Break It Down

by Lydia Davis

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.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, American, Literary Fiction, 20th Century, Contemporary, Literature

177 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Lydia Davis, acclaimed fiction writer and translator, is famous in literary circles for her extremely brief and brilliantly inventive short stories. In fall 2003 she received one of 25 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” awards. In granting the award the MacArthur Foundation praised Davis’s work for showing “how language itself can entertain, how all that what one word says, and leaves unsaid, can hold a reader’s interest. . . . Davis grants readers a glimpse of life’s previously invisible details, revealing new sources of philosophical insights and beauty.” In 2013 She was the winner of the Man Booker International prize.

Davis’s recent collection, “Varieties of Disturbance” (May 2007), was featured on the front cover of the “Los Angeles Times Book Review” and garnered a starred review from “Publishers Weekly.” Her “Samuel Johnson Is Indignant” (2001) was praised by “Elle” magazine for its “Highly intelligent, wildly entertaining stories, bound by visionary, philosophical, comic prose—part Gertrude Stein, part Simone Weil, and pure Lydia Davis.”

Davis is also a celebrated translator of French literature into English. The French government named her a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for her fiction and her distinguished translations of works by Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve, Michel Butor and others.

Davis recently published a new translation (the first in more than 80 years) of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, “Swann’s Way” (2003), the first volume of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” A story of childhood and sexual jealousy set in fin de siecle France, “Swann’s Way” is widely regarded as one of the most important literary works of the 20th century.

The “Sunday Telegraph” (London) called the new translation “A triumph [that] will bring this inexhaustible artwork to new audiences throughout the English-speaking world.” Writing for the “Irish Times,” Frank Wynne said, “What soars in this new version is the simplicity of language and fidelity to the cambers of Proust’s prose… Davis’ translation is magnificent, precise.”

Davis’s previous works include “Almost No Memory” (stories, 1997), “The End of the Story” (novel, 1995), “Break It Down” (stories, 1986), “Story and Other Stories” (1983), and “The Thirteenth Woman” (stories, 1976).

Grace Paley wrote of “Almost No Memory” that Lydia Davis is the kind of writer who “makes you say, ‘Oh, at last!’—brains, language, energy, a playfulness with form, and what appears to be a generous nature.” The collection was chosen as one of the “25 Favorite Books of 1997” by the “Voice Literary Supplement” and one of the “100 Best Books of 1997” by the “Los Angeles Times.”

Davis first received serious critical attention for her collection of stories, “Break It Down,” which was selected as a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. The book’s positive critical reception helped Davis win a prestigious Whiting Writer’s Award in 1988.

She is the daughter of Robert Gorham Davis and Hope Hale Davis. From 1974 to 1978 Davis was married to Paul Auster, with whom she has a son, Daniel Auster. Davis is currently married to painter Alan Cote, with whom she has a son, Theo Cote. She is a professor of creative writing at University at Albany, SUNY.
Davis is considered hugely influential by a generation of writers including Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, who once wrote that she "blows the roof off of so many of our assumptions about what constitutes short fiction."

Reviews

[Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

perfect for the holidays … very short fiction






One of Davis’s influences, from a young age, was Samuel Beckett. In this interview http://www.believermag.com/issues/200... Davis talks about her craft and other things literary. Here’s a second interview with very little overlap to the previous one: http://brickmag.com/interview-lydia-d....


boneless fiction

It’s been said that Davis has, with her short stories, created her own genre. Well, what is this genre? I’ll be so bold as to attempt a description. Most of the stories in this collection, one of her earliest, are, I believe, fairly representative of her style. They employ a first person narrator much more commonly than usual; there is usually very little in the way of plot; characters are employed sparingly (usually only the narrator, who may be talking about one other person, often unnamed); no dialogue between characters (except in the narration itself: “I said … and you said …”); and at times extremely short stories, a paragraph in some cases, even a sentence. Bare bones is something that suggests itself, because her stories are so stripped down.

But what’s missing from them, plot, character, dialogue (never narration, that is the only thing that can’t be jettisoned) are, after all, the skeleton of traditional fiction, are they not? So to do without them is not “bare bones”, it is “boneless”. Boneless fiction.

Break It Down (1986)

This collection of short stories contains 33 stories in 140 pages. Fourteen stories are less than three pages long; most of those are a page or a paragraph. These were probably the best short stories I’ve ever read, taking into account how little time they required, and how tempting it was to keep picking up the book. Having finished it, and now moving into her second collection, Almost No Memory, I keep going back to stories in this volume. They do cast a spell.

Here’s one of my favorite micro stories.

What She Knew

People did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old man?

