Break It Down
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Average rating4
15
Ratings2
Average rating4
The thirty-four stories in this seminal collection powerfully display what have become Lydia Davis's trademarks—dexterity, brevity, understatement, and surprise. Although the certainty of her prose suggests a world of almost clinical reason and clarity, her characters show us that life, thought, and language are full of disorder. Break It Down is Davis at her best. In the words of Jonathan Franzen, she is "a magician of self-consciousness."
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This book has been on my to-read shelf for ages because I was repeatedly turned off from continuing past the beginning of the first story, because the first story is a piece of Davis's later novel The End of the Story which made me kind of depressed when I read it on our honeymoon. Of all times to read that novel, on a honeymoon! It's the only sour impression I have of Davis's work, because I made the dumb decision to read a depressing book during a holiday that was meant to be even a better time than other holidays. So I would try to read this book but never get through the first story. Well, this time I braved it and finished and even moved on to the second story. Yay for me, because this collection is great and Davis is definitely a writer worth reading.
From “Break It Down”:
“Then you forget some of it all, maybe most of it all, almost all of it, in the end, and you work hard at remembering everything now so you won't ever forget, but you can kill it too even by thinking about it too much, though you can't helping thinking about it nearly all the time.”
From “Sketches for a Life of Wassilly”:
“Working on a list, he would send himself into a certain room to check a book title or the date and forget why he had gone there, distracted by the sight of another unfinished project. He received from himself a number of unrelated instructions which he could not remember, and spent entire mornings uselessly rushing from room to room. There was a strange gap between volition and action: sitting at his desk, before his work but not working, he dreamt of perfection in many things, and this exhilarated him. But when he took one step toward that perfection, he faltered in the face of its demands. There were mornings when he woke under a weight of discouragement so heavy that he could not get out of bed but lay there all day watching the sunlight move across the floor and up the wall.”
From “Five Signs of Disturbance”:
“Each time she looked down at them, the three quarters separated into groups of one quarter and two quarters, but each time she was prepared to put one back it appeared to her as one of a pair, so that she couldn't put it back. This happened over and over again as she rolled closer to the booths, until finally, against her will, she put one quarter back. She told herself the choice was arbitrary, but she felt strongly that it was not. She felt that it was in fact governed by an important rule, though she did not know what the rule was.”
