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Translation Is Hard Work. Lydia Davis Makes It Thrilling.

By Molly Young

• Nov. 30, 2021
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Lydia Davis learned German after being plopped into a classroom in Graz, Austria, at the age of 7. Her immersion began at home with breakfast: If she woke early, she received Schokolade mit Schlag (hot chocolate with whipped cream), and if she slept late she got Schokolade ohne Schlag (no whipped cream). After moving back to the United States not long after, she studied French, Latin and Italian. A lifetime of work as a translator (and novelist and short story writer and essayist) has followed.

Her new book, “Essays Two,” is organized around translation. As Davis points out in a preface, the book is more focused in its material than was her previous collection, “Essays One.” With “Two,” it helps to have a pre-existing interest in translation, or at least a general curiosity about language, whereas to enjoy the earlier collection you needed only a pre-existing interest in “stuff.” But whatever the topic, Davis is always superb company: erudite, adventurous, surprising.

In addition to translating Proust and Flaubert, she has tackled “books of all degrees of excellence and nonexcellence, of interest and no interest” — among them a sentimental biography of Marie Curie, art catalogs, travel essays and histories of China. Whatever the source, Davis finds innumerable joys in its conversion. The first essay here enumerates 21 of these pleasures. Translation, she notes, puts a person in intimate communion with an author, removes the anxiety of invention that attends most writing work and presents eternal (but often solvable) riddles. It also offers a form of hard-core armchair travel: To puzzle through “Madame Bovary” is to shoot through a wormhole from America of the 21st century into France of the 19th.

In an essay about translating Proust’s letters, Davis voyages to the apartment where he wrote much of “In Search of Lost Time.” The apartment has not been maintained as Proust left it, with his furniture and artifacts intact, but has instead become the location of a bank. Davis receives a tour of the writer’s former apartment from an employee who occasionally has to run off and deal with banking questions. Client meetings are held in Proust’s bedroom, and the bank’s waiting room is where the writer once warehoused an unruly pile of inherited possessions. “An imaginative financier with a little information might be haunted, sitting next to the lone potted plant, by the lingering ghostly presence of a crowded accumulation of heavy fin de siècle furniture and bric-a-brac, imbued with Proust’s personal associations,” Davis writes.

Although she learned German by immersion, Davis’s preferred method of language acquisition is quite different, and, to an outside observer, demonically challenging: She finds a book published in a language that she does not fully or even partially understand and then tries to figure out what it means.

To improve her Spanish, she digs into a copy of “Las Aventuras de Tom Sawyer.” In some cases the decryption proves easy. Words like “plan” are the same in English and Spanish. In other cases she inductively reasons the meaning of a word after noticing it in different contexts. Hoja initially stumps her when it pops up in the phrase hoja de papel — “ hoja of paper.” Later in the book, it occurs in the context of a tree. Finally, Huck wraps a dry hoja around something to make a cigarette, and Davis realizes that only one meaning would work as well with paper as with a tree or a cigarette: “leaf.” Of course, it would be possible to solve the hoja enigma in two seconds by plugging the word into Google, but that would destroy the fun.

Norwegian is a tougher case. For this, Davis selects a perversely difficult family saga by the writer Dag Solstad. At 426 pages, the novel consists of “almost unbroken blocks, with no chapters and few paragraph breaks.” Davis reads at a snail’s speed with a sharp pencil in hand, scribbling lists of vocabulary. The word sarkastisk (sarcastic) provides her with a trick for unlocking others: If she mentally replaces the k’s with c’s, Davis finds, certain foreign words become more easily deciphered: kusine is now legible as “cousin,” and kom as “come.”

Trying to learn a language from scratch by reading a book is like trying to write a complicated cake recipe by sitting and staring at the finished cake for several hundred hours. Is it the most efficient form of pedagogy? No, but Davis extracts endless thrills from the painstaking process. Her essays do a beautiful job of transmitting that satisfaction to the reader, although I was occasionally tempted to exercise my skimming muscles in places where she dove deep into the weeds. Skimming, however, would be the wrong move in a book that contains an incredible amount of life-enhancing morsels, such as the fact that the sound of a sneeze in Norwegian is spelled atsjoo .

In a piece about the French city of Arles, we learn that Arles not only receives the icy northwesterly mistral wind that is rumored to drive people insane, but that there are old diagrams called “wind roses” that include up to 32 named winds, each blowing from a specific direction. Unless you are a person whose activities heavily involve wind — mariner, surfer, kite enthusiast — it is unlikely that you will have considered such nuances of air movement in your daily life. “Never too soon to start!” you might think, considering whether you might be able to chart a wind rose tailored to your own neighborhood.

Davis’s essays are packed with these windows of opportunity to think more deeply — or at all — about many subjects. Others include paving stones, Gascon folk tales, parataxis, punctuation, cognates, medieval architecture and sheepdogs.

I enjoyed the book’s plenitude so much that I wasn’t distracted by its squat physical shape, which is adorable to hold but designed in such a way that the book tries to flip itself shut as you read. No amount of violent spine-cracking would break the object’s resistance, and around Page 300 I turned a corner and became charmed by its antagonistic construction. I will read you and you will like it , I warned my copy of “Essays Two.” And lo, I liked it, too.

