Cathedral

Raymond Carver’s third collection of stories, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, including the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another.

It was morning in America when Raymond Carver’s Cathedral came out in 1983, but the characters in this dry collection of short stories from the forgotten corners of land of opportunity didn’t receive much sunlight. Nothing much happens to the subjects of Carver’s fiction, which is precisely why they are so harrowing: nothingness is a daunting presence to overcome. And rarely do they prevail, but the loneliness and quiet struggle the characters endure provide fertile ground for literary triumph, particularly in the hands of Carver, who was perhaps in his best form with this effort.

Raymond Carver (1938-1988) was an author who rejected the more experimental fiction of the 60s and 70s. He pioneered a precisionist realism reinventing the American short story during the eighties, heading the line of so-called “dirty realists” or “K-mart realists”. Set in trailer parks and shopping malls, they are stories of banal lives that turn on a seemingly insignificant detail. Carver writes with meticulous economy, suddenly bringing a life into focus in a similar way to the paintings of Edward Hopper. As well as being a master of the short story, he was an accomplished poet publishing several highly acclaimed volumes.