Customer Reviews

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?: Stories

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There is something very satisfying about short stories, especially if you are short of time; here you still manage to feel some sort of "accomplishment" at having read a "piece of life" embodied in a story. Raymond Carver's short stories are a special treat in this regard. I first came by Raymond Carver's name while watching the movie "Short cuts". This is why I was so intrigued to read this book, his first collection of short stories.
"Will you please be quiet, please?" is an assortment of harsh, condensed, short stories. The stories are brief and "to the point". Carver captures the human experience at a certain important moment in time. This moment can seem trivial to an outside observer, but this is a flash of revelation, a private understanding that comes after a seemingly regular event. This is a moment of small change, recognition --- something will not remain as it was before.
The story "Fat" can be a good example for Carver's style. "Fat" opens the book and is one of my favorite stories in this collection. This is an account of a rather trivial, every day encounter of a waitress with a fat client. However, this encounter manages to shake something inside her and force her to feel something of his "Fat experience". Somehow this makes her think about relationships and people and brings her to a certain realization as to her personal interactions.
Carver does not glorify human beings. His description is not tender and he does not write with mercy. This is true regarding instants of ugliness and on the other hand - quick moments of great love and compassion - just as during one day you can have mixed feelings and a great moment of love can come from nowhere and just pass by, sometimes even unnoticed. Somehow Carver manages to grasp the stream of thoughts, feelings and events that led to the after come feeling.
Carver's descriptions give us glimpses of life - ordinary, as it happens in real. No drama around it. Carver talks about father son relationship, husband and wife or two lovers. Most of his stories deal with difficult moments, and center around simple, ordinary people, struggling to make a life to themselves - Like Al, the main character in "Jerry and Molly and Sam". Al feels his life is falling apart. His work is not secure any more, he has an affair and is a little terrified by it, he just rented a new apartment... and on top of it there's this new dog his sister in law brought the kids. As an attempt to put some order in his personal chaos Al decides he has to get rid of the dog - an act that puts him into an emotional turmoil of facing his inner self.
These stories are "short cuts" of life, which can be ugly and beautiful but is never dull.

Raymond Carver is my all-time favourite writer. I was hooked on his writings since the first time I read his book, which is this one. When I first finished reading this book some years ago, it changed my view in English literature altogether. What struck me was the stark honesty and reality in his writings. Never had I come across a writer who was as honest as Carver. He tells his stories the way life really is, without trying to twist, sensationalise or glamourise it. He tells stories about people like us. In fact, his stories are about us and the people around us.

Don't be fooled by the length of his short stories, his shortest pieces like 'Neighbors' and 'Fat' are among his best (though I can't really point out any that is not his best anyway) because it tells so much in so little words.

Another startling thing about Carver's stories is that it can relate to people everywhere in the world though he writes about Americans.

I first bought and read this collection while an undergrad
at the University of Oklahoma. Mr. Carver wasn't then such a
recognized master of the short story. Most striking was how pain-
ful the stories were to read, and this was without the life experience one has gained since the late 1970's.
Raymomd Carver already wrote the stories I was aspiring to; there
was nothing left but to obtain his wonderful story collections, and re-read them every five years or so. The stories become more harrowing the older one gets. I just can't be objective about this collection in particular, as it's been such a touchstone for me.

I love Raymond Carver, but I would say don't read this one until you've read Cathedral and What We Talk About When We Talk about Love. Simply because this is his first collection, and it's a little rough.

There are good stories here, and definitely hints and flashes of what Carver will become. His talent for small-talk dialoge is apparent and the shining moments in this book come when couples get together and talk. But he has not perfected that bright, clean, no-nonsense tone that became his trademark. There is a feeling of a lot of borrowing tones, writing like other writers, and playing around. Which is all fine. But the stories here lack the vision and power of those in the later books.

So read those first. Then, when you're hooked like I am, come read these.

I know plenty of people who say things like, "My life is going to change. I feel it." They're usually trying to figure things out, working through abstract ideas about "happiness" and "satisfaction." I like these people--for the most part--and to read about them in stories that are written using the same language they use is a treat. To see the working women and men of a downtrodden 1970s America (and, truly, any time) be discussed without degradation and be looked at instead of down upon is so rare. To see them not be glorified, either, is even more rare. If anything, the characters Carver creates are painfully real, if nothing else.

Stylistically, Carver doesn't have much variety. Even when looking at the more uplifting, detailed scope of Cathedral and beyond, he's always rooted himself in characters who speak with short declarations or lengthier monologues. The people he creates are unable to interact with each other without tension, and they are the ones who drive the narrative.

