One of the most touching and thought-provoking stories bears the same title as the entire collection. It focuses on two couples that gather around a table drinking gin and talking about love. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Theme Physical love

These stories are short, to the point, and jolting. The dialogue is precise and authentic. People talk just like this! I swear I was sitting at that table along with those two couples throughout the titular story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” I’m bracing myself for the next Carver I pull off my shelf. 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.”What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is set in the kitchen of an ordinary home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. There are no specific details that definitively point to any one point in time, making this story a timeless contemplation on modern love. There are, however, a few details in the story that could imply a time period and that relate to Carver's own life. genul scurt, Raymond Carver (1938 - 1988) rămîne, probabil, cel mai influent prozator american. Știu, în România, povestirile nu se vînd prea bine, chiar dacă cel care le-a scris se numește Borges, se numește Cortazar, se numește Carver, se numește Bolaño. Și e păcat. 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. His stories are all occurrences, all about things that just happen to people and cause their lives to take a turn. Maybe the bottom falls out. Maybe they have a near-miss with disaster. Maybe they just have to go on, knowing things they don't really want to know about one another. The short story is an example of dirty realism, which examines the darkness and grit of mundane life.

Symbolism: a person/place/thing is a symbol for, or represents, some greater value/idea. Sunlight and Darkness Mel’s job is also rich with symbolism, but also irony. He is a heart surgeon, but by his own admission he’s just a ‘mechanic’ who fixes things that people have physically wrong with them. Other ‘matters of the heart’, we might say, such as love, are as mysterious to him as they are to the others.I first became interested in this book when I read Haruki Murakami’s memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Any book that can inspire Murakami to steal (most of) the line must be worth reading. Mustn’t it? Well I thought so, though it took me some time to get around to this collection of 17 short stories. The cover of the Vintage Classics version I read is sparse and the blurb gave nothing away. Ah well, in for a penny… In addition to being in love, we like each other and enjoy one another's company. She's easy to be with. In using this 30-year-old title template, authors forfeit the chance to stamp their work with clear, representative titles.

I've crossed some kind of invisible line. I feel as if I've come to a place I never thought I'd have to come to. And I don't know how I got here. It's a strange place. It's a place where a little harmless dreaming and then some sleepy, early-morning talk has led me into considerations of death and annihilation.” Popular American short story writer and poet Raymond Carver (1938-1988) published the short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" in his collection of short stories by the same name in 1981. It is one of his most successful short story collections, and the short story itself is one of his most popular. As the title suggests, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is almost entirely comprised of a dialogue between four characters, discussing the nature of love.Alcohol acts as an ambivalent force in the story, although it has more negative connotations than positive ones. On one hand, the characters open up more to one another when they have had more to drink. Alcohol makes everyone, especially Mel, talk freely. The narrator describes Mel. He’s forty-five, and his movements are usually precise when he hasn’t been drinking. The narrator asks how Ed bungled his suicide, but Mel merely replies that Ed was always threatening him and Terri. Laura asks again what happened with the suicide, and Mel says that when Ed shot himself, someone heard it and called an ambulance, and Ed lived for three days. Terri says she was with him when he died and that Ed died for love. But she admits that she and Mel were scared when Ed was threatening them and that Mel had even made a will. Mel opens another bottle of gin.