I'll save you another review about how Lydia Davis is good when she's writing really short stories that break the rules/writing standard short stories that are really emotionally affecting, and bad when she's writing standard short stories that are really emotionally affecting/writing really short stories that break the rules. Suffice it to say, she does both of these things fairly well.

That aside, I have no idea what all the hype is about. Having read all of one book by Davis and two by Knausgaard, I'd put them in the same basket: formally adventurous, more or less devoid of content, unless you count what I (and probably you) do every day to be interesting content, which I do not. I've already done it. I barely care about my own little incidences of domestic unhappiness (to be fair, they are very rare and very minor, because my wife is a wondrous human being); I sure as shit don't care about someone else's; and that goes double for invented versions of the same.

So yes, there is some formal inventiveness here, and I don't mean the one line stories, which are neither cute nor interesting. Davis at the very least varies her means of delivering domestic unhappiness, and sometimes even branches out into some slightly more imaginative territory. But I honestly have no idea what people would get out of this if they weren't obsessed with literary form. In that sense, Davis is in pretty good company. I feel the same way about James Joyce, for instance. She's also in pretty bad company, e.g., James Joyce.

I am a philistine. I care that people write about something worth writing about. I'll read more of Davis's work, because hey, it's easy to turn the pages and her sentences are okay and really, it's no small thing to be constantly futzing with form. But I lash back at the critics on this one. "A clear eyed and surgical inquiry"? Well yes, Dave Eggers, I agree. "into the nature of existence itself". Er... no. ( )

Ensconced, as I am right now, in short stories, one could scarcely imagine a greater contrast with Alice Munro. This is not just because Davis does rather stretch – or should I say shrink – the boundaries of what a short story is. Take this, for example:

Certain Knowledge from Herodotus

These are the facts about the fish in the Nile:

That’s it, the entire enchilada. It made me google Herodotus, fish and Nile, which sent me to this rather wonderful quotation:

There are many ways how to hunt crocodiles; I shall describe the way I think is most worth mentioning. The hunter baits a hook with a pig’s back, and lets it float in the river. He remains on the bank with a live piglet and beats it. The crocodile hears the squeals of the pig, follows the sound, and finds the bait, which it swallows; then the hunter hauls in the line. When the crocodile is ashore, he covers its eyes with mud; then the quarry is very easily overcome, but without that it would be very difficult.
Herodotus, Histories 2,70

Handy advice when I’m back in Australia next.

Rest here:


http://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/samuel-johnson-is-indignan... ( )

Ensconced, as I am right now, in short stories, one could scarcely imagine a greater contrast with Alice Munro. This is not just because Davis does rather stretch – or should I say shrink – the boundaries of what a short story is. Take this, for example:

Certain Knowledge from Herodotus

These are the facts about the fish in the Nile:

That’s it, the entire enchilada. It made me google Herodotus, fish and Nile, which sent me to this rather wonderful quotation:

There are many ways how to hunt crocodiles; I shall describe the way I think is most worth mentioning. The hunter baits a hook with a pig’s back, and lets it float in the river. He remains on the bank with a live piglet and beats it. The crocodile hears the squeals of the pig, follows the sound, and finds the bait, which it swallows; then the hunter hauls in the line. When the crocodile is ashore, he covers its eyes with mud; then the quarry is very easily overcome, but without that it would be very difficult.
Herodotus, Histories 2,70

Handy advice when I’m back in Australia next.

Rest here:


http://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/samuel-johnson-is-indignan... ( )

Ensconced, as I am right now, in short stories, one could scarcely imagine a greater contrast with Alice Munro. This is not just because Davis does rather stretch – or should I say shrink – the boundaries of what a short story is. Take this, for example:

Certain Knowledge from Herodotus

These are the facts about the fish in the Nile:

That’s it, the entire enchilada. It made me google Herodotus, fish and Nile, which sent me to this rather wonderful quotation:

There are many ways how to hunt crocodiles; I shall describe the way I think is most worth mentioning. The hunter baits a hook with a pig’s back, and lets it float in the river. He remains on the bank with a live piglet and beats it. The crocodile hears the squeals of the pig, follows the sound, and finds the bait, which it swallows; then the hunter hauls in the line. When the crocodile is ashore, he covers its eyes with mud; then the quarry is very easily overcome, but without that it would be very difficult.
Herodotus, Histories 2,70

Handy advice when I’m back in Australia next.

Rest here:


http://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/samuel-johnson-is-indignan... ( )

Rather than comment on the stories in this collection I will let the author speak for herself. Here are selected paragraphs from "Blind Date";

""There isn't really much to tell," she said, but she would tell it if I liked. We were sitting in a midtown luncheonette. "I've only had one blind date in my life. And I didn't really have it. I can think of more interesting situations that are like a blind date--say, when someone gives you a book as a present, when they fix you up with that book. I was once given a book of essays about reading, writing, book collecting. I felt it was a perfect match. I started reading it right away, in the backseat of the car. I stopped listening to the conversation in the front. I like to read about how other people read and collect books, even how they shelve their books. But by the time I was done with the book, I had taken a strong dislike to the author's personality. I won't have another date with her!" She laughed. Here we were interrupted by the waiter, and then a series of incidents followed that kept us from resuming our conversation that day."

...

"I was fifteen or sixteen, I guess," she said. "I was home from boarding school. Maybe it was summer. I don't know where my parents were. They were often away. They often left me alone there, sometimes for the evening, sometimes for weeks at a time. The phone rang. It was a boy I didn't know. He said he was a friend of a boy from school—I can't remember who. We talked a little and then he asked me if I wanted to have dinner with him. He sounded nice enough so I said I would, and we agreed on a day and a time and I told him where I lived."

...

"Well, when the day came, I didn't want to go out to dinner with this boy. I just didn't want the difficulty of this date. It scared me—not because there was anything scary about the boy but because he was a stranger, I didn't know him. I didn't want to sit there face-to-face in some restaurant and start from the very beginning, knowing nothing. It didn't feel right. And there was the burden of that recommendation—'Give her a try.'

"Then again, maybe there were other reasons. Maybe I had been alone in that apartment so much by then that I had retreated into some kind of inner, unsociable space that was hard to come out of. Maybe I felt I had disappeared and I was comfortable that way and did not want to be forced back into existence. I don't know. ( )