral. The perspective is one with her newly discovered sense of alarm and despair about the world: This is how we treat each other now? And it is Claire's moral awareness in the face of a callous man, her husband, edging closer to verbal and physical violence, that anchors the story. We once again return to Carver¡¯s prominent theme of ineloquence. Stuart¡¯s inability to explain his own ethical failure is precisely what endangers Claire. Carver demonstrates how quickly frustrated rhetoric can turn to force, and how the need for moral vindication finds an out in the conjugal sanction of male prerogative. Stuart takes cover, in other words, in the power-conferring reality of his gender, and in so doing destroys the true heart of his marriage. Carver is unsparing about the costs of Stuart¡¯s cowardly appeal to authority. It is nothing less than a betrayal of the private character on which any marriage depends: the specific ways we come to know and care for a spouse, and all the unique emotional¨Cpsychological components of an identity laid bare to another¡¯s keeping. His speech is consequently corrupted; he stops trying to explain and starts to threaten, berate, insult. He becomes the face of all the craven, implacable drives Claire has been fleeing; she becomes merely something to be used for his pleasure. Inarticulacy is thus elevated from a symptom of the characters' existential plight to an emotional reality that determines their fate. Carver¡¯s eye and ear are never sharper than in these scenes of marital emergency. The dam-breaking moment when Stuart's humanity gives way is something I won¡¯t soon forget. This is penetrating, insightful work that illuminates and clarifies, where others in the collection are content to describe or unfold a scene.
The two other stories that most fully share these qualities, though perhaps not quite as stirringly, are ¡°Cathedral¡± and ¡°A Small, Good Thing.¡± In the first, the husband¡¯s terse and almost parodically hard-boiled narration subtly expands with the effort of describing and inhabiting the unknown. He accepts the risks of change, braves mystery, and breaks the pattern of wry cynicism to understand what blindness is like. I perceive a similar dynamic at work in the second. The job of doctor and baker tell both men what they are and how they should behave. They have succumbed to these definitions, sealing them off from real, developing life. The doctor's certitude, denying that Scotty has lapsed into a coma, is illusory and wrong, but he's playing the part and to be pitied. The baker¡¯s taciturnity marks his struggle for subsistence; it has, in turn, estranged him from the family of man. A shattering of professional identity, so facile in the face of death, enables the baker to display his humanity in a small gesture of sympathy, giving the best of himself in comfort and healing. Perhaps in this we glimpse a sad comment on the writer himself. In life, he was apparently every bit the drinking and carousing figure his hero Hemingway suggested he should be, while revealing a different and sensitive self in the best of his stories. This paradox, more than the temporary phenomenon of ¡°Kmart realism¡± or the Lish question, is a key to the fascination and significance of Carver¡¯s art.
Having addressed Carver¡¯s aesthetic commitments, I will now lay out some reservations, such as Carver¡¯s adherence to a straightforward slice-of-life telling. One consequence of this broad unanimity of scope is a broad unanimity of tone: an amorously involved male and female, usually white and working class, arguing in a room over work, sex, or life aspirations and struggling toward resolution. This thoroughgoing focus on ennui, stagnation, and the characters¡¯ futile efforts to effect change can, at its best, lead to surprise moral realignments (¡°They¡¯re Not Your Husband¡±). More often, such tales fail to transcend realistic portraits of deprivation (¡°The Student¡¯s Wife,¡± ¡°One More Thing,¡± ¡°What¡¯s in Alaska?¡±): they are ¡°true¡± as depictions of longing and dysfunction but lack the finer details and broader contexts consistent with the world-in-miniature quality of the best short fiction. They, indeed, may not take you farther than ¡°the sofa to the junk room and back¡± (Tolstoy¡¯s ironic remark about Chekhov¡¯s plays in ¡°Errand¡±). (Sidenote: I only recently learned about the term ¡°Kmart realism,¡± the paladin of which was Carver¡¯s longtime editor, Gordon Lish. The abiding controversy about who deserves the most credit, Carver or Lish, for the trademark spare ¡°Carver style¡± doesn¡¯t interest me much. Besides, Hemingway long ago demonstrated minimalism¡¯s capacity to produce the sublime, which should be the goal of any story, whatever its brand name.) This is one kind of Carver story, terse and domestic, and happily not the only one. And even within this limited stratum, he has the talent to strike home. I think of ¡°Neighbors,¡± which ends on a note of elliptical dread that works because the couple¡¯s small, sad life can hardly withstand another loss. Too, Carver¡¯s command of mystery and ambiguous danger in ¡°Why, Honey?¡± is remarkable, containing in seven pages a mother¡¯s fear of her possibly sociopathic son, addressed to an anonymous recipient whose very identity (the mother¡¯s address is unlisted) is a secondary cause of anxiety. In general, though, I prefer Carver in a different mode. The writer of ¡°Cathedral,¡± ¡°A Small, Good Thing,¡± and, above all, ¡°So Much Water So Close to Home,¡± sees into deeper truths.
