Our story begins in 1989, with the publication of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. In this collection’s title story, two couples discuss love and relationships over a bottle of gin. Mel and Terri have been together for a while, and by now, their unhappiness peeks through their heroic courtship story. As Mel launches into an anecdote, he says, “it ought to make us ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love.” Immediately, Terri says: “Come on, now. Don’t talk like you’re drunk if you’re not drunk.” It is perhaps significant that this moment leads the four adults to grin at each other like children: they have been made more innocent by the light, rather than wiser or more experienced. The group continues drinking, talking about knights and Ed and Mel's ex. Mel says he wants to call his children, but Terri reminds him he would have to talk to his ex-wife, Marjorie. Marjorie reportedly only stays single to torment Mel and Terri and take their money. Paul E. Blom, PhD Student and Teaching Fellow | The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Department of English and Comparative Literature | Greenlaw Hall, CB #3520 | Chapel Hill, NC 27599 | [email protected] I Could See the Smallest Things' has a woman thinking of slugs as she looks at her husband in the middle of the night, a new vision of their marriage coming to light.

Mel is a 45-year-old cardiologist who commands most of the dialogue in the short story. He gets the group on the topic of love when he starts to talk about it in the spiritual sense, saying that he studied for five years in a seminary. He argues that Terri's ex was crazy and didn't love her, while claiming that all four of the friends are new to love and don't truly understand it.The other stories are also memorable, with the themes of infidelity and alcohol glugging through their veins. They aren't uplifting, that is certain. But there's a truth here, a humanity, a shared pain, that make them worth reading. Honey, I’m just talking,” Mel said. “All right? I don’t have to be drunk to say what I think. I mean, we’re all just talking, right?” Mel said. He fixed his eyes on her. Little men have their own little vices: drunkenness, unfaithfulness, spitefulness… And little men have their own little handicaps: stupidity, silliness, incompetence… Carver gets mileage out of yard sales, photographers offering their services, accidental death, a night of bingo, doing things and doing nothing, talking yet saying nothing.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is a short story by Raymond Carver where four friends gather for drinks. As the conversation progresses, the couples settle on the topic of defining love. Each one of them tries to articulate what they believe love to be, yet words continuously fall short in describing this feeling. This story explores the paradoxes of love through its representation in the character Mel, a cardiologist who approaches love very rationally, yet is met with the complications that emotions bring to such a stance. The stories "So Much Water So Close to Home" and "Tell the Women We're Going" were adapted for Robert Altman's 1993 feature film Short Cuts. The former was the inspiration for the Paul Kelly song "Everything's Turning to White" on the album So Much Water So Close to Home and was also later adapted for the 2006 film Jindabyne. The stories are filled with Carver being able to choose a short phrase or sentence that ca Mel argues that everyone falls in love again even after heartbreak, which contributes to his confusion about the nature of love, unsplash. I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.

Mel cites an example of true love by mentioning an old couple that got in a car accident and became depressed because they could no longer see each other. He hates his ex-wife but misses his children, and reveals that he is alarmed by his ignorance of love. Teresa (Terri) Love dominates the topic of conversation as well as the themes presented in the short story. But love isn't presented in a fairy tale romance, white-wedding-dress kind of way. In fact, the love in the story is messy and dark, involving a car crash, killer bees, alcohol, suicide, and abuse. The two couples’ attempts to talk about love end up in circles because they do not come to a consensus on what real love is. The ending of the story gives no clear answer to the question about what love is. Each person has a different definition of love, and this applies today. For instance, some people endure domestic violence because they believe the bartering occurs due to love. Pungi”, un părinte cu mari întrebări etice încearcă să-i explice fiului cum a căzut în păcat fără să vrea. Ceasul rău! Povestește întîmplarea după cum urmează:

