Casey's review
Varieties of Disturbance: Stories
by Lydia Davis
Yeah, I feel like she's either a one-star or a five-star. It's tough, because some of the writers I love get accused of showing off or being overly clever, where I find them genuinely brilliant, and what are they supposed to do, curb that brilliance or their cleverness so that people don't accuse them of being such? Could you say, then, that there isn't such a thing as a showoffy author, that it's all opinion? I wouldn't, but who knows where I'll stand w/r/t that issue in ten years. I think she's brilliant, and while some of her stories really don't work for me (your example is a good one), most of them are pretty revelatory in their concision. Some are linguistically funny, as in she has the ability to make me literally laugh out loud with the way she forms sentences and with how strong her command of the language is (typical for a translator? See Helen DeWitt), some, in my opinion, succeed in boiling things -- emotions or whatever -- down to their most essential. Differing HOs, is what we have here. Our friendship will suffer. What about that cover, though?
Some famous linguist once said it's not what you put in but what you leave out that makes a story resonate.
Cover rules, our friendship, not so much. J/k x 1,000,000.
As for the brilliance thing, I don't think anyone's hating on brilliance itself. It's just to what end is that brilliance being employed. I don't think using one's superior intelligence, as LD does, to write a short story proving that you can use every permeatation of words relating to familial relationships in two pages or less is worthwhile. I'm not asking her to curb anything, I'm asking her to spend some time crafting a story that strikes a chord in the reader deeper than, "Wow. How clever."
Some of her stuff does strike a chord deeper than that, though apparently far more for you than for me. Either way, it seems she could often go deeper, but instead she gets lazy, willing to employ mental gymnastics at the expense of emotional resonance. Not to drop the RC bomb, but...to me it takes far more brilliance to write one good Carver story than 16 volumes of uber-'brilliant' LD-style fiction.
Brilliance is a means, not an end, that's all the people are saying. Also, they're saying 'Free Mumia'.
Casey's review
Varieties of Disturbance: Stories by Lydia Davis
Casey's review
rating:
Lydia Davis is an incredible writer in terms of having complete and total control over the English language. In terms of writing stories that spark any emotion, revelation, or greater than a passing interest in me, however, she is a very bad writer.
She writes stories that don't have plots or characters that you care about or enough development of a situation to build up concern about what will happen next. At times I think she's trying to boil down stories to the absolute core, which is a cool idea but ends up feeling like you watched the five-minute climax of a three hour movie, and are then expected to care about it, when that's pretty much impossible.
She writes stories in a variety of formats that don't fit into the traditional structure of what people consider a 'short story.' I'm not against experimentation or crazy story structure or even the lack of a plot, necessarily. But when it's for the sake of either a.) showing how clever you are, or b.) simply to show that stor...more
She writes stories that don't have plots or characters that you care about or enough development of a situation to build up concern about what will happen next. At times I think she's trying to boil down stories to the absolute core, which is a cool idea but ends up feeling like you watched the five-minute climax of a three hour movie, and are then expected to care about it, when that's pretty much impossible.
She writes stories in a variety of formats that don't fit into the traditional structure of what people consider a 'short story.' I'm not against experimentation or crazy story structure or even the lack of a plot, necessarily. But when it's for the sake of either a.) showing how clever you are, or b.) simply to show that stor...more
Yeah, I feel like she's either a one-star or a five-star. It's tough, because some of the writers I love get accused of showing off or being overly clever, where I find them genuinely brilliant, and what are they supposed to do, curb that brilliance or their cleverness so that people don't accuse them of being such? Could you say, then, that there isn't such a thing as a showoffy author, that it's all opinion? I wouldn't, but who knows where I'll stand w/r/t that issue in ten years. I think she's brilliant, and while some of her stories really don't work for me (your example is a good one), most of them are pretty revelatory in their concision. Some are linguistically funny, as in she has the ability to make me literally laugh out loud with the way she forms sentences and with how strong her command of the language is (typical for a translator? See Helen DeWitt), some, in my opinion, succeed in boiling things -- emotions or whatever -- down to their most essential. Differing HOs, is what we have here. Our friendship will suffer. What about that cover, though?Some famous linguist once said it's not what you put in but what you leave out that makes a story resonate.
Cover rules, our friendship, not so much. J/k x 1,000,000.
As for the brilliance thing, I don't think anyone's hating on brilliance itself. It's just to what end is that brilliance being employed. I don't think using one's superior intelligence, as LD does, to write a short story proving that you can use every permeatation of words relating to familial relationships in two pages or less is worthwhile. I'm not asking her to curb anything, I'm asking her to spend some time crafting a story that strikes a chord in the reader deeper than, "Wow. How clever."
Some of her stuff does strike a chord deeper than that, though apparently far more for you than for me. Either way, it seems she could often go deeper, but instead she gets lazy, willing to employ mental gymnastics at the expense of emotional resonance. Not to drop the RC bomb, but...to me it takes far more brilliance to write one good Carver story than 16 volumes of uber-'brilliant' LD-style fiction.
Brilliance is a means, not an end, that's all the people are saying. Also, they're saying 'Free Mumia'.