"Detalhes", saudade de Raymond Carver e o mundo de Richard Ford

Nos anos 80 tudo se perdia por Raymond Carver e pelo modo de escrever sempre em menos palavras. Cortar, cortar... era o minimalismo na escrita de que sinto por vezes falta e que me provocou, pelo menos a mim, um certo desagrado por escritores mais palavrosos. Na altura lia Raymond Carver duvidando da sua capacidade de enfrentar o "teste do tempo"... Como se algum teste existisse e como se isso sequer tivesse qualquer importância. Relembrei Carver e o prazer que me davam as suas frases concentradas quando li hoje no Times Literary Supplement (artigo que transcrevo em baixo com medo que o retirem da página) um excelente artigo de Bill Broun sobre um lançamento verdadeiramente notável: a reedição do "New Granta Book of The American Short Story", doze anos depois, introduzida e compilada por Richard Ford, talvez um dos melhores escritores americanos vivos. A ele voltarei, e a este livo. Por agora, deixo aqui um "Little Things", página que infelizmente me fala com voz alta, de Raymond Carver, e que está disponível no "Carversite".

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Little Things
Raymond Carver

"Early that day the weather turned and the snow was melting into dirty water. Streaks of it ran down from the little shoulder-high window that faced the backyard. Cars slushed by on the street outside, where it was getting dark. But it was getting dark on the inside too.

He was in the bedroom pushing clothes into a suitcase when she came to the door.

I'm glad you're leaving! I'm glad you're leaving! she said. Do you hear?

He kept on putting his things into the suitcase.

Son of a bitch! I'm so glad you're leaving! She began to cry. You can't even look me in the face, can you?

Then she noticed the baby's picture on the bed and picked it up.

He looked at her and she wiped her eyes and stared at him before turning and going back to the living room.

Bring that back, he said.

Just get your things and get out, she said.

He did not answer. He fastened the suitcase, put on his coat, looked around the bedroom before turning off the light. Then he went out to the living room.

She stood in the doorway of the little kitchen, holding the baby.

I want the baby, he said.

Are you crazy?

No, but I want the baby. I'll get someone to come by for his things.

You're not touching this baby, she said.

The baby had begun to cry and she uncovered the blanket from around his head.

Oh, oh, she said, looking at the baby.

He moved toward her.

For God's sake! she said. She took a step back into the kitchen.

I want the baby.

Get out of here!

She turned and tried to hold the baby over in a corner behind the stove.

But he came up. He reached across the stove and tightened his hands on the baby.

Let go of him, he said.

Get away, get away! she cried.

The baby was red-faced and screaming. In the scuffle they knocked down a flowerpot that hung behind the stove.

He crowded her into the wall then, trying to break her grip. He held on to the baby and pushed with all his weight.

Let go of him, he said.

Don't, she said. You're hurting the baby, she said.

I'm not hurting the baby, he said.

The kitchen window gave no light. In the near-dark he worked on her fisted fingers with one hand and with the other hand he gripped the screaming baby up under an arm near the shoulder.

She felt her fingers being forced open. She felt the baby going from her.

No! she screamed just as her hands came loose.

She would have it, this baby. She grabbed for the baby's other arm. She caught the baby around the wrist and leaned back.

But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard.

In this manner, the issue was decided. "


"Little Things," From Where I'm Calling From: The Selected Stories Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988. Copyright © 1988 by Tess Gallagher.

The story appeared as "Mine" in Furious Seasons And Other Stories Capra Press, 1977 and as "Popular Mechanics" in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love Knopf, 1981.




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The all-American short story
A bold new collection moves from the hot cauldron of the South to the urbanity of the north and west

de Bill Broun, no Times Literary Supplement de 7 de Novembro 2007
(meus destaques, leitura de quase escola)

What exactly is American about the American short story these days? The question is not addressed directly in this astute, all-new update of 1992’s Granta Book of the American Short Story but, considering the book’s title, how can it be ignored? The gratifying result here suggests it wasn’t – not by a long shot – despite the editor’s insistence, in his fine introduction (nearly worth the purchase price alone), that there remains less evidence than ever that American stories are “fated to be stylistically, thematically, generically different from another nationality’s”. Richard Ford, the Pulitzer Prizewinning novelist and short-story writer, brings a deceptively unassuming vision to his task of editing the anthology. His efforts are quietly wonderful.

