This is so much more about love in the negative than the positive.

It's about those times when we no longer have love left, when it's all over and things have gone awry. The shorts are also interesting in that each time Carver presents a different voice.

Moreover, it's about how these moments such as deaths, divorces, and pain are anti-climactic. They're not the high drama we expect in films. Instead, traumatic things occur quietly as we struggle to carry on with life.

Life consists of many slow, insignificant moments that accumulate without us noticing, eventually becoming a big deal. We expect everything to happen all at once, but no, the break-up is a slow and painful descent that we don't notice day by day. However, looking back now, we can't even imagine what it felt like to be as happy as we were back then.

The story "The Bath" was probably my favorite. It truly felt like love.

Also, it once again brings up how narrow our modern definitions of love are and how I don't think this helps us at all in understanding ourselves and our relationships.

At this point, writing about a book by Carver (or Carver-Lish, as this one actually seems to be) is something more than complicated if one wants to seem original; being original is completely impossible.

It is as impossible as not using words or expressions such as dirty realism, disconcertion, silences, like a knife, solitude, cold, punch in the stomach, the ineffable, unease, everyday facts, violence, couple relationships, incomprehension, alcoholism, the American dream, crudeness, Chekhov, uncompromising, desolation, sordid, perfection, dry, without adjectives, force, minimalism, family, authenticity, strangeness, hope, despair, contradiction, rupture, boredom, straight to the heart, infidelity, laconicism, suggestive, disoriented, to hide, without sentimentality, memories of happy moments, unhappiness, the desire to recover those happy moments, unhappiness...

And since I can't think of anything else, I will simply tell you that it was the movie Birdman that brought these stories back to my mind; my recent penchant for rereading and the number of years since I read them that made me return to them; my terrible memory that allowed me to marvel virginally when rereading them; and the age and the load of readings that I already carry that have intensified that pleasure that I already experienced with these naked, terrible, sincere and extraordinary tales.

It was impossible.

**Minimal moralia**

Closing the book, you wonder how Carver manages, with his extremely short stories, a minimalist writing that narrates snippets of the everyday lives of ordinary people and yet turns out to be so rich and incisive, making you reflect on life, unhappiness, love (?). It's not that he is presenting you with a literary micro-reality, peeping morbidly and randomly into the lives of others. So I did some reasoning, re-read a couple of stories and formulated a hypothesis: it's not that Carver is telling you just any moment in the lives of these men and women... he is making a distillation. A distillation starts from a liquid raw material, heats it until it evaporates and then condenses it drop by drop. What remains at the end of the process is a lot of alcohol (and in Carver there is always no shortage of it) and a whole series of aromas, volatile reminders, essences, perfumes and flavors that are the concentrate and synthesis of the starting substance. Carver has done this with these lives, distilled their essence, isolated in an almost metaphysical space (as Pivano writes in the beautiful postscript) the smell of tobacco and whisky, the bitter odor of sadness or despair, the more reassuring one of boredom, the taste of defeat and indifference, the strong aftertaste of betrayal. He has captured for us the tenuous sensations of a moment, of that moment that will never return again and has presented them to us in a mix that doesn't need to age in oak barrels to find quality.

This book is something special.

It is there, hidden within, throughout life.

It contains all the possible stars.

It's like a magical treasure chest waiting to be discovered.

Every page holds a new adventure, a new world to explore.

The words dance on the paper, captivating the reader's imagination.

It has the power to transport you to places you've never been before.

Whether you're looking for inspiration, knowledge, or just a good story, this book has it all.

It's a companion that will stay with you through thick and thin.

Open it up and let the magic begin.

I took my time with this book, carefully reading seventeen short stories over a span of six months. And I'm truly glad that I did so. I'm pretty certain that this book has taught me a great deal about reading. The back of my copy had a quote from the Daily Telegraph, hailing Carver as "the master craftsman of the modern American short story." So, naturally, I had high expectations. However, when I read the first couple of stories, those expectations weren't immediately fulfilled. But as I continued reading, I realized that it was my own inability to recognize the richness of his words. He is an absolute master craftsman, efficiently using so few words to convey so much. I love the fact that there will always be books in my life that challenge my patterns and habits of understanding and retention. I will keep learning, evolving, and reflecting those changes for as long as I'm able to breathe and think :-)

“But he stays by the window, remembering. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else—the cold, and where he’d go on in it—was outside, for a while anyway.”

