Author: RAYMOND CARVER
Translator: Youngmoon Jeong
Publisher: Munhak Dongne
248 pages.
| Important! Please read before you order! |
| >>>This book is written in Korean only. |
About This Book
"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is not only the most well-known
short story title of the latter part of the 20th century; it has come to stand
for an entire aesthetic, the bare-bones prose style for which Raymond Carver
became famous. Perhaps, it could be argued, too famous, at least for his
fiction's own good. Like those of Hemingway or any other writer similarly loved,
imitated, parodied, and reviled, these stories can sometimes produce the sense
of reading pastiche. "A man without hands came to the door to sell me a
photograph of my house." "That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and
licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window." "My friend Mel
McGinnis was talking. Mel is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the
right." What other writer ever produced first sentences like these? They are
like doors into Carverworld, where everyone speaks in simple declarative
phrases, no one ever stops at one beer, and failure or violence are the true
outcomes of the American dream.
Yet these stories bear careful re-reading, like any truly important and enduring
work. For one thing, Carver is one of the few writers who can make
desperation--cutting your ex-wife's telephone cord in the middle of a
conversation, standing on your own roof chunking rocks while a man with no hands
takes your picture--deeply funny. Then there is the sheer craft that went into
their creation. Despite their seeming simplicity, his tales are as artfully
constructed as poems--and like poems, the best of them can make your breath
catch in your throat. In the title piece, for instance, after the gin has been
drunk, after the stories have been told, after the tensions in the room have
come to the surface and subsided again, there comes a moment of strange
lightness and peace: "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."
Much of what happens in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)
happens offstage, and we're left with tragedy's props: booze, instant coffee,
furniture from a failed marriage, cigarettes smoked in the middle of the night.
This is not merely a matter of technique. Carver leaves out a great deal, but
that's only a measure of his characters' vulnerability, the nerve endings his
stories lay bare. To say anything more, one feels, would simply hurt too much.
--Mary Park
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