Follow Molly Young on Twitter: @MollyYoung .

Essays Two On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles By Lydia Davis Illustrated. 571 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35.

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Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles

Lydia davis. farrar, straus and giroux, $35 (592p) isbn 978-0-374-14886-7.

Reviewed on: 07/20/2021

Genre: Nonfiction

Paperback - 592 pages - 978-1-250-85882-5

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• Published: 14 April 2022
• ISBN: 9780241554661
• Imprint: Penguin eBooks
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• Linguistics
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Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis returns with a timeless collection of essays on literature and language.

'A writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert, and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust'(Ali Smith) Lydia Davis gathered a selection of her non-fiction writing for the first time in 2019 with Essays . Now, she continues the project with Essays Two , focusing on the art of translation, the learning of foreign languages through reading, and her experience of translating, amongst others, Flaubert and Proust, about whom she writes with an unmatched understanding of the nuances of their styles. Every essay in this book is a revelation.

About the author

Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and several collections of short fiction, the latest of which is Samuel Johnson Is Indignant. She is also the translator of numerous works from the French by, among others, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve and Michel Leiris, and was recently named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government.

Also by Lydia Davis

Praise for Essays Two

'Precise, concentrated, lyrical. No one writes like Lydia Davis, and everyone should read her' Hanif Kureishi

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Essays Two Hardcover – 2 Dec. 2021

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Lydia Davis returns with a timeless collection of essays on literature and language. 'Precise, concentrated, lyrical. No one writes like Lydia Davis, and everyone should read her' Hanif Kureishi 'A writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert, and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust' Ali Smith Lydia Davis gathered a selection of her non-fiction writing for the first time in 2019 with Essays . Now, she continues the project with Essays Two , focusing on the art of translation, the learning of foreign languages through reading, and her experience of translating, amongst others, Flaubert and Proust, about whom she writes with an unmatched understanding of the nuances of their styles. Every essay in this book is a revelation.

• Print length 592 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Hamish Hamilton
• Publication date 2 Dec. 2021
• Dimensions 13.8 x 4.3 x 20.4 cm
• ISBN-10 0241554659
• ISBN-13 978-0241554654
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hamish Hamilton (2 Dec. 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 592 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0241554659
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0241554654
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.8 x 4.3 x 20.4 cm
• 370 in Translation & Interpretation Reference
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About the author

Lydia davis.

Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and seven story collections, the most recent of which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the acclaimed translator of a new edition of Swann's Way and is at work on a new translation of Madame Bovary.

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• Published: 14 April 2022
• ISBN: 9780241554661
• Imprint: Penguin eBooks
• Format: EBook
• Linguistics
• Non-fiction prose

Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis returns with a timeless collection of essays on literature and language.

'A writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert, and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust'(Ali Smith) Lydia Davis gathered a selection of her non-fiction writing for the first time in 2019 with Essays . Now, she continues the project with Essays Two , focusing on the art of translation, the learning of foreign languages through reading, and her experience of translating, amongst others, Flaubert and Proust, about whom she writes with an unmatched understanding of the nuances of their styles. Every essay in this book is a revelation.

About the author

Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and several collections of short fiction, the latest of which is Samuel Johnson Is Indignant. She is also the translator of numerous works from the French by, among others, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve and Michel Leiris, and was recently named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government.

Also by Lydia Davis

Praise for Essays Two

'Precise, concentrated, lyrical. No one writes like Lydia Davis, and everyone should read her' Hanif Kureishi

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A collection of essays on translation, foreign languages, Proust, and one French city, from the master short-fiction writer and acclaimed translator Lydia Davis In Essays One , Lydia Davis, who has been called "a magician of self-consciousness" by Jonathan Franzen and "the best prose stylist in America" by Rick Moody, gathered a generous selection of her essays about best writing practices, representations of Jesus, early tourist photographs, and much more. Essays Two collects Davis's writings and talks on her second profession: the art of translation. The award-winning translator from the French reflects on her experience translating Proust ("A work of creation in its own right." —Claire Messud, Newsday ), Madame Bovary ("[Flaubert's] masterwork has been given the English translation it deserves." —Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times Book Review ), and Michel Leiris ("Magnificent." —Tim Watson, Public Books ). She also makes an extended visit to the French city of Arles, and writes about the varied adventures of learning Norwegian, Dutch, and Spanish through reading and translation. Davis, a 2003 MacArthur Fellow and the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize for her fiction, here focuses her unique intelligence and idiosyncratic ways of understanding on the endlessly complex relations between languages. Together with Essays One , this provocative and delightful volume cements her status as one of our most original and beguiling writers.

StarTribune

Review: 'essays two,' by lydia davis.

Lydia Davis has thrice distinguished herself in the world of American letters. First, as a fiction writer (seven collections and one novel), then as a translator (Proust's "Swann's Way," Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," et al), and third, with the publication of "Essays One" in 2019 and now "Essays Two," as an essayist.

The first two of these roles — fiction writer and translator — have always seemed a bit at odds with each other. Davis is celebrated for her micro-fiction pieces, some of which are a mere paragraph long, and one of her most famous stories is only a complete sentence when it's combined with the title (it's called "Samuel Johnson Is Indignant" and it goes, "that Scotland has so few trees").

