Customer Reviews

Break It Down: Stories

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Break it down by Lydia Davis is a great book of short stories. I appreciate her bare bones approach to each story. She has little staging and dialogue. The way she introduces many of her characters is through interior thoughts using the character, or an authorial voice as she looks from the outside onto the character. The reader gets a full 360 view of each character in this book. There are many themes in the book, but a general theme is self absorption and how it manifests itself in behaviors and thoughts in each character. This book has alot to do with the hidden anxiety in each of us, that we don't necessairly want to think about or discuss. Good stories to study and break down.

Absolutely no word is wasted in Lydia Davis' Break it Down. Her stories are comical, honest, clever and varying.

I simply hate sitting down to a short story collection and reading the same "finding myself" story 20 times over. This bad experience had led to never be much of a short stories person, and yet this I was drawn to. I am glad that I was.

I am a big library-goer, a.k.a. don't want to spend money on books that I will read only once. But this is one that I will head to the bookstore to purchase, to keep on my shelf as a reference book, almost, to brilliant and forthright writing.

I highly recommend picking it up.

It has become a cliché to say that less is more, but there is no other expression that best summarizes Lydia Davis's writing. Her stories are, however, way beyond any clichéd idea. They are fresh, perceptive and addictive. She writes as if telling us something personal, something that happened with her - some stories may have an autobiographical touch, especially when told in first person, but nevertheless they don't mean to be really confessional.

She writes both short-short stories and short-long ones and is first among equals in each case. Her shortest stories may be not longer than one line, and even in these cases she is able to bring something meaningful.

In her first collection "Break it down", Davis writes mostly about fractured relationships, about lost love, and people dealing with the changes in their lives. One of the best of them is "The fears of Mrs Orlando", about a woman afraid of leaving her home, and the consequences of that. Actually it is not only about it - this woman's fear works as a metaphor for everybody's fears. Another brilliant one is called "French Lesson I: Le Meurtre". It could be read as a thriller disguised as a French Lesson. The key words, which are taught in this lesson, give away a deeper meaning to the narrative.

First published in 1984, "Break it down" is seen as an assured debut of a mature talent for short fiction. Davis doesn't aim a Chekhovian realism - her helm is another one that sometimes is expressed in only a few words.

Probably there is something in myself that doesn't respond well to Davis' writing, but this story collection of Lydia Davis has not raised in me anything like the enthusiastic appraisal bestowed on it on both the sides of the Atlantic.

Jonathan Franzen - who is among my most loved authors - has defined Davis "a magician of self-consciousness". Maybe he is quite right. The point is, however - as far as I am concerned - that I've never been an unreserved fan of magicians' tricks: the more amazing they appear, the stronger I feel the necessary presence of the underlying deception.

Of course I wouldn't (and couldn't) deny that Break It Down proves that this writer has an extraordinary mastery of the language and an unusual ability to be a short story innovator. Yet - or, possibly, due to this very reason - most of her stories do not succeed in making me feel totally fascinated by, involved in, or even only deeply absorbed in the narrative.

Most of the time I feel like assisting to some sort of experimenting which calls on my attention in a very deliberate and, though clever, eventually rather artificial way: "now I'll show you what I can do", or "let's see how it works, telling it in this way". Empathy and, more generally, emotions are thus left aside, they keep on sleeping. All the (many) times that the story is being narrated, as they say, "in real time" - reporting step by step what the main character/narrator does, thinks, says or would say, etc. - rather than letting me feel increasingly attracted to, or even deeply immersed in the story's core, it makes me feel miles away from it or, sometimes, invited to assist to some sort of fiction's autopsy .

Last, in my opinion Davis will certainly be a great innovator, but even she cannot allow herself to break the basic rule of fiction writing - show, don't tell - -, as sometimes she does (e.g., Mothers) without loosing entirely the narrator's grip on the reader

Out of thirtythree stories, all in all there are eight I truly liked in various ways (The Mouse, The Letter, The House Plans, The Brother-in-Law, Visit to Her Husband, A Few Things Wrong with Me, Sketches for a Life of Wassilly, What an Old Woman Will Wear). And they are exactly the stories in which the search of the effects, the experimentation, the new ways' inventivness, the prose's style, in my personal judgment, turn out to be perfectly functional to the narration, without overflowing it.