✉️Review - "Collectors" by Raymond Carver🏡

This was a short, uneventful story which I had to read twice to make sure that I wasn't missing anything. It reminds me of the type that are set as close reading exercises, and I normally like this sort of modernist story where people are just going through life. I didn't click with this one.

The plot is basic: An unemployed man is waiting for letter. A vacuum cleaner salesman arrives at the house, saying that Mrs Slater has won a free cleaning. The narrator claims that Mrs Slater doesn't live there and that he is to poor to purchase a vacuum cleaner. The narrator seems more motivated to make it clear that he can't afford it, rather than out of concern for the cleaner. The salesman proceeds to clean the house anyway, and picks-up the letter when it arrives. Claiming that the letter is for Mr Slater and that he would "see to it." Then the salesman leaves.

Was there any meaning to it? It was just a slither of the daily routine of two people. I guess what is remarkable about it is that another author may have made the story farcical, the story of a man going through the motions of cleaning a house for the wrong person, who had no intention of buying a vacuum cleaner either. But this story here is just mundane.