As a translator, though, Davis most successfully tackled the first book of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time," a digressive, seven-volume text made up of lengthy sentences and paragraphs that stretch for pages and pages, quite the contrast to Davis's severe economy.

Her excellent essays exist somewhere in the middle of these two poles. Here, she's more verbose than in her stories, but still succinct, clear and eloquent. Her first collection focused on writers and artists whom Davis admires, as well as pieces on her own fiction. "Essays Two" is concerned with translation and foreign languages in general. In the preface, Davis deems this second collection a more "single-minded" work, and she's correct. This is a celebration of the beautiful and bewildering intermittences of language.

Fittingly, she opens with "Twenty-One Pleasures of Translating (and a Silver Lining)," a delightful rumination that showcases just how difficult and complicated the act of translating is. She tells a story about attending a wine-tasting in France and being instructed to "mâchez le vin" ("chew the wine"), which sends her back seven years to when she translated "Madame Bovary" and struggled over the verb "mâcher" in a sentence she rendered as "like a man continuing to chew, after dinner, the taste of the truffles he is digesting." That a single word could linger so long after the work is finished attests to how arduous the translator's job can be.

Far and away the best and most fascinating section here is the one on "Translating Proust," which includes a 100-page "Alphabet (in Progress) of Proust Translation Observations, from Aurore to Zut." It's such an assiduous and insightful essay that it could justifiably be published on its own in book form and should be required reading for anyone interested in translations, languages or literary art.

When translating Proust, she explains, she "tended to consider and reconsider even the smallest questions." Davis' work is a productive blend of authority and doubt, solution and exploration, confidence and humility. "If I were to write a memoir about being a translator," she writes, "I might title it: 'Then Again, Maybe Not.' " May we all learn from her convicted uncertainty.

"Essays Two" may not be light reading for the general interest reader, but for all its erudition it's always accessible, comprehensible, and even fun. Davis is a literary treasure.

Jonathan Russell Clark is the author of "An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom" and the forthcoming "Skateboard." His writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the L.A. Times, the Boston Globe and other publications. He lives in Columbus, Ohio.

By: Lydia Davis.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 571 pages, $35.

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ON PROUST, TRANSLATION, FOREIGN LANGUAGES, AND THE CITY OF ARLES

by Lydia Davis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 2, 2021

For those wondering what translators do and how they do it, this collection is a must.

A vivid portrait of the translating life.

Davis is known for both her precise, uber-concise short fiction and her translations of Proust, Flaubert, and others. In this immersive collection, she offers a second (following Essays One ) in-depth exploration of foreign languages and the art of translation. As a girl, learning German as a second language created a “hunger” in her to find out what words “mean.” The author begins by describing the 21 pleasures she gets from translating, including how it helps with her own writing; she enjoys subsuming herself in the writer and another culture and the pure joyous comfort that comes from it. She prefers beginning a translation without reading the book. Davis had already translated more than 30 French books before undertaking the daunting process, which she describes in luscious detail, of translating Proust’s Swann’s Way . In an essay on learning Spanish, she offers advice on how children should learn a foreign language, explaining how she learned by reading a Spanish translation of Tom Sawyer . Essays on translating “one kind of English to another”—e.g., converting Sidney Brooks’ memoir, Our Village , into a poem—and why she does these as experiments are fascinating. The experience of translating Michel Leiris’ The Rules of the Game  “was heady because, for the first time in my translating life, I felt like a conduit through which the original French was effortlessly passing to become, instantly, an English equivalent, even a close English equivalent, in some way identical to the French, as though I had achieved some version of Borges’s Menardian ideal.” Other languages Davis discusses are Dutch, Gascon, and the “two kinds of Norwegian.” Taking on a new translation of the oft-translated Madame Bovary , Davis, the inveterate translator, writes, “the more the better.” Numerous examples of her and others’ translations are included throughout.

Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-374-14886-7

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021

GENERAL NONFICTION

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by Lydia Davis

by A.L. Snijders ; translated by Lydia Davis

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IndieBound Bestseller

A WEALTH OF PIGEONS

A cartoon collection.

by Steve Martin illustrated by Harry Bliss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2020

A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.

The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.

Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker . So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny .” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.

Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Celadon Books

Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020

ART & PHOTOGRAPHY | GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY

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by Steve Martin

by Steve Martin & illustrated by C.F. Payne

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PERSPECTIVES

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2018

New York Times Bestseller

by David Sedaris ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 29, 2018

Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.

In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.

Mortality is weighing on Sedaris ( Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002 , 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “ I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.

Pub Date: May 29, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018

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Why Lydia Davis Loves Misunderstandings

By Merve Emre

In 2019, the literary magazine NOON published a story by Lydia Davis called “The Language of Armagnac,” a quietly comic meditation on the difficulties of translating “the patois of the city of Auch, which is a local form of the language of Gascon, which is in turn a dialect language of Occitan.” A second version of the story much like the first was included in Davis’s “Essays Two,” a collection of her writings on translation, a career that parallels her work as a writer of fiction. A third and notably different version appears in her story collection “Our Strangers,” under the title “Bothered Scholar on Train.” It refashions Davis’s elaborate philological commentaries as the tirade of a scholar whose attempt to read in the language of Armagnac is disrupted by noisy passengers. Davis designed the story to open with an exclamation—“Oh, can’t you quiet down, please!”—and end with an exclamation mark, too (“So, please!”). This symmetry would clue readers in to an irony underlying the scene. The bothered shouts at others to be quiet. He—or she—annoys strangers while insisting that they are the annoying ones.

