"Break It Down"
Nov. 29th, 2021 02:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoeLydia Davis's debut story collection. The "French Lesson" one is my favorite by far.
'Story'
Finally I sit down and write in my notebook that when he calls me either he will then come to me, or he will not and I will be angry, and so I will have either him or my own anger, and this might be all right, since anger is always a great comfort, as I found with my husband. And then I go on to write, in the third person and the past tense, that clearly she always needed to have a love even if it was a complicated love.
for example, he says he did not want to see me because he wanted to work and even more because he wanted to be alone, but he has not worked and he has not been alone. There is no way I can get him to reconcile any of his contradictions, and when this conversation begins to sound too much like many I had with my husband I say goodbye and hang up. I finish writing down what I started to write down even though by now it no longer seems true that anger is any great comfort.
'Break It Down'
And once she lay over against me late in the night and she started talking, her breath in my ear, and she just went on and on, and talked faster and faster, she couldn’t stop, and I loved it, I just felt that all that life in her was running into me too, I had so little life in me, her life, her fire, was coming into me, in that hot breath in my ear, and I just wanted her to go on talking forever right there next to me, and I would go on living, like that, I would be able to go on living, but without her I don’t know.
'Mr. Burdoff’s Visit to Germany'
The hesitation of the members of the class as they attempt to speak is charming; a fresh innocence endows them as they expose their weakness.
Late in their affair, by the time Mr. Burdoff has sat through the entire Ring cycle and The Flying Dutchman, as well as a symphonic poem by Strauss and what seem to him innumerable violin concertos by Bruch, Mr. Burdoff feels that Helen has taken him deep into the nineteenth century, a century he has always carefully avoided. He is surprised by its lushness, its brilliance, and its female sensibility,
'House Plans'
Returning across the fields to my house, I looked at the red landscape and felt that it was deeply familiar to me, as though it had been mine long before I found it. The idea of leaving it seemed to make no sense at all. Within a few days my rage and disappointment had ebbed away, and now, as in the beginning, each thing I looked at seemed only a shell or a husk that would fall away and reveal a perfect fruit.
'A Few Things Wrong with Me'
Then he talked in a very reasonable way about how bad the chances were for us to be happy together, and about changing over to a friendship now before it was too late. I said he was talking about me as though I were an old tire that might blow out on the highway. He thought that was funny.
'French Lesson I: Le Meurtre'
A French arbre is not the elm or maple shading the main street of our New England towns in the infinitely long, hot and listless, vacant summer of our childhoods, which are themselves different from the childhoods of French children, and if you see a Frenchman standing on a street in a small town in America pointing to an elm or a maple and calling it an arbre, you will know this is wrong. An arbre is a plane tree in an ancient town square with lopped, stubby branches and patchy, leprous bark standing in a row of similar plane trees across from the town hall, in front of which a bicycle ridden by a man with thick, reddish skin and an old cap wavers past and turns into a narrow lane. Or an arbre is one of the dense, scrubby live oaks in the blazing dry hills of Provence, through which a similar figure in a blue cloth jacket carrying some sort of a net or trap pushes his way. An arbre can also cast a pleasant shade and keep la maison cool in the summer, but remember that la maison is not wood-framed with a widow’s walk and a wide front porch but is laid out on a north-south axis, is built of irregular, sand-colored blocks of stone, and has a red tile roof, small square windows with green shutters, and no windows on the north side, which is also protected from the wind by a closely planted line of cypresses, while a pretty mulberry or olive may shade the south. Not that there are not many different sorts of maisons in France, their architecture depending on their climate or on the fact that there may be a foreign country nearby, like Germany, but we cannot really have more than one image behind a word we say, like maison. What do you see when you say house? Do you see more than one kind of house?
'The Sock'
He told me his mother was in bad shape and couldn’t stay with them, and he asked me if I would please take her home with me later. Without thinking I said I would. I was forgetting the way she would look at the inside of my house and how I would clean the worst of it while she watched.
