[Review] What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver

Title of Book: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Author: Raymond Carver
Publisher: Vintage Classics
Publication Year: 2009
Language: English
Format: Paperback
Pages: 134

This powerful collection of stories, set in the mid-West among the lonely men and women who drink, fish and play cards to ease the passing of time, was the first by Raymond Carver to be published in the UK. With its spare, colloquial narration and razor-sharp sense of how people really communicate, the collection was to become one of the most influential literary works of the 1980s.

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a short story collection by Raymond Carver which revolves around the theme of love. The book consists of 17 short stories. Though I prefer calling them mini stories because some of them are relatively brief.

Carver’s writing style is clear and simple. The characters in his stories are the everyday people that we might encounter daily. I believe that’s why his stories are easy to relate to, aside from having the topic that we’re familiar with. However, because it’s so concise, some of them feel like they end abruptly. The story stop before I could draw a conclusion of what happened to the characters. Sometimes I suspected that the point of the story is to show a certain state of mind people could experience which the readers perhaps could relate to. It doesn’t matter what happens to the characters, as long as we understand what they’re going through and what we make of it. Again, since the stories don’t really give closure, the interpretation could differ for each reader which I appreciate. They could instigate interesting discussion between readers.

Reading this book, I realized that Carver’s writing has this particular style that I guessed there must be a specific movement with this similar style. Later I found out that this literary movement is called dirty realism. According to references I read, dirty realism is characterized by the minimal use of words and the depiction of the mundane side of life which in my opinion perfectly describes Carver’s writing in this book. Honestly, reading about this movement intrigued me to find out more about it and to read more stories or books with this style.

Of all the stories in this collection, my favorite is the titular short story. If you’ve read Symposium by Plato, this short story reminds me of that. What we talk about when we talk about love is basically about four people who have a discussion about the nature of love, like Symposium, minus the Greek Gods and the dramatic speeches. One might say this story is the dirty realism version of Symposium, if you will. The characters in this story give out their interpretation of love while stating some examples; but of course in the spirit of dirty realism, the examples given are seamier and so ordinary. Even some of them are absurd and give no conclusions. In the end, the definition of love remains elusive. Instead of defining what love is, they figure out what love is not.

All in all, I’m glad to finally read this book. To be honest, I was a bit intimidated to start this book but once I started reading it, I thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, I’m planning to read Carver’s another works. His writing style is the kind that I like reading. I recommend this short story collection to read. Especially for those who have short attention span, this minimalism style might fit you.