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A review by sebp
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis
Did not finish book. Stopped at 9%.
Not really interested in reading 700 pages of short stories, but I found it as a way to re-think the short story and its subcategories.
Skimming through most of Davis's short stories in this collection makes it quite clear that a fair chunk of them are autofiction, and typically thinly veiled recounts of events, many of which find the narrator in strife with some friend or family member. At times she uses vaguely realistic names and sometimes opts to replace them with letters like 'X' and 'Y'. I can imagine Davis in the moment of the argument or confrontation, thinking to herself, I'll let my readers decide who was in the right in this situation.
There are also many repetitive stories which use the same conventions and playful syntactic structures, where Davis is reflectively considering something about herself, or she is comparing two things. She chooses to focus on the mundane, clarifying in every possible way what she is and what she is not, what she believes and what she does not believe, etc, etc, making sure to cover every single scenario. Some of the one-pagers are really good though, like the Mildred one, the feeling like an old man, ones that aren't full of nauseating, verbose interiority.
Skimming through most of Davis's short stories in this collection makes it quite clear that a fair chunk of them are autofiction, and typically thinly veiled recounts of events, many of which find the narrator in strife with some friend or family member. At times she uses vaguely realistic names and sometimes opts to replace them with letters like 'X' and 'Y'. I can imagine Davis in the moment of the argument or confrontation, thinking to herself, I'll let my readers decide who was in the right in this situation.
There are also many repetitive stories which use the same conventions and playful syntactic structures, where Davis is reflectively considering something about herself, or she is comparing two things. She chooses to focus on the mundane, clarifying in every possible way what she is and what she is not, what she believes and what she does not believe, etc, etc, making sure to cover every single scenario. Some of the one-pagers are really good though, like the Mildred one, the feeling like an old man, ones that aren't full of nauseating, verbose interiority.