Check out my article on Raymond Carver’s ‘Cathedral’ on the Bookanista site:
http://bookanista.com/raymond-carver-cathedral/
I’ve been reading Carver for years and keep coming back to him. Our prose styles are totally different. He felt he was not living in a Baroque age for literature and his language certainly reflects that. It has a clean, spare quality which is hard to find. Mine is probably its polar opposite and I love playing with words and I’m addicted to my thesaurus. But that doesn’t mean I can’t admire another writer who manipulates language with as much skill as Carver. It is his use of epiphany which impresses me most – how the ordinary people he uses as characters often have difficult and unfulfilled lives, yet there are these beautiful moments of clarity where they glimpse something incredibly moving and meaningful; all of this is handled with such subtle dexterity, it seems as if it were easy as pie to write. But I bet it wasn’t.
So, if you don’t know Carver, try my article on ‘Cathedral’, then have a go at reading some of his masterful stories yourself. Hope you like them as much as I do…
