You can’t begin again with “Beginners”
December 3, 2009
U.K. edition
Back to my question. Can those of us who read Carver before this comparative hullabaloo approach Beginners with a blank literary slate, reading it as if the stories are new? As if we had never read Carver-by-Lish? Or will we be compelled to read it side-by-side with the collection it became under Lish’s pen, rendering Beginners a representation of change instead of an original work?
What do I recommend to someone who wants to read a Carver book? Should I recommend Beginners and say this is the real Carver? But his early stories edited by Lish were considered groundbreaking work, a minimalist style alive with a raw focus on working-class lives. Would Carver have been as successful without Lish? Which is better, Beginners or What We Talk About When We Talk About Love?
Maybe history has been righted, but readers from now on are left with reading two Carvers and thinking about him with two truths. It’s a strange and uncomfortable fence to sit on.
- Carol Sklenicka’s biography Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life gives in-depth coverage to the Carver-Lish relationship in an account that, according to Stephen King in his Sunday New York Times book review “is meticulous and heartbreaking.”
- Beginners, the un-touched-by-Lish version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is included in Library of America’s Carver: Collected Stories edited by William Stull and Maureen Carroll, published August 2009.
- The aforementioned is not the first book Stull and Carroll edited about Carver. I came across Remembering Ray: A Composite Biography of Raymond Carver (Capra Press: 1993) in the holiday catalogue of Between the Covers Rare Books. Edited by Stull and Carroll, this catalogue offering is signed by Carver and going for $650.
- Jonathan Cape Publishers in the U.K. published Beginners as a stand-alone earlier this year. (Cover image above.)
The book I missed: “Tears in the Darkness”
December 1, 2009
There’s usually one new book during a year that I didn’t read and then — come year’s end – can’t forget. It’s not the same as a book I wished I’d read. There are many new books I wish I’d read January to December. A book missed, though, is one I can’t let go of, or it won’t let go of me.
That book this year is Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman. Typical to the annual pattern, I learned about the book in forecasts and got a spark of intuition that it’s an important book. I ignored the spark, though, and, also typical to the pattern, the book kept coming to my attention. Publisher’s Weekly defined it as a summer sleeper defying expectation. Dwight Garner in The New York Times on June 16 wrote this, to give you an idea of its content:
“Tears in the Darkness is authoritative history. Ten years in the making, it is based on hundreds of interviews with American, Filipino and Japanese combatants. But it is also a narrative achievement. The book seamlessly blends a wide-angle view with the stories of many individual participants. And at this book’s beating emotional heart is the tale of just one American soldier, a young cowboy and aspiring artist out of Montana named Ben Steele.”
World War II’s 1942 Bataan Death March is grim subject matter that, for some, may best be read after the holiday season’s merry-making. Then again, it may be just the absorbing book in which to seek refuge while we’re mired in a deluge of meaningless materialism. You can read an excerpt from Tears in the Darkness and find out much more on the book’s website. I’ve already ordered the book and plan to dig in right away. The drawings within its pages are from Ben Steele’s sketchbooks that were made during his six decades as an artist and teacher in Billings, Montana.
