The brief description of each story included in Carver's collection turns out to be in vain, as I think it is a work that one appreciates when reading it as a whole. The stories seem to be episodes of a larger one, and the narratives seem to be overall symptoms of a contemporary illness or each one to constitute "another tragedy in a long line of low-rent tragedies", as one of the broken and withdrawn characters explains towards the end of the collection.

What makes Carver's prose so unique, so powerful and convincing? Besides the theme, that of alienation, what fascinates is the author's art of expressing more by saying less, a doctrine that is also attested by the structure of the stories, with most of them occupying half a page ("Popular Mechanics"), but also with the weight of the dissatisfaction and disappointment being translated into a single word ("Gazebo"). Mainly, however, it is the silences, the things that remain unknown, the empty looks and the empty spaces, the heavy steps and the hardships that the body postures declare, the discreet but extremely revealing elements of the characters' pain.

Poetry, verses, cinema attract with their promises that beauty and happiness last. However, Carver seeks something different, at least at first sight. All his stories are distinguished by pain, loss and despair. They show that happiness can be a dangerous illusion, together with romantic love, and they seem real, authentic and familiar precisely because they depict the corruption of communication, the inadequacy of touch, the loneliness that is much sharper after cohabiting with someone. Young lovers, old loves, illegal couples are caught by the author at the moment when they drop their shields, when they expose their raw feelings to lies, deception, the boredom of routine and conventional relationships. Mercilessly depressing, the narratives share a unique purity in prose with Murakami's writing.

\\n  [...] and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.\\n