What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
1981
- translations from american
- korean short stories
- american short stories
- translations into korean
- fiction
- manners and customs
- short stories
- american fiction (fictional works by one author)
- fiction, short stories (single author)
- chinese language materials
The story
In his second collection of stories, as in his first, Carver's characters are peripheral people--people without education, insight or prospects, people too unimaginative to even give up. Carver celebrates these men and women.
What it’s like
Spare, plainspoken prose with long pauses and little ornament, the kind of minimalist surface where the emotional weight sits under the dialogue. Kitchen tables under flat overhead light, cigarette smoke and cold coffee, ordinary American interiors in winter and late afternoon, rendered in clipped sentences that rarely describe more than they must. The mood is quietly bleak but never melodramatic: a restless, wintry unease softened by a dry, tender humor and a steady sympathy for people who keep going without much to show for it. The stories are short and read in single sittings, well suited to a late-night read alone, a cold weekend afternoon, or a slow stretch with a cup of something hot. Violence is mostly off-page and emotional rather than physical, with drinking, marital strain, and sudden silences doing the damage; the tension is domestic and sharp rather than graphic, and some scenes are uncomfortable in their candor. It suits readers who want honest, unshowy portraits of working and lower-middle-class lives, and anyone drawn to the compression and restraint of short fiction where what goes unsaid matters most.
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