A world in a handful of words

Though Lydia Davis probably first came to the attention of English readers through her translations, she has been making a substantial reputation for herself in America with sharp, inventive and demanding short stories. Her field is awkwardness, social ‘leakage’, as sociologists say, and the often bad fit between acts and speech, language and meaning. There is a certain delectable inappropriateness in the fact that some readers (like me) will first have encountered her as one of the translators of Penguin’s 2002 Proust. She did an accurate job, but as a writer herself she could not be much further from that great but voluble and frequently casual writer (your punctuation, Marcel, your punctuation). She is precise, considered and laconic to an unprecedented degree; 30 of her short stories could go into one of Proust’s longer sentences.

Her reputation as a writer’s writer rests largely on those short stories where she reduces what must be told into a mere handful of words. (I am going to save time, and indicate by an asterisk when I am quoting the whole of a short story):

My body aches so — it must be this heavy bed pressing up against me. (* ‘Insomnia’)

Oh, poor Dad. I’m sorry I made fun of you. Now I’m spelling Nietszche wrong, too. (* ‘Nietszche’ )

He says, ‘When I first met you, I didn’t think you would turn out to be so . . . strange.’ (* ‘Almost Over: What’s the Word?’)

In some of them, she exploits the habit of the eager reader to embark upon the body of a story before turning back conscientiously to the title, where the solution to an ambiguity may be found:

At the back of the bus, inside the bathroom, this very small illegal passenger, on its way to Boston. (*‘The Fly’)