Themes and Style

In the first version of this review, I thought that I could get away with simply presenting the following stories. No. No. Not only did I try to learn a new trick, I also learned that I didn’t do the trick very well.

At any rate, these are the stories, but with a little bit of context, that should make the points better. (The stories themselves are the same as before.)

First of all. I said above that Davis employs first person narration often. Yet in the four of these stories that have a narrator, I employed the first person in ALL of them. That’s actually what I was thinking that Davis did. But no, I was fooled by seeing it so much that I thought I’d seen it nearly everywhere.

Here’s an actual count from the collection.
First person narrator: 9 (7 female, 2 male)
No narrator: 2
Third person narrator: 22 (Some of these are difficult to categorize, since so few pronouns appear.)

About 1 in 3 are first person, not 4 in 4! SO. These stories are not representative in that sense, for sure.


Instances of Disturbance

This story is a retelling of the last selection in the book, Five Types of Disturbance. For whatever reason, I transferred the narrator from an impersonal one, to first person. But not the person whom the story is about. And why I inserted the very last sentence somehow escapes me. Lydia’s version is a very disturbing tale; near the end I wrote that it reminded me of Polanski’s movie Repulsion.


I have watched her for three months now. Across the avenue, in a friend’s apartment. I know that the friend is away in Greece. He will return in November. It’s now the middle of October. He told me a woman would be staying in the apartment while he was gone. Then they would trade places. He would be there, and she would be gone.

She stands looking out at the park, on my side of the street. All times of the day. Even at night sometimes. When I see her there I pick up my binoculars, always kept near the window just in case. They no longer have to be focused for her.

Sometimes her venetian blinds are down but open, other times they are up. She usually wears some ratty looking tee shirt, sometimes a robe, sometimes nothing. I can only imagine what else she does or doesn’t have on.

She did not notice me until recently. One day last week, after the sun had risen, watching her, I suddenly saw her look directly at me. She crossed her arms, what I could see of her was naked, and smiled just a little. She looked somewhat drunk.

She stared. I stared. Then she pointed at her head and made a circling motion with her finger cuckoo? then pointed at her chest. Perhaps at her breast? I don’t know, that’s what I looked at.

I understood her to sign that she was crazy. Or something like that. Then she pointed at herself, pointed across at me, pointed at herself, seemed to move her mouth.

I lowered the binoculars and looked across. I didn’t know what to do. I was nodding yes, but then thought to make the same finger signs me-you-me-you that she made. Then she moved to the side and shut the blinds.

We met later that day in the park. I’m not sure that she recognized me, she seemed surprised when I took my binoculars out of my bag and signed toward her with them. But she walked over. We walked a little ways and sat on a bench.

I had no idea what to say. She just said I must find an apartment. I was going to say why but realized I knew why. Yes, I said. After a while she asked if I knew of any not too expensive. No, I said. Oh … . We sat for a while. I was thinking of whether to ask if she might want to stay in my place. But I didn’t really like the looks of her. She looked disturbed, in five different ways at least.

After a while, saying nothing else, she got up and walked up the block, without looking back. I followed her. She took the subway to the last stop along the sound. I followed her. She walked a couple blocks to the deserted beach. The sun was getting low. I followed. Then she walked right into the water, up to her waist.

I was a little bit alarmed, but not too. I don’t think I cared much, I didn’t know her. But I cared some. I stood just off the beach watching. No one came by. She did nothing except stare out across the water. Finally I looked at my watch. The sun was going down. I thought of calling out to her, but remembered that I didn’t know her name. I wanted to go back to the city. I walked away, looking back once, she was still standing in the small waves, up to her waist.

I didn’t see her across the way yesterday, nor the day before. I’m feeling more than a bit disturbed. I drank myself to sleep last night and didn’t go to work today.

My friend will be back this weekend. Perhaps he will know where she is.

I have quite short hair. I can’t help wondering if she had been surprised when I showed up a woman the one time we met.


How to Decide?

I discovered, rereading some of Davis’s stories, that certain details in this one have been taken almost exactly from The Letter, which she wrote in the third person narrative style. I had no recollection of that when I was writing.

This story attempts to illustrate a theme that I found in several of the stories, exemplified by this sentence in the middle of the first story in the collection, Story:

I try to figure it out.

I guess the name for what I’m talking about is analysis paralysis. The inability to arrive at a decision about the likely truth of a situation, because each analytical statement leads to a further refinement of the analysis, further consideration of unlikely but possible exceptions, further qualification of a once asserted conclusion. I was very alert to this in Davis’ narratives, because I’m very familiar with the condition.


When I returned from work today there was a package under the mailboxes inside my walk-up door. It had a FROM/TO label addressed to L.D. in Apt. 301. Well, 401, but the 4 was crossed out and a 3 was there instead. I took it upstairs. Of course it was a birthday gift. There was no FROM name.

