The End of the Story

Like many, I first came to Lydia Davis through her short stories, many of which are EXTREMELY short, on the order of tens of words. I was intrigued to see she had written a novel, and much to my delight her modus operandi scaled beautifully; I don't think there is a wasted word on any of these 240 pages. The central theme of the work is memory, and Davis approaches this subject in a unique and compelling way. The novel is almost scientific in nature, and its form evoked the image of a jeweler scrutinizing a gem under a loupe, looking at each facet in different lights and at different angles in order comprehend the whole of it totally and fully. Most books I read leave something to be desired, but this one was polished to perfection.

I've been reading on this book for seven or eight months. It's an experimental novel, with the main character attempting to remember every event of her relationship with a man, starting with the last first. The end of the story is really the beginning. Fun to start, like most gimmicks, but grew quite wearing. Where did this author go for her degree in creative writing?

‰ЫПI used to try to study what it meant to love someone. I would write down quotations from the works of famous writers, writers who did not interest me otherwise, like Hippolyte Taine or Alfred de Musset. For instance, Taine said that to love is to make one‰ЫЄs goal the happiness of another person. I would try to apply this to my own situation. But if loving a person meant putting him before myself, how could I do that? There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn how to love a person while continuing to be selfish. I did not think I could manage the first two, but I thought I could learn how to be just unselfish enough to love someone at least part of the time.‰Ыќ