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Loading... What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Storiesby Raymond Carver
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. a great collection of stories by the way they altogether weave a feeling about life. a bit sad though.  edamamegreen | Nov 22, 2009 |  Dark and sad short stories dealing wih love and alcoholism. Fantastic narration, absolutely loved it. (  ) helka | Sep 22, 2009 | Carver is very spare and very depressing, at least at first. I must admit that I wasn't sure I liked his stories much in the beginning, but about halfway through (I think with the story "So Much Water So Close to Home") I warmed up to him, and by the end I loved the overall effect Carver achieved. A critical blurb from Tim O'Brien on the back of the book says it better than I can: "The collection as a whole, unlike most, begins to grow and resonate in a wonderful cumulative effect." I totally agree with that; even Lorrie Moore, whose stories I absolutely love, hasn't achieved that kind of cohesion with her collections. Carver is very subtle, so reading one or two stories by him won't do it--the whole collection needs to be read through, and I would guess it's best to do it quickly, like I did. It's the mood that's important, not the individual stories (which often don't even have plots, just character interactions), and Carver captures a sense of the emotionally seedy underbelly of America. It's honest and blunt and would be depressing if it weren't so good. ( )2  wunderkind | Jul 2, 2009 | Carver's minimalist writing does not build up characters but breaks them down and nearly destroys them. He captures people at their most vulnerable and illustrates the power a chaotic moment can have on an otherwise stable person. The unexpected is all that should be expected in his often morose America as it is the unexpected which seems to matter most. (  ) aoxford | May 17, 2009 | My first Carver - superlative. Not a word wasted. ( ) CarltonC | Oct 26, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
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Yet these stories bear careful re-reading, like any truly important and enduring work. For one thing, Carver is one of the few writers who can make desperation--cutting your ex-wife's telephone cord in the middle of a conversation, standing on your own roof chunking rocks while a man with no hands takes your picture--deeply funny. Then there is the sheer craft that went into their creation. Despite their seeming simplicity, his tales are as artfully constructed as poems--and like poems, the best of them can make your breath catch in your throat. In the title piece, for instance, after the gin has been drunk, after the stories have been told, after the tensions in the room have come to the surface and subsided again, there comes a moment of strange lightness and peace: "I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark."
Much of what happens in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) happens offstage, and we're left with tragedy's props: booze, instant coffee, furniture from a failed marriage, cigarettes smoked in the middle of the night. This is not merely a matter of technique. Carver leaves out a great deal, but that's only a measure of his characters' vulnerability, the nerve endings his stories lay bare. To say anything more, one feels, would simply hurt too much. --Mary Park
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:15 -0400)
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