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A review by appenthaknows
What We Talk about When We Talk about Love by Raymond Carver
5.0
I wouldn't usually leave a review. I'm a reader not a writer and there are a million witty, intelligent reviews out there that will better help you decide if a book's worth reading or not.
But it felt really important that I marked how I feel after reading this book.
I've been reading what we talk about when we talk about love over the last two days and it's completely broken my self imposed ban on short stories. They never seemed enough before. Just as they started they stopped and left a million unanswered questions in the ether.
Carvers' stories are miniature scenes, fragments of highlight from a possibly otherwise uneventful life. They don't boast of heroic deeds, they don't try to make you learn a moral or sell a lifestyle.
When I haven't been reading I've been thinking about these characters constantly. They run deep. I can picture the gravel filled pond teeming with bass, the shivering housewife pulling her dressing gown around her as she goes to shut the gate, the friends for life cruising down a dusty highway looking for some action and finding it, the retired tax inspector pulling into his usual spot at the bingo and finding someone new parked there, the affairs, the drinking, the passing of time in small ways, I can see these more clearly than my own mothers face.
He examines these fragments with such clarity, depth and soul that there is no more to ask.
To me he speaks of moments of brilliance, flashes of insight and honestly and truth.
It's writing so breathtakingly elegant it's left me in state of withdrawal.
One for the forever bookshelf.
But it felt really important that I marked how I feel after reading this book.
I've been reading what we talk about when we talk about love over the last two days and it's completely broken my self imposed ban on short stories. They never seemed enough before. Just as they started they stopped and left a million unanswered questions in the ether.
Carvers' stories are miniature scenes, fragments of highlight from a possibly otherwise uneventful life. They don't boast of heroic deeds, they don't try to make you learn a moral or sell a lifestyle.
When I haven't been reading I've been thinking about these characters constantly. They run deep. I can picture the gravel filled pond teeming with bass, the shivering housewife pulling her dressing gown around her as she goes to shut the gate, the friends for life cruising down a dusty highway looking for some action and finding it, the retired tax inspector pulling into his usual spot at the bingo and finding someone new parked there, the affairs, the drinking, the passing of time in small ways, I can see these more clearly than my own mothers face.
He examines these fragments with such clarity, depth and soul that there is no more to ask.
To me he speaks of moments of brilliance, flashes of insight and honestly and truth.
It's writing so breathtakingly elegant it's left me in state of withdrawal.
One for the forever bookshelf.