Varieties of Disturbance

by Lydia Davis

Overview

A National Book Award finalist, this collection of "whimsical, seemingly eventless [short stories] . . . gain momentum as tiny epics of paranoia and ennui" (The New Yorker).

"Davis is a magician of self-consciousness. Few writers now working make the words on the page matter more." ―Jonathan Franzen

"Davis is the kind of writer about whom you say: 'Oh, at last!'" ―Grace Paley

Fifty-seven rule-breaking short stories, in which Lydia Davis proposes a clear account of the sexual act, rides the bus, gets lost in a foreign city, and addresses common anxieties regarding etiquette, work, taste, the fourth grade, death, and conversation.

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.

"Davis's work defies categorization and possesses a moving, austere elegance." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466806276
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	08/06/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	244
File size:	898 KB

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

Varieties of Disturbance

Stories

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By Lydia Davis

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC

Copyright © 2007 Lydia Davis
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-28173-1

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Chapter One

A Man from Her Past

I think 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. How can there be improper relations with a woman of ninety-four? Yet my confusion must be this: though her body is old, her capacity for betrayal is still young and fresh.

Dog and Me

An ant can look up at you, too, and even threaten you with its arms. Of course, my dog does not know I am human, he sees me as dog, though I do not leap up at a fence. I am a strong dog. But I do not leave my mouth hanging open when I walk along. Even on a hot day, I do not leave my tongue hanging out. But I bark at him: "No! No!"

Enlightened

I don't know if I can remain friends with her. I've thought and thought about it-she'll never know how much. I gave it one last try. I called her, after a year. But I didn't like the way the conversation went. The problem is that she is not very enlightened. Or I should say, she is not enlightened enough for me. She is nearly fifty years old and no more enlightened, as far as I can see, than when I first knew her twenty years ago, when we talked mainly about men. I did not mind how unenlightened she was then, maybe because I was not so enlightened myself. I believe I am more enlightened now, and certainly more enlightened than she is, although I know it's not very enlightened to say that. But I want to say it, so I am willing to postpone being more enlightened myself so that I can still say a thing like that about a friend.

The Good Taste Contest

The husband and wife were competing in a Good Taste Contest judged by a jury of their peers, men and women of good taste, including a fabric designer, a rare-book dealer, a pastry cook, and a librarian. The wife was judged to have better taste in furniture, especially antique furniture. The husband was judged to have overall poor taste in lighting fixtures, tableware, and glassware. The wife was judged to have indifferent taste in window treatments, but the husband and wife both were judged to have good taste in floor coverings, bed linen, bath linen, large appliances, and small appliances. The husband was felt to have good taste in carpets, but only fair taste in upholstery fabrics. The husband was felt to have very good taste in both food and alcoholic beverages, while the wife had inconsistently good to poor taste in food. The husband had better taste in clothes than the wife though inconsistent taste in perfumes and colognes. While both husband and wife were judged to have no more than fair taste in garden design, they were judged to have good taste in number and variety of evergreens. The husband was felt to have excellent taste in roses but poor taste in bulbs. The wife was felt to have better taste in bulbs and generally good taste in shade plantings with the exception of hostas. The husband's taste was felt to be good in garden furniture but only fair in ornamental planters. The wife's taste was judged consistently poor in garden statuary. After a brief discussion, the judges gave the decision to the husband for his higher overall points score.

Collaboration with Fly

I put that word on the page, but he added the apostrophe.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis Copyright © 2007 by Lydia Davis. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