In the original, 1992 volume, which he also edited, Ford recognized a distinct “un-settlement” simmering in the form’s practitioners, a fertile lack of doctrinarianism which emerged as some of the intense artistic battles of the 1970s and 80s reached détente. Today, in a context shaped by recent seismic shocks (9/11, Katrina, Middle Eastern wars, George W. Bush’s Presidency) to traditional American confidence, Ford says that he hears “very little aesthetic ruckus” in our dialogue over fiction, and suggests we stand “distant from any legitimate and new aesthetic movement”. Accordingly, his forty-four choices for inclusion in this new edition (beginning with Eudora Welty’s “Ladies in Spring”) may strike some readers as offering few risks, despite the fact that Ford often uses words such as “audacity”, “bravura” and “daring” to define what makes an individual short story great. And it is true enough that even the youngest talents here, such as Adam Haslett and Nell Freudenberger, weren’t exactly plucked from some edgy literary underground filled with the smoke of clove cigarettes and the clatter of heroin syringes. The newer authors are more likely to have been educated in the Ivy League and to have appeared first in publications such as the New Yorker and the Yale Review.

Still, this gathering is never short on boldness or urges to turn over fresh artistic soil. Any mainstream anthology of American short fiction from the mid-twentieth century onwards which proffers the unrepresentative but marvellous “Errand” as its Raymond Carver taster seems to be wanting to say something. Like several of the selections here, this nineteenth-century-set homage to Chekhov, written by the great minimalist known for tales of boozed-up working men in the Pacific Northwest, comes from a vast unexplored periphery of the American short- fiction canon.

And there is daring to spare: the John Cheever selection, the brief, brilliant “Reunion”, accomplishes in three pages what many entire novels strive and fail to capture: the utter destruction of a father-and-child relationship through insecurity, egoism and alcoholism, something Cheever expertly etches in concrete terms. “He put his arm around me, and I smelled my father the way my mother sniffs a rose. It was a rich compound of whiskey, after-shave lotion, shoe polish, woolens, and the rankness of a mature male”. While the shoe polish and “woolens” may be very mid-twentieth-century, the pain of loving an imperfect father is not. Like many of the choices here, “Reunion” is one of those slightly secreted gems, a nearly but not quite forgotten tour de force, perhaps read just once, maybe twice, long ago; it is not the first story that comes to mind as representative of Cheever, but rereading it, one is astonished it hasn’t been anthologized more widely.

The same pleasurable realization comes again and again in The New Granta Book of the American Short Story. In general, Ford's choices chart, chronologically, a contrapuntal movement in American literature out of that hot cauldron of story, the South, then northwards and westwards to urbanity. “The Artificial Nigger” by Flannery O’Connor, which has undoubtedly – and unfairly – suffered from neglect because of its politically incorrect title, is arguably her finest story; O’Connor herself seems to have thought so at one time. It presents an odyssey in miniature about a racist rural grandfather’s attempt to educate his susceptible grandson in the ways of the world during a journey to the big city (in this case, Atlanta). The poignancy of the old man’s dreadful efforts to inculcate a “wisdom” of the ages climaxes in a typically O’Connoresque moment of spiritual abjection, all against a pre-Civil-Rights-era backdrop which defines the American Southern grotesque. This kind of historically instructive and artistically motivated model of the form deserves notice today, but the story (which appeared in the influential Best American Short Stories series in 1955) rarely appears in college literature textbooks, where the imperative to create easily digestible and “representative” packages for huge university survey classes drives editorial decisions. This is the kind of situation in which a commanding artist-editor such as Ford, working with a literary publisher, can make headway: rescuing tales from marginality, if not obscurity, and, as Ford puts it, honouring established writers “whose work continues to renew itself”. In the case of some of the perpetually underappreciated authors Ford favours, such as Richard Yates (“Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired”) and Donald Barthelme (“Me and Miss Mandible”) – the sort of “writer’s writers” often more praised than read – any appearance in a new anthology merits applause.

Marginality doesn’t necessarily mean experimentalism in this book. Indeed, a mannered literary temperance seems to underpin Ford’s choices, and it makes good sense: at a time when, as he puts it, “our high-speed sensation of event occurs faster than we can transact it imaginatively”, fiction needs to be grappled with on well-established terrain that honours tradition without choking innovation.

