by Lydia Davis
ISBN: 9780374281731
There’s a weirdness with formats going on here that I liked, the sense that “that is a story” and so is that, and so is this even though what I’m reading is a kind of transcript or is so short it isn’t even haiku, it’s all sorts of stuff.
Davis is also a translator (apparently her version Proust’s Swann’s Way was well-received, and she’s also translated Foucault) and I have to wonder if that is why she seems to write with such precision and oddness — she is playing with the language of stories, she’s stretching what the form can do. But without, I have to add, sacrificing readability or engagement for the reader or indulging in any of those annoying, irritating, anger-provoking tactics one might apply to experimental fiction.
I suspect Davis will either make you crazy or you’ll like her stuff without much in between, because she’s smart and quietly bizarre and that really isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It’s obviously tea, though, so you won’t wind up that lost if you give her stories a go. You’ll find a married couple in a good taste contest, grade schoolers’ letters to a hospitalizated classmate scrutinized, an analyis of aged women’s lifestyles, several references to flies, an accounting of a probably neurotic woman’s maids, stories of a paragraph or two or less, and stories that could be poems. “Head, Heart” was my favorite of this last kind of story:
Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again:
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday.
Heart feels better, then.
But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Head is all heart has.
Help, head. Help heart.
I think it was the “Head is all heart has” line that got me the first time. I’m not sure what else to say, other than I wouldn’t think I’d like this so very much, but I do.
Davis has a way of dissecting the world to expose potential meaning in it, so I like reading her stories. Recommended.
