When mentioning the art of the short story, we eventually come to the subject of Raymond Carver. Brought to the height of his career in the 1980s, Carver was known for revival of the short form and for his curt, direct style of writing that came to be known as dirty realism. Of course, there was the controversy between Carver and his editor, Gordon Lish, but by the time Cathedral came out, Carver had already distanced himself away from the editor (he actually re-wrote "The Bath" which in a 21 page extension re-titled "A Small Good Thing.) Cathedral, Carver's last book, shows an evolved writer beyond the minimalist to show something sad (yes, the book is rather depressing) yet essentially human.

Among the stories collected here is of course the title story, widely anthologized and widely held as Carver's masterpiece. Within its 19 pages, we see a story of a marriage falling apart and a man's blindness to his love life. The falling apart of life is a theme in the collection. In the dozen stories, we see not only marriages falling apart ("Vitamins") but also families ("The Compartment") and selfhoods ("Where I'm Calling From"). What makes Carver's collection distinct though, is that people don't just fall apart, life slips away from them, but they really have no choice but to survive.

His movement is called dirty realism for a reason.

Among my favorite stories are "Vitamins," "A Small Good Thing," and "The Train," but everything is worth reading, and you shouldn't be skipping around in a short story collection anyway. To read Cathedral, like any short story collection, you read the first story and then you progress, you savor.

Within the Carver's stories, what we taste is a bitter sadness mixed with a subtle hint of fear, but Carver realistically portrays life (that depressing thing) a raw, simple language that you can't help but feel cut, yet want to read on, maybe a bit more.

While some might complain that the stories don't progress and that "nothing happens," these are the same people looking at fiction for escapism. Which is not wrong. It's just not what Carver does. To read Carver to examine your own life and the lives of other through a magnifying glass. This aren't fables, kids. ( )

loved this even though several endings baffled me a bit, but likely that was the point, I was immediately captivated with each scenario within a sentence or 2 and wanted to know what happens next....not always the case today with modern fiction, but it is, after all, why i love to read!! ( )

Not what I expected.: Despite the reviews, I don't connect with this book. It had nothing memorable. Sorry, it's going to get donated to the local library.

I came across Raymond Carver in graduate school, a few months before his death in 1988, with "What We Talk about when We Talk about Love." I recently revisited "Cathedral," his 1979 masterpiece, in a collection of his short stories. Carver is often compared to Chekhov, his literary influence, but I argue the better comparison is Hemingway. Carver's stories are about broken people suffering from failed marriages, substance abuse, alcoholism, and flaws in their characters. His writing is sparse and pared of ornament, sentences stripped to carefully chosen verbs and nouns, but told in the natural voices of a cross-section of America. "Cathedral" is the closest we get to an uplifting story from Carver. It is the story of a man who cannot see past his daily life and his whiskey glass. A strange blind man knows more about the unnamed narrator's wife than he does. He is a man who works a job he hates and comes home to the TV and the bottle, what Thoreau called "a life of quiet desperation." A visit from a blind man, an old friend of his wife's, forces the narrator to face his superficiality:

"He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the
movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed... a blind man in my house
was not something I looked forward to."

Soon, however, the narrator learns to see his wife's friend as someone who suffers just as the narrator does, but is more honest about his sorrows, mainly the death of his wife:

"Hearing this, I felt sorry for the blind man for a bit. And then I found myself thinking
what a pitiful life this woman must have led. Imagine a woman who could never see
herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one. A woman could go on day after
day and never receive the smallest compliment from her beloved. A woman whose
husband could never read the expression on her face, be it misery or something
better. Someone who could wear makeup or not-what difference to him... Pathetic.

The narrator could easily be describing himself. As the story ends, the narrator attempts to describe to the blind man a cathedral he sees on TV. When language fails, he takes a pen and paper draws the cathedral on paper, the blind man's hands on his, tracing the shapes for the blind man to feel: "So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now." Our narrator learns that he can only see truly when he sees through the eyes of the blind.

Cathedral's narrator is the only Carver character in the collection to mature, to escape the lke of desperation. Carver's other alcoholic characters aren't so lucky. "Where I'm Calling from" is a story told by a man in a drug-counseling center somewhere in California's Sonoma Valley , his second time there, and as we gather from his narration, it will not be his last. Sobriety is a temporary sojourn from alcoholism, and he is too weak to ever escape it. So, too with the narrator of "Chef's House," a man who temporarily escapes heavy drinking to reconnect with his ex-wife and manage a summer of happiness in Crescent City. But when his landlord has to evict he and his wife, the reader knows that the bliss was only temporary, the hold of alcohol is too strong, and we end the story imagining the unstated, the narrator alone again, in some seedy bar with knotty pine walls, drunk at 3:30 in the afternoon, his wife long left.

Thus it is with Carver. His stories are snapshots of people on or beginning their decline, yet each character still manages some measure of dignity, even if false. Carver reminds us, as Longfellow once wrote, that "in the wreck of human lives, something noble still survives." ( )

Collection of short stories. Very well written, I like Carver style of writing. It seems I can't find one extra word in is sentence ;). I didn't like his stories: they are too pessimistic and almost every character is alcoholic. ( )