Varieties of disturbance : stories
/ Lydia Davis
- 1st ed
- New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux , 2007.
- xi, 219 p. ; 21 cm.
Man from her past -- Dog and me -- Enlightened -- Good taste contest -- Collaboration with fly -- Kafka cooks dinner -- Tropical storm -- Good times -- Idea for a short documentary film -- Forbidden subjects -- Two types -- Senses -- Grammar questions -- Hand -- Caterpillar -- Childcare -- We miss you: A study of get-well letters from a class of fourth-graders -- Passing wind -- Television -- Jane and the cane -- Getting to know your body -- Absentminded -- Southward bound, reads Worstward Ho -- Walk -- Varieties of disturbance -- Lonely -- Mrs. D and her maids -- 20 sculptures in one hour -- Nietszche -- What you learned about the baby -- Her mother's mother -- How it is done -- Insomnia -- Burning family members -- Way to perfection -- Fellowship -- Helen and Vi: A study in health and vitality -- Reducing expenses -- Mother's reaction to my travel plans -- For sixty cents -- How shall I mourn them? -- Strange impulse -- How she could not drive -- Suddenly afraid -- Getting better -- Head, heart -- Strangers -- Busy road -- Order -- Fly -- Traveling with Mother -- Index entry -- My son -- Example of the continuing past tense in a hotel room -- Cape Cod diary -- Almost over: What's the word? -- Different man.
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.