and now for something different … Lydia Davis. Born in Massachusetts in 1947, of American parents – dad a professor, mother a writer and teacher. The family lived in Austria for a year when she was seven, Lydia learned German. Later in New York, in a private school, around the age of ten, she learned French. The French grew on her, to the extent that she has translated many French novels into English, including Georges Simenon’s African Trio (1970), Proust’s Swann’s Way (2004), and Flaubert’s Madam Bovary (2010).Davis went to Barnard College, has been married twice (one son by each union), currently to the artist Alan Cole. In 2003 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, in 2005 elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2013 won the Man Booker International Prize. Davis currently teaches at the University of Albany, SUNY. Her most recent collection of stories is Can't and Won't: Stories. (2014).One of Davis’s influences, from a young age, was Samuel Beckett. In this interview http://www.believermag.com/issues/200... Davis talks about her craft and other things literary. Here’s a second interview with very little overlap to the previous one: http://brickmag.com/interview-lydia-d....It’s been said that Davis has, with her short stories, created her own genre. Well, what is this genre? I’ll be so bold as to attempt a description. Most of the stories in this collection, one of her earliest, are, I believe, fairly representative of her style. They employ a first person narrator much more commonly than usual; there is usually very little in the way of plot; characters are employed sparingly (usually only the narrator, who may be talking about one other person, often unnamed); no dialogue between characters (except in the narration itself: “I said … and you said …”); and at times extremely short stories, a paragraph in some cases, even a sentence. Bare bones is something that suggests itself, because her stories are so stripped down. But what’s missing from them, plot, character, dialogue (never narration, that is the only thing that can’t be jettisoned) are, after all, the skeleton of traditional fiction, are they not? So to do without them is not “bare bones”, it is “boneless”. Boneless fiction.Break It Down (1986)This collection of short stories contains 33 stories in 140 pages. Fourteen stories are less than three pages long; most of those are a page or a paragraph. These were probably the best short stories I’ve ever read, taking into account how little time they required, and how tempting it was to keep picking up the book. Having finished it, and now moving into her second collection, Almost No Memory, I keep going back to stories in this volume. They do cast a spell.Here’s one of my favorite micro stories.What She KnewPeople did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old man?Themes and StyleIn the first version of this review, I thought that I could get away with simply presenting the following stories. No. No. Not only did I try to learn a new trick, I also learned that I didn’t do the trick very well. At any rate, these are the stories, but with a little bit of context, that should make the points better. (The stories themselves are the same as before.)First of all. I said above that Davis employs first person narration often. Yet in the four of these stories that have a narrator, I employed the first person in ALL of them. That’s actually what I was thinking that Davis did. But no, I was fooled by seeing it so much that I thought I’d seen it nearly everywhere.Here’s an actual count from the collection.First person narrator: 9 (7 female, 2 male)No narrator: 2Third person narrator: 22 (Some of these are difficult to categorize, since so few pronouns appear.)About 1 in 3 are first person, not 4 in 4! SO. These stories are not representative in that sense, for sure.Instances of DisturbanceThis story is a retelling of the last selection in the book, Five Types of Disturbance. For whatever reason, I transferred the narrator from an impersonal one, to first person. But not the person whom the story is about. And why I inserted the very last sentence somehow escapes me. Lydia’s version is a very disturbing tale; near the end I wrote that it reminded me of Polanski’s movie Repulsion.(view spoiler)[I have watched her for three months now. Across the avenue, in a friend’s apartment. I know that the friend is away in Greece. He will return in November. It’s now the middle of October. He told me a woman would be staying in the apartment while he was gone. Then they would trade places. He would be there, and she would be gone.She stands looking out at the park, on my side of the street. All times of the day. Even at night sometimes. When I see her there I pick up my binoculars, always kept near the window just in case. They no longer have to be focused for her.Sometimes her venetian blinds are down but open, other times they are up. She usually wears some ratty looking tee shirt, sometimes a robe, sometimes nothing. I can only imagine what else she does or doesn’t have on.She did not notice me until recently. One day last week, after the sun had risen, watching her, I suddenly saw her look directly at me. She crossed her arms, what I could see of her was naked, and smiled just a little. She looked somewhat drunk.She stared. I stared. Then she pointed at her head and made a circling motion with her finger cuckoo? then pointed at her chest. Perhaps