Can't and Won't: Stories, by Lydia Davis
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Can't and Won't: Stories, by Lydia Davis
Free Ebook PDF Can't and Won't: Stories, by Lydia Davis
NATIONAL BESTSELLERThe New York Times • Los Angeles Times • The Boston GlobeHer stories may be literal one-liners: the entirety of "Bloomington" reads, "Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before." Or they may be lengthier investigations of the havoc wreaked by the most mundane disruptions to routine: in "A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates," a professor receives a gift of thirty-two small chocolates and is paralyzed by the multitude of options she imagines for their consumption. The stories may appear in the form of letters of complaint; they may be extracted from Flaubert's correspondence; or they may be inspired by the author's own dreams, or the dreams of friends. What does not vary throughout Can't and Won't, Lydia Davis's fifth collection of stories, is the power of her finely honed prose. Davis is sharply observant; she is wry or witty or poignant. Above all, she is refreshing. Davis writes with bracing candor and sly humor about the quotidian, revealing the mysterious, the foreign, the alienating, and the pleasurable within the predictable patterns of daily life.
Can't and Won't: Stories, by Lydia Davis- Amazon Sales Rank: #111830 in Books
- Brand: Davis, Lydia
- Published on: 2015-03-31
- Released on: 2015-03-31
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.19" h x .80" w x 5.49" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 304 pages
From Booklist The title story in Davis’ latest collection of nimble and caustic stories, a wry tale about why a writer was denied a prize, is two sentences in length, but, as always with this master of distillation, it conveys volumes. In the wake of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2009) and receiving the Man Booker International Prize, Davis presents delectably intriguing and affecting new works shaped by her devotion to language, vigilant observations, literary erudition, and tart humor. A number of strikingly enigmatic stories carry the tag “dream,” and they are, in fact, based on dreams dreamed by Davis and her family and friends. Thirteen intricately layered and thorny pieces flagged as “stories from Flaubert” improvise saucily and revealingly on the seminal writer’s letters. Elsewhere, Davis tosses together the trivial and the profound in hilarious and plangent tales about painful memories and epic indecision, deftly capturing the mind’s perpetual churning and the terrible arbitrariness of life. Then, amid all this fretfulness and angst, a narrator devotes herself to watching three serene cows in a neighboring field. Davis is resplendent. --Donna Seaman
Review
“Widely considered one of the most original minds in American fiction today.” ―Dana Goodyear, The New Yorker
“This is what the best and most original literature can do: make us more acutely aware of life on and off the page.” ―Peter Orner, The New York Times Book Review
“[Can't and Won't] is evidence of a writer who is in total control of her own peculiar original voice; its ¬pleasures are un¬expected and manifold.” ―Kate Christensen, Elle
“A master of sequencing. Davis mixes long and short dispatches to intoxicating effect.” ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“The most revolutionary collection of stories by an American in twenty-five years.” ―John Freeman, The Boston Globe
“Drop everything and pick up Lydia Davis's fifth collection of short stories . . . Observation, drama, and (yes) compression--it's all there, giving the most minor moments a kind of epic weight.” ―David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
“Davis's signal gift is to make us feel alive.” ―Claire Messud, Financial Times
“Davis dances right up to and around that final mystery that can't, won't, and must be borne, that most inexplicable magic trick, life's vanishing act.” ―Parul Sehgal, NPR
“Davis is official literary dynamite . . . Everything she writes looks effortless.” ―San Francisco Chronicle
About the Author Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and four previous story collections, including Varieties of Disturbance, a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is also the acclaimed translator of Swann's Way (2003) and Madame Bovary (2010), both of which were awarded the French American Foundation Translation Prize. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, published in 2009, was described by James Wood in The New Yorker as a "grand cumulative achievement." She is the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize.
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19 of 21 people found the following review helpful. Off the boil By Tony Covatta I was disappointed in Lydia Davis's latest collection of "stories." This one contains the usual collection of aphoristic one or two liners, a few of her characteristic page and a half plays on themes or tropes, some very short traditional stories, and at least one full length masterfully done longer story, "The Seals" which I would recommend to anyone. There are also some pointless short sketches of dreams of hers and her friends, and reworkings of scenes from Flaubert.All of it is delivered in very well done prose, but I found too much of it pointless and cold, and when Ms. Davis reveals herself, as many of the snippets seem autobiographical, the persona that emerges is of a person who is not very engaging, indeed is a bit cranky and self-centered. Something has happened to her sensibility since she wrote the stories contained in her Collected Stories. There she came across as quirky, but plucky and engaging, willing to risk a bit of herself in exploring her situation in the world. Here she seems a smaller person, with a jaundiced point of view. An irritating example is the somewhat longish letter to the hotel manager where she takes the hotel to task for placing "schrod" on the menu, insisting that there is no such thing as schrod. Of course, there is. Schrod is young cod. I've known this for years. If she was intending to portray the narrator as an irritable and irritating pedant, on purpose, she did so, but at what a cost. The story, like most of this collection was to this reader only irritating, riddled with a solipsism that I did not find enjoyable. Ironically many of the successful stories she wrote earlier had to do with her divorce or the deaths and declines of her mother and father. Difficulty brought out the best in her. Has success spoiled Lydia Davis?If you must read this after enjoying her Collected Stories, read "The Seals," "Local Obits" and the one toward the end about attending a wedding and what you see and don't see, "If at the Wedding (At the Zoo)." These are very good stories, showing she can still write at a very high level. Perhaps she simply cannot sustain the seriocomic vision necessary for that level of effort any more. Time will tell, if she continues to write.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful. Sorry, Lydia By eva b. I'm an ardent Lydia Davis fan, but this is not my favorite. There are some winners here, but some that feel like inert fillers.Understood that she is an important translator of French literature, but those pieces seem inappropriate in this collection.Maybe that's another book. I'm having a bit of a slog to finish this book. Some of it just feels tired and forced (to earn the publisher's advance). With regrets . . .