That said, when Carver is good, he's good. When he's not as good, it's just because he didn't write a good story. His experimentation is limited to a couple stories in No Heroics, Please ("Furious Seasons" is mediocre Faulkner and "The Aficionados" is funny Hemingway) and the oddly brilliant short story "Errand" about the last day of Chekhov's life. Only one story in here leaves "present day" in favor of an earlier time--the mediocre "Sixty Acres," set in some sort of Little House on the Prairie era, it seems--with rest being standard Carver fare (aside from "Why, Honey?" a story in letter form from a mother to a son). The stories that miss the mark aren't bad, really, just uneventful. "The Father" seems unfinished, and certainly too short. "The Ducks" is simply boring. "Jerry and Molly and Sam" is reminiscent of Bukowski's more literary attempts at short fiction, but Carver's reluctance to write a flat-out humor story seems to have muddled things up for him. The mailman narrator of "What Do You Do In San Francisco?" is annoying, and the contrast between the family and the narrator is too heavy handed. There are a few others that just don't stick to the ribs, though I can't say that anything in here was painful to read.

The good stories are plentiful: "The Student's Wife" and "They're Not Your Husband" cover marital woes wonderfully, as we find out what people unknowingly will and will not do, respectively, to save their marriage. "Fat" is bizarre in both set-up and pay off. "Collectors" is another odd one, showing what people cling to in the pathetic depths of loneliness. Perhaps the two finest stories here--"Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarets" and "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please"--find Carver tiptoeing around Hemingway's "definition of manliness" territory. The first of these family affairs deals with a son, his father, and, disjointedly, the father's father. In the second, the reader is left in the midst of a crumbling marriage, right next to the man who had to know if the truth was more important.

Though this is his first collection, Carver already has his footing in fiction. It's almost unfair to say that the stories improve for his next collection (What We Talk About When We Talk About Love), as the good stories here are amongst his best work. This is a strong collection, but the stories worth reading (for the non-diehards) have all been anthologized in Where I'm Calling From, Carver's epic "greatest hits" book. Though he would write both his bleakest and his most optimistic work after Will You Please Be Quiet, Please, the stories found here are just as solid and honest as the very lives the emulate.

Carver is truly amazing, and not even at his peak in this collection. His stories, minimalist sketches of loss and inarticulation, have spawned an entire generation of imitations. Don't bother with them, read the best. And don't smoke.

Raymond Carver's celebrayed 22 short story collection that re drew the map of short story telling. The stories are often brief and give just the slightest of moments in ordinary peoples lives, yet proves the adage that everyone is extraordinary.Depite the lack of background detail and the feeling you are either thrown in or intruding on a situation that is none of your business, there is something deeply human and personal to each tale;the tensions brought on by day to day exsistence, the need for identity, to belong, to fit in-even shame at what your life is or your partners appearence,that make you instantly relate to that something that Carver manages to install in each tale. How many tales has anyone written about a door to door vacuum salesman ('Collectors') for example, that give an insight to our own hopes and failings?
I've read Carver's 'What we talk about when we talk about Love' and this collection is every bit as impressive. If you haven't 'discovered' Raymond Carver, please do!

Anyone who knows anything, knows what Carver was (and is), what he can be, could be. This book is everything conveyed with next to nothing, it is more, so much more. If Carver were music he would be jazz.

Carver's genius lies in his powers of transportation. His ability to paint his subjects in the most transparent of washes, the faintest of brush-strokes and yet still manage to make you imagine them in their fullness and their complexity. Like the Chinese or Japanese masters of 'sumi-e' (ink painting), he lays down the simplest of lines, the simplest of narratives and the simplest language to convey to the viewer (the reader) just what was intended to be conveyed. There is no waste, no excess, no fat to be trimmed here, he stops short of giving too much and just shy of not giving you enough.

Carver arguably restored the relationship, the contract between the reader and an author. A contract whereby both parties agree to work for a common goal. The author agrees to give part of the story, if the reader agrees to use their imagination to fill in the blanks. And in agreeing to this contract, they agree to not just use their imagination in some passive, inert sense, but rather agree to draw on their store of experiences and knowledge to deepen one's assimilation to the characters and situations laid down on the page.

This short collection is memorable from start to finish and is highly recommended for anyone who likes great story-telling, who is interested in the human condition, or anyone who wants to encounter just what the short story can be.

These are short, simple stories about people without any money, looks or otherwise striking features; that is to say, it`s as real as it gets. The small losses and gains that make up the sum of "Will you Please..." probably made me a better human being, since it takes you away from literature (the ultimate ivory tower) and puts you back among people as they are. A lot of tears, "cigarets" and deadpan irony on this volume, which is far from Carver`s best but great anyway. I particularly ove "They're not your Husband", "Why, Honey?" and "Sixty Acres".

A beautifully written first book. Made me think of Jones Inn and also A Stranger in this World. You can really see the direct correlation between Carver and how he influenced two of the greatest writers of the 90's, Canty and Elliott.