at her breast? I don’t know, that’s what I looked at.I understood her to sign that she was crazy. Or something like that. Then she pointed at herself, pointed across at me, pointed at herself, seemed to move her mouth.I lowered the binoculars and looked across. I didn’t know what to do. I was nodding yes, but then thought to make the same finger signs me-you-me-you that she made. Then she moved to the side and shut the blinds.We met later that day in the park. I’m not sure that she recognized me, she seemed surprised when I took my binoculars out of my bag and signed toward her with them. But she walked over. We walked a little ways and sat on a bench.I had no idea what to say. She just said I must find an apartment. I was going to say why but realized I knew why. Yes, I said. After a while she asked if I knew of any not too expensive. No, I said. Oh … . We sat for a while. I was thinking of whether to ask if she might want to stay in my place. But I didn’t really like the looks of her. She looked disturbed, in five different ways at least.After a while, saying nothing else, she got up and walked up the block, without looking back. I followed her. She took the subway to the last stop along the sound. I followed her. She walked a couple blocks to the deserted beach. The sun was getting low. I followed. Then she walked right into the water, up to her waist.I was a little bit alarmed, but not too. I don’t think I cared much, I didn’t know her. But I cared some. I stood just off the beach watching. No one came by. She did nothing except stare out across the water. Finally I looked at my watch. The sun was going down. I thought of calling out to her, but remembered that I didn’t know her name. I wanted to go back to the city. I walked away, looking back once, she was still standing in the small waves, up to her waist.I didn’t see her across the way yesterday, nor the day before. I’m feeling more than a bit disturbed. I drank myself to sleep last night and didn’t go to work today.My friend will be back this weekend. Perhaps he will know where she is. I have quite short hair. I can’t help wondering if she had been surprised when I showed up a woman the one time we met. (hide spoiler)]
I've been reading and worshiping Ms. Davis' translations of Maurice Blanchot since my college days in the 1980s and, weirdly to me, have only just recently discovered that she has been, since about that same time (1986) been working herself to redefine and/or expand the possibilities of the short story form with a series of critically well-received collections. Perfect timing, in a sense, as I am currently writing a novel in frames, a system of linked short narratives and I, too, want to both write the greatest short stories ever written while also simultaneously redefining and/or expanding the boundaries of what can be accomplished in a short prose narrative. So, yeah, I had a total agenda in reading this book: to steal her inspirational fire like a little literary Prometheus in an attempt to create a new narrative humankind out of a slip of the divine creative power of invention.So, bias out on the table (in front of everyone!), I am both interested enough to keep on reading Davis' short stories in the future (yeah, I actually have the Penguin collected stories edition but plan on reading the books collected in it one at a time) but also rather disappointed. What I took from my feelings after whipping through the collection--the shortness and compactness of the tales leads one on quickly--is that some of these experiments in short prose tend, often, to come out cold. Very cold. While I know that it's often more powerful to describe heightened moments of human passion in a semi-detached way--in order to be more honest and to fight the stench of melodrama--but still, many of these stories were, literally, chilling and the feelings I drew for them were more concern, pity, and annoyance with Ms. Davis. Such a chilly reaction to this book on my part might also be at least partially provoked by the last book I read, _I Love Dick_ by Chris Kraus, which I loved too much perhaps for my own good. Often it's hard for that first book after a great, great read to seem at all good as it will not stand up to the comparison. What interest me, however, most about my having read these two texts back-to-back and my response (and to raise the gender issue, which also fascinates me, even as I would seek to collapse gender differences and not be forced ever and always to have to define myself via my own maleness) is that I fell in love with Ms. Kraus while reading her book--certainly seduction is a theme so I do also believe that, as a reader, any reader, I was meant to fall in love with that narrator and that exactly is why that narrative so worked for me. The many narrators of the tales of _Break It Down_ are the kind of neurotics that are often attractive because of their neuroses but you also know from the moment that you meet such characters that your relationship, whether friendship or romance, causal acquaintance or messy, ambiguous long-term bugfuck, will end with their own neuroses running the show completely as if you were never there before them. The reader feels left out of the stories, helplessly witnessing over self-absorbed characters creating their own alienating scenarios. A literary/romantic shut door; I walk on through the wintry cold to the next book.
What do You think about Break It Down (1996)?