I found that I couldn't really relate to any of these stories. They deal with the rather bleak turns in the lives of middle-aged men and women, and I'm only nineteen, with no clue as to where and how the rest of my life will unfold. But hopefully, it'll be better than whatever these characters had going on for them. And of course, reading this with Abeer, my beloved, has exponentially heightened my enjoyment and perception of this book. It's always the greatest, and I can't wait to read more books together with him!!

Carver, your dirty realism has truly施展了 its charm on us literature-covetous beings.

If it is asserted that I have long been immersed in the world of the literary ocean, you, for one, are a novel droplet of water, which is distinctively attributable to a depth that had not reached me until now. The tales of the losers, regarding loss, about the alienation of the dilapidated, of love in all its manifestations – and much of its absence – brotherly love, lover love, conjugal love, lost love, rediscovered love, amiable love, and more of lovelessness. All these elements, when combined and tightly bundled, create a rejuvenating literary package.

It is a fulfilling experience of pure literary excellence within just a few pages!

I haven't read a book in a long time that didn't convey anything to me.

The stories are extremely monotonous, most of them having no narrative structure at all. There is no resolution, and in the case of many of them, the ending is irritatingly banal.

The reason why I gave it 2 stars instead of 1 is because I somewhat understood the author's intention of presenting episodes from people's daily lives as realistically as possible, but I don't think that this represents sufficient material to capture the reader's attention.

Perhaps the author could have added more depth and complexity to the characters and their situations. This would have made the stories more engaging and interesting.

Also, a better narrative structure would have helped to build tension and keep the reader hooked until the end.

Overall, while I appreciate the author's attempt to depict real life, I believe that there is still room for improvement in terms of storytelling.

Opening my eyes, I look at the ceiling, listen to the ringing, and wonder what is happening to us.

These short stories by Carver are somewhat refreshing, and each of them has given me the feeling that there is a thread of strangeness when love is emphasized in a practical sense. The stories take up four to five pages, so the whole book can be read in a very short time. Carver is austere in language, but the ascetic atmosphere he provides is something that is not seen so often. Each sentence, not stylistically polished at all, gives precision to Carver's aphorism, hitting the mark exactly without any frills. There is something mysterious in the simple actions of his characters (who are often on the verge of madness), and in what they are prompted to do. Carver is not explicit, his stories seem a little incomplete, so the reader has to take the whole context of the story in order not to draw the wrong conclusion from it. He gradually draws the reader in, first serving him mild, slightly happier stories, but as they progress, it seems as if there is no light at the end of the tunnel, or if there is, it seems as if that end of the tunnel is the wrong one. His characters, ordinary workers, barbers, waiters, etc., are resigned, worn down by the system in which they find themselves, often without the strength to say anything. Married people in a marriage where there is less and less marriage and more and more quarrels and discomfort. Isn't it the frequent reality of an ordinary person, a passerby, a neighbor?

Otvaram oči, gledam u strop, slušam zvonjavu i pitam se šta nam se to događa.

Vivan los libros hermosos.

I love those books whose force impacts, those that unbalance you, that hit you hard. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is one of them.

In it, Carver constructs a series of stories that complicate the idea of love. Each one of them produces very strong sensations in me, conflicting feelings, but in the end, I have loved them.

The author does not show us complete and defined stories, but rather fully shows us the daily transit of each of the individuals he introduces. The stories in this book usually do not have a defined resolution, and it is there where the potential of the work lies. With open endings, inconclusive dialogues and gestures that say more than a thousand words, Carver builds a story that allows the reader to enter into the vicissitudes of love, in a web of happiness and pain.

The plots of each story are so well worked that it is impossible to resist the emotion of completing them and enjoying them again and again. In each of his stories, the author dispenses with many things and leaves the reader to base on his silences and omissions. Each one is self-sufficient, with what it says and with what it does not, thus constituting a quick and indelible look at some episode of love, loneliness, desire and almost anything that revolves around that feeling that unites us all as humans.

