When we are young, we always have many expectations, looking forward to the many possibilities of life, and believe that as long as we work hard, we will be able to achieve what we want.
As we grow up, we slowly understand that life often doesn't go according to its plan. Many times, we try our best, but we still stop where we are, and gradually realize our limitations and accept the fact that we are mediocre and ordinary people.
Perhaps, this kind of helplessness and frustration is a necessary process of our lives. There will always be a time when you can't do anything, and only after experiencing setbacks can you grow slowly. And before the turnaround comes, we who are powerless need only a fellow traveler.
There is a writer who is your best fellow traveler, and after reading his life and novels, you will feel that your bad things are not enough to worry about.
He was Raymond Carver, who was called "The Chekhov of America" and "the most influential short story writer in America after Hemingway."
▲ Raymond Carver
When carver is mentioned, many people will think of his famous article "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love", which is a title sentence that is widely imitated today, and even Haruki Murakami is not exempt from the vulgarity, using "What Do I Talk About When I Talk About Running" to pay tribute to his literary idol and mentor Carver. And for many more, Carver's real entry into their lives was from a book called "Please Be Quiet, Okay?" The collection of short stories began.
Please be quiet, okay? 》
Raymond Carver
His life was destitute
Carver once said: "For most people, life is not an adventure, but a torrent of uncanny power." "Carver's life is always in the midst of paying bills, earning bread and struggling to survive.
Born into a poor blue-collar family, he began to earn a living after graduating from high school, because his lover was unmarried and pregnant, he had to get married, and at the age of 20, he was already a father of two children, but he was penniless and had no skills.
Carver had to travel from place to place to support his family, and he did almost every bad job you could think of: as a sawmill helper, delivery man, sales clerk, cleaner, warehouse keeper, tulip picker, show listing in Hollywood, and even cleaned the toilet at a charity hospital for three years...
In addition to trying to get enough money, Carver was constantly at the mercy of his children's needs and willfulness: "My two children were like racetrack spectators, pulling their throats and screaming, and they were about to eat me alive." I can't move forward, I can't go back, I can't go anywhere. ”
Carver and his wife Maria (left), Carver and two children (right)
Despite the fact that there was too much helplessness to bear in life, Carver still tried "more than his best" to fight for educational opportunities, completed his studies intermittently, and wrote as hard as he could, although most of the time he had to write hurriedly in the car, with the sticky notepad on his knee.
"Hard work does not mean success", at the age of 38, Carver, who has wanted to become a writer all his life, ushered in another wretched bankruptcy. He said: "It seems that you can never get what you want to fight for yourself, for writing, for your wife and children, and you are almost powerless to change the direction of your life."
▲ Young Carver (left) and younger brother James
But it was also in this year that Carver ushered in a turning point in his life. He spent more than a decade fumbling around with his first collection of novels, Please Be Quiet, Okay? It was published and nominated the following year for the National Book Award, the most prestigious literary award in the United States.
Carver's life finally seeped a glimmer of hope, and his name began to be known to more people.
This book, a refuge for the frustrated
Frustrated Carver focuses on frustrated people. He pays attention to the plight of the losers, the fragmented lives of the little people at the bottom, and the deterioration of life and the hopelessness of the desperate, and his novel is a cup of mellow whiskey brewed from the bottom of life, allowing you to have an epiphany about the truth of life in a slight drunken gap.
Please be quiet, okay? The 22 short stories included in "" are also fragments of 22 frustrated little people: unemployment, bankruptcy, affair, divorce, the troubles of sleeping in the same bed and dreams, the unfortunate original family, the troubles of raising children, the troubles of embarrassing and uneasy life... These unspeakable frustrations are inextricably linked to the lives of each of us.
In 1984, Haruki Murakami visited his idol Carver as a translator, saying that he had never met a writer so tall
In "Nobody Says a Word", boy R's parents argue constantly. After a heroic fight, he managed to catch a rare oversized hard-headed trout, and when he excitedly brought the fish home and tried to win his father's praise, his father asked him to throw "that damn thing" into the "damn dumpster"...
In "They're Not Your Husbands," the salesman husband is at the café where his wife works and overhears two men looking at their wives. When he got home, he offered to let his wife lose weight, and after she had lost many pounds, he went to the café again, pointed to his wife, and asked a strange man, "What do you think of her body?" ”
In "What's Wrong? In it, a couple went bankrupt and had to sell it. The savvy and capable wife dressed up carefully, went out to find a buyer for the large convertible they bought when they were generous, and eventually had to eat with the car dealer and spend the night.
In "Please Be Quiet, Okay?" In the (short story of the same name), the wife, under questioning, finally admits that she had a relationship with another man when she was at a party two years ago. Unable to accept the facts, the husband slammed the door and went out, but was beaten by strangers on the street, and when he returned home, in the face of his wife's pleading, he cried out in despair: "Please be quiet, okay?" ”
......
▲ The famous movie "Silver Sex, Men and Women" is adapted from 9 short stories by Carver
The protagonists of these novels all live in embarrassment, doing the lowest level of occupation, work, children, marriage problems, constitute their chaotic and scattered life, one lie on top of another. They want to straighten out, to correct, to find a way out, but in the end they find that it is all a futile effort, and life can only continue to go on with a hard scalp.
Why don't they look like you and me who are suffering from all kinds of helplessness in life? Life is too difficult, there are too many problems, trouble seems to be impossible to solve, more often, as ordinary people, we can only do our best, try to play our own roles, play the existing life script.
As a witness, observer and expressor of life at the bottom, Carver shows the difficult days of ordinary people in front of you and me. Through his stories, we can glimpse the heartache of ordinary people, see the true face of life, and know that we are not alone in the torrent of life.
What we are reading when we read Carver
Life stripped Carver's characters of their essence, and Carver cut his words to the point of craggy.
Carver was passionate about the short story all his life, never wrote a long novel, and his novels were extremely concise, colloquial, and free of superfluous nonsense, which also gave him the title of "father of minimalism".
Therefore, if you don't have to experience it, it is difficult to capture the mystery of the 22 novels in this book, which is like facing a good cup of tea or wine, and only by tasting the taste of it can you get a long-lasting enjoyment.
Whether it's an introduction to everyday life or a streamlined narrative in style, Carver has influenced a generation of writers, including Haruki Murakami. Some even think that because of "Please be quiet, okay?" The publication of 1976 was the year when realism in the American short story began to revive, and for Carver, the book began his second life.
Fifteen months after the book was published, Carver gave up alcohol completely. After that, he published the short stories "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" and "Cathedral", and he became famous enough to finally sit in the open room and concentrate on writing, no longer having to worry about the chair under his ass being sucked away at any time, or the children clamoring why they wanted dinner but hadn't done it yet.
In the face of the noise of reputation and everything that comforts, Carver has always held a humble heart, even when diagnosed with lung cancer and most of his left lung has been removed, he is still extremely optimistic and grateful: "I am very happy, I think I am one of the luckiest people." 」 ”
Carver's second wife, Tess Gallagher, accompanied Carver through his "second life"
Carver only lived to be 50 years old, and his life was an endless test of willpower and endurance, and he knew the hardships of fate, but he was still indomitable and trying to live. The faint fire in his heart also shines in his works, allowing us to feel the warmth of his pen.
As Haruki Murakami said, "Because he saved himself a little through writing, we tend to get a little salvation, which is probably one of the reasons why readers around the world are enthusiastic about reading Carver's works." Hopefully, every ordinary person with the possibility of frustration can find some salvation from Carver and his novels.