He was right “What We Talk About” is stunningly desolate, a group of stories so laconic they almost perfectly reflect the resignation of characters struggling with alcoholism, infidelity and the desperation of diminished dreams. Knopf in the late 1970s and cut some of the stories in “What We Talk About” by more than three-quarters, paring down the language, even changing endings to highlight what he called “a peculiar bleakness.” Not only that, but in 1995, it was revealed that his 1981 breakthrough, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” was extensively reworked by Gordon Lish, who as fiction editor of Esquire helped bring Carver’s work to a national audience. When does an act of reclamation cease to be about restoration and become about something else? That’s the question raised by “Collected Stories,” the Library of America’s new collection of the complete short fiction of Raymond Carver, who died at 50 in August 1988.Ĭomplete, of course, is a relative concept in regard to Carver, an inveterate rewriter who published many stories in different versions at various points in his career.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |