What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)

I read a lot of novels, but I always on the lookout for good collections of short stories. This book might be the single best collection of short stories I have ever read. First off, Raymond Carver is one of the best short story writers there is. He is well known his spare style of writing. And because he takes on real life situations, love, alcoholism, dysfunctional relationships, uncomfortable things that many of us deal with, his spare style captures the type of stories he writes in a powerful way. The title story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, is a touching and thought provoking story. Two couples, best friends, have a deep discussion about what love is, or isn’t. The one lady is telling how she was in an abusive relationship. It was bad. And her current husband, who she really loves, is saying how horrible her former lover was. But the lady makes an fascinating point, that although it was not a healthy relationship, it was still love. Her husband disagrees. How can an abusive relationship be love? The two couples are charming and you feel like you are sitting down with them, right in the middle of the conversation. And Carver shows you what healthy love is by the wonderful relationship of these two couples, while also showing you how unclear love can be, through the discussion they are having. It’s a masterpiece. The stories are varied. The Calm is a story at a barbershop. The Third Thing That Killed My Father is a twisted story about circumstances that ultimately do someone in. His father, being callus and looking out for his own interests, and how he didn’t anticipate what it would lead to. After The Denim, is a nice older couple who like to play Bingo and Carver does an amazing job showing the sweet little things, the things people get obsessively annoyed about to the point of letting it ruin a nice evening. Then there’s the unsettling story of Tell The Women We’re Going. The Bath is a sad but true to life tale of how two parents deal with a sudden tragedy, and the disbelief and denial and ways people distract themselves to try to deal with it. This collection run the gamut of sweet to creepy to the strange little everyday things that people make important. And Carver is masterful at telling these things in a way that makes you fascinated with the simple things people do, or the way people complicate their own lives with things we all do.

She was introduced to me as a cardiologist so I said oh one of my favorite stories is told by a cardiologist. That meant nothing to her so I resolved to buy her What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and for the moment moved on to Rorie Childers, professor of cardiology at the University of Chicago for what fifty years now, grandson of the revolutionary, son of the president, and told the physician some of his Brendan Behan stories. You don't have to know who Brendan was to enjoy them. Brendan was a fountain of stories long before he wrote a word. I can also sing Mountains of Mourne, Kathleen Mulvany, and the Parting Glass but we didn't get that far into my stage Irish act. I liked her so I did order the book the next day. I noticed on Amazon that the story had become a great work since its editor suggested I read it when the collection came out in 1981. He was my teacher. Thinking back on reading Raymond Carver that way reminds me of Harvard Knowles typing out poems and stories to mimeograph for us in the fall of 1978. I.A. Richards had done that at one of the old British universities early in the twentieth century, reporting the written reactions of his students to these anonymized works in his Practical Criticism. The critical situation is so pure. "I offer this work to your attention. What do you think of it? What support for your view can you offer from the document which we all have in our hands?" What Harvard was teaching us, by the way, is a social practice by which this country is governed. We were not writing students. Anyways. For thirty years now writing students in the United States have already known that Raymond Carver is something else. Many even have opinions about Gordon, his editor, my teacher, who got Ray across to a large paying public. I missed all that, got to just read what he had to say. I thirteen years later recited the first paragraph of What We Talk About to the assembled staff of the Literature Publishing House in their offices in the stable behind the Ha Noi mansion they had rented out to a photo developer. As I have got to know the novelist David Willson more and more over decades we have shared our common roots in Yakima, where both David and Ray are from and where my brothers and I and a great deal of the world picked fruit. I once found Yakima in common between me and an Indian man I happened to walk out of the same Manhattan apartment house with to the subway. Anyways. "My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right".

If you like stories where something happens, characters find fullfillment, love and success, characters talk things out and get somewhere----this book is not for you. I like those books, but I like this too---in certain moods, usually when I'm taking things a little on the dark side. Carver is a master short story writer, but these are minimalist, very sad stories about people at the end of some tether or other. I can only read a few a night, and often reread them so I can stop reading for the action and read for Mr. Carver's beautiful language. Especially interesting is the title story, what we talk about etc. In the story two couples sit down and start talking about love. One of the women talks alot about her ex-boyfriend, an abusive guy who she couldn't seem to stay away from. They're drinking, of course---de rigeur and the source of most trouble in Carver stories. They talk and drink, and as they talk, the rooms darkens---but nobody turns on the lights. I think it's a metaphor for how we live. Nothing is easy. We can color love with all kinds of pretty hearts and flowers colors, but it's really hard to keep that bright outlook in the face of what it takes to love somebody, every day, the right way. If you've been happily married for 30 years, this probably won't mean alot to you. But for the many people who have experience with creating their own misery at some length, it can be a resonant read. I wouldn't know anything about that, of course...... Not for everyone, but pretty darn good.

this is an amazing book, and it is a masterwork in minimalism book. the stories are dark comedy, or just dark, but they are amazing. what these stories are not is heartwarming, hollywood, with resolution, morality, etc. instead, these stories are more like life... and reflect the world more as it is rather than as we imagine or wish the world might be. i suspect the folks who give this book few stars just don't like what the book has to say about the world, or they want writing that is not minimalism... with resolution. anyway, i don't often agree with critics, but they are right in this case.

