The Two Raymond Carvers

Im New York Review of Books habe ich einen Text gefunden, in dem eine neue Sammlung short stories von Raymond Carver, einem meiner absoluten Lieblingsautoren, gewürdigt wird. Wenn man Raymond Carver liest, dann hat man seine klare, präzise und dabei ungemein detaillierte Sprache vor Augen. Carver ist mittlerweile wohl zur Ikone eines jeden creative writing Kurses geworden. Auch wenn nicht klar ist, woher diese Sprache stammt - manche vermuten die bisweilen alzu straffe Hand des Lektors dahinter - ist bewunderswert, mit welchem Detailreichtum auch die kleinesten Details, und abei absolut neutral zum Sujet beschrieben werden.

There is, for example, almost no difference between the manner in which Carver describes a woman ordering a birthday cake for her son—

The cake she chose was decorated with a spaceship and a launching pad under a sprinkling of white stars. The name SCOTTY would be iced on in green as if it were the name of the spaceship.

—and the manner in which, shortly thereafter, he describes the son being hit by a car:

At an intersection, without looking, the birthday boy stepped off the curb, and was promptly knocked down by a car. He fell on his side, his head in the gutter, his legs in the road moving as if he were climbing a wall.

Der Artikel deutet wieder darauf hin, dass Lektor Gordon Lish, der von Carver sehr bewundert wird, in starkem Maße in die Texte eingriff.

On July 8, 1980, however, one year before his triumphant summer at Yaddo, Carver had written to Gordon Lish urging him to halt production on What We Talk About. He had just spent the whole night going over Lish’s edited version of the book and was taken aback by the changes. His manuscript had been radically transformed. Lish had cut the total length of the book by over 50 percent; three stories were at least 70 percent shorter; ten stories had new titles and the endings of fourteen had been rewritten.

Die Beispiele, die dann aufgeführt werden, zeigen deutlich - ohne Lish würden wir heute nicht mehr von Carver reden.  Lesenswerter Artikel. das Buch kaufe ich mir nicht, will mir doch meinen carver nicht vermiesen...