Loved this book! I've loved Lydia Davis for a few years based on her short stories (micro- stories, more like it). This is her only full-length novel, written in 95, but for some reason I hadn't read it until now. Great story, about a short love affair and a long break-up. ( )

After 10% is stopped. Not sure if this a story of a stalker. Cannot connect with the main character ( )

At some point, the narrator describes her unwillingness to look at an old photograph of her subject because she knows he will look different than her memory of him. It's a metaphor for the writing process, when our subjects are our own lives and memories.

This is quite an interesting novel that is not a story but a relation of the process involved in writing one. It is about the failure of memory, the necessity of omitting and rearranging details in order to create a coherent and compelling narrative. The book itself is about breaking all of the rules of writing. There is no plot, no dialogue, no characterization, only vignette after vignette and then revisions of those vignettes as memories resurface and timelines are rearranged. It lacks consistency or pacing and seems to go on too long without understanding that it should have ended already. It somehow manages to fail and succeed simultaneously. I loved it.

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Lydia Davis' novel "The End of the Story" is an okay book, but not something that I would have ever read (or wanted to read) if it wasn't on the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die" list.

The novel tells the story of an unnamed narrator's obsession with an ex-lover as their relationship slowly crumbles and ends.

Davis has an interesting writing style but I found it didn't really carry the novel through here. I could see the very obvious connections with Proust's work, (and it's pretty ballsy I think to try and write a book that's going to be compared with Proust's masterpiece.) I didn't think Davis' writing was strong enough to carry off a slow moving story like this. ( )

3.5 stars
This is a book about the end of a love affair. The story begins at the end of the narrator’s relationship with a younger man. The narrator also happens to be a writer and she decides to write a book about the ending of this relationship. The book we read is therefore composed of a novel within a novel interspersed with the narrator’s commentary about the process of writing a novel based on this love affair. Themes of reality versus creative process (think Proust), relationships, and love are central to this book.

I liked this book and found the style interesting. The narrator introduces doubt regarding the accuracy of the details of her story by her commentary on the limitations of memory and how memory gets transformed through both emotions and the process of writing. It is a strange experience as a reader to be reading a novel within a novel in which the author/narrator questions the reliability of her own telling of the story (e.g., she questions the chronology of events & the events themselves). In many ways this book reminded me of some of the themes in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (then afterwards I did some research on the author and learned that she was a translator for Proust’s works). It was most definitely not a fast moving, plot driven book, but certainly an interesting read. Davis does a nice job writing about the complexities involved in the dissolution of a relationship (both parties are responsible, both parties engage in behaviors that are not so positive, etc). But, the most interesting part of the book is the discussion of how experience is transformed by the creative process (our emotions and recall of events changes when we attempt to recreate or retell events).
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