Review by New York Times Review
AVANT-GARDE fiction in America can seem something of an oxymoron, operating less as a forward movement than as a separatist cult that neither desires nor expects to have any influence on mainstream literature. But the absence of influence is also the presence of freedom, a characteristic easily discernible in the work of Lydia Davis. Known for her translations from the French, especially for her version of "Swarm's Way," the first volume of Proust's monumental modernist novel, Davis seems to work on the margins as a writer. Her spare, elliptical short fiction is critically acclaimed, but it forms a challenging body of work, dispensing with straightforward narrative in favor of a microscopic examination of language and thought. Davis's new collection, "Varieties of Disturbance," continues that approach. Sometimes, a title can be nearly as long as the story, as in "Mother's Reaction to My Travel Plans," whose entire text reads: "Gainsville! It's too bad your cousin is dead!" We could almost text-message it, but then we wouldn't get the effect of the surrounding white space, against which the words seem to suggest an almost gnomic quality. We might miss the exclamation marks, the italics, the iambic pentameter; we might miss the insight that we're missing something. Such self-reflexiveness in the reader is what Davis's fiction seems to aim for. She wants us to engage in a minute scrutiny of language, to pay attention to the valence of words and the logic of syntax for what they reveal of character, interiority and story. Sprinkling her present collection with aphorisms, anecdotes and internal monologues, she ensures that we will read very carefully indeed. In "What You Learn About the Baby," the narrator addresses the mother of a newborn, each fragment of a section building up a world where life encounters life in all its perplexity, frustration and hope. "How he is curious," the final section reads, "to the limits of his understanding; how he attempts to approach what arouses his curiosity, to the limits of his motion; how confident he is, to the limits of his knowledge; how masterful he is, to the limits of his competence; how he derives satisfaction from another face before him, to the limits of his attention; how he asserts his needs, to the limits of his force." It's a completely accurate description of most babies, but it's also an oblique comment on adulthood. Davis's incantatory sentences seem to show a being who has transcended limits in his very awareness of limits, which leads us to think that growing up is largely a measure of how far we stray from that first, initial perfection. Such a capacity to make language unleash entire states of existence reveals the extent to which Davis's fiction is influenced by her work as a translator. Apart from Proust, her credits include French thinkers and writers like Maurice Blanchot, Michel Butor and Michel Foucault. In reading Davis's stories, therefore, we are likely to be reminded as much of the poststructuralist emphasis on language in the works of Blanchot as of the antinarrative impulse of French nouveau-Romanists like Butor. Occasionally, such European postmodernism can seem a little limiting, as in the story "We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters From a Class of Fourth-Graders." Written in the clinical tone of a cultural anthropologist or a literary theorist, the story analyzes letters under various subheads like "Overall Coherence" and "Formulaic Expressions of Sympathy." Against all expectations, Davis coaxes idiosyncrasies of personality and society from a dry subject, but ultimately the writer's intelligence and expertise are more memorable than the character studies conducted through laboratory samples of language. Still, when Davis sets her fiction fully loose to ponder questions of language and being, the results can be remarkable. In "The Walk," probably the finest story in the collection, a female translator of Proust meets a male critic at a conference in Oxford. The critic has reacted negatively to her work, preferring "the studied cadences of an earlier version." Yet the two like each other, and they go out for an evening walk after the conference has ended. They lose their way and then suddenly emerge at a familiar spot, an occurrence that suggests to the translator "a parallel with a scene in the book she had translated." We are then given the scene in the style preferred by the critic, a lyrical, sinuous passage about the young Marcel on a walk with his parents in Combray, followed by the translator's tauter, more direct version. Neither passage is identified, but the first is C. K. Scott-Moncrieff's 1922 translation, the second Davis's. We have read three passages about circular walks, which may sound indulgent. In fact, the deceptively simple story becomes a palimpsest in which the current experience is seen to be a rewriting of other, previous experiences, and Proust's memory of a childhood already vanished at the time of its writing comes alive in the evening walk of two middle-aged scholars adrift in a foreign university town. Haunting, dreamlike and yet indisputably real, "The Walk" perfectly illustrates Davis's exceptional skills as a writer. Her belief that language is both the subject and the medium of fiction has not led her, as we might expect, into solipsistic echo chambers, but into new worlds. Siddhartha Deb is the author of the novels "The Point of Return" and "An Outline of the Republic."