Let me explain, if I can, why I thought ¡°So Much Water¡¡± separated so much from the pack. Claire, the first-person narrator, is the wife of a man named Stuart who ignores a young woman¡¯s waterlogged corpse in order to prolong a fishing trip. When she learns of his breathtaking selfishness, she indeed changes; haunted by his evident disregard, she sees women imperiled everywhere. Her voice turns, to an unusual and harrowing degree, on moral reassessment and horror. The truth of her situation becomes clear: the world of male violence has come to her door, and it is here to stay. Suddenly, she remembers a high-school classmate¡¯s brutal rape and murder, she is leered at (she perceives) by a filling-station attendant, and she is tailed by an overly inquisitive male driver on the way to the girl¡¯s funeral. The perspective is one with her newly discovered sense of alarm and despair about the world: This is how we treat each other now? And it is Claire's moral awareness in the face of a callous man, her husband, edging closer to verbal and physical violence, that anchors the story. We once again return to Carver¡¯s prominent theme of ineloquence. Stuart¡¯s inability to explain his own ethical failure is precisely what endangers Claire. Carver demonstrates how quickly frustrated rhetoric can turn to force, and how the need for moral vindication finds an out in the conjugal sanction of male prerogative. Stuart takes cover, in other words, in the power-conferring reality of his gender, and in so doing destroys the true heart of his marriage. Carver is unsparing about the costs of Stuart¡¯s cowardly appeal to authority. It is nothing less than a betrayal of the private character on which any marriage depends: the specific ways we come to know and care for a spouse, and all the unique emotional¨Cpsychological components of an identity laid bare to another¡¯s keeping. His speech is consequently corrupted; he stops trying to explain and starts to threaten, berate, insult. He becomes the face of all the craven, implacable drives Claire has been fleeing; she becomes merely something to be used for his pleasure. Inarticulacy is thus elevated from a symptom of the characters' existential plight to an emotional reality that determines their fate. Carver¡¯s eye and ear are never sharper than in these scenes of marital emergency. The dam-breaking moment when Stuart's humanity gives way is something I won¡¯t soon forget. This is penetrating, insightful work that illuminates and clarifies, where others in the collection are content to describe or unfold a scene.