As always in Davis’s fiction, an almost imperceptible line divides pedantry from precision, enthusiasm from solipsism. When I met Davis at her house in East Nassau, New York, this August, she eyed the galley of “Our Strangers” that I had brought with me and noticed that, in it, the final exclamation mark was missing from “Bothered Scholar on Train.” “You’ve got to have the exclamation mark there,” she said. When we looked at a finished copy of the U.K. edition that she’d been sent, we discovered that someone had blundered: the exclamation mark was still missing. “Well, that’s too bad,” she said. “That was important.” Then, while trying to find another story, we discovered that almost all of the table of contents had been misnumbered. “There’s so much trouble that goes into trying to get something right, and then they do something really basic wrong,” Davis said. She sat on the couch with Jack, her cat, curled at her side, and started to correct the errors with a pencil. “It’s terrible,” she said. “But it’s good we’re doing this, because I might not have done this on my own.”

Since the mid-nineteen-seventies, Davis’s fiction has often taken as its subject matter the mistakes that creep into writing, or the misunderstandings that arise from speech and silence. The stories in “The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis” and “Can’t and Won’t” reward what I think of as too-close reading: an attentiveness to the marvel of the individual letter, the punctuation mark, and the italicized word, perfectly and savagely deployed. In “Mother’s Reaction to My Travel Plans,” we hear, “Gainesville! It’s too bad your cousin is dead!” The shortest stories are often composed of a single sentence or a snatch of dialogue, as in “Overheard on the Train: Two Old Ladies Agree”:

“Everything gets worse.”

“Does anything get better?”

The painstaking attention to how the smallest units of language can be used or misused scales up to momentous questions about errors or missteps in human relations. Davis’s novel, “The End of the Story,” whose protagonist negotiates an agonized love affair and separation, rivals Marcel Proust’s “Swann in Love” in its intimate yet analytic representation of the whirl of consciousness. One can see her great economy of style at work in her translations—of works by Proust, Michel Leiris, Maurice Blanchot, Peter Bichsel, and A. L. Snijders, and, most notably, of Gustave Flaubert. Her translation of “Madame Bovary” is the best English version by far, because its deadpan reminds us that the book is both a great realist novel and a satire of realism.

On and off the page, Davis is reserved, droll, precise, and principled. She does not fly, eat meat, kill insects, or buy anything on Amazon; “Our Strangers” will be available for purchase only at independent bookstores or through bookshop.org. She and her husband, the painter Alan Cote, live in a converted schoolhouse with their three cats. They—Davis and Cote, not the cats—are generous hosts. After speaking for several hours, Davis asked for half an hour of complete silence (she prepared lunch, I got on with some work), and then we ate: cucumber-mint soup, a vegetable quiche, chocolate-chip cookies on “teeny-tiny plates,” Davis and Cote joked, and, from their garden, white peaches and strawberries in cream in teeny-tiny bowls. Cote told me that he was rereading “Ulysses,” while Davis and her book club were reading Matthew Desmond’s “Poverty, by America.” She was hoping to persuade the club to read another hundred pages of “Don Quixote.” “There are still plenty of people who want to settle down with a big, fat, long novel,” she said. “But I hate to think that it’s the only thing people should read.”

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What attracts you to scenarios in which speech causes confusion?

I’m thinking of the story “Caramel Drizzle,” in which an airline flight attendant is stuck ordering her coffee because she doesn’t know what the difference is between a caramel drizzle or a caramel syrup. She has to think about what the words mean. That thinking is what captures my attention. But it always emerges from a combination of language and character. I don’t know if I would have been drawn to that scene the same way if the main character, the flight attendant, was someone else, someone different. But I liked her confusion and her alertness, and she seemed like a nice person. It feels natural to be drawn to a scenario like that because of my interest in language and then my interest in human relations. Where they intersect are these moments of dialogue and misunderstood dialogue.

It’s a misunderstanding that is easier to see in certain characters. I’m thinking of your story “Egg.” It begins with a paragraph on cognates for “egg” in several languages, and then shows us two little boys trying to say the word “egg” to describe a round, white object. It turns out to be a Ping-Pong ball.

You would relate to that because you have two boys.

I do, and I do relate to it. For those children, and for my children, too, there’s often a mismatch between a word and an object. There’s comedy in that mismatch, but there’s also pathos, especially when the characters are little.

I’m drawn to humor, but also how language, humor, and character create moving situations. And what is touching about “Egg” is that the boys are so earnest. Kids are very earnest. They’re so earnest in their little tiny way because they couldn’t have been very old. And yet they’re working so hard at identifying an object, which isn’t even an egg. And, at that age, they’re playing parallel to each other, not together, but they’re still influenced by each other.