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Davis, a celebrated Proust translator as well as a fiction writer prized for her sly wit and inventiveness, presents a new array of piquant and elegant tales. A master of the extremely short story, some told in one sentence, Davis neatly castigates the vicious circle that is family, the insidious toxins of relationships, and the oddities of intellectual and creative pursuits. Literary and artistic erudition and fluency in loneliness, disappointment, and fretfulness shape these mordant yet pirouetting stories. The Walk, a gem, draws on Davis' love of translation. In For Sixty Cents, Davis performs an insouciant and bracing extrapolation as she calculates all that a customer gets in a cup of coffee. Parodies of academic studies and note taking lead to wickedly cutting stories, such as the compressed epic of a writer and the maids she dreams will free her from child care and housework. Davis' attempts to quantify predicaments to eliminate emotion intensify it instead, which is but one of life's many ironies Davis so artfully reveals. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Davis's spare, always surprising short fiction was most recently collected in Samuel Johnson Is Indignant. In this introspective, more sober culling, Davis touches on favorite themes (mothers, dogs, flies and husbands) and encapsulates, as in "Insomnia," everyday life's absurdist binds: "My body aches so-It must be this heavy bed pressing up against me." Davis is a noted translator (Swann's Way), and a kind of passion-and bemused suffering-for points of rhetoric produces a delicate beauty in "Grammar Questions" ("Now, during his time of dying, can I say, "This is where he lives'?") and "We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth-Graders," written to their hospitalized classmate. The longest selection, "Helen and Vi: A Study in Health and Vitality," examines the long lives of two elderly women, one white, one black, in terms of background, employment, pets and conversational manner. Most moving may be "Burning Family Members," which can be read as a response to the Iraq War: " "They' burned her thousands of miles away from here. The "they' that are starving him here are different." Davis's work defies categorization and possesses a moving, austere elegance. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Davis (Samuel Johnson Is Indignant), a novelist, translator, poet, and, most notably, author of short fiction, defies conventionality with her stories; some are as brief as a single sentence, while others are told in poetry. The writing is pithy and sparse, and there is often more left unsaid than there is written. "The Hand" is complete as follows: "Beyond the hand holding this book that I'm reading, I see another hand lying idle and slightly out of focus--my extra hand." The story "Jane and the Cane," about an elderly mother who cannot find her cane with the dog head, is one paragraph, and the rhythm of the text is strangely evocative of a children's story, a sort of geriatric Dick and Jane reader. A challenging book, with frequent jumps in voice, story, and style, this is not to be read through but rather sipped like a dry, wry martini. This collection will appeal to a limited audience where Davis's other works are appreciated.--Caroline M. Hallsworth, Sudbury, Ont. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
More dauntingly opaque but often brilliant snippets and meditations from MacArthur recipient Davis (Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, 2001, etc.). Davis, an esteemed translator from French, writes in the tradition of the French postmodernists and surrealists. (She's translated Blanchot and Leiris.) The 56 stories in this volume include short prose poems ("The Fly," "Head, Heart") and chilling one-liners ("Suddenly Afraid," "Mother's Reaction to My Travel Plans"). Two of the longer pieces adopt the dispassionate protocols of case studies. "We Miss You" exhaustively deconstructs get-well letters written by '50s-era fourth graders to a classmate hospitalized after being hit by a car. "Helen and Vi, a Study in Health and Vitality" analyzes how the workaday routines and altruism of two elderly women have contributed to their healthy longevity. (Contrast the intermittent, italicized foibles of narcissist Hope, age 100.) Many of the stories not overtly labeled studies are structured as such, with topical captions, such as "Mrs. D. and Her Maids," possibly about Davis's writer-mother. Parents, particularly aged parents, are a preoccupation: Davis has clearly done her time in the halls of eldercare. Her narrators are cynical and reluctant but "good-enough" caregivers. In "What You Learn About the Baby," a mother catalogs in excruciating detail just how her infant dominates and disrupts her life. The laconic "Burning Family Members" bears hard-eyed, shell-shocked witness to a father's death. Unabashedly autobiographical, like many of the stories, is "The Walk," a defense of Davis's translation of Proust's Swann's Way (2003) vs. the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation, and "Cape Cod Diary," in which a writer vicariously travels America with a nameless French historian (presumably de Tocqueville, also translated by Davis). Her impersonal, bloodless tone, plain prose style and tendency to summarize rather than dramatize can have a distancing effect; but Davis' ability to parse hopelessly snarled human interactions (as in the title story) astounds. An initially off-putting collection that gradually becomes habit-forming. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
