The End of the Story: A Novel [Paperback]

Lydia Davis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2004

Mislabeled boxes, problems with visiting nurses, confusing notes, an outing to the county fair--such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she attempts to organize her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit, and what appears to be candor, 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Davis (Break It Down, a story collection) plunges into fiction-as-catharsis in her absorbing and lucid first novel. The narrative is comprised of the unnamed narrator's memories of and reflections upon her ended love affair with a nameless man 13 years her junior; its history infiltrates the books she reads and translates, as well as the novel she is struggling to write, which is this novel. As she probes the moments and minutiae of their relationship, the man's identity fades, and he becomes material for her fiction: like a backward-spiraling track into memory, a labyrinthine sentence mimes the diminishing roar of his car when he leaves her. Scenes gather, dissolve and reassemble, as does the man's fragmented image, with impressions and facts seeping through the narrator's consciousness and dreams-the man's skin, hair, clothing, his charm and flaws, his lies and his library, the money he fails to repay. Avoiding the earthiness of dialogue, of which there is none, the narrator experiences much of the world as "floating" ("his essence floated inside me")-the man's anger, her own features in a mirror, another story wafting loose in a room where a book lies open. Bereft, she turns stalker and voyeur, searching for her lover (as for story material) through streets surreal and noir, peering into his room and the gas station where he works. Finally, a cup of bitter tea, offered in a bookstore, provides ritual closure to the story of her search for her lover, though "something continued, something not formed into any story." Despite Davis's writerly self-consciousness, her novel works as an aching love story recollected in tranquillity. Translation, first serial, dramatic rights: Georges Borchardt.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

The narrator of this novel, who never reveals her name, is writing a novel about an obsessive relationship she had with a younger man. Although the woman did not seem totally committed while the couple was together, she became completely obsessed with her former partner after they separated. This first-person remembrance, with events imprecisely defined and sometimes out of sequence, is self-conscious and introspective. The narration is highly descriptive, and there is no dialog. The narrator comments that "my thoughts are not orderly-one is interrupted by another, or one contradicts another, and in addition to that, my memories are quite often false, confused, abbreviated, or collapsed into one another." A more apt description of the style would be hard to imagine. For anyone who has had a failed intimate relationship, this book could be uncomfortable reading. From the author of Break It Down (Farrar, 1986), a short story collection.
Kimberly G. Allen, MCI Corporate Information Resources Ctr., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Picador (July 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312423713
• ISBN-13: 978-0312423711
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #212,535 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spectacularly abstract, October 16, 2008

By 

James Elkins (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The End of the Story: A Novel (Paperback)

This is an astonishing novel. I have more or less given up writing reviews for Amazon, because (as Nicholson Baker points out) they don't seem to add to anything or create any kind of community, they just sink into the general accumulation of texts. (He was comparing Amazon with Wikipedia, where everyone's writing adds to something large.)

But I'm back again, writing for Amazon, because I think this novel needs to be remembered, and bought. There is a five-star review here that notes it's necessary to read the novel more than once. I think that is true, if you are expecting any sort of ordinary narrative. Davis has that rarest of all qualities: an original voice. She speaks plainly, in a minimalist style, and that is fairly conventional. But the use the makes of the minimalist voice (which I find myself mimicking in this review, inadvertently) is not at all usual. This is life with all its content subtracted away. The novel is about a love affair, but we are scarcely told anything about what either person looks like. We hear, in passing, that the narrator likes to identify species of grass and spiders, but we do not hear any names of grasses or spiders. She falls in love with a man, but we have no idea what kind of person he is. They are both attached to a university, but we hear next to nothing about what they study or teach. She is a translator of French, but there is no French in the book. (That is especially astonishing: think of other Francophiles, like Wallace Stevens.) Nothing has content, everything is told as her recollections of actions and places.

In this contentless, abstract world the writer's voice is all we have. We listen as she wonders whether her memories are correct, and admits that some art not. We hear her descriptions of her behavior, always written as if she were at some remove from them. When she is suffering most acutely from the absence of the man she fell in love with, we hear that she seems to see herself from a distance. That is the book's strangest moment. We have always seen her from a distance. What kind of narrator could construct a novel so impeccably abstracted from the proper names and the direct emotions of life, and then say that, in her memory, she was only abstracted in that way during a short period of grief?

The psychology of the book is absolutely without parallel. It is deeply sympathetic, sad, detached, and also, at the same time, entirely perverse and because of that perversity incomprehensible. The book is, in its own way, a masterpiece.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Beautiful Book, May 7, 2001

By 

Naomi Himmelhoch (Northern California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The End of the Story (High Risk Books) (Paperback)

Lydia Davis has written a breath-taking book about how writing transforms both a writer and her subject. A wonderfully written study of how the process of creating a written record about her unlikely obsession with a younger man eventually freed her from it. I recommend this book to everyone I meet.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting concept, slightly off on the delivery, May 30, 2006

By 

M. Jason Schmitt (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The End of the Story: A Novel (Paperback)

Lydia Davis introduces an intriguing and unique concept in this story that makes you think a little bit differently while reading other novels afterward. The concept of this novel, whereby the narrator plays back an experience of love with the context of knowledge and emotions after the fact, makes you wonder how differently you would feel during past experiences, had you known what you know now. While this concept has really stuck with me for many months after reading the book, I found the story itself and depth of characters a little light and forgettable.