I looked closely at the handwriting, what little there was. It looked like my former husband’s. It also looked something like the man whom I’m currently with, whatsis. I decided it must be from him, I haven’t heard from former for three years now.

But before opening it I thought I should figure this out. If it was from whatsis then of course I wanted to open it. But if it was from former I didn’t want it at all. In fact in that case it could even be a bomb. That wasn’t likely but what if it was? I decided it would be best to wait until whatsis showed up, but then realized that I wasn’t seeing him until Friday, and I was meeting him for a drink over near his place. I couldn’t just call him and ask, because what if it wasn’t from him? He’s been insanely jealous of former ever since we started together. He doesn’t believe me when I tell him it’s over. And I then realized that I didn’t think whatis even knew when my birthday was, how could it be from him?

I looked at the apartment number again. What if it really were for L.D. in 401? I didn’t know the person above me. I walked down to look at the mailbox for 401. There were just a couple letters scrawled in script for the name. I couldn’t read them at all. But it looked like they could be ld. Of course if it were for 401 I should just leave it under the mailboxes. I went back upstairs, got the package and took it back down. As I laid it on the floor a man from the first floor was leaving. He looked at me, at the package, then went out.

Back in my room I was going nuts trying to figure what the most likely thing is about this package, and assessing what will happen if I do x or y or z and I’m right, and if I do x or y or z and I’m wrong. The thing that really worries me is the bomb.

Now it’s later in the evening. I decided that package must be for me, but when I went down to get it, I could see from the top of the stairs that it wasn’t there. I went down anyway, peered carefully at the empty floor all around the door and mailboxes, walked all the way down the hall, looking at the empty floor.

And now I’m trying to figure out what I say to whatsis when I meet him Friday. What do I say, or not say? And what if he asks about the package? I guess I just say I never saw it. But I think I once saw him standing outside the walk-up talking to the guy who saw me leave the package on the floor! What if they know each other?


The Housemaid of Notre Dame

This story is a version of Davis’s Housemaid. Both are first person narratives. My version careened off on a different track when the title occurred to me, but retains, I think, the rather frightening mood of hers.


My father and I live in the great cathedral of Notre Dame. He is a hunchback and tells me that people don’t like looking at him. I’m his daughter by a union he had many years ago with a gypsy woman, my mother. My father has told me many times that she was beautiful. I have asked him why I am not beautiful if my mother was. He always says that I am beautiful. But Monseigneur Martin tells me I am not.

So I don’t know if I am beautiful as my father says, or not beautiful, as Monseigneur Martin says.

I cannot remember ever seeing another woman. I only know of women through the sayings of my father and the teachings of the Monseigneur. I serve the Monseigneur. He calls me his housemaid. He has explained that my duties are very simple. They are simply to do as he tells me. He tells me to go with my father when he rings the bells. He tells me to keep to certain passages high in the Cathedral. He tells me and my father where we sleep, were we eat. He tells me to come to his rooms when he needs further things to be done by me.

Sometimes I have imagined that I was the Monseigneur’s daughter, at other times his wife, at other times even his dog. Sometimes he has called me his dog, but never his wife or his daughter.

Yesterday my father told me that the Monseigneur was leaving. I didn’t understand how that could be. Then he told me that there had been other Monseigneurs before Monseigneur Martin. That Monseigneur Martin had only come when I was a very young girl, that another Monseigneur, at least one that my father could remember maybe two, had preceded M. Martin.

My father seems concerned about M. Martin’s leaving. He says many things may change, though I don’t know how many things could change, since there seem so few things in this world of the high cathedral. When I said this to my father he looked at me saying nothing. It seemed he was not looking at me. He seemed about to say something but did not. I finally left his room.

Last night he did not fetch me to accompany him to the bells.


A Very Short Introduction to Very Short Stories

This is my weird tribute to twelve of the one and two page stories in the collection. Random linkings of pronouns, story subjects, and a quote from a story.


They wrote of what they knew the faces of two sisters in death are bitter by long habit. Lydia wrote of a fish a barrier provides safety for its love - its beard, her breasts, its glasses, her glasses etc. We wrote of mothers they could not bear the cold, and began to dissipate. He wrote of a besieged house Of course there might have been another explanation for what he heard. It wrote of visiting its husband my husband and I have gone our separate ways, but every now and then we remember the bone, and the Jewish doctor. You wrote of city employees when they are guests at dinner, they eat well, like children, but seem absent. She wrote of her love for her son’s pediatrician Why is this young man flirting with this old man? I wrote of a problem with seven independent variables, the answer? what is the question? and that’s the problem! and so I have the answer! and the variables mean nothing.


