Raymond Carver

This powerful collection of stories, set in the mid-West among the lonely men and women who drink, fish and play cards to ease the passing of time, was the first by Raymond Carver to be published in the UK. With its spare, colloquial narration and razor-sharp sense of how people really communicate, the collection was to become one of the most influential literary works of the 1980s.

What We Talk about when We Talk about Love

In his second collection, Carver establishes his reputation as one of the most celebrated and beloved short-story writers in American literature—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark.

Stories

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

bianca

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.

“What do any of us really know about love?” Mel said. “It seems to me we’re just beginners at love. We say we love each other and we do, I don’t doubt it. I love Terri and Terri loves me, and you guys love each other too. You know the kind of love I’m talking about now. Physical love, that impulse that drives you to someone special, as well as love of the other person’s being, his or her essence, as it were. Carnal love and, well, call it sentimental love, the day-to-day caring about the other person. But sometimes I have a hard time accounting for the fact that I must have loved my first wife too. But I did, I know I did. So I suppose I am like Terri in that regard. Terri and Ed.” He thought about it and then he went on. “There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I’d like to know. I wish someone could tell me. Then there’s Ed. Okay, we’re back to Ed. He loves Terri so much he tries to kill her and he winds up killing himself.” Mel stopped talking and swallowed from his glass. “You guys have been together eighteen months and you love each other. It shows all over you. You glow with it. But you both loved other people before you met each other. You’ve both been married before, just like us. And you probably loved other people before that too, even. Terri and I have been together five years, been married for four. And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, you might say, is that if something happened to one of us—excuse me for saying this—but if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one, the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough. All this, all of this love we’re talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I’m wrong. I want to know. I mean, I don’t know anything, and I’m the first one to admit it.”

Things change, he says. I don’t know how they do. But they do without your realizing it or wanting them to.

Beatriz Salvador 

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.

That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

Louis Norton

Luke Pearce

Cullen Bounds

Profound in their simplicity, Carver's stories will remain with me for the rest of my life. Phenomenal collection.

Gavin

I'm surprised to find Carver relying on punchlines - last-line narrative puns - in most of these stories. There is: a lot of rambling, a lot of meanness (breakups, fights, conversations that would be much healthier if they were honest fights), and then a transcendent or transcendently degraded last line. It would almost be not worth reading if you lost all the last lines. Here's what I mean by a pun - from 'The Calm':

  But today I was thinking of that place, of Crescent City, and of how I was trying out a new life there with my wife, and how, in the barber's chair that morning, I had made up my mind to go. I was thinking today about the calm I felt when I closed my eyes and let the barber's fingers move through my hair, the sweetness of those fingers, the hair already starting to grow.

I expected him to care for his wretches.

The one from the wife's perspective, 'So Much Water So Close To Home' is the only standout. Completely menacing with almost no action, no flash. Good portraits of the oafish, as opposed to the rapey, as opposed to the long-suffering. I can't decide if the last line is acquiescence or perversity.

The title story is surprisingly slight, a 16-page Symposium with oddly inarticulate, repetitive drinkers. (One has ~10 years of college education, and but he's the most primitive.) You could put this down to naturalism and forget it entirely, but for its two great lines. (The story is, then, a fine thing for the protagonist of 
  Birdman
 to stage - self-defeating, opaque, not as deep as it wants.)

Stories like these live or die on dialogue, and there's neither enough heft or polish in their chat for me. I always get Chandler and Carver mixed up (yeah, I know) - but if I didn't, I'd go for Chandler every time. The lowness of Chandler is Gothic, stylised, and somehow less general.

Plus one star for SMWSCTH.

tiff

What can I say? How does one get to write such meaning in such tightly manicured prose? I am speechless. This is not my favorite of his collections but it is very, very good.

I really like the way he tells stories and focuses on little things I'd usually take for granted. I also like that his characters are kind of unlikeable like real people.

Becca M

Ri Liu

Jas Wang

Short stories that feature a pantheon of losers, peripheral people, and men and women without education, insight, or prospects who, ironically, are too unimaginative to ever give up

Melody Izard

The things that aren't said are more haunting than the things that are said. 

His stories have more than a whiff of hopelessness. But the things that you don't find out are possibly worse.

Isabelle Dion

Went into this one with such high hopes... But it just wasn't for me. It was a collection of slice of life stories about people struggling with a variety of issues surrounding the idea of love, in all it's shapes. I don't always dislike ambiguous endings and little plot, but in this case I think that since there was so little character development, I just didn't enjoy it.

Howard Lo

Fantastic read... though you will be left feeling empty and thinking about loneliness...

What We Talk about when We Talk about Love

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