Jun

7

Short, short stories are a specialty of Lydia Davis, this year's Man Booker International Prize Winner. Perhaps it is a sign of the times given the stresses of modern life and lessening attention spans. Davis also has translated Proust for more patient readers.

"Lydia Davis Wins " :

Literary critic and scholar Sir Christopher Ricks, chair of the judges, said: "Lydia Davis' writings fling their lithe arms wide to embrace many a kind. Just how to categorise them? Should we simply concur with the official title and dub them stories? Or perhaps miniatures? Anecdotes? Essays? Jokes? Parables? Fables? Texts? Aphorisms, or even apophthegms? Prayers, or perhaps wisdom literature? Or might we settle for observations? "There is vigilance to her stories, and great imaginative attention. Vigilance as how to realize things down to the very word or syllable; vigilance as to everybody's impure motives and illusions of feeling."

Here is a sample from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis:

The Fish Tank

I stare at four fish in a tank in a supermarket. They are swimming in parallel formation against a small current created by a jet of water, and they are opening and closing their mouths and staring off into the distance with the one eye, each, that I can see. As I watch them through the glass, thinking how fresh they would be to eat, still alive now, and calculating whether I might buy one to cook for dinner, I also see, as though behind or through them, a larger, shadowy form darkening their tank, what there is of me on the glass, their predator.


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