Everything is a story: Lydia Davis's Very Short Fiction

Abstract

For Lydia Davis, writing has always wished to be as concise as possible. Her very short stories have almost no plot, emerging as reiterative pieces of thoughts where the chronology becomes a subject rather than a formal device. One of the most important aspects of her tales is that they are nourished by ordinary people and by the frustrations we find around us. They ingeniously manage to focus on what is important in everyday life, revealing its beauty and rescuing what is valuable in the simple actions of each day, immortalizing them with a very particular style. Davis's narratives may be bizarre, absurd and strange but they keep a secret truth to be discovered. Her short stories are undoubtedly short ways to express the secrecy of many truths that not even a long story could tell. Like good pictures, her very short fiction is really very powerful to capture instant glimpses of deeper dimensions in every common routine or experience of our daily lives, where everything is a story. If her writing was acknowledged as belonging to an American tradition, her fiction also persists in evoking the influence of many other writers such as Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Kafka, Hemingway, W.G. Sebald or Peter Handke. Like them, Lydia Davis is a radical expert of making a long story very short.