The two other stories that most fully share these qualities, though perhaps not quite as stirringly, are ¡°Cathedral¡± and ¡°A Small, Good Thing.¡± In the first, the husband¡¯s terse and almost parodically hard-boiled narration subtly expands with the effort of describing and inhabiting the unknown. He accepts the risks of change, braves mystery, and breaks the pattern of wry cynicism to understand what blindness is like. I perceive a similar dynamic at work in the second. The job of doctor and baker tell both men what they are and how they should behave. They have succumbed to these definitions, sealing them off from real, developing life. The doctor's certitude, denying that Scotty has lapsed into a coma, is illusory and wrong, but he's playing the part and to be pitied. The baker¡¯s taciturnity marks his struggle for subsistence; it has, in turn, estranged him from the family of man. A shattering of professional identity, so facile in the face of death, enables the baker to display his humanity in a small gesture of sympathy, giving the best of himself in comfort and healing. Perhaps in this we glimpse a sad comment on the writer himself. In life, he was apparently every bit the drinking and carousing figure his hero Hemingway suggested he should be, while revealing a different and sensitive self in the best of his stories. This paradox, more than the temporary phenomenon of ¡°Kmart realism¡± or the Lish question, is a key to the fascination and significance of Carver¡¯s art.
January 24, 2014
A straightforward story about an average married couple who wish to emulate their neighbors. Carver does not add flourish or fancy or much finesse to his writing, but he does examine idealism, materialism, and other themes within this short story. Not the most exciting material but an okay read.
June 20, 2017
"Da dove sto chiamando" ¨¨ una raccolta di 37 dei migliori racconti di Carver. Carver, con la sua grande capacit¨¤ e invettiva, ci porta nella sua America.
L'America raccontata e descritta da Carver ¨¨ completamente ddiiversa dalla America che siamo abituati a conoscere. Non ¨¨ l'America dei sogni che si realizzano, ma ¨¨ l'America dei sogni infranti, della disperazione.
I racconti di Carver sono vere e proprie pennellate di vita. Sono pennellate che raccontano e descrivono la desolazione, l'incomunicabilit¨¤, la difficolt¨¤ di arrivare a fine mese, l'amore, la tragedia, ecc. I protagonisti dei suoi racconti sono uomini e donne, persone normali, semplici che vivono i problemi di ogni giorno. Sono personaggi nei quali ci si pu¨° immedesimare. Sono racconti che toccano il cuore e sono vicini a ognuno di noi.
Lo stile di Carver ¨¨ asciutto, senza fronzoli, semplice proprio come i suoi personaggi, esseri con i loro difetti e pregi che li rendono molto simili e uguali a noi.
L'America raccontata e descritta da Carver ¨¨ completamente ddiiversa dalla America che siamo abituati a conoscere. Non ¨¨ l'America dei sogni che si realizzano, ma ¨¨ l'America dei sogni infranti, della disperazione.
I racconti di Carver sono vere e proprie pennellate di vita. Sono pennellate che raccontano e descrivono la desolazione, l'incomunicabilit¨¤, la difficolt¨¤ di arrivare a fine mese, l'amore, la tragedia, ecc. I protagonisti dei suoi racconti sono uomini e donne, persone normali, semplici che vivono i problemi di ogni giorno. Sono personaggi nei quali ci si pu¨° immedesimare. Sono racconti che toccano il cuore e sono vicini a ognuno di noi.
Lo stile di Carver ¨¨ asciutto, senza fronzoli, semplice proprio come i suoi personaggi, esseri con i loro difetti e pregi che li rendono molto simili e uguali a noi.
March 9, 2018
This was a casual re-read¡ªI fell out of a Carver mood mid-book so I'm out. I stand by what I said last time below anyway :)
Some excellent, some great, too many overall- dampens the effect of each.
The stories from and especially are his best :)
Some excellent, some great, too many overall- dampens the effect of each.
The stories from and especially are his best :)
March 10, 2016
4.5
i enjoyed most of the stories. two in particular that i really enjoyed were elephant (best ending) and a small good thing (all around great. tearjerker) read it. highly recommend.
this review would be much better buttttt i lost my notes.
i enjoyed most of the stories. two in particular that i really enjoyed were elephant (best ending) and a small good thing (all around great. tearjerker) read it. highly recommend.
this review would be much better buttttt i lost my notes.
October 12, 2021
Carver strikes gold again. Some of these I'd come across in his other works, but it was a chance to just marvel at them again. The ones I hadn't already read were just as impressive. What a writer. For me short story writers don't come much better.