The House of Anti-Contraction Therapy

This is a story inspired by one of Davis’ stories (Therapy) and a story by Jorge Luis Borges (The House of Asterion). I had just read the latter, and had picked up the Davis collection and started reading the former. As soon as I started reading, I scribbled, “Coming straight from Borges, it seems as if the narrator hasn’t changed!?” Finally, it seems to me that some (not all) of Davis’s stories are worded very primly, where she favors not using contractions, but spelling each word out. I could be wrong.


I am writing in my notebook, which I always carry in my purse. I don’t do not know how much time is left.

Yesterday I felt very angry with my therapist, just as he had been angry with me, apparently, though at the time I was not sure, at least at first. I had started with him not long ago. I was uneasy when I approached his house, after finding it in a warehouse district. There hadn’t been any had been no people on the narrow streets. The address was 12345 Asterion Place but when I found the street the only address I saw at first was 12345.1 I had walked to the left and found 12345.2 and kept walking until finding 12345.13 and then further found 12345.1 again. I went in and had found myself in a long hall. The doctor’s name was on a nameplate, and a small sign said THIS WAY.

I went THIS WAY and after a while found an open door, saw a desk and a man in a dark suit behind the desk, looking at the doorway and so at me. He motioned me in and thus began my first therapy session.

The only thing I remember about this first session or really any of them is that I wasn’t was not allowed to say any contractions during the therapy. Dr. T (that was the name he wished me to use, though at the front door had been a sign for Dr. Theodosius, the name I had been referred to) called it anti-contraction therapy, which should have set off some kind of alarm for me I think but didn’t.

When I was leaving that first session, Dr. T had called his assistant, Mr. M, to show me out. I never saw Mr. M’s face, he walked in front of me, very tall and with an oddly shaped head, through a hall with many turns and other halls branching off from it, to a door. As I left, I noticed the sign I had seen coming in, but going out I saw that the number on the door on the outside was 12345.7.

Yesterday when I came to my session (my fourth) Dr. T. asked me how things were going. I said that I couldn’t be sure and before I could change that to could not be sure he exploded in anger, which at first I for some reason thought was a joke on his part. I said no wait I meant with a slight smile I think and he said No that’s the end for us but since yesterday I have thought about what he said and now think that he said for you and not for us.

He called Mr. M and said show her out, and I’m sure he also said fourteen.

Mr. M again led me through the long hall, as he had done at the end of each session. I had decided that I was glad to be leaving and glad to be finished with Dr. T. When we reached the door Mr M for the first time opened it himself and went through. We were not on the street but in front of a high hedge. He pointed toward an opening in the hedge and said that way and then I’m I am sure said good luck. He turned away and I now think as I search my memory went into the hedge at a different place, not back into the house.

Now it isn’t is not yesterday any longer but today. After wandering in the hedge for a long while and not being able to find Asterion Place it grew dark. I had cried quite a bit. At one point I thought I saw Mr M down another path and called out to him. He turned towards me and I screamed. Then he stepped to the side and disappeared. It grew dark. Then after a long while it grew lighter and I took out my notebook and began to write. I am very frightened.

what she saw




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Previous review: My Antonia
Random review: Iberia second review
Next review: The Blind Assassin

Previous library review: The Manchurian Candidate
Next library review: Almost No Memory more Lydia Davis

[Adam Dalva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disclosure: Lydia was a grad school professor of mine, but I really do love this book. What's great about it - possibly unique - is how the stories revolve around the same central trauma (divorce, loneliness) in a way that feels incredibly personal without connecting in any tangible way. It's therefore not really linked - but it is certainly spoked. The book ebbs and flows in quality of action, but is always perfect on the line level (sometimes bordering on overly systemic. She never omits the "step b" in a logical flow.) Despite the seemingly pedantic narratives, there is a strange, dark vibe here that will make you read it fast. It would be, I think, the perfect break-up book. I can think of a few times in my life that I wish I had read it.

Oh, and the title story is worth about 6 stars on its own. One of the best.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book pissed me off a little. It's not that there aren't flashes of greatness in this ultra-short story collection. Because there are, particularly in the title story. But at her very worst, Lydia Davis inundates her readers with terse anecdotes or observations that don't seem to have anything going for them. They aren't linguistically or rhythmically interesting. They don't suggest or allude to some Grand Ineffable Something going on behind the scenes. They aren't affecting. They aren't amusing. They're often just flat reportage of nothing at all very interesting.

