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Rating:  - American master of characterization
Short stories? Movie adaptation? Sounds like a terrible premise for a movie. And it sounds like an even worse premise for a book. However, I believe this to be a very good introduction to Carver's work. If you haven't read Carver, yet, I will tell you this: he is a master of characterization. He is a master of the things that matter when writing about ordinary and real human beings; he is a master of the d-e-t-a-i-l-s. The important ones, not the extraneous. While Carver's stories are full of details, he is also a minimalist. Writers like him give minimalism power and meaning. And like his prose, this collection of his works is short and concise.
Carver's work gives us a very interesting picture of contemporary American life -- full desire, hopelessness, disappointment, drug use, and the constant presence of violent undertones. What could be more American? Raymond Carver has the ability to turn the ordinary, the seemingly mundane, into something raw, interesting, and valuable.
Rating:  - A world of his own
Robert Altman in his introduction to this volume speaks about the element of chance in Carver's work, and how lives are drastically changed in the Carver world by some small incident which can set everything going in a new direction, often a disastrous one.
I feel very uncomfortable with the Carver world though I see what he is doing and recognize his power as a dramatic story- writer who keeps the reader reading to know what is going to happen next. Carver's characters are often people scrambling to make a living. They are often couples in some kind of disarray. The Carver world is a harsh one and yet it has surprising moments of grace and human kindness.
Above all I feel in it some element of destruction, often violent, but often too coming from the self- destructiveness of the characters.
Carver's language is sharp , colloquial and his people seem 'real'.
I recognize his great ability as a writer but somehow I do not feel close to his world or his characters. It is too incidental, transient and difficult for me.
But probably no other writer portrays a certain kind of American world in the way he does. And he gives a feeling of its being a very real world indeed.
Rating: - One of the most exquisite collections of short stories you'll find
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.
Rating: - Great introduction to a great writer...
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.
Rating: - Edge of my seat
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.
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