This book has been on my to-read shelf for ages because I was repeatedly turned off from continuing past the beginning of the first story, because the first story is a piece of Davis's later novel The End of the Story which made me kind of depressed when I read it on our honeymoon. Of all times to read that novel, on a honeymoon! It's the only sour impression I have of Davis's work, because I made the dumb decision to read a depressing book during a holiday that was meant to be even a better time than other holidays. So I would try to read this book but never get through the first story. Well, this time I braved it and finished and even moved on to the second story. Yay for me, because this collection is great and Davis is definitely a writer worth reading. From "Break It Down":"Then you forget some of it all, maybe most of it all, almost all of it, in the end, and you work hard at remembering everything now so you won't ever forget, but you can kill it too even by thinking about it too much, though you can't helping thinking about it nearly all the time."From "Sketches for a Life of Wassilly":"Working on a list, he would send himself into a certain room to check a book title or the date and forget why he had gone there, distracted by the sight of another unfinished project. He received from himself a number of unrelated instructions which he could not remember, and spent entire mornings uselessly rushing from room to room. There was a strange gap between volition and action: sitting at his desk, before his work but not working, he dreamt of perfection in many things, and this exhilarated him. But when he took one step toward that perfection, he faltered in the face of its demands. There were mornings when he woke under a weight of discouragement so heavy that he could not get out of bed but lay there all day watching the sunlight move across the floor and up the wall."From "Five Signs of Disturbance":"Each time she looked down at them, the three quarters separated into groups of one quarter and two quarters, but each time she was prepared to put one back it appeared to her as one of a pair, so that she couldn't put it back. This happened over and over again as she rolled closer to the booths, until finally, against her will, she put one quarter back. She told herself the choice was arbitrary, but she felt strongly that it was not. She felt that it was in fact governed by an important rule, though she did not know what the rule was."
—Laura
Picked this up for a local Twitter book club, glad I did as this is not normally the kind of stuff I would read. The writer has a very different voice than most of the 1st person narratives I tend to read so it took some adjusting. That said, her writing style is just incredible The stories themselves--all rather short--where interesting in different ways. Davis' voice is very insular and cathartic one moment and then stand-offish and stoic the next. The first short-story, called "Story" interestingly enough was the most moving for me. It's about a woman obsessing over the minutia-of-the-moment involving the activities of her BF and his ex-GF, what got me was that this speaks to everyone...we've all sat and waited for the phone to ring, stared at it, called back 5 minutes later just in case they were taking the garbage out. It seemed to embody the irrationality that love can induce.-R
—Rob Findlay
This is the second collection of "short stories" by Lydia Davis that I've tried, and it will be my last. The other collection, "Samuel Johnson is Indignant" had enough flashes of genuine wit to make it almost tolerable, despite Ms Davis's predilection for microscopically short "stories" (sometimes no more than a sentence long) and a preternaturally detached prose style. The kind of writing that garners raves from the usual suspects - "The best prose stylist in America" (Rick Moody), "one of most precise and economical writers we have" (Dave Eggers), "few writers now working make the words on the page matter more" (Jonathan Franzen).Well, allow me to differ, Herr Franzen. "Break it Down" is as dismal a collection of bleak, emotionally constipated, tales of misery as I've had the misfortune to read in the last ten years. And let's be clear, Ms Davis's trademarks - "dexterity, brevity, understatement" - are not necessarily virtues. Not when they lead to passages like these, which are ubiquitous"She stands over a fish, thinking about certain irrevocable mistakes she has made today""My husband is married to a different woman now, shorter than I am, about five feet tall, solidly built. Next to her I feel bony and awkward ..""I moved into the city just before Christmas. I was alone, and this was a new thing for me. Where had my husband gone? He was living in a small room across the river, in a district of warehouses.""He said there were things about me that he hadn't liked from the very beginning.""Though everyone wishes it would not happen, and though it would be far better if it did not happen, it does sometimes happen that a second daughter is born and there are two sisters. Of course any daughter, crying in the hour of her birth, is only a failure, and is greeted with a heavy heart by her father..""She can't say to herself that it is really over, even though anyone else would say it was over, since he has moved to another city, hasn't been in touch with her in more than a year, and is married to another woman.""The fact that he does not tell me the truth all the time makes me not sure of his truth at certain times, and then I work to figure out for myself if what he is telling me is the truth or not, and sometimes i can figure out that it's not the truth and sometimes I don't know and never know, and sometimes just because...."Oh Christ, why don't I just slit my fucking wrists right now? It would surely beat reading this kind of drivel. At a guess, at least half of the 34 'stories' in this book consist of a 3rd person or 1st person narrative, centring on a clinically depressed doormat of a woman either in, or trying to recover from, a toxic relationship with a man who psychologically abuses here. None of these women has a name - they are all just "she". And Davis writes about them with a detachment that borders on the clinical. In contrast to Jonathan Franzen, I can't imagine how a writer could make the words on the page matter less. The dreary 'stories' in this volume adhere to the dismal prevailing conventions of the late 1980s - tales of narcissistic or bipolar protagonists in which nothing much ever happens, served up in a kind of minimalist prose with that knowing ironic detachment. The kind of tripe that drives me up the wall, in other words. (on edit, after posting this review: I notice that many of my good friends here on GR don't share my opinion - well, bring it on, Jessicas!)I just found out that she was at one time married to Paul Auster. Why am I not surprised?
—David