March 1, 2014
When I read a book of short stories, I usually wait eagerly for the title story, the one that the book is named after. And then I wonder how that selection was made. In this case the stories are gathered from several previous collections but only one was chosen to be the title of the book. Often in the review of a book of short stories, like this one, the reviewer will summarize several stories to give you a flavor of the book. Other reviewers have done that with Where I¡¯m Calling From so I will resist.
But I¡¯ll say a bit about the title story just in case you are looking forward to that. It¡¯s a story about a drunk who meets another drunk in a place they are getting sober. I figure some of the stories are autobiographical since Raymond Carver was a drunk. He was also a fisher and hunter and some of the stories include fishing and hunting. But not this one. I try to imagine someone telling parts of this story at an AA meeting where someone is celebrating the anniversary of their sobriety. Seems possible from my experience. Drunks are often good story tellers as Carver shows. Where I¡¯m Calling From includes regular parts of a drunk story: tremors, a wife, a girlfriend, kids. It also includes kissing a chimney sweep for good luck.
Again, I will not try to summarize the thirty-seven stories in this collection. Judging from the review of the book from the New York Times, these particular stories were selected by the author himself.
Many of the stories involve married couples and their not-always-positive impressions of and experiences with each other. I would say the book will leave you sober and thoughtful about life, maybe even slogging occasionally though the gritty minutia. I found myself wondering where I was when I finished reading many of the stories. What has just happened to the characters in the story? What was going to happen next? It couldn¡¯t possibly be a happy ending, could it? Not likely.
I wonder why I would want to read a book like this? Well, I like the glimpses I get of my own weird interior life. It makes me feel alive in the midst of what might seem like the humdrum of daily routine because my mind is always bumping though this kind of material. The intricacy and beauty of the snowflake is not easy to capture in the whiteout but I think Raymond Carver might be trying to do that in the midst of his portrayal of so much gloom. Or is it just the opposite of beauty: the putrid smell of the refuse? The promise and threat of the storm cloud is often present at the beginning, in the middle, at the end of the story.
We are told that the stories in the book are arranged ¡°generally¡± in chronological order. I believe the inclusion of the word generally is to both raise our curiosity and our hackles. This is what Carver does with words habitually. Or at least he did that until he died in 1988, the year this book was published, at the young age of fifty.
Sometimes the story just ends.
Carver seems to be a bit of a folk hero; the fact that he died young and sober after being a raging drunk for many years gives him some notoriety and mystery. I want to read more of his stories. This book contains the stories that he selected. Before he died he suggested that there were some of his stories that he would NOT select. But, in spite of that, his heirs collected many unpublished stories and made new books, even new collections after he was dead and buried.
I just kept reading this book. No good reason. It seemed as depressing as all get out to tell you the truth. But then I got into the new stories that were at the end of the book. Remember that I said the stories were ¡°generally in chronological order¡±? So the new stories are the most recent stories.
And it occurs to me that with these new stories you can sob and cry OR YOU CAN BREAK INTO LAUGHTER. You had to stop being so serious and LAUGH! So I did and I loved the feeling. Thank you, Mr. Raymond Carver! The new stories were the best stories ¨C maybe because they were written when he had been sober the longest. He may not have been a nice drunk; some of the people in his previously published stories are certainly not nice. He seemed quite well acquainted with them however. This is not to say that the characters in the new stories are nice. They are not especially. But I got more enjoyment from those stories.
Five grateful stars as I realized that things just could NOT be as bad as all that. There is drama. There is pessimism. There is riveting writing.
You should read the NYT¡¯s article about Carver by Stephen King:
The 1993 Robert Altman film Short Cuts is based on Carver short stories and is available on DVD.
As you delve more deeply into the life and writing career of Mr. Carver, the roles of both his editor/agent, Gordon Lish, and his biographer, Carol Sklenicka, become more convoluted and entwined with his life. Both are people I would like to know more about as I try to understand Mr. Carver.
