Customer Reviews

Short Cuts: Selected Stories

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Carver explores the neurotic undercurrents of urban dwellers. His characters are typically immersed in the Everyday where the repetitive force of the mundane has them mired in the mechanics of living: House-sitting, birthday parties, beer buddy fishing trips, boredom, initiation of an affair, two pals cruising, looking for a thrill. From these commonplace events, Carver produces stories that are pristine, using language scrubbed clean of verbal theatrics-no show off words, no eccentric constructions - just prose as clean and as spare as Hemingway's and honed dialogue that is simple, but in the way that we say Mozart is simple.

The story beneath the undercurrents is what makes Carver so addictive. He describes urges, images, and muted longings that you have always felt, but never could express in words-until now.

Take the story "So Much Water So Close To Home." A group of men go on a beer-bash fishing trip. Early into their trip, they discover the body of a nude woman floating face down in the river. The beer buddies figure to keep fishing! Why ruin a good fishing trip? She's dead already, what harm? After all, they're going to notify the authorities, only later, so as not to interrupt having a good time. The beer-induced logic is funny as hell, but the story's neurotic undercurrent explores sloth, inaction and soulless indifference, characters whose actions can only be sanctified after the factors of humanity and decency have been removed from the equation. The wife of one of the beer buddies serves as the story's conscious. When she discovers that her husband drank and fished while a dead body floated downstream, she is appalled, alarmed. To her every accusation of "What kind of man are you to have done this?" Her husband's consistent answer is "She was ALREADY dead." The marital rift over this issue reflects the story's title "So Much Water So Close To Home."

These are among the best short stories ever penned. If you enjoyed "The Killers," by Hemingway or any of John Cheever's short stories you will be rewarded by reading Carver.

If you love Raymond Carver, or have yet to read any of his stories, this is a great book for you. These are selected stories by Carver, which inspired the movie "Short Cuts." Though I did enjoy the movie, reading the actual stories is ten times more satisfying.

Carver is a genius when it comes to the crafting of a short story. He's showed me that you don't need to have the most complex plot or the happiest ending in short stories. You don't even need a solid resolution. Carver creates some of the most memorable characters and is a pro when it comes to dialogue.

I really enjoyed these stories. I liked the fact that some of these stories really caught me off guard. "Tell the Women We're Going," has to have one of the most horrifying and disturbing endings I have ever read in a story. I also liked the fact that these characters seem so real. It's like these are people you have known for all of your life. He writes the way people actually talk, and that is a great talent.

My favorite stories are, "They're Not Your Husband" "Neighbors," "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" "A Small, Good Thing," "Tell the Women We're Going," and "So Much Water so Close to Home." These are very realistic stories that paint a picture of everyday life.

Raymond Carver was a brilliant writer. We need more like him. If you like Carver, or you have yet to read any of his work, check out this book and read some of the stories. It doesn't have a lot, but the ones that are in here are very well done. A book I will read over and over again. We miss you Carver!

Robert Altman made a wonderful film in the 90s based on 9 short stories published by famous American short story writer Raymond Carver. The film was entitled "Short Cuts" and this publication brings together these 9 stories (including a poem) which were culled from several original Carver publications. The book opens with an introduction by Altman who confesses to taking small liberties with Carver's stories and its characters but without compromising their integrity. Those who have seen the movie will concede that the changes in fact give the entity a coherence that would otherwise be missing. But as a collection of short stories. they can and should be read as standalones. Carver is a master of social commentary, using anecdotes of casual human behaviour to capture the absurdity of modern American life. These candid snapshots may not conform with the dictates of conventional fictional writing in that they may lack a beginning, distinct plot development and a neat ending. Often it isn't even the events that trigger off the response of the characters that are significant but the fact that they respond in a certain way that is interesting from the view point of understanding human behaviour. Carver seems to be saying that sometimes the strange things that happen to us are all due to chance and that like it or not, we need to factor chance into the equation of living. As a short story writer, Carver is exceptional. He has that rare ability to communicate some essential truth about the human condition without using melodrama or any of the other techniques frequently used by lesser writers to captivate and sustain our interest. The 9 stories in this collection are individually separate entities which exist in their own right. No character appears anywhere but in the story he originates from. The situations they capture are also pretty diverse. Yet, they don't seem disjointed when you read them in sequence. They are thematically bound together by Carver's magic which may be hard to define but there all the same. I found every one of them absorbing and captivating. Read this first before you watch the movie. You'll enjoy both better.

Raymond Carver's stories are far from universally appealing - my wife hates his style - yet I find many of his stories to be extremely poignant and affecting. For whatever reason, I seem to be very open to the minimalist method he uses to tell these vignettes, or at least I find it very effective at transmitting what I believe to be Carver's aims.

