The End of the Story
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The first and only novel by Lydia Davis, winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2013. 'It surprised me, over and over, to find that I was with such a young man. He was twenty-two when I met him. He turned twenty-three while I knew him, but by the time I turned thirty-five I did not know where he was anymore.' Mislabelled boxes, confusing notes, wrong turnings - such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she organises her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit and what seems to be candour, she seeks to determine what she actually knows about herself and her past, but we begin to suspect, along with her, that given the elusiveness of memory and understanding, any tale retrieved from the past must be fiction Back in print at last, this is Lydia Davis's first - and so far only - novel. 'Extraordinary' Newsday 'Brilliant' New Yorker 'Breathtakingly elegant' Details 'Beautifully written' Marie Claire 'Astonishing' Elle Lydia Davis is the author of Collected Stories, one novel and six short story collections, most recently Can't and Won't. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust. She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.
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Like many, I first came to Lydia Davis through her short stories, many of which are EXTREMELY short, on the order of tens of words. I was intrigued to see she had written a novel, and much to my delight her modus operandi scaled beautifully; I don't think there is a wasted word on any of these 240 pages. The central theme of the work is memory, and Davis approaches this subject in a unique and compelling way. The novel is almost scientific in nature, and its form evoked the image of a jeweler scrutinizing a gem under a loupe, looking at each facet in different lights and at different angles in order comprehend the whole of it totally and fully. Most books I read leave something to be desired, but this one was polished to perfection.
I've been reading on this book for seven or eight months. It's an experimental novel, with the main character attempting to remember every event of her relationship with a man, starting with the last first. The end of the story is really the beginning. Fun to start, like most gimmicks, but grew quite wearing. Where did this author go for her degree in creative writing?
‰ЫПI used to try to study what it meant to love someone. I would write down quotations from the works of famous writers, writers who did not interest me otherwise, like Hippolyte Taine or Alfred de Musset. For instance, Taine said that to love is to make one‰ЫЄs goal the happiness of another person. I would try to apply this to my own situation. But if loving a person meant putting him before myself, how could I do that? There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn how to love a person while continuing to be selfish. I did not think I could manage the first two, but I thought I could learn how to be just unselfish enough to love someone at least part of the time.‰Ыќ