The kernel of the story is obviously the kids and trying to identify that object. But then I added the first paragraph because they have their own way of saying the word. But then we have all these other languages that also have different ways of saying the word. And it’s similar to the boys. The boys get very close. Their words for “egg” or “Ping-Pong ball” are very close. And we have neighboring languages that are very close, but then the comedy for me comes in, you know, with the Scots Gaelic word for “egg” is just “ ugh .” And the French is funny too, “ oeuf .” They suddenly have nothing to do with the thing itself.

The Turkish for “egg” is “ yumurta .”

It’s a much more complicated word.

It’s entirely too irritating to say when all you want is a boiled egg for your breakfast.

Another reason I was drawn to that story is that an egg is so primordial. It’s absolutely essential and basic.

Those boys were eggs not too long ago.

That’s right. They were eggs until they got inspired.

In other words, the yolk of that story was the boys and then you added the first paragraph to it?

Did you not feel like the second paragraph could have stood on its own?

It could have. But sometimes I like to be mock scholarly, so I thought, Let’s have a little preface to this story. I liked the balance—the dry information, very straightforward and plain, and then moving to the scene in the living room with the boys. I like making fun of stuffy academics.

“Bothered Scholar on Train” gives us a stuffy academic who is offensive less for their stuffiness or pedantry than for the desire to impose themselves on everyone around him. Why are people comfortable with being so talkative and self-revealing?

There are several ways to answer that. One thing I think a lot about is Europe versus America. That may be changing in Europe, but there’s sort of a code there, or there was, especially on trains. You would be quiet. You would keep your voice down. You would be quiet. And in restaurants, too. I was thinking about it in a restaurant the other night because people are extremely loud in restaurants. And it’s not just New York City but even up here. And, in Europe, it used to be anyway that you kept your voice down because you were in a room full of people who all wanted to enjoy their dinner.

It leads me to think about something that I’m always amazed by: that some people I know are very aware of their own behavior, and then there are other people who just don’t seem to be able to see themselves from the outside. They are not able to stand back and look at themselves, especially once they start talking. One friend and I have a running conversation about the people we know who will talk on and on almost neurotically—you know, the people you know, that you are friends with, who have no sense that they are dominating the conversation from start to finish and make it very hard for anyone else to comment. And they have strategies for it. They’ll say “Ah.” They’ll stop in mid-sentence so you don’t dare intervene, or they’ll fill up the silence with “Ah . . . um.”

Situations in which people cannot see themselves from the outside while they’re talking to others often become quite generative for you. The most striking story in “Our Strangers” is “Addie and the Chili,” in which the narrator goes to a restaurant with her friends Ellie and Addie, orders chili, and confronts Addie about her tendency to make herself the center of attention.

Yes, she is a good example of someone who’s not aware of her whole situation, not aware of how she’s fitting into it or not fitting into it.

But it’s also a case where the narrator intervenes.

Which is unusual. But, if you think of the opposite, if she hadn’t said anything, that’s very uncomfortable, too. Either way, if she said something to Addie or didn’t say something to her, it would have been equally frustrating.

The stories are not all necessarily close to reality and close to my life. But that one is. The character I’m calling Ellie is the person I just mentioned, with whom I was having this ongoing conversation about people who talk so much. She was the one who went to this experience. And, soon after, she must have said, “You should write a story about it.” But, as I say in this story, she had no memory of that or really of the occasion. I enjoy this story because of the way it traces the shifting moods. Now the narrator is angry. Now she’s not angry anymore. And the waiter is sort of the straight man among the ladies. And this weird thing, which I don’t think would happen in New York City anymore: she takes the bowl of chili home with her. That would not really happen anymore.

In “Our Strangers,” as well as in “Can’t and Won’t” and “The Collected Stories,” it is often women who are speaking to one another. Is there a way you think that women speak to one another that is different, or particularly amenable to scenarios like the one where Addie’s friends take her to task?

I don’t know about that. I’m thinking of an earlier story, “Glenn Gould,” about friends watching “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” in which the friend is Mitch. Even though the narrator is a married woman with a family and husband, it’s her friend Mitch that she’s relating to in somewhat the same way as the narrator is relating to Ellie here. I say “she” because it isn’t me. When I write, the character becomes objectified. But I think there are male-female friendships that are comfortable in the same way and familiar in the same way. I’d have to really look through and think, What’s the role of men versus women here? I don’t usually think that way. You’re probably much too sophisticated to imagine that I’ve set out to make a point. Because I don’t set out to make a point. I don’t set out to write about women in a certain way, or even to write about women, period.

I am thinking about your story “Suddenly Afraid”: “because she couldn’t write the name of what she was: a wa wam owm owamn womn.” I can’t quite pronounce the semantically incoherent permutations. . . .

The permutations of the word “woman.”

It’s difficult to read a story like that and not think you set out to write about gender.

I didn’t mean to insult you. I was actually showing respect for you. Because I have been asked that so much: What was your intention? What were you setting out to do with the story? And I never set out beforehand to do something. That one just came out of the actual fact that I was trying to write the word “woman,” and I couldn’t. I got it all mixed up. And I was probably typing, but I get things mixed up when I write by hand, too. That’s all it was—capturing that moment. Of course, I saw the implications.