The stories in 'Short Cuts', as well as his other collections, are about ordinary people doing ordinary things. There is no weirdness for weirdness sake, no post-modern literary games; Carver examines the absolute commonplace with a microscope. To anyone not familiar with his stories (and even to some that are), one might wonder what possible value that could hold. Yet along with the everyday, there is also some small event that occurs during the story, sometimes something as small as a lost key or as large as stumbling upon a dead body; but something that causes one character to look at their wife or husband and really see them as a person, and not just as extras in their own story. Whether these characters come to know each other in positive or negative ways isn't as important as the idea that they are no longer isolated within themselves - willingly or not they are confronted with the fact that they are part of the rest of humanity.

Those are the ideas that I take away from his stories at least. Some stories seem to communicate this better than others, and while the selection included in 'Short Cuts' still reflects what I like about Carver, I found this collection inferior to 'Cathedral', the other book of his stories that I've read. Another problem with this specific collection is that it is made up of stories already published elsewhere - if you decided to buy another collection later, you will automatically be duplicating some of the stories. Better to skip this format and get one of the other collections - you'll still be getting everything that makes Carver Carver, and reduce the chance of 'double-dipping' should you want more.

Raymond Carver was unequivocally one of the top five non-fiction writers of the c.20th. Add to this honour, that he was also the undisputed world heavyweight champion of the short story, and only then can one begins to understand the pedigree of the artist. An artist who at times painted such a thin wash over his canvass that it was still possible to see the very fabric underneath. If one were to complain that there was insufficient colour painted on his canvass, then the correct response would be to say that the reader was not fulfilling their side of the contract. A contract which Carver single-handedly re-established; that is the unwritten contact between the author and the reader which states the author provides only half of the data and the reader uses their imagination to provide the remainder. If you want Carver to spoon-feed you, you will undoubtedly walk away hungry.

Regarding the specifics of this text, it should be made clear to any potential purchaser, that all of the stories contained herein were originally published elsewhere and are contained in other collections, so more than likely you don't need to purchase this collection. In addition, I would like to point out that this text is really just a marketing spin-off from Robert Altman's 1993 'Short Cuts', which is loosely based on the nine short this anthology contains. Therein lies the reasons why I only awarded it the five stars, as this wasn't made clear on the Amazon page.

Having stated the above, I might still have purchased this collection because it contains so interesting additions and editions I have yet to come across. New works I have yet to read were:

i) Vitamins
ii) Lemonade

Both of which were excellent, especially 'Lemonade'. In addition to these two, there is also an 'alternative take' of 'A Small Good Thing', which contains not only a new ending and a fatter body, but also shows Carver in a very different mode. Firstly the re-structured tale could actually be described as 'up-beat', an adjective we seldom see used in connection with his work. Secondly and perhaps more significantly, it also contains closure - something we seldom see in Carver's work (that is closure in the 'traditional' sense).

In addition to the above gems I also liked the fact that volume has a numbered text, something which means that it could be used for a reading class or seminar. Unfortunately however, I bought the 'Reclaim' version (red cover) which is a German edition and has the key vocabulary translated into German, along with the notes and biography. Again, this was not made clear on the Amazon page.

To summarise, collectors of Carver's work will appreciate this volume, likewise new arrivals and students should also get something from this too. If you see nothing, or this collection fails to please you, then I guess you need to re-examine, what you read and why your read what you do.

Carver explores the neurotic undercurrents of urban dwellers. Carver's characters are typically immersed in the Everyday. The repetitive force of the mundane has them mired in the mechanics of living: House-sitting, birthday parties, beer buddy fishing trips, boredom, initiation of an affair, two pals cruising, looking for a thrill. From the mundane and monotony, Carver produces stories that are pristine, using language scrubbed clean of verbal theatrics-no show off words, no eccentric constructions - just prose as clean and as spare as Hemingway and honed dialogue that is simple, but in the way that Mozart is simple.

The story beneath the undercurrents is what makes Carver so addictive. He describes urges, images, and muted longings that you have always known existed, but never could express in words-until now.

Take the story "So Much Water So Close To Home." A group of men go on a beer-bash fishing trip. Early into their trip, they discover the body of a nude woman floating face down in the river. The beer buddies figure to keep fishing! Why ruin a good fishing trip? She's dead already, what harm? After all, they're going to notify the authorities; only later, so as not to interrupt having a good time. The beer-induced logic is funny as hell, but the story's neurotic undercurrent explores sloth, inaction and soulless indifference, actions that can only be sanctified after the factors of humanity and decency have been removed from the equation. The wife of one of the beer buddies serves as the story's conscious. When she discovers that her husband drank and fished while a dead body floated downstream, she is appalled, alarmed. To her every accusation of "What kind of man are you to have done this?" Her husband's consistent answer is "She was ALREADY dead." The marital rift over this issue reflects the story's title "So Much Water So Close To Home."

These are among the best short stories ever penned. If you enjoyed "The Killers," by Hemingway or any of John Cheever's short stories you will be rewarded by reading Carver.

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.

I was truly on the edge of my seat during these stories. They are beautifully written. I plan on re-reading these stories for years to come.

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.

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.