In What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver creates throughout his stories an America that appears on the surface to be the same as normal, but differs when you look at it deeper. In the seventeen stories of this collection, Carver instills his readers with a kind of gloominess, as if they should be reading these stories on a gray, rainy day. Almost every story in the collection, if not all of them, involves an event of death or adultery. Throughout these stories, he paints a picture of a rural America that is very bleak and is full of fractured relationships, but it is an unrealistic world because there are never solutions for the bleakness. Carver ends most of the stories in this collection with the fracturing of relationships, or even with death of a character, but never provides a redemption for the characters. For instance, the story Popular Mechanics involves a husband who is leaving his wife but wants to bring his baby with him. The husband and wife fight over the baby to the point where they are literally playing tug a war with the baby as the rope. The story ends on a cliffhanger, but it almost implies that they tore the baby in half. Carver does not provide any kind of resolution to the fight; he does not even say who got to keep the baby. The worldview behind the stories is an empty one without any meaning, which is reflected in how the characters treat each other. Almost all of the stories involve a deadbeat kind of man and a woman who seems slightly crazy, and every single one of the relationships depicted in the collection are unhealthy. In the stories involving death, such as The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off, there is nothing to comfort the characters when their friends die. This is because these stories are empty; there is no point to the life of the characters except that they just keep on going. The characters in these stories never leave a partner who has cheated on them or treats them badly, they just keep on going. They never attempt to better their situations, they just keep on going. Carver’s idea of love within the stories always involves some kind of sin against a character, which is most commonly adultery, but never involves repentance or forgiveness. In the fourth story in the collection, titled Gazebo, it is revealed that the character Duane has been cheating on his wife Holly with a maid. This has an extreme impact on Holly, as the story begins with her attempting to jump out of a window. Carver goes into length about the affair itself and how Holly and Duane are holed up in their little apartment fighting over it, but the story feels incomplete. The story is incomplete because there is no repentance like you expect to see in a story involving adultery. Duane does not apologize even once to Holly or even say that he regrets the affair, he only attempts to talk her out of being upset. Since there is no real repentance in Gazebo, there is also no way for Holly to forgive Duane and so the reader is left unsatisfied with the ending. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is an unrealistic collection of stories. Carver writes these stories as if to showcase the bleakness of life but includes no redemption for the characters, and empty worldview, and, within the romantic relationships, he involves no repentance or forgiveness. While this does showcase the harshness of reality, it is ultimately an unrealistic world. In everyday reality, we are not bound by darkness like Carver’s characters are. When someone does something to hurt us, they apologize and we forgive and then the relationship moves forward. Everyday people are not stuck in life, as Carver’s characters are, and do not have to stay in awful relationships because they have no where else to go in life. This collection is an interesting and engaging read, but ultimately leaves you feeling let down by the empty, inaccurate reality that Carver presents.

This short collection of stories is often sad,often depressing and often very disillusioning. But these are Carver's themes. He wants to explore a side of life that most everyone experiences but would rather shove in a remote corner of his or her mind and forget about. Carver writes in the language of common people experiencing the ramifications of lost love and trying mostly futilely to regain the magic and excitement of the initial experience of love. And he does a wonderful job of exploring and illuminating these themes. My favorite story from this memorable collection is "What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Love." The same title as the collection of stories. This story reminds me of the Eugene O' Neil play--"A Long Day's Journey Into Night" Like,the O'Neil play the characters sit around a table getting drunk and talking about relationships,behavior and other significant things in their lives. And as their drunken journey unfolds,they shed inhibitions,cast aside tact and discretion and lay bare many of their innermost thoughts. Carver's collection reads quickly because there are no complicated paragraphs or words that you need to grab a dictionary to understand. I've already read the collection twice,gaining a deeper understanding of the collection on the second reading. In the future I will be reading it again and then again and with each subsequent reading undoubtedly gaining more insight and understanding on the themes that Carver explores so well.