For me, the difficulty that the story addresses isn’t only about gender. It’s about the difficulty of speech. When I teach it, and I ask students to read it aloud, they don’t know what to do with it. It seems like the kind of utterance that can only exist in writing.

Although I have read it out loud.

How do you read it?

I’d have to have it in front of me, but I just pronounce it phonetically: whoa-hum-mana.

Now your mouth looks like it’s trying to say “egg” in Turkish.

What is it again?

“ Yumurta .”

It might be good to make students pronounce it. I don’t know if kids are taught phonics anymore. It makes them read phonetically, and it makes them make weird sounds and be O.K. with it or do it anyway. I think that’s a good thing.

Going back to what you said about people who can’t see themselves from the outside: as I was reading your story about singing lessons, “Learning to Sing,” I realized that singing was the experience that made it most evident to me that what I think I sound like is not, in fact, what I sound like. Singing is a deeply self-estranging experience for me. I wonder if it is for you as well.

I was starting from rock bottom. As I write in the story, I had always sung some, and fairly musically in tune, but the quality of my voice was not great. What I wanted from the lessons was to be able to sing more musically. I never got very far. As the story shows, it’s not just the quality of your voice but of your whole being. If you’re very reserved most of the time, it’s hard to produce a nice sound.

You write that singing makes you imagine that you could be bigger than you are. A bigger woman.

And to sing more like a woman.

Did singing make you want to be bigger?

Oh, sure. Generally, I don’t feel like I have to be bigger. But for that purpose it would be fun to inhabit that large, operatic persona. Oh, just less reserved or withheld and more generous. But I don’t think I’d want to live that way all the time.

Despite my voice not being great, I love singing with people. There’s a group that sings shape singing, which is an early American form of singing. People who didn’t read music could tell what the notes were by the shape and the notes. But they still print the shape-singing books, with music, too. On a historical day, at a historical site near here, they had a shape-singing activity. I did that on that day. And they said, “Oh, you should join our shape-singing group.” I was very happy. It made me think, O.K., I could be a screechy old woman and be in a group and be screeching and not singing in tune and my voice may be awful but I don’t care.

It occurred to me as we were eating that I had forgotten to tell you that “The End of the Story” is one of my favorite novels. I’ve never read anything that captures the torque of consciousness as it does, from the beginning to the end of an agonized love affair. I wonder how you managed to achieve this, because it’s the kind of experience that seems impossible to get a grip on when you’re in it, and impossible to remember once you’re out of it.

I’m really glad you like it, because it is not mentioned often just because it doesn’t fit in. It’s not a story. It’s a novel. “She’s not a novelist,” people said. But I worked very hard on it. And I thought it was really good.

I’m surprised that it doesn’t get mentioned more, because it’s truly excellent. I give it to many heartbroken friends as a gift.

You can imagine that it was based on an experience. And it started, really, as scenes. I will write something, whether it’s very small or that novel, if the material just interests me so much. All the observations in the novel, all the perceptions she has about this or that or all the strange things that go into it, it just interested me so much. I have to write about it.

But it started out as two different novels. I don’t know if I’ve talked about this anywhere before. I thought, I’ll write a story of this love affair. But then I was kind of bored by it as just a straight story of the love affair and the breakup. It just did not captivate me. At the same time, I started writing what I called Novel No. 2, which was about the process of writing Novel No. 1. And I kept Novel No. 2 a secret. My publisher was waiting for Novel No. 1. But I was at the same time writing Novel No. 2, and they didn’t know about that.

And then Alan, who doesn’t usually play a crucial part in my work, strangely enough said, “If you’re kind of bored with that one, why don’t you write a second one that you don’t tell anyone about?” He guessed what I was already doing. He didn’t suggest it. I was already doing it. That was odd. And, at some point, I realized, Oh, I can merge them, and then I’ll be perfectly happy with Novel No. 1 because it serves the purposes of Novel No. 2.

A friend was disappointed that there wasn’t any sex in it. I just never wanted to have sex in it because it’s almost demanded: writing about this passionate love affair, you have to have the crucial central scene with very good sex. But I just never wanted to because it seemed so rote and so required and so uninteresting. So I had a sort of negative sex scene with a later lover who doesn’t do this and doesn’t do that, to imply all that went on in the other one. It amused me to do it that way, but my friend—well, he should have been more sophisticated and not disappointed in my sex scene.

I can remember the mood of the entire novel. But the detail I can visualize most clearly comes at the end, when the narrator feels the love affair is maybe finally over and is given a cup of tea by a stranger in a bookstore.

I wonder why.

I was hoping you could tell me.

I really didn’t know how to end the novel, until I thought of this grim, sad tea ceremony. The narrator is tired. She’s sitting in a bookstore for a tea ceremony, and although the tea is comforting, it isn’t very good. It’s strong, Lipton tea. But the gesture is comforting. So that can become the end. But it was very hard, especially since I had never written a novel. So how do you end it? And then what are the very last words of the ending? I labored over it.

Perhaps I remember it because it is the gesture of a stranger who can choose to be kind to her or not. So much depends on that choice.

Yes, and he comes in from outside the story. He doesn’t know the story. He doesn’t know her. He just intervenes.

It makes me think of the story “Judgment.” Maybe because his decision to give her the tea is a very small act of judgment.