For example. In one two-page story, the narrator describes how her husband (or boyfriend, I forget) gets a fish bone stuck in his throat in France. They try various remedies but nothing dislodges it. They go to the hospital. [Spoiler!] A doctor uses some medical tool to remove it. End of story. There's no affective embellishment to the story, no oblique commentary on relationships or foreignness or even fish bones. It's just an anecdote. There's nothing else there.

I do like very short fiction in general (because my attention span is dwindling with age), but brevity demands precision and economy. In this collection, Davis is not quite there.

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the second collection of "short stories" by Lydia Davis that I've tried, and it will be my last. The other collection, "Samuel Johnson is Indignant" had enough flashes of genuine wit to make it almost tolerable, despite Ms Davis's predilection for microscopically short "stories" (sometimes no more than a sentence long) and a preternaturally detached prose style. The kind of writing that garners raves from the usual suspects - "The best prose stylist in America" (Rick Moody), "one of most precise and economical writers we have" (Dave Eggers), "few writers now working make the words on the page matter more" (Jonathan Franzen).

Well, allow me to differ, Herr Franzen. "Break it Down" is as dismal a collection of bleak, emotionally constipated, tales of misery as I've had the misfortune to read in the last ten years. And let's be clear, Ms Davis's trademarks - "dexterity, brevity, understatement" - are not necessarily virtues. Not when they lead to passages like these, which are ubiquitous

"She stands over a fish, thinking about certain irrevocable mistakes she has made today"
"My husband is married to a different woman now, shorter than I am, about five feet tall, solidly built. Next to her I feel bony and awkward .."
"I moved into the city just before Christmas. I was alone, and this was a new thing for me. Where had my husband gone? He was living in a small room across the river, in a district of warehouses."
"He said there were things about me that he hadn't liked from the very beginning."
"Though everyone wishes it would not happen, and though it would be far better if it did not happen, it does sometimes happen that a second daughter is born and there are two sisters. Of course any daughter, crying in the hour of her birth, is only a failure, and is greeted with a heavy heart by her father.."
"She can't say to herself that it is really over, even though anyone else would say it was over, since he has moved to another city, hasn't been in touch with her in more than a year, and is married to another woman."
"The fact that he does not tell me the truth all the time makes me not sure of his truth at certain times, and then I work to figure out for myself if what he is telling me is the truth or not, and sometimes i can figure out that it's not the truth and sometimes I don't know and never know, and sometimes just because...."

Oh Christ, why don't I just slit my fucking wrists right now? It would surely beat reading this kind of drivel. At a guess, at least half of the 34 'stories' in this book consist of a 3rd person or 1st person narrative, centring on a clinically depressed doormat of a woman either in, or trying to recover from, a toxic relationship with a man who psychologically abuses here. None of these women has a name - they are all just "she". And Davis writes about them with a detachment that borders on the clinical.

In contrast to Jonathan Franzen, I can't imagine how a writer could make the words on the page matter less. The dreary 'stories' in this volume adhere to the dismal prevailing conventions of the late 1980s - tales of narcissistic or bipolar protagonists in which nothing much ever happens, served up in a kind of minimalist prose with that knowing ironic detachment. The kind of tripe that drives me up the wall, in other words.

(on edit, after posting this review: I notice that many of my good friends here on GR don't share my opinion - well, bring it on, Jessicas!)

I just found out that she was at one time married to Paul Auster. Why am I not surprised?

[Paul Sánchez Keighley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wow, I guess I’m not a big fan of Lydia Davis’ early work. I’d read some of her stories here and there over the years, and was always impressed by them. But most of the stories in this first collection just left me muttering, Gee, Miss Gloomy, I get it, life sucks, your point being?

All the characteristics of her style (dry understatement, detached examination of emotional minutiae...) are present, but shoddy, imperfect, unrefined.

Some recurrent themes seem to be: our difficult relationship with nature, the impertinence of thought, the abruptness of objects, insomnia, ennui.

What’s unusual about these stories is their length, which Davis must have eventually realised is their weakness. They’re so much longer on average than I’ve come to expect of her. The concepts are good, but an older Davis would squeeze a lot more juice out of them with less words (e.g., I like the idea behind the titular story, Break It Down, but it is stretched to the point of tedium).

My favourite story was The Fish, which could easily fit into a collection of her later works. Other stories I liked are: Mr Burdoff’s Visit to Germany, Extracts from a Life and Sketches for a Life of Wassily (the three of which are quite similar in structure; I like it when she tells large stories through a series of little tableaux). French Lesson I: Le Meurtre was also cool.