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful. Magnificent Collection of Stories Offering a Sympathetic Insight into Our Lives By Dr. Laurence Raw The title adumbrates the book's basic concern: "Can't" suggests an inability to do something; "Won't" a conscious decision not to do anything. This tension between willed action and human powerlessness persists throughout most of the stories in this collection. In "A Visit to the Dentist" the speaker speculates on whether "thoughts are fluid, and flow downward from one person to another;" suggesting a lack of self-determination; in "An Awkward Situation" the protagonist finds herself in an unexpectedly difficult situation, prompting her to wonder where her husband is and why he does not come to help her out. Even when human beings do have control over their lives, they often discover that their actions seem absurd, at least to the readers. What are we to make, for example, of the sentence in "The Piano," telling us that "One driver walks away down the lane with his back turned while the other shoves it over the cliff?" Through such stories Lydia Davis reminds us of language's limitations - although we use it to persuade, or think 'rationally', we are often faced with situations that are quite simply impossible or inexpressible. On such occasions we have to trust in ourselves and/or rely on our own judgments. Sometimes this process can be difficult - in "The Letter to the Foundation" the writer wonders whether they "have to exist" any more - but in the end perhaps we have to accept the way of the world and get on with it by acknowledging that there is no permanent "meaningful connection" between words, actions and things.This kind of ontological speculation might suggest that CAN'T AND WON'T is a difficult read. Far from it: in her latest collection of stories, Lydia Davis writes humorously yet sympathetically about her fellow human beings. Some of the stories are nothing more than one or two sentences in length; others (such as "The Seals" are quite substantial in length. While it is difficult to identify Davis with a particular point of view, as there are so many speakers in the stories, we understand something of her perspective from a quotation in "The Exhibition:: "What s it that makes me so attractive to cretins, madmen, idiots, and savages? Do those poor creatures sense a kind of sympathy in me ..." This passage is cleverly structured: the first question suggests displeasure with the use of derogatory names for different sections of the population, while the second sentence communicates precisely the opposite feeling. The speaker is sympathetic to everyone, regardless of their appearance; and it is this sympathy that helps her to understand the difficulties of communication at any and every level.At another level, CAN'T AND WON'T also offers a view of contemporary America. In the days when cities thrived on their heavy industries, and everyone had full employment, life seemed uncomplicated. Now in the post-industrial world, where "there are poles falling over into the water with all their wires still strung on them" ("The Seals") - people find it difficult to make sense of their lives. Often they believe that time is passing without their noticing it: "things in the middle distance flow past more quietly and steadily, or sometimes they seem to be moving forward, just because the things in the middle distance are moving backward" ("The Seals"). At such moments Davis' use of wordplay recalls that of modernists like Beckett or Joyce, suggesting that life is basically absurd: "the days had passed, time had moved on and left her behind."But Davis refuses to sustain this negative message. Many of her stories are inspired by Flaubert, who sometimes also appears as a speaker in some of the tales. This suggests some kind of continuity; the past informs the present both in terms of content and form. A knowledge of this can help to sustain us; like the nineteenth century master, we are capable of understanding our "stream of consciousness" ("Flaubert and Point of View"). If we understand this, then perhaps we can start to enjoy our lives, just like the woman who "for the first time, experienced the tiniest of chocolates, that was what she preferred" ("A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates").Such knowledge can be very powerful, making us aware of arbitrary many of the so-called "conventions" in life actually are. Take, for example, the distinction between "reality" and "fiction." In "Two Characters in a Paragraph" the speaker realizes that the writing is extremely dense; two characters are in "the very middle of it, and it's dark in there." The only way out for them is for the writing to become less dense in tone. While the sentence is wryly amusing, it nonetheless alerts us to how fictional characters can often determine our future behavior. For Davis this is a positive thing, as it provides a means of making sense of our lives. Literature is an important way of identifying our humanity.Beautifully written with sympathy and insight, CAN'T AND WON'T is a collection that deserves every success, as it offers a profound comment on our lives.
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