The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis [Tapa dura]

I first heard about her about two years ago when I read an interview in Poets & Writers; what I found most interesting was the way she loved to experiment with the form. Any aspiring writer would do well to study and enjoy this book, but anyone would love it because she is SO funny! Some of the stories are SHORT indeed, while others are much longer. My favorite so far is Sketches in the Life of Vassilly, but I have about 600 more pages to go which makes me GLAD I am just now discovering her!!!!!!!!!

I also love her crazy, obsessed female characters - they let me know that I am not the only headcase dealing with my relationships. LOL I can't say it enough, read and study, laugh and learn...the meaning of these stories is up to you but their impact will be stunning to anyone who picks it up!! What a lovely hardcover - don't wait for the paperback! You will read it a hundred times over before THAT comes out.

I was pointed to this book by the most glowing review I have ever read in the New Yorker. The gist was that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and that over the course of four collections of stories, a very full character is painted. I would agree with that. These stories feel very autobiographical, some, especially for their brevity feel like they capture an event that has just occurred - almost impressionistic. At the end, we have a very good feeling for a character, whether this is Lydia or not, is sort of moot. That's a pretty significant literary achievement.

Here's the problem. This isn't the world's shortest book. I think what is actually the case is that the fourth collection is really a great book and that LD has significantly grown as a writer into probably a major writer. That isn't really evident in the first two collections, and while reading them gives you further depth of attachment to the character, I'm not sure it's time optimally spent. I've got Faulkner's Collected and Borges Collected stories sitting on the shelf ignored while I pass them over for a very enthusiastically reviewed orange tome. Ok, that's not a particularly fair comparison, but hey, it's what happened.

There are great moments in each of the collections, but those moments are very close together in the final collection. How Shall I Mourn Them is heartbreaking, and a good example of how appropriate a literary experiment is to grieving. There is so little comforting at the moment of when pain feels so particular and personal in recognizing how common rending grief is. The uniqueness of an experiment seems absolutely right. Barthelme's The Dead Father has something of the same feeling.

A nice common thread throughout is Issa and his gentle and minutely observed humanity. The influence shows early on, and the feeling in the beginning is how pleasant it is to reintroduce this style, but how difficult it is to be a disciple of his. By the end, LD seems to be Haikuist of similar empathy and observational power. That's no mean feat.

733 pages is an awful lot of Lydia Davis. When this book arrived I thought, will I ever want to read Lydia Davis again, when I'm done with this book?

I was a student in one of those MFA Creative Writing programs no one can disparage enough. In the late 90s they were pretty much workshops for the creation of Lydia Davis imitations. A few of these, too, read like Lydia Davis imitations. Occasionally I feel like the target of a confidence trick, like, would it all seem so profound, if the spine didn't say 'Farrar, Straus and Giroux'?

And yet -- I would read ten more volumes of Lydia Davis, each the size of this one. Her stories are a very special and quiet kind of music, which make me listen to everything differently. The stories work because Lydia Davis somehow smuggles me into a slightly different consciousness, the one next door, the one I sense when I've had one strong cup of coffee too many, and feel the meaning of life is slowly being revealed to me, in the form of a code contained in the very most minor events of my life.

Lydia Davis inspires a very special kind of attention, like a day spent in silence. This book is a good chance to be entirely caught up in that familiar and strange light.