Books like Break It Down

perfect for the holidays … very short fictionOne 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 KnewPeople 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 StyleIn 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: 2Third 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 DisturbanceThis 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.(view spoiler)[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. (hide spoiler)]