But I¡¯ll say a bit about the title story just in case you are looking forward to that. It¡¯s a story about a drunk who meets another drunk in a place they are getting sober. I figure some of the stories are autobiographical since Raymond Carver was a drunk. He was also a fisher and hunter and some of the stories include fishing and hunting. But not this one. I try to imagine someone telling parts of this story at an AA meeting where someone is celebrating the anniversary of their sobriety. Seems possible from my experience. Drunks are often good story tellers as Carver shows. Where I¡¯m Calling From includes regular parts of a drunk story: tremors, a wife, a girlfriend, kids. It also includes kissing a chimney sweep for good luck.
Again, I will not try to summarize the thirty-seven stories in this collection. Judging from the review of the book from the New York Times, these particular stories were selected by the author himself.
In putting together ''Where I'm Calling From,'' Mr. Carver decided against collecting all his stories. ''There are some I'm not particularly fond of and would not like to see reprinted again. I just picked up ones that I felt I could live with.''
Many of the stories involve married couples and their not-always-positive impressions of and experiences with each other. I would say the book will leave you sober and thoughtful about life, maybe even slogging occasionally though the gritty minutia. I found myself wondering where I was when I finished reading many of the stories. What has just happened to the characters in the story? What was going to happen next? It couldn¡¯t possibly be a happy ending, could it? Not likely.
I wonder why I would want to read a book like this? Well, I like the glimpses I get of my own weird interior life. It makes me feel alive in the midst of what might seem like the humdrum of daily routine because my mind is always bumping though this kind of material. The intricacy and beauty of the snowflake is not easy to capture in the whiteout but I think Raymond Carver might be trying to do that in the midst of his portrayal of so much gloom. Or is it just the opposite of beauty: the putrid smell of the refuse? The promise and threat of the storm cloud is often present at the beginning, in the middle, at the end of the story.
We are told that the stories in the book are arranged ¡°generally¡± in chronological order. I believe the inclusion of the word generally is to both raise our curiosity and our hackles. This is what Carver does with words habitually. Or at least he did that until he died in 1988, the year this book was published, at the young age of fifty.
Sometimes the story just ends.
He said, ¡°I just want to say one more thing.¡±
And then he could not think what it could possibly be.
Carver seems to be a bit of a folk hero; the fact that he died young and sober after being a raging drunk for many years gives him some notoriety and mystery. I want to read more of his stories. This book contains the stories that he selected. Before he died he suggested that there were some of his stories that he would NOT select. But, in spite of that, his heirs collected many unpublished stories and made new books, even new collections after he was dead and buried.
I just kept reading this book. No good reason. It seemed as depressing as all get out to tell you the truth. But then I got into the new stories that were at the end of the book. Remember that I said the stories were ¡°generally in chronological order¡±? So the new stories are the most recent stories.
And it occurs to me that with these new stories you can sob and cry OR YOU CAN BREAK INTO LAUGHTER. You had to stop being so serious and LAUGH! So I did and I loved the feeling. Thank you, Mr. Raymond Carver! The new stories were the best stories ¨C maybe because they were written when he had been sober the longest. He may not have been a nice drunk; some of the people in his previously published stories are certainly not nice. He seemed quite well acquainted with them however. This is not to say that the characters in the new stories are nice. They are not especially. But I got more enjoyment from those stories.
Five grateful stars as I realized that things just could NOT be as bad as all that. There is drama. There is pessimism. There is riveting writing.
You should read the NYT¡¯s article about Carver by Stephen King:
The 1993 Robert Altman film Short Cuts is based on Carver short stories and is available on DVD.
As you delve more deeply into the life and writing career of Mr. Carver, the roles of both his editor/agent, Gordon Lish, and his biographer, Carol Sklenicka, become more convoluted and entwined with his life. Both are people I would like to know more about as I try to understand Mr. Carver.
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