Call If You Need Me by Raymond Carver

 Call If You Need Me by Raymond Carver


 

The story of Raymond Carver is conditioning the reader for a happy ride: Palo Alto, The Californian Coast, the beach.

Words create Worlds as Tal Ben-Shahar keeps saying at Harvard.

With the words from “Call if You Need Me” our mindset becomes positive. Tests have been made and they showed that words used in soccer, or Florida (to my surprise) create a framework which makes us think and act in strange ways.

“Nancy was a tall, long legged woman, with brown hair…” there’s a character to make your reading even more pleasant, although I may be wrong.

The story is more complex than that. The two married people who are at the center of the tale have marital problems, which can be resolved, the husband aka narrator tells us.

Husband and wife cheat on each other, but agree to avoid contacting the other parties involved, in order to resolve their issues.

I wonder what the verdict of John Gottman would be in their case. He is a renowned specialist, who can tell after five minutes if a marriage will work or break apart, with an accuracy rate of 95%.

He is the author of a classic: Seven Principles to Make Marriage Work- it makes for interesting reading, if you want your relationship, affair to work, I’d say it’s not just for a married couple.

Among the many interesting things we can learn from the good psychology books I remember the revelation that an affair is not the beginning of the end, a sign that the marriage is falling apart, but a symptom, an occurrence which takes place when the marriage is already in dire straits, it is not provoking a union to fail, but it gets going once the couple had drifted apart.  

One superb (this is an excellent word, which Emy keeps using- with wonderful results, remember? Words create Worlds) image is that of a group of horses coming on the porch of the house where two of our characters spend a few days. I think I can imagine what a beautiful sight and exquisite moment that is, even if I was thrown off a horse once and felt terrible for some time…

What a fabulous surprise: “white big horses in the front yard…My God! They’re beautiful! We’ll never see anything like this again” I bet they were beautiful and unique.

Silliness is present in the story- Nancy and the narrator go looking for a dog, even if they do not know what to do with it back in the city and the search for a pet goes nowhere- but life has that side- “learn to fail, or fail to learn” – to refer to the same wise guy, Shahar.

 

 

Trying to change tack, I will recommend some short stories, which will take very little of your time and might make you happier. This one lasts 27 minutes, as an audiobook reading, and will be posted in our Happiness is a Choice…Make it – on facebook.

And hey! Call if You need Me!

Comentarii

Trimiteți un comentariu

Postări populare de pe acest blog

Epistolary edited by Gabriel Liiceanu http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/11/50-minutes-with-plesu-and-liiceanu-10.html - 10 out of 10

  Epistolary edited by Gabriel Liiceanu http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/11/50-minutes-with-plesu-and-liiceanu-10.html 10 out of 10     This wonderful book contains letters exchanged between the brightest minds we have in this realm – there is the exception of Eugen Simion, the late president of the Academy here, a rather horrid attack on luminaries that were so much wiser than this fellow, who came to lead a forum that should be only for the crème de la crème, yet, his presence at the top in fact reveals the ‘values’ that have reached what should be the chamber of the nec plus ultra – and as such, much of what is being debated is quite inaccessible   Ergo, the spoiler alert, warning, disclaimer, and maybe the way out of accusations of spam – one of the notes I have posted on Goodreads, Cleo From 5 to 7 http://realini.blogspot.com/2023/07/cleo-from-5-to-7-aka-cleo-de-5-7-by.html has been deleted, because it was considered spam, while the one who is the #...
Citiți mai multe

The Killer by Luc Jacamon 10 out of 10

  The Killer by Luc Jacamon 10 out of 10     Reading about killers, or watching the stupendous The Killer, with fabulous Michael Fassbinder in the leading role may seem like the wrong idea, in a world that has some nasty wars taking place in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, and the danger is that they might be expanding, as it is, Iran is attacking the USA, through its proxies Hezbollah, Houthis in Yemen (they have launched missiles) and militias in Iraq and Syria   It all depends on how good the author is, what the adaptation looks like, cast, director, you could have a magnum opus that is a crime story, such as Crime and Punishment http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/06/crime-and-punishment-by-fyodor.html by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - an algorithm has recently looked at various relevant compilations and established the 50 Greatest Novels and the story of Raskolnikov is on it, together with other astounding works, Marcel Proust is at number one The Killer starts...
Citiți mai multe

The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom by Tobias Smollett – included on The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read List http://poemeglume.blogspot.com/2023/04/1000-novels-everyone-must-read.html - 7 out of 10

  The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom by Tobias Smollett – included on The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read List http://poemeglume.blogspot.com/2023/04/1000-novels-everyone-must-read.html 7 out of 10     The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom was first published in 1753, which might mean that it is not for the tastes of readers from our times, not even middle aged ones, like yours truly (who is actually sixty in a couple of months, but like to adopt the ‘the sixties are the new forties’ slogan) who has abandoned this   Hence, the spoiler alert, warning, disclaimer to avoid being (again) censored for spam – though I did not get the inclusion in that category, a reading of the definition could help, but this being my note, until it is obliterated by the Goodreads staff, and then it will still be available at the new blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/ I say that spam is used for the unrequested messages we receive, meant to make us buy things ...
Citiți mai multe