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sunshowerdandelionFinished The End of the Story and I guess I'm not used to Lydia Davis's style for longer works. I'm familiar with her flash fiction and short prose poems and stuff, just not her novels. And I think is beautiful in short-form, say, in Break It Down, sort of gets repetitive in longer works. Her fiction to be sure is as sharp as ever: the book is very metafictional, I think, and it's a bit about the impossibility of remembering love and the omissions that make love possible, and also about the difficulty of knowing any fixed thing. I really like the bits where the unnamed narrator finds out that, actually, unconsciously, she's combined several incidents in her mind, smoothed things out, made errors in remembering because of her mood.
I think the muted sound of the narration truly works when it's recounting the nitty-gritty of relationships. Like, oh, we had beer, and then we did this, and then thought this. That is what a relationship is. That is the reality of a relationship. I think through this way of writing, the narrator tries to demystify her own experience... but even then it doesn't work. Those omissions are still emerge in the text.
I think the emotions are deliberately muted - there's less in the way of devices meant for empathy, and I think that's deliberate. I did feel their lack. When I read about love I do expect to feel it, and maybe that's a failure on my part in reading this book. The prose lacks sound - there's too many ors, and lots of bets are hedged by the narrator, but I suppose that is the point.
Maybe I'm too used to reading romances.
I think the muted sound of the narration truly works when it's recounting the nitty-gritty of relationships. Like, oh, we had beer, and then we did this, and then thought this. That is what a relationship is. That is the reality of a relationship. I think through this way of writing, the narrator tries to demystify her own experience... but even then it doesn't work. Those omissions are still emerge in the text.
I think the emotions are deliberately muted - there's less in the way of devices meant for empathy, and I think that's deliberate. I did feel their lack. When I read about love I do expect to feel it, and maybe that's a failure on my part in reading this book. The prose lacks sound - there's too many ors, and lots of bets are hedged by the narrator, but I suppose that is the point.
Maybe I'm too used to reading romances.
