Name: Cathedral
Rating: 4.388888888888889 (54 reviews)
ISBN: 9780679723691

Raymond Carver

Twelve stories deal with loneliness, loss, the tragic banality of everyday life, and redemption.

Stories

Cathedral

Raymond Carver said it was possible 'to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language and endow these things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with immense, even startling power'. Nowhere is this alchemy more striking than in the title story of Cathedral in which a blind man guides the hand of a sighted man as together they draw the cathedral the blind man can never see. Many view this story, and indeed this collection, as a watershed in the maturing of Carver's work to a more confidently poetic style.

ikkychan

I first got introduced to Carver when I read an interview on one of my favorite Japanese author, Haruki Murakami, in which he stated that one of his inspiration was the stories by Raymond Carver. I got intrigued and started to dig his books afterward. Reading his intimate, transformative narration of everyday life, i understand Murakami's fascination with them.<br /><br />There's something tender, closely personal and compassionate about his way of recounting each character's storyline. His taking his sweet time telling mundane, uneventful episode with remarkable detail only intensifies the deep, untold emotions the characters harbor for each other. But differ from Murakami, who made this mundane telling expands into surrealistic features, Carver's narrative remains to sketch out ordinary people with their ordinary problems, and that's what I most like about it.<br /><br />My favorite story from this book is "Fever" which is about a man named Carlyle who has trouble finding a babysitter for his two kids after his wife left him. It shows that sometime, the best way to face your problems is to reminisce it to someone else, the way your body let out its toxics in order for it to heal.

Masterful. How can someone make your soul ache with so few words?

Madi

Ioana Kardos

One of the best short story writers. Detailed, imaginative, always with something up his sleeve. I wish he wrote more.

tiff

If you aren't a realist or a writer, or if you haven't suffered major atrocities in your life then sure, these stories are depressing and it is more or less like, "So what?". I find that most people, when reading are reading to escape the mundane and heavy existence reality brings. You're not going to escape into any of these stories. You're not going to smile or get physically excited or swoon from the sheer romance of these stories. The prose is sparse, the ends are open and if you're a reader who can appreciate a bit of dense tightly written not TOLD to you fiction then you WILL NOT put this book down. It is wry humor in some. In other stories it is a heavy burden to carry the message of it because these stories are not meant to brighten your day. They are meant to inform, enlighten, enrich but in no uncertain way are they meant to entertain, not by today's standards. So pass on this collection if you want a light hearted read.

Trever

I've tried this one many times and I just couldn't get into it. I remember liking "Chef's House" a bit, and I admire Carver's writing and emotional heft, but the stories didn't grab me enough to keep me going. I may return to Carver one day, though.

Frederik Van den Bril

This collection called ‘Cathedral’ has one of the most haunting and perhaps my favorite story of Carver, a story called ‘Feathers’. As usual in Carver’s stories, a lot is being left unsaid, which is the case in this story where the narrator, Jack his wife Fran are invited to dinner at a colleague's house. They have a strange encounter with a peacock and things become even weirder after that. Another story that stayed with me for a long time is “A Small, Good Thing” where a woman orders a birthday cake for her son. The son gets into a car accident on the day of his birthday and the cake never gets picked up.

Perhaps not the same raw intensity of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”. That short-story collection was a real punch in the gut for me. Or maybe because that was the first time I read Carver. I read the first half of this book in 2016 and the second half just now. I needed a break, sometimes Carver’s somewhat sad and depressing universe is best consumed one story at a time. Looking back now I realized what an incredibly strong collection of short-stories this book is. Carver’s portrayal of human melancholia and tragedy is unparalleled.

Cathedral Stories

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