NOBODY can write like Lydia Davis, or touch the heart the way she does in her writing. Short, intense, significant details compressed into a crisp style, her writing is in a class by itself. It has been said about Alice Munroe, the great contemporary short story writer, that she is capable of taking the pain and loneliness and anguish of a lifetime and turning it into a story of 30 or 40 pages, but Davis is capable of doing something similar in not more than three or four pages, or even a few sentences.

Davis is the type to be relished by writers and select readers, rather like a cult figure, and reading her work is similar to a secret pleasure reserved only for the initiated few.

I had not actually encountered her writings until I came across her name in the list of the nominations for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize. The majority of the names were new to me and slowly I started reading, assimilating and absorbing the bewildering array of writers. My exploration ultimately took the shape of a book-length issue of Duniyzad which featured selections of the nominated writers, culled with great difficulty from the wilderness of the internet and a few books difficult to access in Pakistan. A handful of stories gleaned from the internet did not tell me much about Lydia Davis until a friend managed to lay his hands on the paperback, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which he then passed on to me but not before laying his claim to the stories he wanted to translate into Urdu. The book passed from hand to hand, became dog-eared and worn with every successive reader folding the top corner of the pages marking the stories they liked.

We had far too many stories to choose from as we wrote to the author seeking permission for translation. Miraculously, Davis granted us this favour. Just after the issue came out but before it could be widely distributed, I got a chance to meet her at the ceremony in which she was named prize winner. While the announcement eulogised her work, she surprised everybody by saying that she thought that she had no chance of being selected so she had not prepared the customary speech of acceptance.

Reading the stories in her new book, Can’t and Won’t, I feel as if I am seeing old friends again. In her new stories, she has not only consolidated her previous position but broken new ground which will not only please her enthusiasts but will win her new admirers. Davis seems to create her stories from next to nothing, sometimes only a point of view. She pares down the story of all details which can be done away with, leaving only the kernel of the story, as Henry James would have called it. For her, the kernel is the entire story, complete in itself. A seemingly minor detail, an apparently casual conversation or closely observed minute things make up the story, brevity putting the finishing touch on it rather than leave the reader hankering for what was left unsaid. The title story reads as follows: “I was recently denied a writing prize because, they said, I was lazy. What they meant by lazy was that I used too many contractions: for instance, I would not write out in full the words cannot and will not, but instead contracted them to can’t and won’t.”

If Davis contracts her word, it is certainly not for laziness. The story called Bloomington’ is completed within a sentence: “Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before.”

Some stories read like aphorisms and others like parables, taking the banal and transforming it into the miraculous. A number of stories are identified as originating from dreams and follow their own logic, not dissimilar from other stories.

Another style Davis has made particularly her own is a letter of complaint written to a large organisation, one person’s discomfort and anxiety poured out to a non-personal entity which can’t and won’t pay any heed to such a thing. The stories, ‘Letter to a Frozen Peas Manufacturer’, ‘Letter to a Marketing Manager’, ‘Letter to a Peppermint Candy Company’, ‘Letter to the Foundation’, ‘Letter to a Hotel Manager’, and ‘Letter to the President of the American Biographical Institute’ are fine examples of a style which she has made uniquely her own.

Interesting from a technical point of view, are the “Flaubert stories”. In the Notes at the back of the book, she identifies how 13 stories were “formed from material found in letters written by Gustave Flaubert during the period he was working on Madame Bovary.” There are other stories which work with a subtle humour and even the long list of local obituaries, ‘Local Obits,’ is not without its own peculiar dry wit. The most moving story is the longest one, ‘The Seals,’ which takes up a lost sister and lives drifting apart in such a way that it becomes a poignant tale about American families and the continental drift between parents and children, between brothers and sisters. Anybody else would have made a whole novel out of it while Lydia Davis says it all in a matter of few pages.

The reviewer is a writer and critic

Can’t And Won’t

(SHORT STORIES)

By Lydia Davis

Hamish Hamilton, London

ISBN 978-0374118582

289pp.