Among my favorite stories are "Viewfinder", "Balverde", "I Could See the Smallest Things", "Tell the Women We're Going", "After the Texans", "The Things That Killed My Father", "The Calm" and "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love". Surprisingly, none of these overflows with sweetness or overflows with stupid romances. Carver dispenses with that and bases himself on the so-called "dirty realism" to build his stories. He, who was a passionate and self-destructive alcoholic, makes his novel a catalog of characters similar to what he was: from abusive husbands to waiters, who are victims and protagonists of the purest and most sincere love that runs through the pages of these stories full of reality.

In conclusion, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is a great book that cannot be left unread and that builds a good, especially real, ideal of what love is, far from all stereotypes and treating it from reality. Thus, this book seems to be a necessary read, for which reason I hope you read it soon, because I really liked it a lot.

http://mariana-is-reading.blogspot.co...

I'll announce the cliché of my loving this book before you beat me to it.

I'm an overeducated, mock-contemplative early-twenty-something with a penchant for strong male voices (despite my feminist leanings) and a distaste for anything too sentimental. I was raised in the tradition of "Show, Don't Tell" and hold this closer than even my favorite teddy (whose name is Atticus.) My middle name is "Minimalism." My other middle name is "Ooh, that sounds pretty."

With that out of the way, yes, of course I loved this volume, and probably for the reasons you'd expect.

Raymond Carver's name should be in lights. Everyone who likes this book is going to tell you that one of Carver's strengths is his knack for understatement. I'm guessing what they're getting at is Carver's ability to keep all the mechanics of his stories imperceptible beneath the surface, with maybe a few out-of-character exceptions (the alcohol device in the title story being one). There's also the fact that Carver seems to accomplish things in the span of one page that so many authors would kill many more trees (and possibly small children, and maybe even a puppy or two) to achieve. For example, see the opening page of "Tell The Women We're Going" to see what I mean. How many authors can convincingly sum up the entire personal history of two characters in only one paragraph?

Beneath the tightness of each story there seems to be a distinctive pulse. Not the rhythm of the language. Rather, the kind of pure life energy that all artistic works strive for (or at least they should.) When stories took turns (and "for the worst" is implicit), what startled me more than each outcome was often the fact that I was so moved by them each. It's because of this pulse that characters who existed for only 3 or 4 pages still seemed to walk off the page and become real. And that's probably what will make these stories linger in my memory.

People often seem to speak of "Raymond Carver's America" when they're trying to grasp these stories. I don't know what that means, or if Raymond Carver's America is anything like mine. Whatever it is, it's tortured and beautiful. And I like it.

This book is a masterpiece that showcases Carver's unique writing style and his ability to create vivid and memorable characters in just a few pages. The stories are simple yet profound, and they explore the human condition in a way that is both relatable and thought-provoking. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who loves good literature.

Things change, he says.

He doesn't know exactly how they do. But they do change without your realizing it or even wanting them to.

As he stands by the window, lost in memories, he recalls those precious moments.

They had laughed heartily, leaning on each other, until the tears streamed down their faces.

At that time, everything else - the cold outside and the uncertainty of where he would go in that cold - seemed to be pushed aside, at least for a while.

Those laughter-filled moments were like a warm haven in the midst of a harsh reality.

Now, as he looks out the window, he can't help but feel a sense of longing for those times when life was a little less complicated and a lot more full of joy.

I only have one word for it: pointless.

This simple yet powerful word encapsulates my entire feeling towards the matter at hand. It seems that no matter what efforts are made, no real progress or meaningful outcome can be achieved.

The situation appears to be a never-ending cycle of futility, with no clear direction or purpose.

Every attempt to make sense of it or find a solution only leads to more confusion and frustration.

It's as if we are trapped in a maze with no exit, constantly running in circles.

The pointlessness of it all is truly disheartening and makes one question the value and worth of continuing.

However, perhaps there is still a glimmer of hope hidden within the chaos. Maybe with a different perspective or approach, we can break free from this cycle of pointlessness and discover a new path forward.

Only time will tell if this is possible.