This review appeared in The Nervous Breakdown back in 2007:There is high genius here. Of the fifty or so stories, I will return over and over to perhaps ten of them. And even as regards the ones I won’t return to, it is most often a question not of fictional failure but of personal taste, the way someone else might not understand my enthusiasm for Hopkins, and I might not understand their enthusiasm for Swinburne, but we can still play buzkashi together, for example, and eat some bacon, if both of us happened to like buzkashi and bacon.There is no buzkashi in this book, and no bacon that I remember, but there are a fair number of inebriated and confused persons, and a vast number of untidy houses. This is one way Davis gives the book a sense of structure; another, more interesting way that she does so is by establishing a given number of formal options and alternating them regularly. I could make a list of those options (1st-person Relationship Pensées, Longer 1st-person Stories With Things That Almost Happen, 3rd-person Relationship Pensées, Stories About Writing, Intellectual Machines, Surreal Villages, Other [Realist], and Other [Not]) but then if I made another list ten minutes later there would be entirely different categories (Mirror Stories, He Said/She Said, Language as Paring Knife…) not because the stories had changed in that ten-minute interval but because I had, and this is perhaps an example of the book at its most structurally successful. However there were also moments when, before turning the page, I could correctly guess the Next Type of Story to Appear, and that is perhaps an example of the book at its least structurally successful, but even then there are workings of language and/or insight sufficiently extraordinary to make me forget that I had unhappily guessed right.It is in the surreal villages that my favorite stories take place--the women of “The Thirteenth Woman” and “The Cedar Trees,” the fog and teeth and cynical trees of “Smoke.” I say that, and then I change my mind and prefer the careful thought and deep intuition of “Pastor Elaine’s Newsletter”; then the sharp metamusings of “What Was Interesting”; then the smartly fragmented history of “Lord Royston’s Tour”; then realize that not even a robot could be left unstirred by “This Condition” or (in a totally, totally, totally different way) “Odd Behavior.” And I am not sure there is any greater sort of success.
Well, such an odd one! I don't know what to make of it.This is the first collection of short stories I have read by Lydia Davis. I had no idea what it would be like, and if I had read the back cover that would not have given me much clue.Most of these stories are very short, and it is hard to call them "stories" at all. Many of them explore a state of mind, a thought, an observation, turning it this way and that and looking at it. A few stories are longer, some identifiable as a story, others more like a journal. Lord Royston's Tour, for example, is a collection of brief descriptions of Royston's experiences in each locality, ending in tragedy, all of it written economically and directly, with no hint of emotion. A recording of events. Affecting nonetheless.The Professor tells us about the narrator's dream of marrying a cowboy. Simple enough on the surface. It explores what a "cowboy" is, why she is interested. We find out how she wants to escape her own thinking at times. I suspect that Davis is compelled to write her thoughts to get them out, to free her from them, and that accounts for many of the little stories as well as this longer explanation.St. Martin is a rather disturbing story about caretakers of a house, who let so much go, even a dog. It too is told without emotion, just an accounting, perhaps the more devastating because of this. I couldn't wait to get to the end of it, to be done.Some of the little ones are funny, a little funny, a little odd. Meanderings of a unique mind.I couldn't help but think that if I were to write stories some of them would be like these, although not really like these. I am not a story-teller. I think and wonder, and odd thoughts cross my mind. If I were to write those down I might have another version of this book.
What do You think about Almost No Memory (2001)?
Davis needs no introduction, nor pithy summary. These stories are mathematical riddles, little sentences twining and twirling around their own meaning. At the end of the collection, I felt as though trapped at the centre of a maze, as though reading them backwards would free me from the spiral of captivity. Her style is homely-cum-brainy, the self-awareness of a part-time egghead, part-time wife-and-mother. The shorter stories tickled me the most, the longer ones felt like forced digressions. How the collection is structured has something to do with this conflict. Short sharp shocks versus long periods of concentration and tightrope-walking. I became addicted to the ultra-concise form and wasn’t as willing to go the distance.New readers should pick up these little collections and leave The Collected Stories to the hardcore Davisites, whose brains resemble orange peels.
—MJ Nicholls
A book teaches you how to read it as you go along. Almost No Memory at first taught me enthusiasm with its freshness and perspicacity about some of the more off-center concerns of the everyday. Later, however, it began to teach me dis-attention and distraction. Often it reminded me of wading in shallow water--actually harder than swimming, and much less gratifying. It taught me to marvel occasionally at its beauty--but, annoyingly, I found there to be more beauty in the tales that were a bit longer than the others, the ones with more resemblance to the short story form as it has been practiced in the modernist era, and I had to wonder if I liked these texts better than the others because of their intrinsic worth as prose pieces or if I was merely responding to the familiarity of the forms and tropes of the genre that have become the guidelines of creative writing courses and the like. Ironically, perhaps, given the collection's title, even though I have only just finished reading the collection, I already have little memory of what exactly I have read. I feel rather more prevalently the miasma of my mixed feelings regarding the mixed bag of experimental prose, meditations, and slightly more alluring narratives, however non-traditional. Like the pieces themselves and their experiments in form, this is both a good and a bad thing.
—Lee Foust
Fiction is one of those arts that makes something out of nothing, and Lydia Davis’s Almost No Memory makes more something out of a balder nothing than any book I can remember ever having read. The blank piece of paper they started as is always within sight throughout every line of these fifty-plus stories. In execution, Almost No Memory is a collection of unconventional achievements, some only a few dozen words long, others stretching out to ten or so pages. Dialogue is nonexistent. Davis’s men, women and children receive very little commonly recognized characterization. Physical description and the assignment of telltale gesture are reserved for the handsome delineation of a pair of dogs in ‘St. Martin,’ a superb and melancholy evocation of nostalgia, an irresistible invitation to reflection, a connection to the shared experience of the human spirit placed directly within the reader’s grasp, a victory of the universal order for consumer and author alike, a deep-thinking effect that wins through again and again in Almost No Memory, even in the stories where the words seem to be fitted together with the logic of crossword puzzle clues and answers.
—Allan MacDonell
