Lydia Davis's thoughts on memory and her closest readings of literary texts

Over the past few months I’ve been reading, on and off, Lydia Davis’s Essays: One (2019), and completed reading it last night, as her collection ends w/ a knockout-punch essay Remember the Van Wagenens, which is really LD’s reflections and observations about memory and how it can be evoked by sensory stimulation and how it can be false and misleading and strange. For example, she writes: Say you’re traveling in Austria and come to the house where Mozart lived and you stand and stare at the house in wonder and it’s a deeply moving experience for you. And say that months or maybe years later you learn that you had the wrong address and the house had nothing to do w/ Mozart. So how does that information change the nature of your profound experience? Did you really have a moment of grace? Or should that experience be erased from your memory? Can it? She also writes about her yearning to recover her first French childhood textbook, which she can picture, right down to the font – and then gets a copy and it’s quite different from her memory, but does that make her memory suspect? Or is it still “accurate,” though metamorphosed by time? As noted in an earlier post, many of the best essays in this collection concern the art of writing, with much shrewd if eccentric advice to young writers. The second half of the volume includes many of LD’s reviews, often of works by obscure European writers, and several of her pieces on the visual arts. Her strength, though, comes from her writing about well-known works of literature, bringing to the works her extreme attention to details of text, the most intense versions of  “close reading,” such as only a writer (only a translator?) can bring. Note in particular her essays on Madame Bovary, which she has translated, and on some passages in the Bible, OT and NT.