As a break from the theoretical turn Evening All Afternoon has been taking of late, let me rhapsodize straightforwardly about the numerous things I love in the writing of Lydia Davis. In particular, I've just finished her 2004 The End of the Story, which treats of the end, beginning, and aftermath (in that order) of a love affair, and also of the process of transforming that love affair into a novel. I was particularly intrigued to pick up Davis's novel, as her stories tend to the radically succinct—one or two paragraphs each, a page or less. Nor is her work overtly affective, consisting of schematic yet detailed accounts of a character's actions, surroundings, habits, or mental processes. Like Proust, whose Swann's Way she translated, Davis pays attention to nuance and is intrigued by the often-perverse twistings and turnings of the human psyche. Unlike Proust, her paragraphs tend to fit on one page, and can usually be enjoyed on their own as single, jewel-like units. While some writers are most impressive at the level of the sentence or the chapter, Davis shines on the level of the paragraph—either single paragraphs or, often, a longer paragraph followed by a shorter paragraph, which shows the earlier paragraph in a new light. It reminds me of the way haikus often work, with the last line casting the first two in a new perspective. In this paragraph pair, for example, the narrator is describing a dream she had just after embarking on the relationship around which the book revolves:Later that night I dreamed I had found a short piece of his writing on the hall floor. It had a title page and my name on it and my address at the university. Most of it was plainly written, but it contained a passage about Paris in which the writing became suddenly more lyrical, including a phrase about the "shudder of war." Then the style became plain again. The last sentence was briefer than the rest: "We are always surprising our bookkeepers." In the dream, I liked the piece and was relieved by that, although I did not like the last sentence. Once I was awake, I liked the last sentence too, even more than the rest. I see now that since I hadn't yet read anything by him at the time of the dream, what I was doing was composing something by him that I would like. And although this was my dream and he did not write what I dreamed he wrote, the words I remember still seem to belong to him, not to me.I find Davis's paragraphs so compelling because, while each one does suggest narrative motion, they are short enough that no real resolution is expected. They allow the reader simply to notice contradiction and live within it at the level of the thought or the moment, without requiring that contradiction to be resolved. Above, for example, the narrator observes the contrast between the lyrical passage and the plain writing that surrounds it; between the brevity of the final sentence and those that preceded it; between her opinions of the last sentence before and after waking. In the second paragraph we have the narrator's feeling that her dream-composition belongs to her ex-lover, which contrasts with her intellectual knowledge that it was created in her own mind. She doesn't seek to explain or interpret any of this in any explicit way, or decide that one impression is correct and the other incorrect. She simply lays out paradox in clean lines, and allows the reader to do with it what she will. I enjoy the aesthetics of art that simply dwells within contradiction, possibly because I find this so difficult to do in my own life. Nor is it easy for Davis's narrator. Despite the detachment of the narrative style, and the fact that reading this book imparted to me a sense of calm, the narrator in her daily life appears anything but peaceful. She is anxious and high-strung, and her behavior both during and after the relationship is often less than admirable—although she seldom makes this explicit judgment herself, writing instead simply, "At that time I liked to drink. I always needed a drink if I was going to sit and talk to someone," or "Most of his friends were as young as he was, and [...] I did not regard people of that age as very interesting, even though I had been that age myself." Oddly, it's the understatement in Davis's prose that makes her depictions of depression and bad behavior particularly uncomfortable for me, as if, in calmly acknowledging these unattractive aspects of her own personality, the narrator is making room for me to do the same. The emotions felt at a given time are simply another piece of information to be recounted, no more freighted or difficult than anything else. Or, if they are more difficult, then this difficulty can in turn be acknowledged, and the narrator can live beside it.But no matter how clearly I saw what I was doing, I would go on doing it, as though I simply allowed my shame to sit there alongside my need to do it, one separate from the other. I often chose to do the wrong thing and feel bad about it rather than do the right thing, if the wrong thing was what I wanted.Although it can sometimes be sobering, Davis's un-emotive delivery can also be dryly hilarious. I was particularly tickled by her portraits of her own compulsive or inconvenient habits of thought, which often had me chuckling and insisting on reading passages aloud to my partner David. The same technique I outlined above, of returning to things previously discussed in order to cast them in a new light, can be extremely funny as well as meditative and thought-provoking, and Davis uses it in all these applications to good effect. My favorite humorous example of this technique, involving