De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de amor

by Raymond Carver, Jesús Zulaika Goicoechea (Translator)

160 pages, Mass Market Paperback

Published September 25, 2025

About the author

Carver was born into a poverty-stricken family at the tail-end of the Depression. He married at 19, started a series of menial jobs and his own career of 'full-time drinking as a serious pursuit', a career that would eventually kill him. Constantly struggling to support his wife and family, Carver enrolled in a writing programme under author John Gardner in 1958. He saw this opportunity as a turning point.

Rejecting the more experimental fiction of the 60s and 70s, he pioneered a precisionist realism reinventing the American short story during the eighties, heading the line of so-called 'dirty realists' or 'K-mart realists'. Set in trailer parks and shopping malls, they are stories of banal lives that turn on a seemingly insignificant detail. Carver writes with meticulous economy, suddenly bringing a life into focus in a similar way to the paintings of Edward Hopper. As well as being a master of the short story, he was an accomplished poet publishing several highly acclaimed volumes.

After the 'line of demarcation' in Carver's life - 2 June 1977, the day he stopped drinking - his stories become increasingly more redemptive and expansive. Alcohol had eventually shattered his health, his work and his family - his first marriage effectively ending in 1978. He finally married his long-term parter Tess Gallagher (they met ten years earlier at a writers' conference in Dallas) in Reno, Nevada, less than two months before he eventually lost his fight with cancer.

Reviews

[Xavi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cómo he disfrutado leyendo a Carver. Todos los relatos del libro comparten el mismo tema de fondo: escenas cotidianas de parejas disfuncionales en los Estados Unidos. En todas ellas el amor actúa como hilo conductor, pero no en su expresión más brillante, sino en su faceta más oscura: desgastado por el agotamiento, limitado por la incapacidad, corrompido por el desencanto...

La prosa cruda y minimalista de Carver es perfecta para retratar la decadencia de la sociedad americana a través de la pareja. Además, su escritura me ha resultado profundamente cinematográfica, donde las palabras se convierten con facilidad en nítidas imágenes con atmósferas muy marcadas.

Los relatos más extraordinarios a mi parecer fueron Belvedere, La calma y De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de amor.

[Giancarlo Sandoval]

De que nos habla Carver cuando habla de amor ? , no hala del amor ideal que se vende en las peliculas y la literatura romantica , nos habla de lo que no se habla , nos habla de soledad, abandono, impotencia, ira , peleas, inseguridad, resignacion… Bajo la lupa del realismo sucio el amor no esas de lo que en realidad es , un sentimiento idealizado que lleva al ser humano a un amalgama de infinitos sentimientos que llevan a diferentes situaciones inesperadas.