The End Of The Story - Softcover

Lydia Davis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 024120545X ISBN 13: 9780241205457

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2015

Synopsis

The first and only novel by Lydia Davis, winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2013. 'It surprised me, over and over, to find that I was with such a young man. He was twenty-two when I met him. He turned twenty-three while I knew him, but by the time I turned thirty-five I did not know where he was anymore.' Mislabelled boxes, confusing notes, wrong turnings - such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she organises her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit and what seems to be candour, she seeks to determine what she actually knows about herself and her past, but we begin to suspect, along with her, that given the elusiveness of memory and understanding, any tale retrieved from the past must be fiction Back in print at last, this is Lydia Davis's first - and so far only - novel. 'Extraordinary' Newsday 'Brilliant' New Yorker 'Breathtakingly elegant' Details 'Beautifully written' Marie Claire 'Astonishing' Elle Lydia Davis is the author of Collected Stories, one novel and six short story collections, most recently Can't and Won't. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust. She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.

About this title

About the Author:

Lydia Davis is the author of Collected Stories, one novel and six short story collections, most recently Can't and Won't. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust. She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.

From Library Journal:

The narrator of this novel, who never reveals her name, is writing a novel about an obsessive relationship she had with a younger man. Although the woman did not seem totally committed while the couple was together, she became completely obsessed with her former partner after they separated. This first-person remembrance, with events imprecisely defined and sometimes out of sequence, is self-conscious and introspective. The narration is highly descriptive, and there is no dialog. The narrator comments that "my thoughts are not orderly-one is interrupted by another, or one contradicts another, and in addition to that, my memories are quite often false, confused, abbreviated, or collapsed into one another." A more apt description of the style would be hard to imagine. For anyone who has had a failed intimate relationship, this book could be uncomfortable reading. From the author of Break It Down (Farrar, 1986), a short story collection.
Kimberly G. Allen, MCI Corporate Information Resources Ctr., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 024120545X
• ISBN 13: 9780241205457
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 236