the 941

How did I select the current entry in The 941 Book CL-B? The truth? I liked the cover.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux is one of the most prestigious names in the American publishing industry (even though it’s now been absorbed by big boy Macmillan) and the list of authors it’s had relationships with is just astonishing: T. S. Eliot, Pablo Neruda, Eugenio Montale, Czeslaw Milosz, William Golding, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Susan Sontag, Jonathan Franzen, Leonard Michaels, Denis Johnson, Roberto Bolaño, on and on.

So FSG has cred to burn, and anything the imprint puts out is at least worth looking into. Over the past few years, the company has been ambitiously reissuing a lot of its classic paperbacks with an elegant, unified look. Discussing books, we don’t talk much about how the thing feels in your hands, and how the font strikes you, and whether or not it’s easy to tote around, but all these things affect how we experience the content within. Which is all a long way of saying that good cover design, a sensible layout and high-quality paper’ll get me every time.

Luckily, the paperback edition of Lydia Davis’ 1986 short story compilation, Break it Down, has a lot more going for it than mere good design. Like top-notch writing.

Davis specializes in exceptionally brief tales; some don’t even run longer than a single sentence. But despite their brevity, Davis’ stories can be devastating. Here is “Safe Love” in its entirety:

She was in love with her son’s pediatrician. Alone out in the country—could anyone blame her.

There was an element of grand passion in this love. It was also a safe thing. The man was on the other side of a barrier. Between him and her: the child on the examining table, the office itself, the staff, his wife, her husband, his stethoscope, his beard, her breasts, his glasses, her glasses, etc.

Davis’ economical language is a joy to read, and while on the surface it appears simple and clean and easy to parse, the meaning behind it is anything but. Her stories often depict seemingly coherent surfaces, with hints of lurking disorder strewn throughout, like the way the French grammar instruction in “French Lesson I” gives way to a never-quite-explicit murder plot.

In an era in which we normally associate the word “masterpiece” with long, epic, sprawling works (Gravity’s Rainbow, Infinite Jest, 2666), Davis reminds us that excellence in prose can also come in tense, tightly controlled, near-poetic short bursts as well.

Upcoming entries in The 941 Book CL-B:

• Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
• Beowulf
• Milan Kundera’s Immortality
• What will land on this list next? Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbo? Sophocles? James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name? Jorge Luis Borges’ Collected Fictions? Harold Pinter’s Betrayal? Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove? Jacques Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy? You won’t know unless you tune in, so to speak, next time.

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