Raymond Carver: Collected Stories
By Raymond Carver
(Library of America, 1019 pp., $40)
 

Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life
By Carol Sklenicka
(Scribner, 578 pp., $35)

In the summer of 1984, the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami and his wife traveled to the remote coastal town of Port Angeles, Washington, to visit Raymond Carver in the glass-walled “Sky House,” overlooking the ocean, which he shared with his partner, the poet Tess Gallagher. It was more of a pilgrimage than a social call. Murakami, who had run a jazz bar in Tokyo before taking up writing six years earlier at the age of twenty-nine, admired Carver more than any other writer. Although they had never met, he considered Carver “the most valuable teacher I had.” Murakami had embarked on the epic task of translating all of Carver’s writings--stories, poems, essays--into Japanese. He had somehow concluded that Carver must be “thin and delicate,” and was surprised by his massive shoulders and big hands. As Carver sipped black tea instead of the alcohol he had sworn off after thirty years of dangerously heavy drinking, Murakami felt that his idol “sat on the sofa with his body crouched up as if to say that he had never intended to get so big.”

Today the European Union finds itself with two new top leaders--Herman Van Rompuy, the EU’s first president, and Catherine Ashton, the new high representative of foreign policy. If the names are unfamiliar, you’re not alone. In fact, the buzz surrounding Van Rompuy, who has been the Belgian prime minister for less than a year, and Ashton, who was most recently the EU’s trade commissioner, is that there is no buzz.

Take this morning’s headlines from around the world: “Leaders lambasted over low-profile EU job nominees,” “Europe’s leaders strike up the bland,” “Von Rampuy—The Reluctant Leader,” “Herman Van Who?” and “Van Rompuy-Ashton appointment: The EU has opted for the quiet life.”

So who are these people?