[Carrie Lorig · Rating 4 out of 5]

lydia davis punched out every lady author i worshiped before her. so much tougher and aware than didion. none of the light self-pity that is sort entwined in loorie moore's work. it's clean and sad. it's less of a game than her ex-husband's (paul auster) books can be. i feel like lydia davis is peeping in my apartment at night. and that is so much more terrifying than any of the premises and theory of the new york triology. god. she cracked my heart open like a pomegranate, but i enjoyed looking at all the red pieces inside.

[Tao · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like the last story and the first story and some of the other stories.

I like "The Fish."

[Mafalda Fernandes · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5*

- Story 4*
- The Fears of Mrs. Orlando 4*
- Liminal: The Little Man 3.5*
- Break It Down 5*
- Mr. Burdoff's Visit to Germany 4*
- What She Knew 4*
- The Fish 3*
- Mildred and the Oboe 4*
- The Mouse 4*
- The Letter 4.5*
- Extracts from a Life 3*
- The House Plans 4*
- The Brother-in-Law 4.5*
- How W.H. Auden Spends the Night in a Friend's House 4*
- Mothers 3.5*
- In a House Besieged 3.5*
- Visit to Her Husband 4*
- Cockroaches in Autumn 3*
- The Bone 4*
- A Few Things Wrong with Me 4.5*
- Sketches for a Life of Wassily 4.5*
- City Employment 4.5*
- Two Sisters 4.5*
- The Mother 5*
- Therapy 4.5*
- French Lesson I: Le Meurtre 4.5*
- Once a Very Stupid Man 4*
- The Housemaid 4*
- The Cottages 4*
- Safe Love 4*
- Problem 3.5*
- What an Old Woman Will Wear 4.5*
- The Sock 4*
- Five Signs of Disturbance 4.5*

[Mithun S · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's as if each story was written in a single, uninterrupted breath. We witness an idea turning into words, words into sentences, and sentences assembling into stories, all along without dropping the weight of that original singular thought. It's as if each reader becomes a writer.

[Pete · Rating 2 out of 5]

my previous experience w lydia davis has been overall positive if limited but good lord is this book excruciating. i cannot imagine someone reading this end to end, or even reading one of the longer stories (it's 75% longer stories by volume) and saying to themself with any semblance of honesty "i enjoyed that" or even "i will someday think about this story ever again". one star because the short ones are great! a second star because the title story is rad! but the other long ones are actual CIA torture! art is a weapon we use on ourselves!

[Daria · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's not a pleasant sensation, reading Lydia Davis. She writes well, she's a disciple of the "simplify, simplify" school, but.... I take my words now from the response I wrote to Break it Down for class:

There is much within-ness within Davis' work. It invites the reader to examine herself, and not in the cajoling way that some texts have of encouraging such examination, but an inescapable one that isn't necessarily optimistic or pretty. I sometimes feel as if Davis reveals more about me to myself than she reveals about Davis. To read her is to be uncomfortably introspective, and Davis' anonymous heroines, delineated only by "she"s, can easily take the form and face and shape of the reader herself. Davis' stories make me restless, and I think that I, too, am at great risk of wandering through soulless suburban spaces, a neurotic woman-writer… Her endings do not do what stories should do, they do not give closure; they are liberating, but at the cost of peace of mind, I think. Nothing Davis ends with offers the reader hope – she is not really in the business of cheering her readers up – but reveals an uneasy, insomniac, fretful examination of the self and the world that ultimately seems to yield nothing:

"Then she looks out at the smokestacks far away and nearly invisible across the sound and thinks, though, that this was not the revelation she was waiting for, either." (177)

"[…]but I kept forgetting to ask, until finally I put them away in a drawer to give her when they came out again, because by then it wasn't going to be long, and it made me tired all over again just to think of it." (164)

"[…] though her eyes rest on the darkening woods, she is not so much watching as waiting, and often, now, feels she is waiting." (152)

"[…] she remembers everything that happened and remembers, though she will have forgotten when I see her again, that she has told it to me now, though just barely." (150)

"They have never known such disappointment as I have." (148)

"I'm not the one who can answer it and anyone else who tries will come up with a different answer, though of course all the answers together may add up to the right one, if there is such a thing as a right answer to a question like that." (98)

"They have suffered for our sakes, and most often in a place where we could not see them" (80)

"They shook him out of the mattress, brushed him over the floor, wiped him off the windowpane, and never knew what they had done." (77)

"Then the poem, and she thinks she can smell something there, though she is probably smelling only the ink." (56)

Isn't this a sobering collection of last sentences? This restlessness, this feeling of having been left hanging, can be seen as positive because it invites motion, perhaps. But I could quote Davis herself in counterargument, from the final sentence of "What an Old Woman Will Wear": "And now that she had said this out loud, she thought that maybe there was no joy, after all, in even thinking about such freedom." (159) There is no joy in Davis' tales, no permission to exhale. There is only restless scrutiny. Searching for something and not finding it. Exhaustion. Waiting. The exhaustion caused by endless waiting. Unrealized futures, unanswered questions, unrecognized people and deeds.

