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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Davis's spare, always surprising short fiction was most recently collected in Samuel Johnson Is Indignant. In this introspective, more sober culling, Davis touches on favorite themes (mothers, dogs, flies and husbands) and encapsulates, as in "Insomnia," everyday life's absurdist binds: "My body aches so—It must be this heavy bed pressing up against me." Davis is a noted translator (Swann's Way), and a kind of passion—and bemused suffering—for points of rhetoric produces a delicate beauty in "Grammar Questions" ("Now, during his time of dying, can I say, 'This is where he lives'?") and "We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth-Graders," written to their hospitalized classmate. The longest selection, "Helen and Vi: A Study in Health and Vitality," examines the long lives of two elderly women, one white, one black, in terms of background, employment, pets and conversational manner. Most moving may be "Burning Family Members," which can be read as a response to the Iraq War: " 'They' burned her thousands of miles away from here. The 'they' that are starving him here are different." Davis's work defies categorization and possesses a moving, austere elegance. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Davis, a celebrated Proust translator as well as a fiction writer prized for her sly wit and inventiveness, presents a new array of piquant and elegant tales. A master of the extremely short story, some told in one sentence, Davis neatly castigates the vicious circle that is family, the insidious toxins of relationships, and the oddities of intellectual and creative pursuits. Literary and artistic erudition and fluency in loneliness, disappointment, and fretfulness shape these mordant yet pirouetting stories. "The Walk," a gem, draws on Davis' love of translation. In "For Sixty Cents," Davis performs an insouciant and bracing extrapolation as she calculates all that a customer gets in a cup of coffee. Parodies of academic studies and note taking lead to wickedly cutting stories, such as the compressed epic of a writer and the maids she dreams will free her from child care and housework. Davis' attempts to quantify predicaments to eliminate emotion intensify it instead, which is but one of life's many ironies Davis so artfully reveals. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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