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: The pain of living second hand never so vivid before Carver
Summary: 5 Stars
Carver has compiled a collection about people failing to make connections and living second hand. If "Why Don't You Dance?" doesn't break your heart, you may not have oneBook Review: Carver shows us the universal in the particular
Summary: 5 Stars
Despite other reviews calling Raymond Carver 'the Hemingway of the trailer court', I am reminded of the quote by Nabokov concerning Hemingway...."Hemingway...bah! he writes books for boys!" Raymond Carver wrote about adults for adults... and, more to the point, the circumstances in which men and women find themselves when they are caught in ethical, mystical, and problematic situations that cry for release from the heart-wrenching tasks of showing compassion, friendship, and love in the willingness to choose, when faced with difficulty and despair.Book Review: Carver's writes truthful stories of the human experience
Summary: 5 Stars
What we talk about when . . . is a collection of stories that speak mountians of truth about love. Love is often viewed as a pure and simple emotion; however, Carver suggested it can be evil and complex as well. The romantic ideals are thrown aside as Carver shows us the truth. A wonderful collection of short stories digging deep in the human condition of emotions. His minimalist writing style lends the reader to believe every word written and to be opened up to the stories truth. You cannot read this collection without being changed and most likely wiser to the truth of being a human.Book Review: This is his masterpiece. The essential Carver work.
Summary: 5 Stars
Raymond Carver's friend Tobias Wolff (see Carver's essay on his friendship with Wolff and Pulizer Prize winner Richard Ford in Carver's collection NO HEROICS,PLEASE) said that when he read the short story "Cathedral" for the first time he had the feeling he was levitating off the couch where he was stretched out reading. I had the same response to this essential work WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE as I emerged from my college library where I should have been studying, but was transfixed by this book I had just picked up by chance the day before. I had the feeling that I was floating across the campus toward the cafeteria for my evening meal after reading this book in one sitting. Who is Raymond Carver? Who is this guy ?, I kept saying to myself, feeling that all the persons and places I passed just NOW were the loveliest things I'd ever seen. How could anyone make me feel like that? I'm still wondering today and that was fourteen years ago! I might talk about Raymond Carver in very sophisticated terms today but my initial primal response still seems inexplicable. I have read everything I could get my hands on that Carver ever wrote or said, but this is the book in which Carver captured the solitary American experience at its heartfelt core. It shows what happens to us, the price we pay for our dreams , loves, and terrors. Or what is, perhaps, as the American poet Michael Palmer has characterized it: the "psychic cost of the American project." Carver wrote this book in the late 1970's just after alcoholism nearly killed him and he had given up everything just to SURVIVE (including, he thought back then, any sense that he might ever write again). My recommendation goes beyond the fact that this is my first and favorite Carver book. Why? This is it! This is where he did it. He stripped the prose here to its poetic core , and it was a wager, a Mallarmean throw of the dice; he would or would not write again with this book. The stories individually are astonishing, but together they become something larger, and more harrowing , and "dynamic". The stories turn into a work, That uniquely human thing we construct with our HANDS from whatever materials are there for us. Carver's whole life and attention are here , and whatever price he paid for that strange attentiveness which was uniquely his own (he's called called it "vision" in one of his essays from FIRES) it came together( ALL of it nearly) here in these pages. It is Carver, more than perhaps anyone else who did this kind of writing in the 70's and 80's who gave me the revelatory sense I have of what I would wish to care for most in my life . And how I might begin that difficult task every day that is given me. CARE. Carver must have loved that word. As the poet Robert Duncan has pointed out: "All the events, things and beings, of our life move then with the intent of a story revealing itself."Book Review: Diary by proxy
Summary: 5 Stars
How can the mundane and banal become a fascinating read replete with startling momements of clairvoyant insight? The answer is Raymond Carver's remarkable writing style that I describe as diary by proxy. There is no reason to assume his characters are lowly or disenfranchised; they are a cultural mean of American society caught and recorded in moments of conflict and despair which would reduce anyone to baseline behavior. A unique and fascinating look at all of us.