depois de

ter lido "Tell the Women We're Going", parte de Beginners de Raymond Carver, esquecido por um tempo nos meandros do Kindle.

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In three early stories written during the 1960s, there are accounts of violence rendered in three distinct literary modes that Carver was imitating on the road to finding his own style. “Furious Seasons” is a Faulknerian tale narrated by using the device of repeating the scene leading up to a murder four times.

With the exception of Hemingway, Carver quickly left early influences behind. And Carver’s realism is a much closer rendering of the lives of everyday Americans than Hemingway’s ever was. While Hemingway was preoccupied with war in Europe, Carver portrays the everyday battles that take place on the real home front: in domestic realms of America. Carver’s stories are more often than not about family relationships, especially marriage. The existence of marital violence has become so pervasive in American society that it risks becoming commonplace4, and it is a pervasive presence in Carver’s stories as well.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) is considered a seminal book in what came to be known as literary minimalism, a pared-down style Carver developed as a sort of extreme form of Hemingway’s telegraphic realism. Though Carver moved quickly beyond the minimalist aesthetic of this volume in his next works, the treatment of women and violence bears the characteristic traits of this movement. Carver made massive cuts to the stories in this volume while preparing it for publication5, replacing some violent episodes with ellipsis, and leaving much to suggestion. Some of the stories take domestic situations similar to those in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? to absurd ends, providing compressed, dark humor in the place of narrative exposition. In the title story of What We Talk About When We talk About Love, two couples get drunk while discussing the nature of love, and debate, among things, whether a husband who beats his wife then kills himself can really feel love for her. The fusing of the themes of sex, love and violence reaches no conclusive resolution, as the gin runs out and the lights dim on the characters. This story sets the tone for a collection in which people commit sudden acts of violence that are more extreme than in the previous volume, yet less contextualized and sometimes seemingly random.

The story “Tell the Women We’re Going” contains the volume’s most horrific account of violence; in it the male perpetrator moves outside the family sphere and into the world at large. The protagonist Bill and his friend Jerry decide to take a Sunday afternoon off from their families. On their way driving home, the men encounter two women biking, and later follow the women onto a hiking trail. Jerry presumably kills them both, though the concluding scene is elliptic: “Jerry used the same rock on both girls, first on the girl called Sharon, then on the one that was supposed to be Bill’s” (66)

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parágrafos fora de ordem e não sequenciais de um ensaio interessante sobre Carver, as mulheres e violência. se bem que a versão acima seja diferente da que li, um ponto para críticos. reavaliando o que gosto e porquê.