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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
tension and melancholy., 25 Jul 2004
"I love the swift leap of a good story, the excitement that often commences in the first sentence, the sense of beauty and mystery found in the best of them; and the fact - so crucially important to me back at the beginning and now still a consideration - that the story can be written and read in one sitting." (from foreword in Where I'm Calling From, 1998)Raymond Carver's short fiction is often placed in the realistic tradition of Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway. Also, given the often muted, anticlimactic atmosphere of the prose there is a tension which is reminiscent of either Franz Kafka or Harold Pinter. A motif within Carver's works is the issue of love, or, more precisely, the issue of love and its absence, and the bearing of love's absence on marriage and individual identity. He depicts the quiet desperation of white-and-blue-collar workers, salesmen and waitresses, and their sense of betrayal at being unable to express themselves. Things are frequently left unspoken and conflicts unresolved, and the meaning of the story is often only revealed through implications. In particular, his portrayals of marriage problems are full of emotional tension, hidden memories, wounds, longing, hate, anxiety, and melancholy. "It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine - the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me." (Carver in The New York Times, February 15, 1981) This particular collection, Where I'm Calling From, published posthumously, contains a good selection, containing stories from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? Cathedral and all seven stories from Elephant. Though, having said that, a better introduction to his stories would probably just be a copy of Cathedral. That way you wont have to buy any repeats.
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by Raymond Carver
by Raymond Carver
by Cormac McCarthy
by Raymond Carver
by Raymond Carver
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