Lydia Davis: evaluation

Transcript context

…If, for you, long books are hard to approach, and you’ve translated the first section of Proust, how is it you approached Proust in a way that helped it make sense for you? Maybe it helps that he conceived of the individual books or the parts that make up the whole book — he conceived of them one at a time or published them one at a time, wrestled with them one at a time. He didn’t set out to write as much as he ended up writing in that one novel, which I can really understand. There are a lot of projects — if you realized how long they were going to be and how long they were going to take, you might not start them. He thought it was going to be a matter of, say, three small volumes, or even two in the beginning, two small volumes or reasonable volumes. It grew and grew, which I can also sympathize with. I didn’t have a problem with that. I had a problem a long time ago trying to read Ulysses by Joyce, and started it twice, and finally read it when I lived in Ireland, which made it much easier because I had his context. That too — I suppose because it had different chapters, each of which approached the ongoing story in a very different way — I found that possible too. It’s tricky. There’s a book by a Catalan writer called Josep Pla that’s called The Gray Notebook. That’s very fat, but I keep going back to it and delighting in it, but I’m not reading it all at once. I’m going back to it and just sort of nibbling away at it. It was an amazing project. He took an early, very brief diary of his when he was 21, I think, and it only covered a year and a half. He kept going back to it rather than publishing it. He kept going back to it and expanding it with more memories and more material, and I love that idea. Maybe that’s why I can read it. What language are you reading it in?…

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