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Review
Tim Adams: `an extraordinary book, more generous and rambling in tone than its distilled counterpart.' -- Observer
`the most interesting book of the year' --Seven Magazine in Sunday Telegraph
`Fans will find it fascinating.'
--The Bookseller
Product Description
Tim O'Brien once said of Raymond Carver, 'He uses the English language like a whittler's knife, carving stark and unadorned prose-objects, paring away everything but the very core of human emotion.'
Beginners is Carver's most famous collection of short stories - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - before this whittling process had begun. It is the unedited version of the masterpiece which would be cut by almost fifty per cent by Carver's editor and mentor, Gordon Lish, before its original publication in 1981 and which would go on to become one of the most influential pieces of modern literature.
Carver's preoccupation with the marrow of things is just as present in these longer stories. A young girl, dancing with her lover amidst the debris of an older man's life, has her first forewarning of the dangers of adulthood, and is filled with an 'unbearable happiness'. A man and woman lock themselves in a motel room and slowly, painfully, acknowledge the end of a relationship, while somewhere else in the lonely Midwest a man is photographed over and over again as he attempts to locate himself in a world that seems utterly without focus. But as we move through the manifold little tragedies at the heart of the ordinary - so much at the core of Carver's work - new layers, new nuances, new meanings reveal themselves.
Where the Lish / Carver collaboration cut this collection to the 'linguistic bone', these fleshier stories say what was previously unsaid, filling in the narrative silences that have both inspired and mystified readers for so long. Beginners is a fascinating insight into the aesthetic of a literary great and, in the questions it raises, may just spark off one of the great cultural debates of our times.
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Customer Reviews
Well it was. This is one of the finest collections of short stories I have ever read. I love punchy short stories, about people in the modern world, tales of urban fiction, if you will - stories I can identify with: people feeling a bit lost and insecure, who drink too much, who don't really know what they're meant to be doing, but kind of just muddle through and try and make sense of it all. I love stories by Bukowski, by Richard Yates, by Hemingway. These are at least on a par with those. If you like that sort of thing, you'll love this.
I'm fully aware of Carver's reputation that he carved (arf!) with Lish's help. Some people have even said this book shows how great Lish was, and how, left alone, Carver waffles on and loses his cutting edge. Well, I have read with and without, and I couldn't disagree more. This is short story writing at its finest, and I will be tracking down everything else of his that I can find. In particular, "Why Don't You Dance" is amazing (one of the ones I loved in the original actually, as it is one of the less heavily edited ones).
This comes as fully recommended as I can recommend anything.
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