[No. 3 Contents | JAST Homepage]

Aþktan Sözettiðimizde Sözünü Ettiklerimiz (What We Talk About When We Talk About Love) , by Raymond Carver. Trans. Zafer Aracagök. 1994, 152 pages. Available from Ýletiþim Yayýnlarý, Klodfarer Caddesi, Ýletiþim Han No. 7, 34400 Ýstanbul.

Raymond Carver (1938-1988) published four short-story collections. He has also three poetry collections to his credit--but is better known as a short-story writer in the "minimalist" tradition. Largely autobiographical, Carver's stories are set in unnamed small towns in the Pacific Northwest. His protagonists are white, working-class Americans entrapped in dull lives. Lonely, dissociated, maimed, inarticulate, these people are readily recognizable. Carver says next to nothing about their physical appearance or backgrounds perhaps because his world is all too familiar.

An unnerving vision of contemporary America unfolds in drying-out centers for alcoholics, in mobile caravans, in kitchens and on porches where we encounter most of Carver's characters. The focus is on the bleak existentialism of daily life. Excluding religious, political, cultural topics, his subject matter centers on failed marriages and wasted lives. The prevailing mood is one of inertia, aimlessness, worthlessness, resignation, and regret--with no redeeming revelation forthcoming. The monotonous atmosphere of the stories is at times broken by acts of gratuitous cruelty and violence.

There are no multiple narratives in Carver's stories. His prose is spare, cryptic, staccato. It is deliberately unliterary, yet has tremendous force. The characters seem to talk past each other; the dialogues, often in the form of monosyllabic retorts, are unedited. Little is said but much is conveyed. The Chekhovian surface simplicity (Chekhov is Carver's acknowledged mentor) masks Kafkaesque intimations of things amiss. Technique and vision, manner and substance are often in perfect harmony.

In his second collection of short stories entitled What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)* the Carver "voice" is omnipresent. The first of the seventeen stories, "Why Don't You Dance?," is a particularly fascinating one. In an odd yard sale, a middle-aged man has reassembled the contents of his house in the front yard, the way they stood inside--an extension card even allows the electric appliances to function. The man gets drunk with a young couple looking for bargains. The girl is haunted by this experience and tries, helplessly, to tell everyone about it. But words fail her. In "Viewfinder," a woman invites for coffee a man without hands who takes photographs of houses. The man immediately senses that her family has left her and that she is desperately lonely. She asks him to take more pictures of her and the house. "It won't work," the man says, "They're not coming back." The alcoholic narrator of "Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit" recounts the affair his wife is having with an unemployed aerospace engineer she has met at an AA meeting. The story of a disintegrating marriage unfolds as a young couple falls into a drunkard stupor in "Gazebo." The alienation of a father and son is underscored in "Sacks," in which the father confesses why his wife divorced him, trying to no avail to get his son's sympathy. A family tragedy concludes ambiguously in "The Bath"--a fine example of Carver's open-ended stories. The violence at the end of "Tell the Women We're Going" seems gratuitous, yet when read carefully, small details used in the story render the ending quite plausible. "So Much Water So Close to Home" is a powerful study of insensitivity. The difficulty of talking about what really matters is the subject of "A Serious Talk." A man, again an alcoholic, comes to visit his estranged wife, and instead of talking about the "important things that had to be discussed," he ends up cutting the telephone cord as the wife talks to her boyfriend. In "The Calm," a man reminisces about the time when he tried to start a new life with his wife in California and, about how, sitting at a barber's shop listening to a disturbing story about deer hunting, he decided to leave her. The two-page "Popular Mechanics" is a horrendous piece about a man deserting a woman--he wants to take their baby with him and in the scuffle that ensues each pulls the baby very hard by one arm. The piece concludes with a typical Carver understatement: "In this manner, the issue was decided."

The title story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is, again, on the difficulty of talking about what really matters. Two couples, both previously married, start a drinking bout in the early afternoon. Their topic of discussion is love: absolute love, sentimental love, carnal love, old love, new love . . . Unlike most Carver characters, the couples in this story are highly educated, the setting is known (Albuquerque), and two of the characters are named and briefly described. Mel, the cardiologist, after several digressions, completes his example of true love which involves an old couple badly injured in a car accident. Both are in casts and are bandaged from head to toe: "the man's heart was breaking because he couldn't turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife." Mel further comments on this ideal love with obscenities as it gets dark and nobody moves to turn on the light. Complete inertia reigns in the room. The gin is consumed. The narrator concludes the story: "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." In "One More Thing," the last story, "I just want to say one more thing," a man says as he walks out on his wife and daughter. "But then he could not think what it could possibly be."

Despite the surface simplicity, there is great verbal skill and painstaking craftsmanship in these stories. They have been sensitively translated into Turkish by Zafer Aracagök. Unfortunately, the Turkish readership is acquainted with Carver through only one other book:Fires (Ateþler), translated again by Aracagök. Also, Robert Altman's Short Cuts, based on several Carver stories, has been shown on Turkish TV.

* New York: Vintage Books, 1982.