It is against this backdrop that Raymond Carver wrote the short story entitled “The Cathedral”.
And they draw characters and write stories.During this period, the gap between the rich and the drastically widened, the poor became poorer and the rich wealthier. They observe life with their unique glasses and take us, blinds, through their vision. The last one, Cathedral, eponymous of the collection’s name is about a man who attempts to describe a cathedral to a blind man. Some end abruptly and I thought “That’s it? What then?” and others sound more complete. This one was different, probably because of the setting and the context.Ĭarver has a gift to pack a lot in a few pages and each story leaves vivid impressions on the reader. An event on the train will derail him from his journey. An American man in on the train to Strasbourg, France to meet his estranged son. The only story that stood out and seemed at odds with the others is The Compartment.
They lose their job, they go fishing with their colleague or they try to crawl out of alcoholism. We see middle and working class people in their quotidian. We catch them raw, at a pivotal time of their lives even if they don’t always know it. We meet people in hard times, a couple losing their child on his birthday, a man unable to leave his sofa after being laid off, a couple recently separated, an alcoholic just admitted in a rehab facility, a man whose wife has taken off, leaving him struggling with their two children. The couples have never met before and the guests are confronted with the ugliest baby they’ve ever seen and a strange peacock. A couple goes to the man’s colleague’s house for dinner. We catch them at awkward moments of their lives, like in the first story Feathers. We feel that they’ve lived before we peeked into their lives and that they’ll keep on living after we’ve dropped the curtain we had risen. I’ll spare you the one by one account of each story.Ĭarver’s stories are like short videos of a moment in the lives of these men and women.
It’s always difficult to write about a collection of short stories and Cathedral is not an exception to that rule. He admires Carver a lot and I had in mind to read at least one of his books. I think that I first heard of Raymond Carver in interviews of Philippe Djian. Cathedral by Raymond Carver (1983) French title: Les vitamines du bonheur.
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