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Varieties of Disturbance

Stories

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks, May 2007
ISBN: 978-0-374-28173-1, ISBN10: 0-374-28173-4,
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 240 pages,
Trade Paperback, $14.00

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Categories and Subcategories

See All Categories Literature U.S. & Canada: Short Stories

A National Book Award Finalist

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

A Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year

A San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book of the Year

Lydia Davis has been called “one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction” (Los Angeles Times), “an American virtuoso of the short story form” (Salon), an innovator who attempts “to remake the model of the modern short story” (The New York Times Book Review). Her admirers include Grace Paley, Jonathan Franzen, and Zadie Smith; as Time magazine observed, her stories are “moving . . . and somehow inevitable, as if she has written what we were all on the verge of thinking.”

In Varieties of Disturbance, her fourth collection, Davis extends her reach as never before in stories that take every form from sociological studies to concise poems. Her subjects include the five senses, fourth-graders, good taste, and tropical storms. She offers a reinterpretation of insomnia and re-creates the ordeals of Kafka in the kitchen. She questions the lengths to which one should go to save the life of a caterpillar, proposes a clear account of the sexual act, rides the bus, probes the limits of marital fidelity, and unlocks the secret to a long and happy life.

No two of these fictions are alike. And yet in each, Davis rearranges our view of the world by looking beyond our preconceptions to a bizarre truth, a source of delight and surprise.

Praise

“Avant-garde fiction in America can seem something of an oxymoron, operating less as a forward movement than as a separatist cult that neither desires nor expects to have any influence on mainstream literature. But the absence of influence is also the presence of freedom, a characteristic easily discernible in the work of Lydia Davis . . . Her spare elliptical short fiction is critically acclaimed, but forms a challenging body of work, dispensing with straightforward narrative in favor of a microscopic examination of language and thought. Davis’s new collection, Varieties of Disturbances, continues that approach . . . ‘The Walk’ perfectly illustrates Davis’s exceptional skills as a writer. Her belief that language is both the subject and the medium of fiction has not led her, as we might expect, into solipsistic echo chambers, but into new worlds.”—Deb Siddhartha, The New York Times

"Like all of Davis' collections, Varieties of Disturbance is well structured, with longer stories broken up by short ones and recurring images spaced to allow reader the pleasure of gathering them up . . . Davis offer a shimmering, apt tribute to Franz Kafka in 'Kafka Cooks Dinner' . . . With each story, it is as though Davis is logically working through the process of grief—and Varieties of Disturbance is her epiphany."—Katherine Hill, San Francisco Chronicle

“In her previous collections as well as her most recent, Varieties of Disturbance, Davis’s domestically surreality reads as if Jane Bowles has been able to liberate her fragments from her multitude of notebooks, a suburban Gertrude Stein choosing as her material the thoughts of the wives Alice B. Toklas sat with, the ‘some domestic complication in all probability’ alluded to but otherwise ignored in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. The poetry of the everyday, the mundane, is the fabric of Davis’s quietly hysterical worlds; she does not patch together the whole quilt, instead giving us neat little squares with more than occasional threads of brilliance. In these stories she agonizes over interactions between both strangers and intimates, disturbances (to quote the title) both banal and serious, the awkwardness of social rituals, the unspoken hostility between spouses, the uneasy disrepair of a long help friendship, and more—unraveling the meaning of all in graceful spirals.”—Kate Zambreno, Rain Taxi

“In a novel and four major collections of stories, Davis has pursued essayistic and philosophical narratives so sculpted, so enamored of logic, and so unnervingly patient that one suspects another estimation she offers of Proust might serve as her own credo: ‘The shape of the sentence was the shape of the thought, and every word was necessary to the thought’ . . . Davis can achieve an impressive degree of realism when it comes to revealing the essence of thinking and feeling. For a writer who is, on the surface, so strenuously cerebral, she produces writing that is often exceedingly intimate, and it’s this discrepancy that proves rewarding in her work. . . . Davis is an extraordinary technician of language, capable of revealing elusive human tendencies through the most unusual means.”—Ben Marcus, Bookforum

“Ms. Davis is one of the most elegant and entertaining formalists in American fiction. She has mastered a brand of short prose that balances sense against sound. She claims Samuel Beckett as a chief influence, explaining that rhythm of Beckett’s sentences sometimes matters as much or more than their meaning. But unlike Beckett, Ms. Davis is a clear, easy read. She prefers a cogent, unified speaker to a wild, integrating one . . . My favorite Davis stories are those that live a little in their dramatic frame before ending.”—Benjamin Lytal, The New York Sun

“Varieties of Disturbance shows Davis at her technical best, telling stories through inspired deconstruction . . . Like the French decadent poet, Charles Baudelaire, who constructed similar riffs on topics such as crowds and drunkenness, Davis is extremely skilled at breaking down an experience without letting her prose turn analytic or cold . . . A poet as well as a translator, Davis is extremely good at turning our perception on the sharp pivot of a single line. The best stories in this book pile up one such minder-bender after another and then turn this observational jujitsu on the form of the story—and often memory too. The collection’s gem is called ‘Grammar Questions,’ in which the narrator parses the words she uses to describe her ailing father . . . This is tricky, sometimes miraculous work. Davis reminds us that words are tools, that stories are devices, and then in the space of just one sentence can make us forget all that and listen, even believe.”—John Freeman, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

"This kind of writing—elliptical, clear-eyed, harboring concealed emotions—has been flooring readers since Davis's first major collection, Break It Down."—Michael Miller, The Believer

"Davis, a celebrated Proust translator as well as a fiction writer prized for her sly wit and inventiveness, presents a new array of piquant and elegant tales. A master of the extremely short story, some told in one sentence, Davis neatly castigates the vicious circle that is family, the insidious toxins of relationships, and the oddities of intellectual and creative pursuits. Literary and artistic erudition and fluency in loneliness, disappointment, and fretfulness shape these mordant yet pirouetting stories. 'The Walk,' a gem, draws on Davis' love of translation. In 'For Sixty Cents,' Davis performs an insouciant and bracing extrapolation as she calculates all that a customer gets in a cup of coffee. Parodies of academic studies and note taking lead to wickedly cutting stories, such as the compressed epic of a writer and the maids she dreams will free her from child care and housework. Davis' attempts to quantify predicaments to eliminate emotion intensify it instead, which is but one of life's many ironies Davis so artfully reveals."—Donna Seaman, Booklist

"Davis, an esteemed translator from French, writes in the tradition of the French postmodernists and surrealists. (She's translated Blanchot and Leiris.) The 56 stories in this volume include short prose poems ('The Fly,' 'Head, Heart') and chilling one-liners ('Suddenly Afraid,' 'Mother's Reaction to My Travel Plans'). Two of the longer pieces adopt the dispassionate protocols of case studies. 'We Miss You' exhaustively deconstructs get-well letters written by '50s-era fourth graders to a classmate hospitalized after being hit by a car. 'Helen and Vi, a Study in Health and Vitality' analyzes how the workaday routines and altruism of two elderly women have contributed to their healthy longevity. (Contrast the intermittent, italicized foibles of narcissist Hope, age 100.) Many of the stories not overtly labeled studies are structured as such, with topical captions, such as 'Mrs. D. and Her Maids,' possibly about Davis's writer-mother. Parents, particularly aged parents, are a preoccupation: Davis has clearly done her time in the halls of eldercare. Her narrators are cynical and reluctant but 'good-enough' caregivers. In 'What You Learn About the Baby,' a mother catalogs in excruciating detail just how her infant dominates and disrupts her life. The laconic 'Burning Family Members' bears hard-eyed, shell-shocked witness to a father's death. Unabashedly autobiographical, like many of the stories, is 'The Walk,' a defense of Davis's translation of Proust's Swann's Way (2003) vs. the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation, and 'Cape Cod Diary,' in which a writer vicariously travels America with a nameless French historian (presumably de Tocqueville, also translated by Davis) . . . Davis' ability to parse hopelessly snarled human interactions (as in the title story) astounds."—Kirkus Reviews

"Davis's spare, always surprising short fiction was most recently collected in Samuel Johnson Is Indignant. In this introspective, more sober culling, Davis touches on favorite themes (mothers, dogs, flies and husbands) and encapsulates, as in "Insomnia," everyday life's absurdist binds: 'My body aches so—It must be this heavy bed pressing up against me.' Davis is a noted translator (Swann's Way), and a kind of passion—and bemused suffering—for points of rhetoric produces a delicate beauty in 'Grammar Questions' ('Now, during his time of dying, can I say, 'This is where he lives'?') and 'We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth-Graders,' written to their hospitalized classmate. The longest selection, 'Helen and Vi: A Study in Health and Vitality,' examines the long lives of two elderly women, one white, one black, in terms of background, employment, pets and conversational manner. Most moving may be 'Burning Family Members,' which can be read as a response to the Iraq War: ''They' burned her thousands of miles away from here. The 'they' that are starving him here are different.' Davis's work defies categorization and possesses a moving, austere elegance."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

About the Author(s)

Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis’s story collections include the Village Voice favorite Samuel Johnson Is Indignant and Almost No Memory, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. She is the acclaimed translator of the new Swann’s Way. She received a 2003 MacArthur fellowship.

photo: David Ignaszewski

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Excerpt

A Man from Her Past

Ithink Mother is flirting with a man from her past who is not Father. I say to myself: Mother ought not to have improper relations with this man "Franz"! "Franz" is a European. I say she should not see this man improperly while Father is away! But I am confusing an old reality with a new reality: Father will not be returning home. He will be staying on at Vernon Hall. As for Mother, she is ninety-four years old.

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