Whether fiction or non, Davis never bores.
Five years after a mammoth, comprehensive collection of stories secured her literary legacy, this unique author explores new directions and blurs boundaries in writing that is always fresh and often funny.
For one of the country’s most critically acclaimed writers (The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, 2009), a new collection is like a box of chocolates, one in which—as she writes in “A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates”—a single piece can be “very good, rich and bitter, sweet and strange at the same time” and can feed “a vague, indefinite hunger, not necessarily for food.” As previously, her shortest stories—a single sentence or paragraph, well less than a page—could often pass as the prose equivalent of a haiku or Zen koan, and elements such as character development, or even characters, are often conspicuous in their absence. The narrative voice has a consistency of tone throughout much of the collection: conversational, intelligent, by no means opaque or impenetrable like much postmodern fiction. It flows easily from dreams to conscious reflection, often about words themselves or “Writing” (the title of one very short story) or reading, ruminations that may or may not be the author’s own. As the relationship between writer and reader becomes more familiar, one gets a sense of a narrative character and of what's important to that character (grammar, concision, precision) and how she spends her time (in academe, on various modes of transportation, among animals in the country). Some stories are based on the letters of Flaubert (whom Davis has translated, along with Proust and others), while others are unsigned (and unsent?) letters to various companies and boards, comments and complaints that often themselves turn into stories. In “Not Interested,” the narrator explains, “I’m not interested in reading this book. I was not interested in reading the last one I tried, either....The books I’m talking about are supposed to be reasonably good, but they simply don’t interest me....These days, I prefer books that contain something real, or something the author at least believed to be real. I don’t want to be bored by someone else’s imagination.”
Whether fiction or non, Davis never bores.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-11858-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
PROFILES
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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