Short Cuts: Selected Stories by Raymond Carver
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Book Reviews of Short Cuts: Selected Stories
Book Review: Enjoyed every page
Summary: 4 Stars
This small book (157 pages) is a collection of Raymond Carver's short stories. The book has been made into a movie of the same title. There are in all nine stories. The last `Lemonade' as a feels more like a prosem.
I had not read any of Carver's books and this book came as a wonderful surprise. While I did not like some of the stories, I loved the way he had written (Carver passed away in 1988) all of them. He has a wonderful ability to paint the deepest agonies of human heart. And he can make you dislike the characters as easily as he can make you empathize with them.
The story `Will you Be Quiet Please?' is also the title of another of his book. It revolves around a man's anguish who finds his wife had sex with his friend but she is refusing to tell him the details of the act. Unable to know what exactly she did and why she did it, the man spends the whole night drinking outside the house. With every paragraph you can feel the escalating pain of the man.
In `They're Not Your Husband' a man forces his wife to lose weight because he overhears a comment made by two men on oversize rear. But he becomes intrigued that after she lost weight nobody is taking any notice of her figure.
One of the stories I liked was `Vitamins', about how a man, on the verge of committing adultery with a wife's colleague develops a sudden revulsion to her by the realization of her true nature. A good ending.
`So Much Water So Close To Home' is about a woman obsessed with a girl whose body was noticed by her husband while on picnic but doesn't act till he finishes enjoying his outing.
`A Small Good Thing' is a very touching story about a boy getting involved in an accident on his birthday. His mother had ordered a cake for his birthday. I couldn't make sense of the ending.
`Collectors' is not even much of a story.
The worst was the `Tell the Women We're Going.' The end is shocking but I couldn't make sense of it. Why a character would suddenly becomes violent. There has not been any hint of his violent nature. There is no foreshadowing either. There has not been that provoking behavior from two strangers to result in their tragic end. And if the character has changed what led to the change?
Conclusion: I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in reading short stories. Carver has his own style but some stories reminded me of `Somerset Maugham.' Wonderful prose. High literary value.
Book Review: Pretty Good So Far
Summary: 4 Stars
I watched the movie and loved it. Altman is a master. His films have a depth and execution which other directors salivate over. I've only read the first few stories of this book so far. I'm very impressed. The stories are very short--between 5 and 10 pages each. They tie in very well to the film, but in many ways the book is superior to the film. He writes about common folk, and he speaks very plainly. It's very refreshing to see writers that don't "talk down" to their readers. People that talk down or have superiority complexes are very annoying. Especially when they are co-workers, and you work in retail.I work with a guy who has these kinds of annoying traits, and honestly I ignore the guy as much as possible. Everyone thinks he should be "86ed" from the joint but we'll have to wait and see.Book Review: worth reading, though I don't love every story
Summary: 4 Stars
Though these stories together tend to leave one rather depressed, they are still worth reading for the glimpses of the characters' lives they offer. Furthermore, some, especially "A Small, Good Thing" are less depressing and, in my mind, actually very good.Don't assume you know these stories because you've seen the film of the same name directed by Robert Altman. He said himself (in the book's intro, actually) that he took liberties with them, and believe you me, he REALLY did. You may even appreciate the stories more after seeing the film. I did, but that might be just me.
Do take a look at these stories regardless, though!
Book Review: A good introduction to Carver's cold world
Summary: 4 Stars
This short, digestible collection of a handful of Carver's stories makes a good introduction to his work. I haven't seen the movie, but reading Robert Altman's superficial, self-congratulatory introduction suggests to me that it probably wasn't very good.
Nonetheless, I guess some good came of the movie, because it resulted in the publishing of these stories together, unencumbered by the overwhelming hugeness of most Carver collections that are still found in stores.
Book Review: Hit and miss
Summary: 3 Stars
Raymond Carver is a very frustrating writer because he is capable of brilliance, and also capable of really bad writing. Worse, he can accomplish all in between. This is not so bad, except for the fact that I should have started my first sentence this way: Raymond Carver is a very frustrating writer because he is capable of brilliance, and also capable of publishing really bad writing. The fact that he let manifestly weak prose slip by into publication is a sad fact, because every writer has written something bad- a writer is judged by that he lets into the public domain- his/her totality of work is saved for the scholars decades or centuries hence. Having recently read his collection of short stories titled Cathedral I was hoping for far more from this book- an anthology, which generally denotes that the writer is putting forth the best of the best.
Such is not the case with Short Cuts since it seems to have been an ad hoc commercial pursuit designed to coincide with the Robert Altman film of the same name, culled from RC tales. Actually nine short stories and a poem.... In a way, he is, at his worst, far closer to the unwittingly self-parodic short story grotesques of a William Faulkner, or the even worse Flannery O'Connor. Bad dialogue can distance, subliminally, a reader from the story, and often leave the reader puzzled at the later actions of a character, because dialogue is always shown selectively, granted to a reader by a narrator that may or may not be reliable. RC is far better at standard narration and interior monologues. In a sense RC is an idea writer, not a plot writer, yet he may have been advised by others to let plot dictate, to get published. While, in the short run that may have got him published, in the long run it hurt his overall oeuvre.
That said, he is still a better short fictionist than either WF or FOC. Yet, still, it gnaws at me- what could have been had this man had just a smidgin' more self-confidence, and a tad less booze? As things turned out RC ended up much like his work- tantalizingly good, with hints of greatness, but too much muddle, and not in the middle!