You mean my story about the ladybug? I thought maybe you meant Kafka’s story about judgment.

I suppose I could have meant Kafka’s story. But I meant yours. “Into how small a space the word judgment . . .”

—“can be compressed: it must fit inside the brain of a ladybug as she, before my eyes, makes a decision.”

And the judgments that ladybugs or strangers make can be small, but they can also be momentous.

I was thinking of that story again, because just now there was an ant on the sink, deciding to go this way or that way. They do have to make a decision, however they do it.

Do you think they do it differently from the way we do it?

They’re certainly not thinking in words. They’re reacting. We do some of the same instinctive things, like choosing a chair in the living room. You don’t think in words, but you go for the chair that feels comfortable for you. I’m sorry to deprive you of what is obviously the best chair. We make instinctive decisions, which they must make.

I meant to tell you that there were a lot of daddy longlegs in the bathroom, in case you were bothered by that.

I wouldn’t have been, but I didn’t see any daddy longlegs in the bathroom.

They’re pretty small. But that’s another one of my principles. I don’t dust away cobwebs. I just let the bugs live. Like, the spiders can live here and the ants can live here and the ladybugs upstairs could live there.

Bugs, like strangers, can be small and large, important and not so important. You put strangers front and center in this new collection. Why?

I noticed after I chose the title that the word “strangers” recurs in other stories. But those particular strangers are neighbors. We’re thrown into relationships with these people we don’t know just because we live close to them.

I think that “Our Strangers,” it may have been born from a story that impressed me very much, a true story, a news story. It was years and years ago. Three brothers living on the edge of a town together in a house, and they were kind of a little crazy or mentally not all there. And they were slovenly, and they were this and they were that. They were very much rejected by the townspeople. But then somehow—I don’t know the story exactly—the authorities came down to move them, to force them out in some way. And the people of the town rallied behind them. There was the sense that, yes, they’re outcasts, but they’re our outcasts. I thought this was the craziest paradox. They’re strangers to us. But they’re our strangers.

There’s a phrase that I like from linguistic anthropology, “entextualization”: the process by which speech is extracted from its original context and turned into a text that others can read. I wonder if your genre of overheard conversations entextualizes the speech of strangers to make them your strangers, or, for you and your reader, our strangers.

I know that this has happened to me a few times, like with those two old ladies on the train. That wasn’t the only thing I heard them saying. They were probably waiting, standing up in the aisle waiting to get off. They were talking to each other. But I really liked them. And I thought, Boy, I would really like to spend time with these women and get to know them. I would just love to get off the train and sit with them. That’s not true of other scenarios. But I see what you mean. It’s not that I want to make them my friends exactly but just possess them for a while.

That’s what’s charming about it. It’s dubious and off-putting to want to possess people for a long time, but it is all right to want to possess them for a very little bit.

Yes, people react to that. I’m careful to ask friends, like the other Davis in the village. Because I didn’t have to use our names. I could have said the two Harrises. But I wanted to use Davis. He didn’t mind. He was fine with it. But people are very sensitive about being appropriated that way and being used, even if you do it in the friendliest way or the most positive or complimentary way. Because you are taking them and using them. That’s tricky.

When did you make the decision not to sell “Our Strangers” on Amazon?

I’ve boycotted Amazon for many years. I shouldn’t say “boycott” because it’s not very effective when one person does it. But I have not bought anything from them. But what triggered it? I think it may have been Dave Eggers’s decision to publish his last book—it’s probably not the last one by now—by not selling through Amazon for the first six weeks. It was limited, but it was only available from bookstores. It was right around the time that the second book of my essays came out, and I regretted that Amazon would be selling that book. I thought, Oh, well, why don’t I just not have Amazon sell it, period. And I vowed this out loud at a dinner table. And then I thought, Oh, well, now that I’ve vowed this out loud at a dinner table, I will not go back on this decision.

Was there an exclamation mark at the end of the vow?

Yes, there definitely was, and there was a very angry face. And then I heard various arguments like, well, if Amazon sells, it’s widely available to people who don’t have as much money. But the trouble is, you’re still going along with a system that’s very oppressive. They’re selling it at a low price at the expense of the workers. There was an earlier version of a book called “How to Resist Amazon and Why,” and I read that, which gave me more reasons and more information. But you know how bad they are. And it goes beyond the business practices. And it goes beyond the bad working conditions, to the very idea of community. I think they’re community wreckers, and I think now more than ever we need community. In every way, I wouldn’t want to support them.

Would you want other writers to do the same? How should we reseed the community they’ve wrecked?

It should be government-led, and I don’t know if that ever will be because of the way our government functions, especially now. In France—and we found this out when selling foreign rights to the book—if you say, “We want to avoid Amazon,” the publishers say, “Oh, that’s no problem. The government already doesn’t allow Amazon to undersell and underprice.” It’s our government that allows this monopolistic situation.

As for other writers, everyone’s at different points in their careers. There might be a young writer who is so eager to reach an audience that she or he doesn’t want to bypass Amazon. I’m not blaming anyone. I understand people’s different reasons. I have friends who buy books through Amazon, and they know that I don’t approve, but they want the book fast. And I disagree with that whole idea, too. Getting things fast and conveniently is a value that I don’t subscribe to. Occasionally, in an emergency or some vital situation, you need something the next day or the same day—O.K. But a book you want to read, you don’t have to get it the same day or the next day.