the narrator's confusion in the face of her own elaborate filing system for different types of fictional material, is too long to share here, but trust me, it's worth a read. Instead I'll give you this passage on lying awake scheming, which strikes me as both funny and a great union of form and content. Just as the brain of the sleepless narrator becomes more and more fixated on her crusading busy-bodying, the paragraph itself focuses in on a particular, esoteric scheme:Now and then I am too excited to sleep, because I have a plan to reform something: if not what we eat, which should be the diet of the hunter-gatherers, then what we have in our house, which should include as little plastic as possible and as much wood, clay, stone, cotton, and wool; or the habits of the people in our town, who should not cut down trees in their yards or burn leaves or rubbish; or the administration of our town, which should create more parks and lay down a sidewalk by the side of every road to encourage people to walk, etc. I wonder what I can do to help save local farms. Then I think we should keep a pig here to eat our table scraps, and that the Senior Citizens Center should keep a pig, too, because so much food is thrown out when the old people don't eat it, as I used to see when I went to pick up Vincent's father at lunchtime. The pig could be fattened on these scraps until the holiday season, and then provide the senior citizens with a holiday meal. A new baby pig could be bought in the spring and amuse the senior citizens with its antics. For some reason, the isolated sentence "I wonder what I can do to help save local farms" is especially funny to me. But as much as I enjoy the humor, my favorite thing about Davis might be her examination of the subjectivity involved in our experiences of reality and in the truths we believe we know. The narrator continually struggles with what to include in her story and how to tell it. The same incident appears differently in her memory each time she remembers it, depending on her mood at the time of remembering, information she has learned in the meantime, or other external factors. In one case, she remembers the same house as three completely different settings: the kitchen in which she played a word game; the back yard through which she entered a party with her lover; the front door and living room she visited after he left her. What is the reality? Are these "really" the same place, or three separate places? Likewise, Davis explores the mental tricks of perception which create a surprising percentage of the texture of one's reality. In the same way, I will decide to include a certain thought in a certain place in the novel and then discover that several months before, I made a note to include the same thought in the same place and then did not do it. I have the curious feeling that my decision of several months ago was made by someone else. Now there has been a consensus and I am suddenly more confident: if she had the same plan, it must be a good one. Of course there is not actually another person making editorial decisions for the narrator, but her lived reality includes a ghost or an impression of this other woman helping her write. In combination with her koan-like style, it's Davis's insights into the unexpected reverses of human consciousness and behavior that will keep me coming back to her work. And although I think she's probably more accomplished as a "micro-story" writer than a novelist, The End of the Story has no problem sustaining its novelistic momentum from beginning to end. I look forward to more of Davis's work, in any format at all.Notes on Disgust(for more information on the disgust project, see here.)Davis's style tends toward the schematic and is unlikely to provoke any disgust in the reader. Still, there is this interesting passage, in which the narrator, just before her lover leaves her, encounters him unexpectedly at a party:It was a feeling of absolute displeasure to see him there, as though he were a hostile element in that place, a thing that intruded where it didn't belong, so that as I watched him among the moving figures, over the shoulders of the other people in the crowded place, those same features of his that had held such a positive attraction for me not long before, and that would exert such a fascinating force again not long after, were just then repugnant to me, blunt and deadly, primitive and vicious, without intelligence, without humanity, the color of clay.What struck me so forcibly about this passage is the narrator's extremely Douglasian description of her own revulsion. Seeing her lover at this party disgusts her because he seems "a thing that intruded where it didn't belong"—matter out of place, just as Douglas describes. The narrator's momentary revulsion even causes her to perceive her lover's feature as "primitive," and we notice the dehumanizing tendency that so often goes hand-in-hand with the disgust emotion. The lover's appearance in a place that the narrator doesn't expect to see him, when she is feeling alienated from him, gives him a repulsive and marginal appearance, almost seeming to melt back into an undifferentiated lump "the color of clay," yet in his distorted, sub-human form is still monstrous, "deadly" and "vicious." True to form, there were also times when the narrator is disgusted at herself, in particular a passage in which she remembers with loathing the chips and playing cards she and her lover bought at the store in an attempt to disguise their growing boredom with each other. But it's this passage that really stood out as intriguing and oddly extreme.
