marco wooster

Carver Country photographs by Bob Adelman, text by Raymond Carver. 1990 ©

“Raymond Carver’s gritty texts, combined with Adelman’s photographs of Carver’s people and haunts, re-create the world of this major writer, bringing to life the bleak, blue-collar towns, people, and places  that became the inspiration for much of his work”.

Carver's stories are populated by characters who live in America's shoddy enclaves of convenience products and conventionality - people who shop at Kwik-Mart and who live in saltbox houses or quickly built apartment complexes. They don't seem to want much: ordinarily divided lives of work and home, food on the table, love and solace when they need them. They yearn for serenity rather than achievement.Still, there is vast unhappiness in them; they don't get the little they want. Carver's people end up being deserted by common satisfactions, and the stories are moral tales, really, explaining why decent men and women, dealt crummy circumstances in a plentiful world, behave badly in their intimate battles with selfishness. Written in an accessible vernacular, resonant with cryptic petulance and loud silences, the stories speak the language of everyday profundity. In the small struggles of individual lives, Carver touches a large human note: When hope flies and impervious helplessness descends, where will we get our next boost from? What do we do now? Life in Carver's America isn't incomprehensible.

"Toujours je fus attiré par la méditation du corps humain. Je me souviens de mon émotion, à huit ans, - il m'est possible de donner cette date avec précision, - quand je feuilletais en famille tel album de tableaux de l'art italien, à mesure que, tournant les pages, j'approchais de certain "Saint Sébastien", et de ma crainte que cette émotion ne fût remarquée". J'ai choisi ces quelques mots d'Henry de Montherlant, extraits de l'introduction, pour présenter ce recueil de photographies de Karel Egermeier qui "apparaissent à l'époque comme le comble de l'érotisme" (Peyrefitte, Propos secrets).

Alexis Delcroix

Claudio Marra.

El Gato Chimney, De Rerum Natura. 2014-2015