The End of the Story
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Summary
The first and only novel by Lydia Davis, winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2013.
'It surprised me, over and over, to find that I was with such a young man. He was twenty-two when I met him. He turned twenty-three while I knew him, but by the time I turned thirty-five I did not know where he was anymore.'
Mislabelled boxes, confusing notes, wrong turnings - such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she organises her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit and what seems to be candour, 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
Back in print at last, this is Lydia Davis's first - and so far only - novel.
'Extraordinary' Newsday
'Brilliant' New Yorker
'Breathtakingly elegant' Details
'Beautifully written' Marie Claire
'Astonishing' Elle
Lydia Davis is the author of Collected Stories, one novel and six short story collections, most recently Can't and Won't. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust. She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.
'It surprised me, over and over, to find that I was with such a young man. He was twenty-two when I met him. He turned twenty-three while I knew him, but by the time I turned thirty-five I did not know where he was anymore.'
Mislabelled boxes, confusing notes, wrong turnings - such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she organises her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit and what seems to be candour, 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
Back in print at last, this is Lydia Davis's first - and so far only - novel.
'Extraordinary' Newsday
'Brilliant' New Yorker
'Breathtakingly elegant' Details
'Beautifully written' Marie Claire
'Astonishing' Elle
Lydia Davis is the author of Collected Stories, one novel and six short story collections, most recently Can't and Won't. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust. She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.
Reviews
Unputdownable . . . [The End of the Story] freed me from the preconceptions I had then about the way novels were supposed to work . . . it deals with the heat and the thirst of infatuation, the desperation to find an end to the torment when a desired object won't reciprocate
Olivia Sudjic, Observer, 'Summer Reads 2023'
