Almost no memory

the long version

Lydia Davis's new collection, Almost No Memory, is a richly inventive array of playful philosophical investigations, involuted domestic disputes, and fables of the dark fantastic. With wittily restrained intensity, she again portrays the contemplative self caught in the paradoxical world. In "Pastor Elaine's Newsletter," a harried mother studies a Bible passage; in "Foucault and Pencil," a troubled analysand on her way home from a session attempts to distract herself with a difficult French text; in "Glenn Gould," a former pianist tries to justify her dependence on a certain television show. The stories in Almost No Memory reveal an empathic, sometimes shattering understanding of human relations, as Davis, in a spare but resonant prose all her own, explores the limits of identity, of logic, and of the known and the knowable.