I made it more than half way through this basic retread of some short stories Lydia Davis has previously written and published. Seems she writes a bit here and there about a boy and her relationship and perhaps a bit more about a girl and her relationship and sometimes about both of them and her relationship with them all and by the time I get to where I am I am so tired and too tired of reading this boring tale of nothing. Ray Johnson, the artist, whose last act was a performance piece in which he leaves a trail of friends who all know a piece of him but no one knows his all, goes and kills himself by drowning in a river. Ray used to do performance pieces in the city and called them "plays about nothing". He had a loyal following and somebody made a movie about his life that was very interesting. It was called "How to Draw a Bunny". Let me give you an example of how Ray operated. If a buyer of his hard art only could afford to pay say three quarters of what Ray's asking price was then after a bit of haggling back and forth Ray would graciously accept the deal, collect the money, and send the buyer three quarters of the piece. Whatever became of the leftover pieces of Ray's art remain a mystery, at least to me. In this novel by Lydia Davis I often noticed a short story of hers that I had already seen elsewhere in other of her collections. For example, "Story", from her first collection of short stories titled BREAK IT DOWN, tells how the narrator's boyfriend couldn't see her before she was to embark on a trip very early the next morning so she stays up all night in her obsessive search to find out why. She makes several trips back and forth to his apartment, several phone calls, and she meets him or talks to him but never quite believes his story and she shouldn't. The names in this story were changed in the novel, but the story is the same story as the text entered into her novel. This happens often in here. Too often for me. It is lame and is a poor way to garner loyalty from me. I had already purchased from amazon.com the Collected Stories of Lydia Davis based on the one superb story I read in the collection FAKES edited by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer in which I do more than mention the piece here:http://mewlhouse.hubpages.com/hub/My-... The Lydia Davis Funeral Parlor story was about a letter she wrote to a funeral home about the attendant naming what was left of her father after his cremation his "cremains". I thought the letter so clever and brilliant and so well written that I bought the entire Lydia Davis collected short story work and now I almost wish I hadn't. The book arrived in the mail today and it matched the description online so I can't send it back. I guess I will see more of what is in it when I have more time and space to do so this coming mid winter. But the few stories I have already read in my perusal of it, as I have had the book on loan to me from the library and I have decided to return it to the library tomorrow in addition to returning the novel which I also borrowed from the library, is that Davis is at the very least a retreader and not at all an original novelist. Or she is senile. Or she has dementia? In the meantime I have to abandon her novel today because it is driving me crazy trying to read it. It is even a more daunting prospect to pick the book up to read when I have EXTINCTION now taking a back seat. In fact, just a few moments ago I did try to pick the book up to continue on with my reading and the feeling of dread was killing me. My eyes floated down below that novel to see EXTINCTION resting there so elegantly and noble at the bottom of my pile of now four books I am currently reading that sit on my end table by my chair in my personal reading library. To think I had temporarily set down the novel EXTINCTION by Thomas Bernhard in order to read this drivel ahead of finishing this great one. I am so sorry, Thomas. I got excited. Forgive me. I thought I had discovered another living genius in our midst. But it is possible she is the real deal of short story writers. Just don't tell me I should have stayed with her and the novel until the end because the novel gets so much better later. If that is the case, and I really do not doubt that this may be true, then she should have started there.
What do You think about The End Of The Story (2004)?
