The narrower the aperture, the greater the depth of
field. The best of Lydia Davis’s stories are little more than a detail or an
image or a wry observation presented without a misplaced word or superfluous
comma, precise enough to suggest that great slabs of life hinge about her words,
without these slabs being fiction as such. Perhaps the distinction between
actuality and fiction is too coarse to be relevant to such literature of the
infra-ordinary and should be left to the literatures of the ordinary (for which
this distinction is constantly contestable if ultimately unimportant) and of the
extra-ordinary (for which it is pre-established in the effective contract
between author and reader). Thrifty with her language, characterisation and
narrative to the point of asceticism, Davis’s work attains a whittled acuity
subtle enough to glance off the surfaces they address without (generally)
becoming imbedded in them. The contents of this book are of three kinds: 1.
Stories (though, really, except for a few that don’t work so well, they aren’t
stories in the usual sense); 2. Dreams - Davis’s and others’ (although these are
sort of interesting, I don’t think they belong with the stories (being
extra-ordinary)); 3. Translations from letters by Flaubert (which are rather
good but could perhaps have been grouped separately). One memorable story in
this collection, which exemplifies the deft irony which makes Davis’s humour at
once sympathetic and brutal, is ‘I’m Pretty Comfortable, But I Could Be a Little
More Comfortable’: merely a list of quotidian irritations that are all the more
irritating for being entirely inconsequential.
(June 2014)
Lydia
Davis has just won the 2013 Man Booker International Prize (and I would have won
the staff sweepstake if I had got around to organising one). There are 133
stories in her Collected Stories, ranging in length from a single
sentence or paragraph to a few pages. You will find yourself reading them one
after another until you have read them all. Davis is a master of the concise,
the precise and the incisive: each sentence she writes is a scalpel wielded at
the life of the emotions, removing scar tissue and all the while exposing the
operations of minds under pressure and the inner gravel of ordinary life. Oh,
and she’s funny, too. Most other writers seem clumsy by
comparison.
(June 2013)
