What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Mandarin Edition)

By Raymond Carver

《当我们谈论爱情时我们在谈论什么》

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.

《当我们谈论爱情时我们在谈论什么》是雷蒙德·卡佛优秀的短篇小说集，由17篇短篇小说组成。讲述了如餐馆女招待、锯木厂工人、修车工、推销员和汽车旅馆管理员等社会底层的体力劳动者的生活。这些普通人有着普通人的愿望，做着再普通不过的事情，但他们发现自己在为生存而挣扎，无法达到在常人看来并不远大的人生目标。他们的生活中充满了窘困和不如意，婚姻破裂，失业，酗酒，破产。卡佛用“极简”的遣词、冷静疏离的叙事，表现了现代社会中人的边缘性以及现代人脆弱的自我意识。本书的出版，为美国短篇小说写作注入了新的生命，并为卡佛赢得了“美国的契诃夫”的称号，使他成为美国继海明威之后受到模仿最多的作家。

• Language: 中文
• Publisher: Yilin
• Release date: Feb 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9787894000743

Raymond Carver

(1939-1988) falleció en pleno reconocimiento de su carrera como narrador y poeta. Sus cuentos lo consagraron internacionalmente como uno de los maestros del género. En Anagrama se han publicado sus seis libros de relatos. ¿Quieres hacer el favor de callarte, por favor?, De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de amor, Catedral, Tres rosas amarillas y los póstumos Si me necesitas, llámame y Principiantes, además de la antología Short Cuts (Vidas cruzadas). Asimismo se ha publicado Carver Country, que contiene textos del autor (cuentos, poemas y cartas inéditas) y fotografías de Bob Adelman.

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Reviews for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Mandarin Edition)

[erickibler · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I had just a few more stories to read in this book and I finally finished it. That's the great thing about short story collections. Finish a story, put a bookmark in it, and you can pick it up again after a long absence without starting over again.

Carver has become one of my favorites. The plainspoken characters. The stark but beautiful use of nature. The unexpected volatility and tenderness of his characters. The specter of sometimes sinister doings. The endings that sometimes provoke a guffaw, sometimes make you scratch your head.

I've been reading his work generally in the order written. In the title story has Carver moving into new territory. Rather than the usual sparse dialog that marks his first stories, it has a group of four relatively articulate friends talking over drinks about what constitutes love. The reality of love is that it is often violent and tinged with madness. It often seems to disappear slice by infinitesimal slice until it's gone, leaving you wonder whether it was ever there. Yet its saving grace is that people always manage to love again.

[satyridae · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Terse. Spare. Amazing.

Carver's vision was singular and pure. His words fall like rain, inevitable and clear.

[amyjmerrick · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In this collection of short stories, Carver’s famously spare prose and flat sentences capture the inarticulate longings of people struggling with loneliness, hatred and regret. Dialogue changes direction abruptly, and Carver withholds important information about his characters—sometimes even their names. What is not said is often as important as what is said. Carver’s minimalist style points to the importance of paying close attention to the depths of character, and it reflects a tolerance for ambiguity and incompleteness in a story.

[alexrichman_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Short and sweet, some stories take only a few pages. They're not all hits, but a goodie is never more than a few turns away. The briefest, Popular Mechanics, is one of the best, but Tell The Women We're Going is the stand-out, spine-tingling highlight.

[vivaval · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Reading these stories made me feel hopeless and alone.

[daddyofattyo · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Having had very high expectations via reputation etc. I must say I was a tad underwhelmed. By all means, a very good writer, and some of the stories were great, but others - I'd like to say 'WTF'? but will instead say were simply over my little head. I don't understand a story that seems to have no beginning and no end, not even a seed of an idea to ponder - it's as if you found a loose page from a book that doesn't exactly leave you with any desire to go and hunt down that book right away. I have another book of his stories - [Where I'm Calling From] and I since that one is an anthology of his best, I have certainly not taken it off of my TBR list.

[moonimal · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Hmm ... I'm a lover of short stories, but didn't get the praise/hype/awards that this guy has won. The fiction is very sparse, and definitely has a very personal flair - mostly through subject matter, and the non-linear progression of the conversations. I think this qualifies as voice, but the stories weren't that compelling to me.I'll re-read this in a year or so, to see if I missed something.