The nature of love remains elusive throughout “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” despite the characters’ best efforts to define it. Mel tries again and again to pinpoint the meaning of love, but his examples never build up to any coherent conclusion. For example, he tells his friends about an elderly couple who nearly died in a car crash, but the conclusion of the story—the old man depressed by not being able to see his wife—merely confuses everyone. When he asserts that he’ll tell everyone exactly what love is, he instead digresses into a muddled meditation about how strange it is that he and the others have loved more than one person. His attempts to clarify the nature of love eventually devolve into a bitter tirade against his ex-wife. He seems much more certain about what love is not and tells Terri several times that if abusive love is true love, then she “can have it.”Exploring Carver's fiction for the first time at the age of forty-three, I feel that in many ways I'm over this. Like listening to someone coming out of AA with their raw stories, epiphanies and apologies, I'm happy they're exorcising their demons, but I can only tolerate point blank despair for so long. I was, is and will always be a big fan of Short Cuts, the bold 1993 film adaptation in which filmmaker Robert Altman relocated the Carververse to contemporary Los Angeles and whose script drew in part from four of the stories in this collection. While the spiritual root canal on screen was numbed by the humor and humanity of its cast, in printed form, these tales are bleak.

DOA: Mel relates a story of love that really impressed him, a story where a drunk teenage driver at high speed slammed into the car of a seventy-year-old husband and wife. The kid was DOA but the husband and wife were at his hospital in traction, bandaged head to foot, in the same hospital room and the husband tells him though a mouth-hole in his bandaged head that what really depresses him isn’t the accident or being injured or the pain but the fact that he can’t turn his head and see his wife through his eye-holes. Mel is a cardiologist whose life revolves around fixing people’s hearts. In hand, this represents his role in the story as the character driving the conversation about what love is. He approaches the topic in a very matter of fact way and views love through a lens of practicality where quantity equates quality and where after you fall out of love, you simply find someone else to be with. When he talks about his relationship with Terri, the first thing he mentions is how long they have been together rather than an emotional connection they share. His education has caused him to view life as a series of questions that need answers and problems he must solve. He presents his beliefs in a very blunt and logical manner, yet his bizarre speech ends with him stating that he knows nothing. He brings up this topic of discussion because he is searching for an answer to his question. Despite his apparent knowledge from experience, Mel is able to recognize that there is a side of love he does not understand. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I’m wrong. I want to know. I mean, I don’t know anything, and I’m the first one to admit it.”Dionysius, One: Terri lived with Ed before she lived with Mel. Terri tells how Ed loved her so much he tried to killer her, dragging her around the living room by her ankles, while repeating, “I love you, I love you, you bitch’. Thus, the four launch into a debate about Ed’s madness and passion being true love. Sidebar: Ed embodies the ancient Greeks myth of Dionysius, the frenzied, drunk intensity of unbridled passion gone wild. And this seems to be the essence of it. Life’s miseries are not sugar coated here. The stories are uniformly melancholy. But overriding this is the feeling that as long as life includes the precious opportunity for us all to experience love then maybe it’s all worthwhile. Carver's original draft of the story "Beginners" was heavily edited by Gordon Lish, who cut out nearly half of Carver's story, adding in details of his own. Carver's original draft, released by his widow Tess Gallagher and published [6] in a December 2007 issue of the New Yorker, reveals the extensive edits. For instance, the character Mel was originally named Herb, and the abusive boyfriend, renamed Ed by Lish, was originally named Carl. Additionally, Herb's story about the old couple was cut nearly in half, with Lish removing the story of the old couple's home life, love, and reunion in the hospital. In Carver's original version, the two had separate rooms, which caused them to pine for each other and eventually led to a scene when they met again. Lish removed all of this, rewrote the couple into the same room, but in body casts that prevented them from seeing each other, and then explained the old man's distress thus: I have read this volume several times, and this time listened to it. So it’s very important to me. In a former life I got an MFA in short fiction, in the eighties, and at that time the premier living short story writer, or certainly the most stylistically influential, was Carver. He himself, a minimalist, would seem to have been himself influenced by Ernest Hemingway. And maybe noir fiction: Very simple, straightforward prose. Carver was particularly a working class fiction writer, an alcoholic writing about booze and the effect of booze: