A book a day: Lydia Davis: I can’t and I don’t want to

Idioma original: English

Original title: Can’t and Won’t: stories

Translation: Inés Garland

Year of publication: 2014

Valuation: advisable

I will open the tabloid sub-section of this blog by providing some information: Lydia Davis was the first wife of the late Paul Auster, and mother of their also deceased common son, Daniel Auster. I don’t know if (like the medical profession) the literary profession is given a certain tendency to inbreeding. I know that a certain comment received on Twitter went so far as to contrast Davis’s talent with that of Siri Hustvedt, in any case it was enough to generate some curiosity that this I can’t and I don’t want to has only partially satisfied. A decade has passed and Davis has not published anything else, in fact she could be considered a specialist in the short genre since she has only published one novel and two essays, and I sense a certain unanimity in the praise of her work in this format.

I can’t and I don’t want to is a collection that includes a hundred pieces that could not be more varied. In fact, although the book is divided into four parts, I distinguish four parts that structure it on another level. On the one hand, short stories, almost always one page long, which the author points out as dreams and which seem to really correspond to this description, both in their style, plain and descriptive, and in their content, almost always bordering on the absurd or surreal, without a defined plot structure beyond, I would like to suppose, the mere exposition of a situation that can be schematic and logically incoherent. The second block (I insist, in a different structure to the sequence established by the author) is made up of a series of stories that are labeled as Flaubert’s stories and which place us in a nineteenth-century France, with carriages and squares with guillotines, stories with recurring characters and situations, although, in a second sequential reading, I have not been able to discover an extraneous plot. A third block would be made up of some long stories, the few that exceed five pages, which have seemed to me to be the most irregular group, confirming a certain perception that the author is better at handling short stories, since the longer ones (especially The cows) I choked on them, although I really liked the slightly bittersweet and twilight tone of Letter to the foundation. The fourth part could be defined as miscellany and it contains everything from pure wordplay to curious relationships that show Lydia Davis as an interesting verbal experimenter. Perhaps this temporal condition of her latest work may manifest a resolute and uninhibited intention, but it seems to me that the essence of the writer lies in that group: in stories that are barely a couple of sentences to relationships, from obituaries, from likes and dislikes, including some curious letters.

Beyond the interest that may be aroused by other works by Davis (perhaps those that are part of the middle phase of his career) perhaps my opinion on I can’t and I don’t want to be ambivalent. I both appreciate and criticize that its dispersion shows it more as a catalogue of skills than as a solid work.