Lydia Davis, that very intelligent and funny friend

A woman reads to someone, her husband infers, the story she was working on. He tells her that she has “no beginning, no ending, no plot.” It might seem like a bad thing, it usually is a bad thing, but here it is a game. It’s a good description of the story. epiphany collection that brings together Lydia Davis in Our Strangershis most recent book that just arrived at local bookstores like Those people we don’t know, with translation by Eleonora González Capria. The mini story in question is “Still Far from Ring Lardner” and it is one of the, quote, longest ones. It takes up a page and a little piece.

The woman who writes the story within the story, in mamushka who plays put in abyss, it could be Lydia Davis. In the other stories, 144 in total in a little more than 300 pages, that air of plausibility is also always present. That is one of the almost supernatural gifts that the author has, she has been publishing for five decades and here she became massively known with I can’t nor do I want to in 2014, with translation by Inés Garland. In 2021 it was published Essays I, an existence detective experienceand another volume will arrive soon, all edited by Eterna Cadencia.

In any genre or register, Davis writes like a very intelligent and funny friend who talks about what crosses his mind. Reading it is an experience of intimacy, humor, wit, and strange (and/or missed) beauty. But in his stories he makes fiction. The temptation to understand them as memories, just the anecdote misplaced or disguised with subtlety, is another game that the author premeditated without innocence. She leaves clues that support the literature hypothesis of the self and an equal number of signs that disprove it.

Another game he plays is to touch on a theme in a story and return to it from another place several stories later. And there is more. Form and in all its forms. It is not arbitrary. Move between cravings and occurrences. An apparent whim, but with foundation, closes the issue with a warning or warning.

Lydia Davis decided that Those people we don’t know is “available only in bookstores and libraries” because he is worried about Amazon’s dominance. Also, because the author wants “people who love reading to return to that place where other people who love reading have been selling books with dedication and care for centuries: the bookstore on the corner.” It is an adorable wish. With many layers of meaning and feeling.

Davis’s (mini)stories do not follow formal structures, They do not pay attention to the expected formats and they simply appear, playful, like flashes. In his latest book are his now classic short stories of a few paragraphs, where there are ideas, dreams, reflections, small domestic anecdotes, conversations overheard and even the points of view of the house’s cat and dog.

There are also others that are planted on the page like poems, and They vary between humor and the exquisiteness of the language. Some are in the form of letters or lists. There are phrases that could be aphorisms, but no, because they do not teach anything, they are only, like the whole, something that shows fragments, a way of looking at things in the world, which is as unique and particular as it is everyday and simple.

The stories are simple, like “My briefcase”, which opens the book, and already makes the total reading agreement clear. “Obviously, it was because of my briefcase that they hired me again to teach the next semester,” he begins in the middle of an idea. In many cases, what matters and stands out is what is omitted. When he tells what life is like in the town through the elderly neighbors he sees passing by. Or the daily life of a young housewife, who is embarrassed in front of the postman because of the mess in her kitchen.

“Living in this world is not an easy thing: everyone is constantly upset by important things that go wrong and even by inconsequential things.” This is how “Everyone Cried” begins, where she describes everyday life in an office from when, at what moment, the types of people can’t avoid tears. In the bathroom at work, on the subway going there or in the morning when you wake up and know that you have to go to work.

“Long is the shadow, / that crosses the counter, / of this grain of salt.”, writes Davis in “Late Afternoon”. And that’s it. Nothing, and a lot. That tiny image and the way of placing the eye there, like this, is also a deep reflection, without editorial or moral. Tear the cloth or veil of general glances in three short verses.

When he releases the prose too, the whole is crossed, as subtext or in the foreground, by the existential, the fear of growing old and/or its strange observation, the duels (of deaths, of loves, of friendships), marriage, (calmly , turbulent, boring, friendly), travel (by train, by plane), translation. And more.

The walk, through diverse themes and feelings, inevitably leads to inspection. Without self-help, with hilarity. Because Davis, at the same time, always entertains. In “Mother’s Devotion”, he says: “I would sacrifice my right arm to see him well and happy./ Well, maybe not the right arm./ But the left one for sure.” That is the entire text. “With excellent expertise.” / is at the top of his staircase, / ruining with the utmost care, / the oldest house in the town”, is the epigram titled “Major Master of Works”.

He was born in Massachusetts, United States, in 1947. He was raised on travel and adventurous scholarship. His mother was also a writer and worked as a teacher.. After finishing high school and before starting his university career, young Lydia came to Argentina for a few months. His father, Robert Gorham Davis, was a literary critic and professor at Columbia University, where among other students he had Norman Mailer, and he spent time teaching in the city of La Plata.

In the early 70’s, Davis lived for a few years in France with Paul Auster, who was her first husband. and with whom he had a son. She is also a translator. Among other authors, he brought Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust and Marguerite Duras into English. As a writer, she has won so many awards that it is impossible to list them all. Just two examples are valid as buttons: the International Booker in 2013 and the Order of Arts and Letters in 2015.

All of this is present in his work, it is the heart that makes his texts beat. Without preening. You don’t necessarily have to be a black palate of literature to get carried away by his books.. Those people we don’t knowas a whole, has a bonus. Although initially it may seem that the grouting is capricious, in reality the curation of the whole leaves a specific flavor in the mouth, or on the tip of the brain, the tongue.

What Davis observes is precisely what he warns of in his original title: “our strangers.” The other, but with belonging (the neighbors, the adjacent passengers on trains or planes, the conversations of others, the strangers in New York who help the Orthodox Jews handle money or electrical things on Shabbat) and to whom they narrate, with amazement , alien to herself (the body, motherhood, marriage, her work). She is meticulous in describing what she sees. It puts the magnifying glass at a minimum point that ends up showing a very enormous whole. What you focus on is quite pertinent to today: how could we relate (well, better) with those people we don’t know and who exist around us?

The answer that remains hovering over you at the end of the book is: being part of the communitywith the threads that are woven, assembling the human hive of relationships. Or, as he warns in the story that gives the book its title, where he explains that a neighbor can become a “kind of cousin” or a “bitter enemy”, someone who is “an intolerable presence” that invades one’s land: “ Thanks to the things that unite us, we become a kind of family.”

Our strangersby Lydia Davis (Eternal Cadence).