What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Critics

• Low-Rent Tragedies

  “Another tragedy in a long line of low-rent tragedies”—thus the mother of a fifteen-year-old girl describes the situation that arises when the daughter, reacting to her drunken and abusive father, stays out of school for weeks and says that no one ca ... (read full critics)

  nybooks published on Thu, 26 Aug 2010

3 Reviews

• 3 people find this helpful

  What people talk about when they talk about Raymond Carver?

  What people talk about when they talk about Raymond Carver? Well, this is a Carver-styled question. In Carver's world, people talk, but the conversation goes nowhere, the ball still rotates, the disaster still there. That's my first impression about him when I read his "talk about love" (and my only ... (continue)

  What people talk about when they talk about Raymond Carver? Well, this is a Carver-styled question. In Carver's world, people talk, but the conversation goes nowhere, the ball still rotates, the disaster still there. That's my first impression about him when I read his "talk about love" (and my only reading!).<br />Carver's heroes and heroines, the protagonists in his novels, are all losers to some extent, plain, isolated and kind of tragical. If they don't talk, they are exactly mutes, and they talk just because they feel that something happens, or just because they feel lonely, which happens everywhere, but quite often in the dinning room. As a result the conversation takes place at the dinning table, they eat, drink and talk, just as we do in the canteen, about love, about a car accident, about anything happens in our life, but we can hardly make any difference, quite often we cannot even reach any conclusion.<br />As things happen, people talk, but they don't really communicate with each other, or they just cannot; father and son, man and woman, friends, are all stuck in their own routines, they come up against irregularity, try to handle it, yet never figure it out. <br />When people talk about Carver, they talk about minimalism and dirty realism, well, the style and the content.<br />Nowadays people find that his "minimalism" has something to do with his editor, but still, he wrote his pieces mainly by direct description, no metaphor, no lyricism, no dramatics, the story hides somewhere behind the words, as Anton Chekhov says, "People eat their dinner, just eat their dinner, and all the time their happiness is being established or their lives are being broken up", which sometimes also reminds me of Hou Hsiao Hsien's latest movies, "Café Lumière" et "Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge". <br />Actually, what Carver and Hou describe in their works are mainly the eating, and the points lie in the fact that they turn out to successfully hint us something else...which is captured by the word of "dirty realism" in Carver's case, the context of the talk, the irregularity or even disaster of the life behind the veil..<br />Well, dirty reality, not necessarily the dirty society, or anything grand, but just frustration or failures in life, such as the existence of a 26 or 27 years old ineligible bachelor...they talk about sex, talk about their ex'es and something the like that a gentleman won't do in their narrow dorms, yet they are still bachelors, ineligible bachelors..and hence maybe they can write their own versions of "what we talk about when we talk about love"...<br />And of course "talk" is just a slide of our life among many others, typical settings in Carver's novels are various non-fancy daily life pieces, never Bresson's "decisive moment", and thus it may remind you of Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants"..<br />Always there are stories, which are untold..

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  revotrats said on Sep 21, 2008 | Add your feedback

• 1 person find this helpful

  

  I was fortunate enough to have known and studied about Raymond Carver in my creative writing class while I was at uni. He became one of my favourite writers, perhaps “less academic” writers, and I’d done some papers about some of his writings. I have most of his books, and always find it thrilled to ... (continue)

  I was fortunate enough to have known and studied about Raymond Carver in my creative writing class while I was at uni. He became one of my favourite writers, perhaps “less academic” writers, and I’d done some papers about some of his writings. I have most of his books, and always find it thrilled to revisiting them.

  Carver’s writing is always muted, anticlimactic, but the context of stories is tense and uneasy, in which reminding the writing of Franz Kafka. Both are tragically short lives, and always refer to minimalist writers.

  In Carver’s writing, there’s a curtain of silence in his prose. His context strikes into the hearts of readers, poses a splendid room of isolated moments, and renders a complete scenario of his storytelling with his nib of feather.

  "Terri and I have been together five year... The terrible thing is, but the good thing too. The saving grace, you might say, is that if something happened to one of us tomorrow... the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else ... 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?"
  CARVER, Raymond. 1989. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
  New York: Vintage.

  We know how we feel, how things fall apart, and what’s left in the end of the days, but we might be just caught between Terri and Mel, exhibit a variety of dysfunctions in inability to communicate, to hear, to express, to share, and to understand each other. Like Terri and Mel, trapped in the prison of their own skins.

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  rum said on Nov 3, 2007 | Add your feedback

• The language is simple. The story is simple, or you may say there is no story at all.

  But there is something else, which you can't tell precisely.

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  Auknife said on Jan 30, 2010 | 1 feedback

Book Details

• Rating:
  (87)
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• English Books
• Paperback 144 Pages
• Edition: New Ed
• ISBN-10: 0099449846
• ISBN-13: 9780099449843
• Publisher: Vintage
• Pub date: Jul 03, 2003
• Dimensions: 1226 mm x 774 mm x 65 mm Just how big is that?
• Also available as: Hardcover and Others
• In other languages: other languages 繁體書, 简体书, 和書, Deutsche Bücher, Libros en Español, Libri Italiani

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