Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #579149 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-15
• Released on: 2007-05-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred 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)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
Davis’s whimsical, seemingly eventless fictions, with their looping motifs and love of obliquity, fall somewhere between prose poetry and Venn diagrams. In her new collection, Kafka agonizes over the menu for a dinner date ("One man fights at Marathon, the other in the kitchen"), and death is approached as a grammatical problem ("Is he, once he is dead, still ‘he’?"). While some stories follow a nominal plot—two academics strolling through Oxford is as wild as it gets—others are not even a sentence long. ("Index Entry" reads, in its entirety, "Christian, I’m not a.") Strung together, they gain momentum as tiny epics of paranoia and ennui, each a snapshot of "a moment of madness during which the people could not bear the frustration of their lives."
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From Booklist
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 © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

smart and surprising
Anyone glancing through this book who thinks "well, gee, I could just write a bunch of one-line stories or prose poems and be as smart as Lydia Davis" will find, if they actually attempt this project, that only Lydia Davis is as smart as Lydia Davis. Whether you read at random or in sequence, you will find your assumptions about fiction, story, and point-of-view seriously and subtly challenged by every piece in this collection. The shorter (as short as one line or indeed sentence fragments) pieces challenge the reader to interrogate the ample blank space for context and, of course, find none. On every page, the stylish ways Davis violates narrative conventions of form and substance just whets the craving for more of her relentlessly sharp, witty, varied prose. How can stories ostensibly structured as an anthropological or linguistic studies (or even a mess of notes) give us such heart-breaking insight into the vivid lives of characters who, in terms of the 'story,' are not even characters at all, but merely subjects? How can a non-story (two conference goers idly sharing a pleasant mental and physical ramble through history and literature) where nothing happens, nothing changes, and nothing is achieved inform us, so startlingly, about what a story actually *is*? Thank goodness people are still writing books that demand a reader actually exert the mental activity to *read*, and not just glance over words on a page.

Irritating and taxing at best
Those with a particular fondness for linguistics will find themselves quite taken with this collection, but unfortunately I am not one of them. These stories read like Dr Seuss for the adult reader, minus character development, and sometimes nary a character at all. The concepts behind this collection leave an unapproachable, almost purposely cold feeling to the reader.

I adore short story collections, and the art of a tale unfolding itself in a small space is utterly fascinating to me. I would highly recommend What Was Mine by Ann Beattie, or Thank You For The Music by Jane McCafferty.

Methodically written sentences and stories: observations (sometimes random) on life
Consider the 57 items included in Varieties of Disturbance: approximately one-third (18) are four of fewer sentences in length (eleven consist of single sentences). Another third (20), the mid-sized, are from five sentences to one page in length. The rest (19) are over one page long. Of the longer ones, several are studies or comparisons: get-well letters from schoolmates of a hospitalized fourth grade boy, a passel of maids hired by a writer woman to care for her home and children, and "...A Study in Health and Vitality" of two elderly women. The story entitled, How Do I Mourn Them, is merely a list of entries beginning with, "Shall I [verb], like [initial]," for example, "Shall I smoke and drink heavily, like K." Grammar Questions concerns the proper way to refer to a dying (then dead) father. In the one-page-long-or-so category, topics include: a good taste contest between husband and wife, taking care of a baby, and the absentmindedness of letting a cat come indoors. The one-liners read a bit like random thoughts (which goes for several of the mid-sized stories as well). Its best accessory - the fake fly on the cover, worst - three pages of in your face all caps review excerpts. Those who like comparisons, analyses, personal journals, and random thoughts will probably love it. The same folks will probably also enjoy Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas and The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios by Yann Martell. Those who prefer to dwell (and read) within the realm of normalcy should probably skip this odd collection. Although Lydia Davis fans will no doubt love Varieties of Disturbance, the rest might prefer: Runaway by Alice Munro, Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman, The Turning by Tim Winton, or A Gravestone Made of Wheat by Will Weaver.