The End of the Story

Mislabeled boxes, problems with visiting nurses, confusing notes, an outing to the county fair--such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she attempts to organize her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit, and what appears to be candor, 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.

Lydia Davis is the author of the story collections Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, Almost No Memory, and Break It Down. She was named a 2003 MacArthur Fellow and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Award, a Wallace/Reader's Digest Award, and a Chevalier from the French government.

Mislabeled boxes, problems with visiting nurses, confusing notes, an outing to the country fair-such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she attempts to organize her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit, and what appears to be candor, 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.

"This breathtaking elegant and unsentimental first novel is about passion, regret, and memory: about the psychology of the spot where recollection and loss intersect."Details

"Extraordinary . . . The End of the Story is a brilliantly assembled novel."Newsday

"Davis has written a brilliant essay in the form of a novel."The New Yorker

"[The End of the Story] succeeds in . . . giving the reader both the story and the painful work that goes into its making, and as such it is not only beautiful, but an extraordinary and very modern achievement."The New York Observer

"Passion and regret, writing and revision, the impossibility of describing, or even remembering, lovethese themes animate Lydia Davis's brilliantly original, funny, wise, and quietly brave new novel."Francine Prose

"Self-consciousness is one of the noblest literary virtues, especially as so exquisitely practiced by Lydia Davis in The End of the Story. This modularmodulatingnovel is about the taste of memory and the awkwardness of lovesickness. Davis explores the decomposition of a relationship and, beyond that. An obscurer object of desire, the composition of her story. A fascinating, piercingly told, smoldering tale."Charles Bernstein

"It is Davis's style that makes the novel come alive. Evocative physical description and somberly beautiful language are among her considerable gifts . . . some descriptions will lodge in your mind forever."The Boston Globe

"Brilliant . . . The palette of Davis's novel reminds me of green tea, bone, quartz light, and dried apricots, and its French room tone buzzes with the obsessiveness of Michel Leiris, the saltwater air of Jane Bowles, and the grouchy who-cares-a-damn silence of Jean Rhys. No contemporary writer has so bravely explored the grisaille of solitude, boredom, pique, and discontent in the midst of desire, or the severe elegance of a thinking woman."The Village Voice

"An excellent first novel . . . works on every level . . . both a coda to the traditional love story and an act of hesitant faith in the power of stories to transcend the flow of information."Poets & Writers

"Davis's distinctive voice has never been easy to fit into conventional categories. . . . What is remarkable about the book is Davis's depiction of her narrator's struggle . . . an excruciatingly detailed anatomy of a relationship [that is] engaging, self-mocking, and scrupulously truthful."The Times Literary Supplement

"Utterly compelling . . . The End of the Story is a comedy, but one of an unusually deep and astringent kind. . . . A remarkably original and successful novel."London Review of Books

"Constructed in brutally perceptive and dazzlingly revelatory prose, this is a stunning work."Booklist

Mislabeled boxes, problems with visiting nurses, confusing notes, an outing to the county fair--such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she attempts to organize her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit, and what appears to be candor, 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.

Lydia Davis is the author of the story collections Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, Almost No Memory, and Break It Down. Recently named a 2003 MacArthur Fellow, she has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Award, a Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and a Chevalier from the French government.