Philip Hensher

A world in a handful of words

Though Lydia Davis probably first came to the attention of English readers through her translations, she has been making a substantial reputation for herself in America with sharp, inventive and demanding short stories.

issue 31 July 2010

Though Lydia Davis probably first came to the attention of English readers through her translations, she has been making a substantial reputation for herself in America with sharp, inventive and demanding short stories. Her field is awkwardness, social ‘leakage’, as sociologists say, and the often bad fit between acts and speech, language and meaning. There is a certain delectable inappropriateness in the fact that some readers (like me) will first have encountered her as one of the translators of Penguin’s 2002 Proust. She did an accurate job, but as a writer herself she could not be much further from that great but voluble and frequently casual writer (your punctuation, Marcel, your punctuation). She is precise, considered and laconic to an unprecedented degree; 30 of her short stories could go into one of Proust’s longer sentences.

Her reputation as a writer’s writer rests largely on those short stories where she reduces what must be told into a mere handful of words.

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