Lydia Davis writes in straightforward, elegant sentences about people whose thoughts are not straightforward at all. With gentle yet penetrating insight, she illuminates characters who are worried, puzzled about how to live their lives, not sure what to believe. They are drawn in by false notions, imagine nonexistent dangers, read philosophy but fail to understand it. The combination of their imperfect thinking and Davis’s flawless prose is touching; it can also be extremely funny.
Most of the stories in “Bezoek aan haar man” are very short: a few pages long, or a paragraph, or one sentence. Although they seldom have an actual plot, they are often concerned with stories and storytelling: she is interested in the effect that narratives have on people’s lives.
In “The Professor,” a woman who teaches English sees a romantic movie and starts wishing she could marry a cowboy. “I was tired of thinking, which was what I did most in those days. […] I might feel something, but I would think about what I was feeling at the same time. […] I imagined that maybe a cowboy would help me stop thinking so much.” She daydreams about running a motel in the desert and falling in love with the cowboy when he comes to stay. “I had that strange confidence, born of watching a good movie, that I could be something different from what I was, and I started listening to country-western music on the car radio, though I knew it wasn’t written for me.”
In “The Bone” a woman describes an incident that happened years before: she served her husband fish for dinner and a bone got caught in his throat. He and she went together to the hospital, where a doctor took it out. Later they divorced. On the rare occasions when they see each other, they still bring up the night of the fishbone. The story itself has become stuck in their throats, a small, tickly scrap of a marriage long ago consumed.
Lydia Davis’s own first husband was Paul Auster, a fact that stimulates curiosity. They were together for 13 years, collaborated on French translations, and have a son. Was he the model for the man with the fishbone? Or for the man in the title story, who meets his wife to discuss their divorce? Like Auster, Davis is a minimalist with a distinctive style. But where Auster is mysterious and abstract, Davis often looks for meaning in domestic detail: sounds from outside an apartment window, the furniture in a room. As a result, her stories are calm even when the people in them are desperate.
In “What Was Interesting,” a writer is trying to describe a moment in which her boyfriend was rude to her. Although she is furious, she can’t seem to make the event sound important, and she wonders why. The result is both an account of deep emotional pain and a subtle inquiry into how love stories create their effect. Likewise, “French Lesson I: Le Meurtre” examines the building blocks of stories. Here, Davis takes words from an elementary French lesson—le poulet, le fermier, la femme—and uses them to construct a mysterious crime thriller.
It took a while for Davis’s star to rise. She is the author of one novel, “The End of the Story” (1995), and the winner of various lesser-known literary prizes, but it has only been in the past ten years, and especially after her “Collected Stories” were published in 2009, that she won widespread critical recognition. (“Bezoek aan haar man,” her first Dutch publication, contains the first half of that collection, in an excellent translation by Peter Bergsma.) She has also translated some 30 books from French to English, including Sartre and Simenon (together with Auster), and more recently Proust and “Madame Bovary.”
Although she’s an experimental writer, she’s not an intimidating one; her brief observations are both intellectual and gently self-mocking. It’s easy to recognize oneself in a story like “A Few Things Wrong with Me,” in which a man calls a woman to end their relationship. When she asks him why, he tells her that there are things about her that bothered him from the beginning. Inevitably, she can’t stop wondering what they are, “a useless question, really, since I’m not the one who can answer it and anyone else who tries will come up with a different answer, though of course all the answers together may add up to the right one, if there is such a thing as a right answer to a question like that.” Seeing that the human condition is absurd, she can only conclude that thinking—and writing—are symptoms, or possibly even causes of the disease.
In “Foucault and Pencil” the narrator describes a failed attempt to read the abstruse philosopher Michel Foucault in French. “Short sentences easier to understand than long ones. Certain long ones understandable part by part, but so long, forgot beginning before reaching end.” It’s comforting to know that one is not the only reader daunted by difficult writing—but Davis is also showing off her own clear thinking. In some ways her stories insist that life can’t be understood, and yet her own power of insight offers hope that it can.
Besides, the idea that uncomfortable experiences—the moments when we realize we are not equal to the demands of life—can also be literature is an encouraging one. In another story, under the heading “I have learned what art really is,” she writes, “Art is not in some far-off place.” Literature is here, in the scraps and bones of life—and in the telling.
Trouw, May 21, 2011. Lydia Davis, Bezoek aan haar man (Amsterdam: Atlas, 2011), Collected Stories (New York: FSG, 2009).