One of the small triumphs of this book is that it reminds us of the difference between literary and political conservatism. Several very traditional story types appear here, including bruisers such as Robert Stone’s “Helping” and Andre Dubus’s “Killings” – which are classic examples of the stripped-down “tough-guy story” that emerged in America in the 1970s and 1980s, and which remain atavistic, guilty celebrations of a fiction-writing ethos with origins in Hemingway and, before him, Chekhov.

None of this means the collection lacks creative energy. The volume dreams its way improbably around what Ford calls the “noisy, terrifying, and extremely plausible” world of headlines and news broadcasts. “The Management of Grief” by the Calcutta-born writer Bharati Mukherjee, a prescient tale centred on the Toronto Indo-Canadian community’s reaction to the 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182, provides an imaginative scheme for this process, as Ford himself points out. The central focus of events is distant – an exploded airplane off the Irish coast – but what occurs back in North America warrants fictional meditation. The protagonist, Mrs Bhave, loses her husband and two sons in the terrorist strike, yet she finds herself tending calmly to others’ needs and finally discovers significance, if not solace, in the rituals of collective anguish. Towards the end of the story, as she walks through a park in Toronto, her unimaginable loss seems to beckon to her:

"Something in the bare trees caught my attention. I looked up from the gravel, into the branches and the clear blue sky beyond. I thought I heard the rustling of larger forms, and I waited a moment for voices. Nothing."

Moments later, however, the voices of her lost family do call to her, one last time: “Your time has come, they said. Go, be brave.” The “larger forms” Mukherjee imagines are the terrible and beautiful things that shake and twist our worlds. Showing how we need both to envisage, and to stride beyond, them is ultimately what Mukherjee’s story and this book do so well.

The selection also throws bright new light on writers often presented by critics in an unduly habitual manner. Mary Gaitskill isn’t typically discussed as a political satirist, but “A Romantic Weekend”, about a sad S&M affair taking place, as it happens, in Washington DC, reads freshly here, and the implications seem unmistakable: as a male figure veers from fantasies of jamming his fingers into his lover’s vagina, bashing her head against the floor, and going home to his wife (who makes him supper), a pornography of violence and good, clean Washington values sit in uneasy proximity.

Some of the best pieces are stories by younger authors, giving the lie to any notion that American fiction has grown complacent: Sherman Alexie’s carnal tale (“The Toughest Indian in the World”) of a motel encounter between two Native American men ends on a dazzling note of poetry; Junot Diaz’s claustrophobic depiction of two dealers in urban New Jersey (“Aurora”) reads as if it drifts out of a narrative crack pipe, but it possesses a quirky cogency.

The decision to exclude work by certain key writers must have agonized the editor. Neither Bobbie Ann Mason nor John Edgar Wideman appears here, nor does Cynthia Ozick, somewhat surprisingly. It may have been crass for Ford to include one of his own powerful stories of lonesome western grifters, but their significance cannot be overlooked. One also misses a few of America’s more inventive storytellers, such as Allan Gurganus and David Foster Wallace. Ford tends also to steer clear of the fiction of precocious, self-referential irony of the McSweeney’s/Dave Eggers vein; older short-fiction pioneers, Robert Coover and William Gass, both of whom enriched the 1992 volume, are sad but reasonable deletions. The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, as the publisher says, is meant to complement, not replace, the older edition.

At times, the stories’ almost relentless depictions of unique, often subcultural communities makes one wonder whether America’s writers have grown too cellular in their outlooks, too navel-gazing. Some of the selections, such as “Devotion” by the impressively mature Adam Haslett and “Lucky Girls” by Nell Freudenberger, consciously reach beyond that inwardness, but it surfaces as a concern elsewhere here. Julie Orringer’s disturbing “Stars of Motown Shining Bright”, for instance, which follows the conflict of two Jewish young women who fall for the same bad boy, appears to take place in a kind of parallel Midwestern universe pared down to stark, anonymous suburbs; but instead of depicting a distinctive teenage milieu in a satisfying way, it comes across as simply incomplete. It is true that Orringer is trying to bring narcissistic teenagers to life, but portraying narcissism fictionally does not mean that our vision, as readers, should be blinkered, yet this is how her story feels. Even a work as unimpeachably stunning as George Saunders’s “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” posits a cosmos with little porousness. Perhaps all great fiction, on some level, needs to do this. But, if nothing else, now is not a time for America’s writers to grow overly self-involved. By and large, this splendid anthology not only acknowledges, but demonstrates that.

Bill Broun is Assistant Professor of English at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania. He is completing a novel.