I’m slightly afraid that if there were suddenly a growing movement, and no authors or most authors would not want their books to be sold by Amazon—which is hard to believe—that Amazon would retaliate in some awful way. They’re very retaliatory. I didn’t do it to set an example or to lead the way or anything like that. I did it because I was just unwilling to let a company like that sell something that mattered to me.

What you said earlier about a young writer who has a desire to reach a larger audience made me wonder if reaching an audience was ever something that felt important to you.

Even as a young writer, I never said, “I want to reach a large audience. I want to be famous.” It was more like “I want to do something as good as Beckett.” I would have high ambition, but it was not for fame and glory. I don’t think you can chase after that. My ambition was to do something really good, like my heroes. Right now, I would like to have readers because I enjoy that kind of communion. People warned me, they said, “You might only have fifty per cent of the readers you would have, if you pull the book from Amazon.” I’m willing to do that based on principle. If you steal from someone, maybe you get a lot of whatever you stole, but the principle is wrong.

Speaking of principles of judgment, do you prefer the early Beckett to the late Beckett?

I like both. I don’t know how I would have reacted if there had been only late Beckett available. I think I would have been intrigued by it, because it’s very intriguing. I think “Ill Seen Ill Said” is in one of my stories, the one about taking the bus down to the airport or something.

“Southward Bound, Reads Worstward Ho .”

Yes, I like having a very thorny text to just mull over like that. But I think the later texts can be too withholding and narrow, if fascinating and wonderful. I wouldn’t emulate them.

What do you mean by “narrow”?

They’re so stingy. “Ill Seen Ill Said”—this is not writing for the people. How many people could read this? There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to write things that no one can read or that only a small sector of people can enjoy. You and others can enjoy the particularity of the title “Southward Bound, Reads Worstward Ho ” because it’s Beckettian already. It’s just using a few words to construct a title. A very different title stylistically but that gives you a similar feeling is “On Their Way South on Sunday Morning (They Thought).” The language and the syntax for the title is very different, much looser and more open and easier: “On Their Way South on Sunday Morning (They Thought).” Whereas “Southward Bound, Reads Worstward Ho ” is thornier.

Another one of my favorite stories of yours is “Kafka Cooks Dinner.” I read it at the same time that I read his letters to Milena Jesenská, which are passionate and beautiful and tortured, as well as quite tedious and irritating in their absolute neuroticism. But it’s wonderful to imagine that neuroticism attending Kafka’s preparation of “Kartoffel Surprise” for the woman he is obsessed with. Did writing it make you think differently about Kafka?

I used to read his diaries very closely and very often when I was younger. I think I felt very close to him. He was never proud or arrogant. I’m sure he had many facets to him, but I found him a very sympathetic, lovable person. I felt very comfortable appropriating him for this dinner situation.

The story started as just a neat idea, because I was having trouble thinking what to make for dinner. And I thought how much more trouble he would have had because he was such a hesitater. It was going to be just a page or so, but then I decided to incorporate his language into it. It grew and grew because I went to his letters, too. And I wanted to incorporate all the wonderful things he says in them, like “Someone once said I swim like a swan, but it was not a compliment.”

This closeness can happen with translation, too. I felt very close to Proust. And even rather closer to Flaubert. Flaubert is not a very lovable person. Proust is, I think, even though he’s weird. He may have his perversions, but I felt that he was very lovable.

What about Michel Leiris?

He’s different. I did meet him once in person. He was very standoffish. No, he wasn’t exactly lovable. But I would definitely feel in very close sympathy with anyone that I was translating that I respected and liked.

You have translated the essays and fiction of Maurice Blanchot and Leiris’s “The Rules of the Game,” which are marvellous on early language acquisition. Does the way we use language change at the extremes of life?

At the early extreme, it’s very dramatic and very interesting. I remember, when we took a trip to Florida, I said, “We’re going to Miami,” and one of my sons—I think he was about seven or eight—didn’t know Miami was a city and said, “When are we getting to your ami?” On the same trip, I talked about the co-pilot, and my son thought that was a pilot of a co. In the beginning, they’re trying hard, but they might get it wrong.

In the end—it’s a cliché, but I think it’s true—old people are more outspoken. They’re quicker to just say what they think. And then, all the way through life, there’s the factor of misunderstanding: one person says this, but someone else misunderstood and thought it meant that. I know that, at the end of life, that can get very interesting, especially the last words on the deathbed. The last word could be something you can’t quite make out. Or that you misunderstand. And, at the end of life, that misunderstanding can be crucial in a way that it isn’t in the middle of life.

My grandmother’s last words were instructions to my grandfather about which woman he should marry next. My grandfather listened to her, but he and his second wife never got along, divorced quickly, and she stole all his good silver. I thought it was extraordinary of my grandmother to use her last words to misunderstand what would make him happy.

I thought that you were going to say that he misheard her. He heard “Please be with Anya,” but what she really said was “Please be with Anna. She would have been wonderful.” ♦

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Patrick Stewart boldly goes there .

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