A review by ananyabhargava
Break It Down by Lydia Davis

4.0

i read the titular story, which is probably the most ambitious story in this collection, two years ago and it has stayed with me since. this was my first time reading this collection in its entirety; and this time around, i gravitated towards the simpler stories that chronicled everyday domestic problems, like the story about the mouse that became a staple in an unhappily married couple's kitchen, and the one about the man who lives in a shed on the land he has purchased and draws heaps of blueprints of his dream house but never acts on his plans. i savored and kept (keep) returning to these uncharmed stories because the straightforward manner in which they delved into the minutiae of the narrators' lives made them feel a lot more profound than the stories that pushed for meaning or cloaked it under clever literary devices.