Raymond Carver has become a literary icon for our time. When he died in 1988 at the age of fifty, he was acclaimed as the greatest influence on the American short story since Hemingway. Carver's ...friends were the stuff of legend as well. In this rich collection-greatly expanded from the earlierWhen We Talk about Raymond Carver-of interviews with close companions, acquaintances, and family, Sam Halpert has chronologically arranged the reminiscences of Carver's adult life, recalling his difficult "Bad Raymond" days through his second life as a recovering alcoholic and triumphantly successful writer. The result is a spirited Irish wake-toasts, anecdotes, lies, songs, confessions, laments-all beautifully orchestrated by Halpert into a very readable and moving narrative.
These funny, poignant, intensely remembered interviews juxtapose personal anecdotes and enlightening criticism. Memory mixes with analysis, and a lively picture of Carver emerges as we hear different stories about him-of the same story told from different viewpoints. He is here presented as hero, victim, and even villain-Carver's readers will recognize the woof and warp of his stories in these affectionate narratives.
Not Far From Here Fachard, Vasiliki; Miltner, Robert
2013, 2014-03-25
eBook
Hailed as the "American Chekhov" by the Times Literary Supplement, Raymond Carver is the most popular and influential American short-story writer since Ernest Hemingway. His works have been adapted ...to film and translated into more than twenty languages. Yet despite this international appeal, the critical attention to his writing has originated mostly in the US. In an attempt to expand the scope and range of Carver criticism, Not Far From Here: The Paris Symposium on Raymond Carver - based o.
Raymond Carver's fiction is widely known for its careful documentation of lower-middle-class North America in the 1970s and 80s. Building upon the realist understanding of Carver's work, Raymond ...Carver's Chronotope uses a central concept of Bakhtin's novelistics to formulate a new context for understanding the celebrated author's minimalist fiction. G. P. Lainsbury describes the critical reception of Carver's work and stakes out his own intellectual and imaginative territory by arguing that Carver's fiction can be understood as diffuse, fragmentary, and randomly ordered. Offering a fresh analysis of Carver's body of work, this book offers an extensive meditation on this major figure in postmodern U.S. fiction.
"Raymond Carver's figures take American disappointment to its barest extreme, haunted as they are by unfulfillable, intangible longings, paralyzed, lost, pushed well beyond the verge of articulate ...dismay .... They cannot speak their pain. They translate it instead into obsessive behaviour, into desperate and abusive patterns, into drinking, smoking, and eating, into adultery, into voyeurism and, on occasion, violence--behaviour linked, as Paul Skenazy observes, 'to a sense of failure and a recognition of the gap between American possibilities and their own hard lot'...But even in Carver's most damaged characters the sense of a model unmistakenly survives, usually a model of ordinary stability and decency whose existence reveals to them the shame of their own failure and abjection." (Critique) The themes of "mediated desire" and "American disappointment" in Carver's stories are analyzed.
