Cosmoetica 2008-10-16

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

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!

Brandon X. Wirtz 2008-03-30

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Short stories? Movie adaptation? Sounds like a terrible premise for a movie. And it sounds like an even worse premise for a book. However, I believe this to be a very good introduction to Carver's work. If you haven't read Carver, yet, I will tell you this: he is a master of characterization. He is a master of the things that matter when writing about ordinary and real human beings; he is a master of the d-e-t-a-i-l-s. The important ones, not the extraneous. While Carver's stories are full of details, he is also a minimalist. Writers like him give minimalism power and meaning. And like his prose, this collection of his works is short and concise.

Carver's work gives us a very interesting picture of contemporary American life -- full desire, hopelessness, disappointment, drug use, and the constant presence of violent undertones. What could be more American? Raymond Carver has the ability to turn the ordinary, the seemingly mundane, into something raw, interesting, and valuable.

Shalom Freedman 2007-12-15

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Robert Altman in his introduction to this volume speaks about the element of chance in Carver's work, and how lives are drastically changed in the Carver world by some small incident which can set everything going in a new direction, often a disastrous one.
I feel very uncomfortable with the Carver world though I see what he is doing and recognize his power as a dramatic story- writer who keeps the reader reading to know what is going to happen next. Carver's characters are often people scrambling to make a living. They are often couples in some kind of disarray. The Carver world is a harsh one and yet it has surprising moments of grace and human kindness.
Above all I feel in it some element of destruction, often violent, but often too coming from the self- destructiveness of the characters.
Carver's language is sharp , colloquial and his people seem 'real'.
I recognize his great ability as a writer but somehow I do not feel close to his world or his characters. It is too incidental, transient and difficult for me.
But probably no other writer portrays a certain kind of American world in the way he does. And he gives a feeling of its being a very real world indeed.

Monique Parker 2006-09-24

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Carver portrays the banal, mundane, and unknown of life in his exquisite collection of short stories. It is the spouse who after twenty-five years of the same monotonous routine, breaks out and acts in ways that are inconsistent. Showing the psychological buildup of internal angst and tension is what Carver has mastered. He has a way exposing the hidden desire and passion that stem from the dark corners of the psyche. According to Joseph Campbell, many people are uncomfortable reading these types of stories.

The emotional charge that comes from Carver's careful observation takes his writing to the level of masterpiece literature. The narrative observatory techniques in the third person are detached and objective. A few of Carver's stories are written in first person, which give him an opportunity to get inside his protagonist, but even here, Carver chooses to stay at a distance, allowing the reader to dally in ambiguity.

JR Pinto 2004-10-06

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

In my opinion, Raymond Carver is among the top five short story writers of the twentieth century. His stories are bold, contemporary, and never boring. This compilation - used to make the Altman film - is a superb sampling of his work. Some of his best stories are here, such as "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?," "So Much Water So Close to Home," and the heartbreaking, "A Small, Good Thing." "Tell the Women We're Going" is one of the most shocking short stories I've read recently. In his introduction, Robert Altman writes, "what he really did was capture the wonderful idiosyncrasies of human behavior, the idiosyncrasies that exist amid the randomness of life's experiences." This is a good introduction to his work.