´Can´t and Won´t´+Varieties of Disturbance

´I´m so tired of your vivid imagination, let someone else enjoy it. That´s how I´m feeling these days, maybe it will pass´.

Lydia Davis is not writing short stories. Lydia Davis does not re-invent the language or words or suggests new narratives. She is simply reshaping the writing. She brings out words polishing the prose and compressing the meanings. Her choice of words is direct, easy and throughout. You have nothing more nothing less of what is supposed to be said. One has to go very far away to come back with such a refined writing technique.

Can´t and Won´t is a collection of short, micro-flash-like prose with a poetic trance. Winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize, she is a French translator as well, who re-published translations from Flaubert and Proust. I would love so much to get into some of her translations, eventually in a bilingual variant. Who would say translators can´t and won´t be creators of wor(l)ds?

Rating: 4.5 stars

Update: 10.01.2022

My second encounter with Lydia Davis: Varieties of Disturbance. There is so much to say about her freedom of writing about literally everything, as much as she wants to, without bothering of what one may say about it. By the very original decision of writing, putting words on paper, Davis brings to life the everyday banality. 

There can be disparate thoughts or isolate events, or the way in which we may look to our baby. The words are feeling the void of the silence. The form or the genre is not important, but the creative process is transparent. One can see how and what exactly happens when an everyday episode is brought to life literally. It is assigned a title and published into a collection, therefore the words do receive a special status. 

It does not matter the subject, there is the ways in which the author is turning the sentences and words into a short, sometimes as short as one sentence long story, which matter. The sentence can be very long or very short, the title may apply to the content or not, at a certain extent directing and a bit manipulating the reader into believing that something literally is about to happen.

Rating: 4 stars