'Story'
Finally I sit down and write in my notebook that when he calls me either he will then come to me, or he will not and I will be angry, and so I will have either him or my own anger, and this might be all right, since anger is always a great comfort, as I found with my husband. And then I go on to write, in the third person and the past tense, that clearly she always needed to have a love even if it was a complicated love.
for example, he says he did not want to see me because he wanted to work and even more because he wanted to be alone, but he has not worked and he has not been alone. There is no way I can get him to reconcile any of his contradictions, and when this conversation begins to sound too much like many I had with my husband I say goodbye and hang up. I finish writing down what I started to write down even though by now it no longer seems true that anger is any great comfort.
'Break It Down'
And once she lay over against me late in the night and she started talking, her breath in my ear, and she just went on and on, and talked faster and faster, she couldn’t stop, and I loved it, I just felt that all that life in her was running into me too, I had so little life in me, her life, her fire, was coming into me, in that hot breath in my ear, and I just wanted her to go on talking forever right there next to me, and I would go on living, like that, I would be able to go on living, but without her I don’t know.
'Mr. Burdoff’s Visit to Germany'
The hesitation of the members of the class as they attempt to speak is charming; a fresh innocence endows them as they expose their weakness.
Late in their affair, by the time Mr. Burdoff has sat through the entire Ring cycle and The Flying Dutchman, as well as a symphonic poem by Strauss and what seem to him innumerable violin concertos by Bruch, Mr. Burdoff feels that Helen has taken him deep into the nineteenth century, a century he has always carefully avoided. He is surprised by its lushness, its brilliance, and its female sensibility,
'House Plans'
Returning across the fields to my house, I looked at the red landscape and felt that it was deeply familiar to me, as though it had been mine long before I found it. The idea of leaving it seemed to make no sense at all. Within a few days my rage and disappointment had ebbed away, and now, as in the beginning, each thing I looked at seemed only a shell or a husk that would fall away and reveal a perfect fruit.
'A Few Things Wrong with Me'
Then he talked in a very reasonable way about how bad the chances were for us to be happy together, and about changing over to a friendship now before it was too late. I said he was talking about me as though I were an old tire that might blow out on the highway. He thought that was funny.
'French Lesson I: Le Meurtre'
A French arbre is not the elm or maple shading the main street of our New England towns in the infinitely long, hot and listless, vacant summer of our childhoods, which are themselves different from the childhoods of French children, and if you see a Frenchman standing on a street in a small town in America pointing to an elm or a maple and calling it an arbre, you will know this is wrong. An arbre is a plane tree in an ancient town square with lopped, stubby branches and patchy, leprous bark standing in a row of similar plane trees across from the town hall, in front of which a bicycle ridden by a man with thick, reddish skin and an old cap wavers past and turns into a narrow lane. Or an arbre is one of the dense, scrubby live oaks in the blazing dry hills of Provence, through which a similar figure in a blue cloth jacket carrying some sort of a net or trap pushes his way. An arbre can also cast a pleasant shade and keep la maison cool in the summer, but remember that la maison is not wood-framed with a widow’s walk and a wide front porch but is laid out on a north-south axis, is built of irregular, sand-colored blocks of stone, and has a red tile roof, small square windows with green shutters, and no windows on the north side, which is also protected from the wind by a closely planted line of cypresses, while a pretty mulberry or olive may shade the south. Not that there are not many different sorts of maisons in France, their architecture depending on their climate or on the fact that there may be a foreign country nearby, like Germany, but we cannot really have more than one image behind a word we say, like maison. What do you see when you say house? Do you see more than one kind of house?
'The Sock'
He told me his mother was in bad shape and couldn’t stay with them, and he asked me if I would please take her home with me later. Without thinking I said I would. I was forgetting the way she would look at the inside of my house and how I would clean the worst of it while she watched.
