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I had a really hard time getting through this small book. I like Lydia Davis, and I respect her a lot as a writer. That's why I'm not giving this book 1 star. I felt like for all of the time she described organizing her thoughts, this was a disorganized mess of rambling. It was not only a story about her failed relationship with someone who was not right for her, whom she didn't much care for until he left her, but also the story of her writing the story. I wanted to care, but I couldn't make my...
Fuck. That's really all I can say.
Minimalist Fiction and Self-AwarenessDavis's minimalist voice (which I find myself mimicking in this review, always a sign of a style's power to inhabit the imagination and control the pen) is not at all the usual minimalism. This novel is life with its content subtracted away. It's 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 aren't given any names of gras...
How much do I adore Lydia Davis? I like her writing because no one is able to categorize it. Sometimes a work of hers that appears in a prose magazine will also appear in a poetry magazine--the same exact piece of writing. I love that. Some libraries list her stuff as personal essays while others have it in the fiction section. The End Of The Story is definitely a novel. I know that because the narrator keeps referring to what she's writing as a novel and the novel she's writing is the novel I w...
I admire what the author did with this book and the way she captured the challenge of processing memories after the fact, of trying to reconstruct a logical timeline of events as they actually occurred, not how we have come to believe they happened or how we wish they had happened. It was definitely a unique book and was worth reading for that alone. However, the story itself just never grabbed my interest and I never felt at all invested in the characters or their actions, so in the end this bo...
Without a doubt, one of the great books on writing that is not non-fiction, but in fact a work of fiction. On one level, a narrative (of sorts) regarding the beginning and ending of a relationship, or what we are led to believing is a relationship. One is not sure, since we're getting the story or narrative from the author -for all I know she maybe making this all up, or it could be a demented diary of sorts. Fragmented, yet totally readable, the narrator comments on every aspect of her relation...
I'm giving this a three because it is a difficult book to like, but an important book to love because here Davis fearlessly confronts the process of resurrecting narrative from our emotional past. It's a dissection, really, of the mind's attempt to make linear sense of the heart, the arm's length of what we call love, the deeper romance of despair. Important for anyone who thinks they write nonfiction, or who thinks they write fiction, or who thinks.
There is some kind of style in this book that made me like it. That style is strange and I did not know how Davis was able to walk away with it.(1) No plot(2) No dialogues(3) Started the 1st person narration ("unreliable") with the ending of the story(4) Time period went back and forth with no pattern(5) Unnecessary characters, events, musingsIt’s an endless recollection of the unnamed narration’s failed love story with a man 12 years her senior. The narrator is a college literature professor an...
1.5 starsRub enough elbows with the literary cognoscenti, you're bound to hear glowing praise about Lydia Davis' short stories. I was delighted to see The End of the Story, her first novel, made available to our library system's e-book exchange to see what the hoopla was all about. Delight turned to unalleviated boredom rather quickly, followed by utter exasperation with the realization (at about page 40) that it never was going to get any better. It's further frustrating that many GR folks fou...
Senryu Review:Supreme break-up bookin stark self-aware prose trumpsall-night make-up sex.
Stephen told me the other day I wasn’t a sensitive person and I was all, “Yes I am,” confusing ‘sensitive’ with ‘perceptive’ and ‘thoughtful’ and then started adding, “Just because I’m not going to sit around and blah blah blah feelings all day and cry over puppies and care about things that are just stupid and,” needless to say he was all, “Point proven.” I guess this furthers his cause, as some of the sentences were stabbingly beautiful and I’m always interested in the exploration of faulty me...
I just didn't care for this much - I probably skimmed the biggest part of it because it just felt like the author was just rambling. There was no real plot and barely even characters.
