There are some authors, you hear their name constantly, but you just don’t read them without reason. After a while, you feel like you’ve read two or three books from them. Because they are literary giants and everyone is talking about them.
Raymond Carver was one of those authors for me. I was finally able to read his stories. I understood very well why I heard so much about him. In fact, I thought we should talk a lot more about him.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a misleading title. Don’t expect love stories from this book; expect better stories.
Raymond Carver is such a good storyteller that he can summarize what many authors would try to explain in dozens of pages in a few paragraphs. I was stunned to read all the history of two characters in a paragraph. And in such an elegant style!
It is also effortless to empathize with the stories of the author who writes in dirty realism style. It offers pieces from ordinary people’s ordinary lives. However, just as good authors can do, this mediocrity affects people as if it were magical. Raymond Carver writes so strikingly that it is impossible not to be affected by every sentence. There are 17 stories in this book; all of them are perfect. Each story is different from each other and leaves an entirely different effect on people.
I think this can be excellent for those who are looking for a good storybook. Enjoy, and please do read!
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
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.
Raymond Carver
Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. was an American short story writer and poet. He is considered to be amongst America’s greatest writers.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