El amor como hilo conductor en una relación de pareja con una considerable diferencia de edad, donde la desconfianza, el posible interés, la sospecha permanente del uno hacia el otro llevará a una dependencia de la protagonista por su particular compañero convirtiéndose todo en una obsesión cuando ya todo se ha terminado y se da cuenta viendo hacia atrás de cómo el tiempo de esa relación resultó un gran fracaso, esta es la base donde Lydia Davis va a contarnos una trama de obsesión y manipulación.. “El final de la historia” es la primera novela escrita hace ya quince años por Lydia Davis a quien Jonathan Franzen (quien no es muy conocido por emitir buenos comentarios ni buenas opiniones públicas sobre otros colegas) calificó a esta autora como “la versión abreviada de Proust”, gracias a la Editorial Alpha Decay se puede disfrutar después de tanto tiempo esta novela sobre una novela. Hablando de manera clara sobre este trabajo hay dos hechos que resaltan inmediatamente, el primero es la historia de una relación de una mujer 12 años mayor que su compañero la cual decide contar por escrito todo lo que sucedió entre ambos recapacitando y recordando todos los errores que se cometieron entre ellos, la otra parte importante es que la protagonista también nos presenta lo difícil que puede resultar para un autor construir y relatar hechos reales dentro de un libro, cosas como que puede sobrar, que no debe ir o que debería eliminar para no hundirse mas en los recuerdos, de esta manera asistimos durante la lectura en dos formas de relatar que la hacen doblemente interesante.De Lydia Davis había disfrutado algunos cuentos sueltos la mayoría leídos por internet pero nunca había tenido la oportunidad de tener en mis manos un libro completo de ella y casualmente me inicio en su trabajo con esta su primera novela. El lenguaje de Davis es acelerado, cuenta sin pudor y frontal toda la historia, si algo decide retirar durante el dialogo la protagonista se lo pregunta a ella misma antes. “El final de la historia” es un libro escrito de manera muy inteligente, sabe contar en primera persona y demostrar lo complicado que son las relaciones humanas por las que todos pasamos permanentemente pero en el caso de los protagonistas la diferencia de edad hace que todo se acelere hacia un choque sentimental y muy complejo destinado al quiebre y ruptura por las inseguridades de la mujer sobre este joven, así como el rechazo dentro de el amor convierte en una obsesión la relación. Usando elipsis muy bien logradas con diálogos internos hacen que uno la lea para poder descifrar como será la manera en que ella pueda poner un punto final o como ambos van a terminar chocando sentimentalmente.“El final de la historia” algunos la calificaron uno de los mejores libros del año 2014, aunque yo no me atrevería a tanto, me parece que Davis en los cuentos es donde mejor sabe desempeñarse, pero este es un libro que debe de leerse porque la manera en que se construyen los personajes hacen que sea una novela de disfrute asegurado. “El final de la historia”Lydia DavisEditado por Alpha Decay (2014)240 paginas
—Jesús Santana
There is some kind of style in this book that made me like it. That style is strange and I did not know how Davis was able to walk away with it.(1)tNo plot(2)tNo dialogues(3)tStarted the 1st person narration ("unreliable") with the ending of the story(4)tTime period went back and forth with no pattern(5)tUnnecessary characters, events, musingsIt’s an endless recollection of the unnamed narration’s failed love story with a man 12 years her senior. The narrator is a college literature professor and a translator. Her boyfriend is a jobless young man, penniless and dabbles in writing poetry. Both of them are trying to write their first books. They live together, they probably are having sex. Although Davis chose not to mention sex she also did not mention - I carefully waited for this while reading – love. That is a unusual strange feat: she was able to write a book about her love story without mentioning sex and even love. Point: this book is emotionally cunning. It talks about love yet it is not mushy not even sentimental. Is that possible? Yes, you have to read between the lines and interpret what the characters are doing and probably bring in your own stories of failed love affairs and you will know what I am trying to say here.This is not for everyone though as the narration goes on and on. If you don’t pay attention to what she is saying, you’ll say that all her blubbering is rubbish. It is like listening to an old friend. Hey, we don't listen to everything that our friends say, right? They are friends but sometimes they talk rubbish too. Well, as I was saying, let’s say you had a friend in high school that you accidentally bumped with one afternoon. You decided to go to a café and catch up with each other’s lives. You asked how she was. She said okay. Then you remembered that she used to date another friend back during the time you all were in high school. She said that her relationship with him did not work out. You asked why. Then she started to tell you everything about it. Will you listen? Are you interested? If that friend was Lydia Davis, I would. 239 pages of brilliant writing. She, Lydia Davis was the first wife of Sir Paul Auster. And this failed love seems to be their love story.
—K.D. Absolutely
For the last couple of years I've been happily dropping in and out of Lydia Davis' Collected Stories to much delight so when I saw this and the praise, I was keen. My god. What a slog.I barely crawled over the end. In fact, I took to reading it on the exercise bike as it was the only way I could guarantee 30 mins of reading without other distractions. It's not just the lack of plot or the meandering structure. For me, it was the complete inanity of the content and the depth of obsessive thinking and analysis we have to endure as our narrator picks apart every single feeling she has about an old, insignificant relationship. It drove me nuts. The back cover has a quote from the Village Voice stating she has "bravely explored the severe elegance of the thinking woman". Really? If every 'thinking' woman (or man or child) was thinking this much how the hell would they ever manage to achieve anything? This to me is more a portrait of someone with an anxiety disorder with a side helping of obsessional thinking. I appreciate the universal draw of a failed relationship, the way you can dwell on the little things and the what ifs, but it doesn't mean it makes for a fun read. No matter how lovely the writing can be at times.Back to the short stories for me.
—Andy
