A review by scottishben
Can't and Won't by Lydia Davis
5.0
Lydia Davis is the type of author that could write about complaining about the colour of peas of packaging or the fact that she does not have a dog and do so in a way that is not only interesting but strangely profound and essential.
Like Richard Ford there is a very distinctive way in which she writes so that reading almost any sentence of hers it is almost always immediately identifiable as hers.
She is well known to write very, very short short stories, some of which are less than 20 words, and yet many of these convey more than many much, much longer works.
This is not a perfect collection and to be honest it did overstay its welcome slightly with me. In many ways this is my fault. I read the collection over the course of a week or so and many short story collections benefit from a decent amount of pauses between stories that I did not really give it. It is also in part that I felt the quality was a little more variable than in previous volumes. There are some of my favorite of her stories in this volume but also some of the least memorable.
Many of the stories are grouped as "dream" or "from Flaubert" but this is not really explained until the end of the book what these actually are. I didnt really like many of the Flaubert stories but this may just be me.
Overall though the highs of the collection outweigh the lows and there will be many of these stories that I read and reread, indeed I have already reread some of the stories several times.
Like Richard Ford there is a very distinctive way in which she writes so that reading almost any sentence of hers it is almost always immediately identifiable as hers.
She is well known to write very, very short short stories, some of which are less than 20 words, and yet many of these convey more than many much, much longer works.
This is not a perfect collection and to be honest it did overstay its welcome slightly with me. In many ways this is my fault. I read the collection over the course of a week or so and many short story collections benefit from a decent amount of pauses between stories that I did not really give it. It is also in part that I felt the quality was a little more variable than in previous volumes. There are some of my favorite of her stories in this volume but also some of the least memorable.
Many of the stories are grouped as "dream" or "from Flaubert" but this is not really explained until the end of the book what these actually are. I didnt really like many of the Flaubert stories but this may just be me.
Overall though the highs of the collection outweigh the lows and there will be many of these stories that I read and reread, indeed I have already reread some of the stories several times.