On modifiers – Heather Cass White in TLS:

‘A story in Lydia Davis’s new collection, Our Strangers, has the ungainly title “On Their Way South on Sunday Morning (They Thought)”. As we begin the story we see that the title might also be the first clause of the opening sentence: “Mark and Gail stopped to refuel their bikes and themselves”. The story’s conflict is complete by the end of the first paragraph: But when they entered the restaurant, the woman who greeted them with menus in her hands said, “We only serve breakfast on Sunday.” “But this is Sunday,” Mark said. “Yes, so we only serve breakfast,” the woman said. They were still confused.
At this point the narrator intercedes to explain that Mark and Gail’s confusion is the result of a grammatical error: “The modifier ‘only’ seems to be misplaced, so that [the woman’s] meaning is unclear”. The narrator explains various ways in which the woman could have made it clearer, noting that “the placement of ‘only’ in a sentence has been a source of studious commentary since the eighteenth century”. Mark, meanwhile, blames himself: “perhaps, because his hearing was not as sharp as it had once been, he had missed the woman’s intonation”.
What has happened in this story? Two people’s emotional lives have been affected by a misplaced modifier. Though all three characters speak the same language, and want to transact the same business, a single word choice leaves two of them confused and self-doubting. Something has been lost in the translation of life into language, a danger that Davis, a translator of Proust and Flaubert, knows well. It is hard enough to move effectively from one language to another – even harder to move from experience to words.’

(…)

‘It would be helpful to readers new to Davis if editions of her writing could be stripped of their blurbs. As things stand it is difficult to read her without having one’s expectations shaped by superlatives. From 1986 onwards, when she began to be published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, her book covers have called her “visionary”, “a genius”, “a giant”, and her work “revolutionary”, “a grand achievement”, “life-enhancing”. Her CV is a young writer’s wish list, starred with names like “Guggenheim”, “Lannan”, “Whiting” and “MacArthur”. She won the International Booker prize in 2013, back when it was a lifetime achievement award, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a Nobel were next.’

(…)

‘Being told that she is “a literary treasure” makes it harder for a reader to let a story like “Marriage Moment of Annoyance – Coconut” work its modest magic. Here it is in its entirety: After many days, he said to her: “Could you do something with this coconut?” This story is funny, probably more so if you have been married for more than ten years. I call it a story by default, although it is lineated, as poetry usually is. It has a conflict of sorts, but no explicit resolution. Maybe it is an anecdote, or a parable.’

(…)

‘But Davis is concerned about forgetting, and, like Plato, she suspects that writing might actually accelerate it: she called her story about keeping notebooks “Almost No Memory”, then named a collection after it (in 1997). And she is acutely aware that writing does not bring back people we lose, something the current collection’s stories about her parents lament. After their deaths, her mother is a box of unspeaking ash (“I know she would want to hear this / She’s just upstairs, what is left of her”) and her father a conjugation puzzle (“Do I have a father, or did I have a father? / I can’t answer that question”).’

(…)

‘Meanwhile, the author gets language right over and over. She can make you laugh at shameful length over an innocent entry on a community chat board (“Does anyone have a walnut tree who would be willing to part with their nuts?”), speak your guiltiest truth (“I always enjoy reading posters that agree with a favorite position of my own”) and slow you down sufficiently to actually see the world (“The landscape of this tree, now that the leaves are off, is bright with small red apples, dark twigs, and pale blue-green lichens”).’

Read the review here.

A Dutch novelist (Mulisch) remarked that there are writers who write unforgettable sentences (Nabokov) and others who write unforgettable books (Dostoevsky).

Nabokov occasionally managed to write a collection of sentences that together turned out to be nothing less than an unforgettable book (‘Laughter in the dark’ for example).

Davis clearly is a writer of sentences. And sometimes one or two sentences are enough.