Da Vinci's Bicycle

by Guy Davenport

Book Overview

Esteemed writer and translator Guy Davenport's brilliant story collection, first published in 1979, is recognized today as a classic of American fiction. Written with tremendous wit, intelligence, and verve, the stories are based on historical figures whose endeavors were too early, too late, or went against the grain of their time.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811213501
• ISBN13: 9780811213509
• Release Date: May 1997
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

"Preposterous that a shoe would go the journey of a foot"

If the story is good enough, a story collection can be worth buying simply for the one. "A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg," which features German author Robert Walser [whom I haven't read], is that good, but it is not the only story in this marvelous volume worth owning. "A Field of Snow" jumps among 3 times in Walser's life--the presumed present, when he is riding in a hot-air balloon; his stay in a mental institution; and his time as a butler for a "dotty" German lord. In all of these Walser is a compelling character, a man we want to know more about, a man capable of telling us, "The snow is a kind of music. Were I ever to write again, perhaps a poem as deft and transparent as one by a Chinese, I would like to witness to the beauty of the snow. And their books, these people who keep writing, who reads them? It is now a business like any other." Another story, "The Invention of Photography in Toledo," revolves around the rival claims of two possible inventors of photography and is laugh-out-loud funny as the [to us unknown] narrator confuses Toledo, Spain, and Toledo, Ohio. Characters in other stories include Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus, and Richard Nixon [in China, no less]. Davenport's fictional world is constructed out of reality in a way unlike most writers, and thus he can have a character wonder, as Walser does, "Is it not preposterous that a shoe would go the journey of a foot?" Perhaps it is, but it is more preposterous that too many American readers do not know Davenport's work