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Title: Almost No Memory : Stories by Lydia Davis ISBN: 0-312-42055-2 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 08 September, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (14 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Master of the Short Short
Comment: This collection of 51 short stories, little fictions, and prose poems by Lydia Davis intrigues and rewards. The pieces come in every length. There's the 46-word "Odd Behavior," and at the center of the book, Davis gives us a forty page story, "Lord Royston's Tour," an extraordinary period travelog, written perfectly in the syntax and idioms of early nineteenth century Britain: "...a good deal tossed and beaten about off the Skaw, before sailing up the river." We learn in after-credits that the tale was adapted from a memoir Davis found, written in 1838.
She employs many styles, tones, and voices. The pieces come variously comic, peculiar, tragic, surreal, mysterious, whimsical, quirky, lyrical, cerebral, and earthy. Some are faintly Kafakaesque, Borgesian, Beckett-echoing, and most have plenty of Davis's originality. Some are very ambitious, others narrow in intent. Each defines its own terms as a fiction. If the reader finds one piece less than compelling, he eagerly continues, if only to see what she will come up with next. And is soon again enthralled. There are meta-fictions, such as "The Center of the Story," and a number of the pieces seem to be written for an audience of writers and sophisticated readers. Other pieces aim more broadly.
In "This Condition" the narrator conveys a state of generalized erotic feeling. It's lovely, sexy writing, a prose poem, with no single object of desire-- sexuality finding its echo in the universe of animals, minerals, vegetables; ideas, maps, texts. A sort of erotica for the lover of life.
In "The Professor," Davis's narrator, teaching English out West, reveals a fantasy of marrying a cowboy.
"...I started listening to country Western music on the car radio, though I knew it wasn't written for me."
She fastens on someone in her class who, though he'll have to do, doesn't quite fill the cowboy bill:
"The facts weren't right. He didn't work as a cowboy but at some kind of job where he glued the bones of chimpanzees together. He played jazz trombone..."
They have one odd date together, but nothing comes of it, and now years later, our professor, married and living back East, still finds herself subject to the cowboy daydream. Davis ends on a delightful goofy/comic note:
"I'm so used to the companionship of my husband by now that if I were to marry a cowboy I would want to take him with me, though he would object strongly to any move in the direction of the West, which he dislikes...."
"It would end, or begin, with my husband and me standing awkwardly there in front of the ranch house, waiting while the cowboy prepared our rooms."
This collection exemplifies the wild and wonderful possibilities in very short fiction where the only real rule is: Make it good. Davis knows how.
Rating: 5
Summary: Goodnes Gracious!
Comment: All of the stories in this book have an awe inspiring precision and simplicity that hides some of the real work that I'm sure went into these pieces. Check out End of The Story if you want to see her talents put into the novel form...a sadly under appreciated book if ever there was one...I think Lydia Davis is one of the best contemporary writers and translators in the U.S. I can't wait to read her translation of Proust which is due out in the next year or so...
Rating: 3
Summary: Some stories resonate, others don't
Comment: While Lydia Davis can crystallize so much in a short short, her metafictional style begins to cloy. It may be the first person point of view, or the use of present tense, or the constant references to what the character is writing at that moment, but so many of these stories sound like they flow from the author's journal, rather than from a planned fictional arc. Frequently they are mere moments, rather than stories in which something happens, and leave this reader--who picked up the book looking for something more daring--longing for the traditional. Overall, this was disappointing.
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Title: Samuel Johnson Is Indignant: Stories by Lydia Davis ISBN: 0312420560 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Break It Down by Lydia Davis ISBN: 1852424214 Publisher: Serpent's Tail Pub. Date: April, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The End of the Story by Lydia Davis ISBN: 1852424206 Publisher: Serpent's Tail Pub. Date: April, 1996 List Price(USD): $12.99 |
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Title: Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme ISBN: 0140153004 Publisher: E P Dutton Pub. Date: February, 1995 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure by Paul Auster ISBN: 0312422326 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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