Lydia aflytter fordrømthed

OK, nu nørder jeg på Lydia Davis, men det er absolut umagen, min og jeres, værd.

I det nye nummer af Paris Review, nr. 194, bidrager hun med "Ten Stories from Flaubert", om hvilke hun i et interview med The Telegraph fortæller:

While working on her translation [af Madame Bovary], Davis read Flaubert’s letters to his lover and friend Louise Colet. “Every now and then he would tell Louise a little story about something he had recently experienced or heard, and it began to strike me that these were nicely formed, discrete tales that with some revision would make good individual stories,” she says.

Her er historien "THE VISIT TO THE DENTIST":

Last week i went to the dentist, thinking he was going to pull my tooth. He said it would be better to wait and see if the pain subsided.
Well, the pain dit not subside - I was in agony and running a fever. So yesterday I went to have it pulled. On my way to see him, I had to cross the old market-place where they used to execute people, not so long ago. I remembered that when I was only six or seven years old, returning home form school one day, I crossed the square after an execution had taken place. The guillotine was there. I saw fresh blood on the paving stones. They were carrying away the basket.
Last night I thought about how I had entered the square on my way to the dentist dreading what was about to happen to me, and how, in the same way, those people condemned to death also used to enter that square dreading what was about to happen to them - though it was worse for them.
When I fell asleep I dreamed about the guillotine; the strange thing was that my little niece, who sleeps downstairs, also dreamed about a guillotine, though I hadn't said anything to her about it. I wonder if thoughts are fluid, and flow downward, from one person to another, within the same house.

Jeg har også anskaffet mig et udsøgt lille hæfte, Lydia Davis: Proust, Blanchot and a Woman in Red fra 2007, hvis sidste og tredje afsnit, "Swimming in Egypt: Dreams While Awake and Asleep", refererer Davis' egne drømme og vågne, drømmelignende oplevelser (uden at markere hvilke, der er hvad), inspireret af en bog af Michel Leiris, her er "THE WOMAN IN RED":

Stading near me is a tall woman in a dark red dress. She has a dazed, rather blank expression on her face. She might be drugged, or this is simply her habitual expression. I am a little afraid of her. A red snake in front of me rears up and threatens me, at the same time changing form once or twice, for instance acquiring tentacles like a squid. Behind it is a large puddle of water in the middle of a broad path. To protect me from the snake, the woman in red lays three broad-brimmed red hats down on the surface of the puddle of water.