The House Behind By Lydia Davis And Another Character From Reflections Of Spring By Duong Thu Huong

House Behind

The narrator lives in a house at the rear of a courtyard and can look across to the bathroom and kitchen windows of the house in front. The dwellers in the front house—many of them high civil servants—enjoy greater economic and social advantages than their neighbors to the rear, (Denon 55-110) who tend to be store owners, salespeople, retired postal workers, and single schoolteachers. The people in front occupy comfortable, spacious apartments; those in the rear endure small, awkward quarters (Proust 45-89).

The House Behind was in one version very loquacious with a large cast of characters, because I had been reading Hawthorne before returning to work on it.) But some of them are fine in the end. Some of those difficult stories, the longer and earlier ones, felt like 'learning stories'(Denon 55-110) - I probably got better at writing as I kept changing them. And yes, I was probably a little tired of them by the time I was done, as a reader would not be tired of them, not having had to struggle with them. There weren't very many like that. Some of the very short ones in the latest book needed some fiddling even though they were sometimes only a title and a single sentence (Proust 45-89) - but then the shorter they are, the more each word and its placement count. I don't hold these in lower esteem, though, no - once I get the story just right I'm delighted by it. Lydia Davis is the author of the novel The End of The Story (1995) and five collections of short fiction, including her most recent work Almost No Memory (The Ecco Press, 1998). She is also a distinguished translator ...