but Because She Did Not Want to Not Have Had a Baby Lydia Davis
A fellow member of the second of the ii book clubs to which I belong, who both teaches a writing class at Rutgers and writes herself, wrinkled her nose when I mentioned Lydia Davis as someone we might want to read next. She had at least heard of Davis. The other club members — all well educated women — knew Davis but in the context of her translations from the French. (We spent final September and October on her English translation of Swann's Way.)
I didn't contend the point. Granted my volume club is no litmus test, I was already fairly certain Lydia Davis is not for everyone. Withal — and although I'm only function mode through her chunkyThe Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, (Picador 2009) — I've already discovered she is definitely for me.
That'south considering she invites the reader into agile partnership with her. Which I love, at this point in my reading life. I love that what she offers in her beautifully off-the-wall and frequently painful pieces — some less than a sentence in length — is both minimal and all I need to know. I love that I must always terminate to remember almost what's on the page because she never tells me what to think. Although for the most role plotless, her pieces are pregnant with story I must supply. Although seemingly shorn of emotion, the precision of her stripped-down language can reflect subterranean emotion that is overpowering. Or it may enhance profound questions to ponder.
In other words, reading Lydia Davis is participatory. It is work. Highly pleasurable work, for readers who want actively to engage with a writer. Probably not such fun if you're looking for beach or bathroom or bedtime reading — light diversion, suspenseful story, hot romance. Not that there's annihilation wrong with such entertainments if they're good at what they practice. it's merely that a Lydia Davis piece isn't like that. Nor is she in the tradition of the swell nineteenth and early twentieth century novelists and short story writers, who too demand your participation, merely in a more familiar style.
Here's what another people accept said about her work.
"Lydia Davis is one of the few undebatably singular prose stylists alive today. She has invented a genre entirely unto itself – a form combining the precision and economic system of poetry, the wry storytelling of short fiction, and a clear-eyed and surgical inquiry into the nature of existence itself. I push her books on everyone I know." – Dave Eggers, author of What Is the What and Zeitoun
"Be prepared for moments of beauty that are precipitous and merciless….We are in a menses of literary history when accuracy, clarity and faithfulness seem transgressive. Only that – shorter, faster, more than changeable – is only culture. Davis…answers to a higher god." — Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
"Her writing defies generic classification. Some of her fiction could just every bit easily be called essay or poetry. Many of her stories are extremely short. Her narrators are often given a drastically narrow scope only an extremely abrupt focus. Their observations might be described equally dispassionate — sometimes humorously so — and for this reason the considerable emotional component of Davis's stories is often subtextual." — Sarah Mancuso, The Believer, Jan. 2008.
"One can read a large portion of Davis's piece of work, and a grand cumulative achievement comes into view – a body of work probably unique in American writing, in its combination of lucidity, aphoristic brevity, formal originality, sly one-act, metaphorical bleakness, philosophical force per unit area, and human wisdom. I suspect that The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis will in time be seen every bit one of great, strange American literary contributions, distinct and crookedly personal." — James Forest, The New Yorker
But judge for yourself. Here's a Davis slice that'due south not even a complete sentence. (It'south the shortest i in the unabridged 733-page paperback edition of the Collected Stories.)
********************
Of a sudden AFRAID
considering she couldn't write the name of what she was: a wa wam own owamn wom
**********************
That's all there is on the otherwise bare folio.
It fills me with terror.
How do yous feel about this side by side slice? Information technology's "merely" a sentence, without a flow (only one which could have been said of me in my late twenties and led to cataclysmic changes in my own life).
**********************
A DOUBLE NEGATIVE
At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to take a child as that she does not want not to accept a child, or not to have had a child
***********************
What story lies behind this unusual observation? What story will it lead to? Who is "she"? How old is "she"? Is "she" married? Is "she" already meaning? If then, does the father want a kid? If not, what must "she" do about her realization? Are double negatives really the same every bit positives? Do they pb to the same results? The answers to all those questions are up to y'all.
Now consider this 1 — and the language in which it is written. And and then consider how you feel most what it says and how you feel nigh what the language in which it is written says:
*************************
HOW It IS Washed
There is a description in a child's science book of the act of love that makes it all quite clear and helps when ane begins to forget. Information technology starts with amore between a human being and a woman. The blood goes to their genitals as they buss and caress each other, this swelling creates a want in these parts to exist touched further, the human being's penis becomes larger and quite stiff and the woman'due south vagina moist and slippery. The penis can now be pushed into the woman's vagina and the parts motion "comfortably and pleasantly" together until the man and woman accomplish orgasm, "non necessarily at the same time." The article ends, however, with a cautionary emendation of the opening statement almost affection: nowadays many people make love, it says, who exercise not love each other, or even accept an affection for each other, and whether or not this is a adept thing we do not however know.
*************************
I also like the following piece very much, probably because I don't think it is only about fellowships, although it is that, likewise. I might even cynically suggest that information technology could be seen as a commentary on much else that many, or almost, of us will ever experience.
*************************
THE FELLOWSHIP
I.
It is non that y'all are non qualified to receive the fellowship, it is that each yr your application is not good enough. When at concluding your application is perfect, and then yous will receive the fellowship.
Two.
It is not that you are non qualified to receive the fellowship, information technology is that your patience must be tested first. Each year, you are patient, but not patient enough. When yous have truly learned what it is to be patient, so much and so that you forget all about the fellowship, and so you volition receive the fellowship.
***********************
Finally, just ane more than. Because it breaks my eye.
************************
HEAD, Centre
Middle weeps.
Head tries to help centre.
Head tells heart how it is, again:
You volition lose the ones you love. They will all get. But even the earth will go, someday.
Center feels amend, and so.
But the words of caput do not remain long in the ears of heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Caput is all heart has.
Help, caput. Help heart.
************************
There are longer pieces in the volume. Some look like proper stories (although they aren't). Simply if these v fail to practise it for you, the others probably won't either.
Don't say I didn't endeavor.
Source: https://ninamishkin.com/2014/02/11/lydia-davis/
0 Response to "but Because She Did Not Want to Not Have Had a Baby Lydia Davis"
Post a Comment