It is an accurate if depressing picture, perhaps. We are all told to "live in the moment" and "carpe diem" this and that, but the truth is that so much of our lives revolves around waiting – always looking to some wiser, better, more incredible tomorrow, and so we stumble over today in anticipation. Retrospection or some gloomy inquisitiveness, that is how Davis' stories begin and end, and in between the two stretches the tedious now, made up of the minuteness of the everyday.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I heard the story "Break it Down" on This American Life and had to check this collection out. The title story is so great. I love it. The rest of the stories in the rest of the collection share a similar narrative style, but hardly any of the emotional weight. They read more like clever exercises, but after just a few I realized I didn't particularly care about the people, the story, or the ideas she was playing with. It reads to me as sort of "academic literature," where they kiss the story and feelings behind it goodbye in favor of experimentation, but why sacrifice? Donald Barthelme pulls off both consistently.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read two of the seven collections of short stories from the MacArthur-awarded Davis, who writes here 34 stories, most of them short shorts, sometimes only a line or two. Her idea overall seems to be to reflect on the nature of story, what it is and what it is not. She's both serious as hell as a writer and damned funny. Just look at some of the titles: "A Few Things Wrong With Me," "Cockroaches in Autumn," "What an Old Woman Will Wear," "Extracts from a Life." These are eminently literary experiments, postmodern-leaning, a cross between Kafka and Woody Allen (in places, because most are not meant to be funny, methinks). Terrific stuff.

[India · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bad, unfortunately. Not a single story I liked. All bleak and self indulgent and seemingly pointless

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was bemused by the fact that Lydia Davis, whose translation of Proust's Swann's Way is so excellent, is also likewise a superb writer of short stories. In Break It Down: Stories, some of the stories are very short indeed, often no more than a middling paragraph in length.

What struck me first, however, was the almost complete lack of dialog, it being one of the principles of the modern short story that the reader is drawn to come to his own conclusions by reading what the characters say to one another. One result of a lack of dialog is a growing feeling of dread: Instead of a Godlike narrator (a la Anthony Trollope), we frequently have a confused narrator who goes from bad to worse.

I am hard put to say which stories I like the most, but "Break It Down" must surely be one. It deals with the monetary value of love from both a male and female perspective. I can understand why Davis chose to name her collection as she did.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would give this book five stars if it were just for the title story "Break It Down." The rest paled in comparison to it, which is more a compliment to "Break it Down" than a criticism of the others.

I have been in love with "Break It Down" for five years--it was assigned for a creative writing class I took in college. Every time I read this story, it makes me cry. And that's not something I do easily.

No story better captures the feelings we all experience after breaking up with someone we really cared for. The protagonist in the story has just ended a short-lived romance with a woman, and his heartbreak has driven him to try to reason out what he has lost in terms of dollars. Even though as we all know, and as the the protagonist figures out by the end of the story, what we lose (and gain) in loving is impossible to quantify or measure.

I don't want to give too much away. If you pick up this book for no other reason, pick it up after a difficult breakup and find a best friend in the protagonist of "Break It Down."

[Nicole Pi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never shut up about this. So upping it to 5 stars.
____

I loved this. It's slice-of-life, (a bit dull, tbh, hence the 4 stars), the ideas aren't revolutionary, but her words have a nice rhythm and that's all I really wanted.

I'll remember a quirky line or two, the contents of the stories I'll probably forget. Reading this was similar to engaging in conversation with co-workers during downtime--nothing substantial comes out of the conversation. However, it's still satisfying and I leave work feeling content.

"One day she sees an apartment she is willing to take. It is not very pretty, but she is ready to take it because she wants to have a home again, she wants to be bound to this city by a lease, she doesn’t want to go on feeling the way she does, loose in the world, the only one without any place."

[Antonia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. . . can't decide. The way these characters muse on their lives is probably very true to life for most of us. But it wasn't exactly enjoyable reading. I best liked the story called "French Lesson I: Le Meurtre." Not much taken with the title story, "Break It Down."

[Update:] Until I heard it read by James Salter on The Guardian Podcast. Now I'm in love with it.

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Are you kneeling and putting your hands on the carpet like that. Are you. On the carpet, your hands are on it?

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

An engaging, easy to read, interesting, thought provoking short story collection where the main topic seems to be the loneliness of single people and their coping mechanisms. I particularly liked the stories that were more than five pages, for example, ‘The Fears of Mrs Orlando’, ‘House Plans’, ‘Sketches of Wassily’s Life’, and ‘Therapy’. My FSG Classics edition is 177 pages.

