What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories by Raymond Carver Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories
Book Review: Master of the Short
Summary: 5 Stars
Raymond Carver is a master of the short story, and this book features a lot of his early raw talent. Make sure you also read "Short Cuts," which has some of the same stories in it, but it has the unedited versions. "What We Talk About..." features work when Ray was still working with his often too critical editor.Book Review: Beautiful and Melancholic
Summary: 4 Stars
The stoic, bare prose of Raymond Carver's short fiction bears the stamp of a true craftsman, as well as an artist who knows the meaning of pain. These stories are a remarkable aesthetic accomplishment, one of the best collections of the period; they are both simple and intriguing in their cool and stark economy of form. Like Hemingway, Carver had the gift of creating a world through brief and beautiful glimpses. Never does he insert any clunky ideology or literary affectations. These stories are elegant, clean, and self-contained. They will also break your heart. Book Review: A thematic experiment that scaffolds Cathedral
Summary: 3 Stars
The title story of this collection is Carver at his best: Human husks take the place of characters, and they are filled with copious amounts of alcohol. They inhabit a sparse and deliberate setting. And no great Carver story would be complete without inebriated reflections on the human condition. Other bright flashes in this collection include the pseudo-horror story "Tell the Women We're Going" and the oft-anthologized "Gazebo."
But too many of the stories in this collection feel incomplete. They are missing that narrative "click," that satisfying sound you hear at the end of a good story when a psychological latch locks something special in your head. Stories like "Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit," "A Serious Talk," "The Bath," and "One More Thing" seem to stop rather than end. Carver must have recognized this himself, because he re-writes "The Bath" as "A Small, Good Thing" for his follow-up collection, Cathedral, which is far superior to What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
This collection seems to have been assembled around the title story. The thematic commitment necessarily binds the stories, but also perhaps weakens the overall craft. The stories either tip-toe around or splash through the theme, darkening it or twisting it here and there, and then when the theme is used up, too many of the stories stop telling themselves. In the title story, this works well, by the majority of this collection falls flat.
Carver is still experimenting in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and I give him credit for bravely submitting his attempts to tell stories in a new way. He hits his stride with the title story and perhaps with "Gazebo," but it isn't until his collection Cathedral that Carver gets control of his craft.
Book Review: A Walk on the Dark Side We Should All Take
Summary: 4 Stars
Reading this collection of short stories was like taking a walk on the dark side of human nature, made all the more scary and powerful by Carver's masterful, minimalist style. He hones right in on the essence of the character's lives and spares the reader any gratuitous drama. The result is a feeling of undeniable bleakness. Yet, similar to Hemmingway's style, the strong characters find their strength in a certain type of resignation.
What I liked most about this book is how I found myself clearly wanting to distance myself from the bleakness of these character's lives, yet, I was maddeningly unable to. That's the beauty of Carver's minimalist style; he hones the truth down to its barest form, so that a reader can't avoid finding a sliver of it within. And that's the true scare-factor of this book; Carver demonstrates beautifully the fine line all of our lives traverse, and how we must be vigilant, aware, and beware in every moment.
Book Review: good book
Summary: 4 Stars
Got the book as promised in a timely manner. The book is good needed it for a class that I was behind in and was able to catch up the same day it came in.