A Man from Her Past     3
Dog and Me     4
Enlightened     5
The Good Taste Contest     6
Collaboration with Fly     8
Kafka Cooks Dinner     9
Tropical Storm     19
Good Times     20
Idea for a Short Documentary Film     22
Forbidden Subjects     23
Two Types     25
The Senses     26
Grammar Questions     27
Hand     30
The Caterpillar     31
Childcare     33
We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth-Graders     34
Passing Wind     58
Television     60
Jane and the Cane     65
Getting to Know Your Body     66
Absentminded     67
Southward Bound, Reads Worstward Ho     68
The Walk     72
Varieties of Disturbance     83
Lonely     86
Mrs. D and Her Maids     87
20 Sculptures in One Hour     112
Nietszche     114
What You Learn About the Baby     115
Her Mother's Mother     125
How It Is Done     127
Insomnia     128
Burning Family Members     129
The Way to Perfection     135
The Fellowship     136
Helen and Vi: A Study in Health and Vitality     137
Reducing Expenses     178
Mother's Reaction to My Travel Plans     181
For Sixty Cents     182
How Shall I Mourn Them?     183
A Strange Impulse     186
How She Could Not Drive     187
Suddenly Afraid     189
Getting Better     190
Head, Heart     191
The Strangers     192
The Busy Road     194
Order     195
The Fly     196
Traveling with Mother     197
Index Entry     199
My Son     200
Example of the Continuing Past Tense in a Hotel Room     201
Cape Cod Diary     202
Almost Over: What's the Word?     218
A Different Man     219

Editorial Reviews

More dauntingly opaque but often brilliant snippets and meditations from MacArthur recipient Davis (Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, 2001, etc.). 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 writervicariously travels America with a nameless French historian (presumably de Tocqueville, also translated by Davis). Her impersonal, bloodless tone, plain prose style and tendency to summarize rather than dramatize can have a distancing effect; but Davis' ability to parse hopelessly snarled human interactions (as in the title story) astounds. An initially off-putting collection that gradually becomes habit-forming.

Kirkus Reviews

An American virtuoso of the short story form.” —Salon

“Davis is a magician of self-consciousness. Few writers now working make the words on the page matter more.” —Jonathan Franzen

“One of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Davis is the kind of writer about whom you say: ‘Oh, at last!’ ” —Grace Paley

“Sharp, deft, ironic, understated, and consistently surprising.” —Joyce Carol Oates

“Frequently poetic and, without question, memorable . . . [Davis] tinkers with nearly every convention imaginable.” —Liam Callanan, The New York Times Book Review

“Sublime writing-at once a fan­tastical jungle and a real world.” —Brian Lennon, The Boston Book Review

“In deadpan prose, Davis turns philosophical snippets into fiction, with moving results . . . inevitable, as if she has written down what we were all on the verge of thinking ourselves.” —Ben Marcus, Time

“Davis’s distinctive voice has never been easy to fit into conventional categories . . . Engaging, self-mocking, and scrupulously truthful.” —Times Literary Supplement (London)

“Brave, wildly unconventional and thought­provoking.” —Time Out (London)

“No contemporary writer has so bravely explored . . . The severe elegance of a thinking woman.” —Bruce Hainley, The Village Voice

“Witty and insightfully inventive.” —Paula Friedman, The Washington Post

“[These stories] are the hearts of stories—thumping, muscular miracles—and they circulate complex emotions with a marvelous efficiency of beats.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Will lodge in your mind forever.” —Ann Harleman, The Boston Globe

“Elegant and unsentimental. The best prose stylist in America.” —Rick Moody

“Extraordinary." —Catherine Texier, Newsday

“Davis is reinventing the short story . . . in our time.” —Charles Baxter

“All who know [Davis’s] work probably remember their first time reading it. It kind of blows the roof off of so many of our assumptions about what constitutes short fiction. I read it on the F train from 6th Avenue to Park Slope—it’s a long ride and that book isn’t all that long—and by the end I felt liberated. She’d broken all of the most constraining rules. some of her stories have plots but most don’t. Some are in the range of acceptable short story length, most aren’t. Many straddle a line between philosophy, poetry and fiction, categories that seem meaningless because her stories just work. There is rarely a plot as we expect from plot the characters in the course of the story don't undergo a fundamental change. The plot, rather, stems from the narrator's trying to get at some truth. [Davis’s] stories are as often as not mental exercises, a brain trying to conclude. Because truth is what she’s after. There is an unrelenting and merciless truth presented, or at least fumbled for, in everything [she] writes . . . Davis is one of the most precise and economical writers we have.” —Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s

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