The collection of short stories What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver is essential reading for short story writers. I say this because what he did seems to be the constant source of bad imitation. You could easily say his stories are about nothing - as I have heard said before. However, this would be inaccurate. Carver's stories are simply about people and the mundane everyday. His stories are minimalist to the extreme - which is what he is known for - and yet Carver still manage to create an entire world in them. Carver's stories are filled with small holes, but the familiarity of his stories allow the reader to automatically fill in the blanks. (I am left thinking about the amazing things many verbose fantasy writers could learn from Carver's more "literary" form of world creation) My favorite story of the bunch is "I Could See the Smallest Things." The story is a perfect example of Carver's writing. It takes place in a brief moment in time. Nothing happens except the passing of life. I would recommend you all to check it out. Many of the other stories are equally fantastic. There are really no complete duds in the bunch. If you are at all interested in the short story, I would go read a few of these quick gems in a bookstore or online somewhere and see if its for you. Carver is not a writer I would read everyday - I enjoy things a little more out there - but I am sure I will read more of his stories and books to satisfy my sporadic reality based literary fiction cravings. Check out other reviews by me on my Amazon profile or at my books blog [...]

I've been using this book in literature classes in Japan, and I have to say that these stories have lost none of their power in the twenty-odd years since they first appeared in book form. Carver was a master at presenting the disillusioned and the lost in terse, understated, colloquial English that still is as crisp and fine as when it was first minted. Like Hemingway, Carver developed a method to freight the simplest words and sentences with a depth of meaning that can skew the whole story in an unexpected way, even in the very last sentence. This takes craft and talent, both qualities that Carver exhibits in the highest degree. Some may find his choice of subject matter rather limited. His characters, too, often exhbit the same strengths and the same weaknesses (booze for instance)--and this may signal a kind of narrowness of vision to some. Certainly Carver does not have the breadth of a Tolstoy or a Doestoyevsky, or even of a Faulkner or a Hemingway--yet these limitations, I would argue, are also his greatest strengths. Though he does not have a universal sweep, Carver knows his territory well, and mines his subject in all kinds of fascinating ways. All in all, this book is a fine introduction to Raymond Carver's work. Carver's a champ in my book and I predict that some of these stories will find their way into the American canon right next to Melville, Poe, Emerson, and all the rest. What a chuckle for Ray when he looks down from his writer's heaven and notices the gold stamping on the spine!

This is a great collection of short stories from Carver. They have his trademark sparse style and sense of realism and the characters are detailed and believable. The stories are simple but touch on serious and universal themes, developed without excessive prose and with strong dialogue. There are often some oddities that give the stories nice specificity and the sense of place in all of them is excellent. And the characters’ personality quirks make them stick in your mind long after you’ve put the book down.

Amazing short stories

I didn't like the book that much at the beginning, maybe because I had great expectations, but I kept on reading and I fell in love with Carver's writing, with his stories and the characters in the book.

Book review of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver Carver’s short stories are quiet, spare, and deceptively simple. But they cut close to the bone. In What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, men and women circle the same human ache: the longing to be seen, chosen, and forgiven. Love here isn’t sentimental. It’s awkward, bruised, sometimes clumsy; and therefore recognisably real... What’s striking is Carver’s empathy for both sexes. His men are often rough-edged, stoic, and reluctant to express emotion, yet they aren't caricatures. They carry responsibility, guilt, loyalty, and a yearning to do right, even when they fail. That quiet endurance, the willingness to stay in the room with suffering, is a form of masculinity rarely celebrated today; but it's deeply human. The women, too, are portrayed with dignity: perceptive, weary, hopeful, and honest about the costs of love. There are no villains here, only people struggling to love well with their limited tools... From a Christian perspective, Carver’s work reads like a meditation on fallen humanity. Grace isn't preached, but its absence is keenly felt. The stories quietly remind us why forgiveness, covenant, and sacrificial love matter; because without them, love fragments into confusion and pain. These relationships would be enhanced through faith, and through belief. This is a short book (less than 180 pages) with long echoes...

Não restam duvidam de que Raymond Carver é um escritor necessário — mesmo não sendo o tão apregoado minimalista que dizem ser. Porém, quando adquiri Beginners e What do we talk about when we talk about Love (original e mutilação), estava muito mais interessado na sua luta — não com as palavras, mas com seu editor, mistura de copidesque estilista e açougueiro, Gordon Lish, que, sem cerimônias e escrúpulos, transfigurou, por exemplo, o excelente conto A small, good thing, de 26 páginas, num resíduo de apenas 9, com o título The bath. Um massacre, felizmente reparado. carlos loria