The Fears of Mrs Orlando: A woman living alone is very apprehensive about the noises she hears and the movements of objects that she sees.
House Plans: A single woman buys a run down cottage in the country with plans to make extensive renovations but her finances make her think again about whether she really wants to live in the country.
Sketches of Wassily’s Life: A single man, a writer, does not mix easily in company and sees little of his father or siblings.
Therapy: A single woman decides she needs to see a therapist and decides to go for one visit but going to a therapist becomes part of her lonely lifestyle.

This book was first published in 1986.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing--so incredibly underrated. Raw, real, and painful. These prose pieces stick with you and eat at you throughout the day--they never leave the reader. The title piece is incredible, reads so easy. I devoured this book and wanted more the second I closed it. Absolutely recommend--leaves you feeling changed yet the same.

[Hannah Gadbois · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I thought that since I was better, my therapy should end soon. I was impatient, and I wondered: How did therapy come to an end? I had other questions too: for instance, How much longer would I continue to need all my strength just to take myself from one day to the next? There was no answer to that one. There would be no end to therapy, either, or I would not be the one who chose to end it.”

[eva · Rating 3 out of 5]

está bien en general pero sería mucho más llevadero si las historias fueran cortas pq es un palo de cojones leerte tres páginas de párrafos pegados

tampoco lo he entendido mucho todo supongo que no soy tan profunda (la historia de la madre y de las hermanas estaban chulas 🙏🙏 ayuda q fueran cortitas pq si no a lo mejor me las saltaba)

podría haber pasado sin el racismo también

[Rachel León]

Hmm... so this book was my first introduction to Lydia Davis and I may have come to it with unfairly high expectations. While I recognize her skill at condensing a short story, I also felt like her writing has a clinical quality that kept me from connecting (which is my favorite thing about reading fiction).

[Katy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant.

[Peter Schutz]

a strange, empty book. but strange enough to keep you interested. but empty.

[Gainsley Korengold · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best short stories ever

[Gina Freyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love her writing.

[Quinn Barber · Rating 5 out of 5]

fantastic. saw some of myself in this, too. can't wait to read some more.

[Lee Foust · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been reading and worshiping Ms. Davis' translations of Maurice Blanchot since my college days in the 1980s and, weirdly to me, have only just recently discovered that she has been, since about that same time (1986) been working herself to redefine and/or expand the possibilities of the short story form with a series of critically well-received collections. Perfect timing, in a sense, as I am currently writing a novel in frames, a system of linked short narratives and I, too, want to both write the greatest short stories ever written while also simultaneously redefining and/or expanding the boundaries of what can be accomplished in a short prose narrative. So, yeah, I had a total agenda in reading this book: to steal her inspirational fire like a little literary Prometheus in an attempt to create a new narrative humankind out of a slip of the divine creative power of invention.

So, bias out on the table (in front of everyone!), I am both interested enough to keep on reading Davis' short stories in the future (yeah, I actually have the Penguin collected stories edition but plan on reading the books collected in it one at a time) but also rather disappointed. What I took from my feelings after whipping through the collection--the shortness and compactness of the tales leads one on quickly--is that some of these experiments in short prose tend, often, to come out cold. Very cold. While I know that it's often more powerful to describe heightened moments of human passion in a semi-detached way--in order to be more honest and to fight the stench of melodrama--but still, many of these stories were, literally, chilling and the feelings I drew for them were more concern, pity, and annoyance with Ms. Davis.

Such a chilly reaction to this book on my part might also be at least partially provoked by the last book I read, _I Love Dick_ by Chris Kraus, which I loved too much perhaps for my own good. Often it's hard for that first book after a great, great read to seem at all good as it will not stand up to the comparison. What interest me, however, most about my having read these two texts back-to-back and my response (and to raise the gender issue, which also fascinates me, even as I would seek to collapse gender differences and not be forced ever and always to have to define myself via my own maleness) is that I fell in love with Ms. Kraus while reading her book--certainly seduction is a theme so I do also believe that, as a reader, any reader, I was meant to fall in love with that narrator and that exactly is why that narrative so worked for me. The many narrators of the tales of _Break It Down_ are the kind of neurotics that are often attractive because of their neuroses but you also know from the moment that you meet such characters that your relationship, whether friendship or romance, causal acquaintance or messy, ambiguous long-term bugfuck, will end with their own neuroses running the show completely as if you were never there before them. The reader feels left out of the stories, helplessly witnessing over self-absorbed characters creating their own alienating scenarios. A literary/romantic shut door; I walk on through the wintry cold to the next book.