[amydross · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

On my first reading, I found it hard to see part the dated elements of so many of the stories. I don't know why that bothered me, except maybe that the 70s are both recent enough and distant enough that it's hard to read stories from that era without smirking a little. The characters are like us and unlike us in precisely uncomfortable ways.Or maybe that was always true of Carver. I don't know, but in subsequent readings, his style really got under my skin. I love the way he leaves you guessing, hiding his Big Ideas under oblique dialogue, carefully recorded details, and gallons of alcohol.

[wunderkind_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Carver is very spare and very depressing, at least at first. I must admit that I wasn't sure I liked his stories much in the beginning, but about halfway through (I think with the story "So Much Water So Close to Home") I warmed up to him, and by the end I loved the overall effect Carver achieved. A critical blurb from Tim O'Brien on the back of the book says it better than I can: "The collection as a whole, unlike most, begins to grow and resonate in a wonderful cumulative effect." I totally agree with that; even Lorrie Moore, whose stories I absolutely love, hasn't achieved that kind of cohesion with her collections. Carver is very subtle, so reading one or two stories by him won't do it--the whole collection needs to be read through, and I would guess it's best to do it quickly, like I did. It's the mood that's important, not the individual stories (which often don't even have plots, just character interactions), and Carver captures a sense of the emotionally seedy underbelly of America. It's honest and blunt and would be depressing if it weren't so good.

[aoxford_4 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Carver's minimalist writing does not build up characters but breaks them down and nearly destroys them. He captures people at their most vulnerable and illustrates the power a chaotic moment can have on an otherwise stable person. The unexpected is all that should be expected in his often morose America as it is the unexpected which seems to matter most.

[rossryanross · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is an amazing collection of stories, with vivid, monumentally flawed characters--drunks, murderers, junkies, and everything else from the socially stigmatized end of the spectrum. Carver creates some great reads and leaves you wanting more.

[whitewavedarling · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

These are fairly short stories, easy quick reads. However, there's really not much depth to anything outside of emotion, primarily the emotions of confusion and discontent. Simply, these are slices of life, straightforward and easy to understand surface-wise. There is some beauty to be seen in the grace and the simplicity with which Carver writes, but the stories get repetitive by the end, even with such a short book.

[the_unnamable · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brutal. Short. Amazing.Clawing through these short stories was reminiscent of reading Bukowski's poetry. Carver wastes no words as he chisels his fiction bluntly from blocks of motive and description. Some of the stories are mere pages, but hold up via the weight of the undercurrent, the hidden text.

[stipe168 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Known for his anguished perusal of every word in his stories, Raymond Carver delivers an incredible collection here. There is an economy to these contemporary stories about cheating spouses and lost love affairs. Many short story writers try to include a whole world in as few words as they can - Carver just gives you a picture and lets you muse over it yourself.

[misirlou_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Raymond Carver's America is bleak. While Sherwood Anderson celebrates the inherent flaws in the individual, Carver works to accept the fact that some personality flaws can never be fixed. In this collection of his short stories, he relies on implication. Much in the way Hemingway likened his stories to icebergs (both are mostly hidden beneath the surface, leaving the viewer to piece together the real size of things based off of what they can see), Carver relies on an economy of language which makes his characters sadder and more pathetic as he asks the reader to imagine these people for themselves. This works because he presents believable characters. Even in a story like "Tell the Women We're Going" where the action (a seemingly unprompted double homicide) is unbelievable, the stories work because the characters are difficult not to believe. In the writing world, where characters are either too perfect or too intentionally eclectic, Carver creates characters whose flaws are mundane. The flaws are only shared with the reader because there's nothing the characters can do to change themselves-- their resignation is what gets you. Without Carver's keen eye for language, these stories wouldn't be nearly as interesting. In "I could see the smallest things" Carver pays special attention to having the narrator of the story see nothing clearly. Every statement she makes after she leaves the comfort of her house concerns her inability to see what's going on. As a metaphor, none of the characters in these stories can see what's going on. Either they choose to ignore the world, they're too caught up on themselves, or they see their mistakes but they take no actions to correct them.Despite the melancholy tone of the book, each story is capable of grabbing your attention and keeping hold of it until the last sentence. This isn't the best book to pick up if you're looking for something to cheer you up, but if you're looking for some easy-to-read, incredible short stories this is the book for you.