Davis can’t repress a recording, story-shaping impulse. Nor could Flaubert. At the funeral of a friend’s wife, Flaubert observes ‘poor Pouchet, who stood there bending and swaying with grief like a stalk of grass in the wind’. Meanwhile, the world carries on. Some fellows begin talking about their orchards, comparing the girth of young fruit trees (no swaying). A man asks Flaubert about the Middle East. Were there any museums in Egypt, and what was the condition of their public libraries? The priest ‘standing over the hole’ speaks French, not Latin, because the service is a Protestant one, and the gentleman beside Flaubert approves, then makes slighting remarks about Catholicism. Poor Pouchet stands, forlorn.

The story is spare, vivid, and unforgettable. Davis, honoured with a 1999 Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for fiction and her translations of Proust, Flaubert, and others, is a very different writer from Flaubert, but she catches his pulse of meaning and cadence. His stories meld into hers.

Much has been made of Davis’s stylistic eccentricities, and there is accelerated critical grouching now she has become internationally as well as locally famous (the 2013 Man Booker International Prize as well as the 2013 American Academy of Arts and Letters Merit Medal). She doesn’t fit the usual taxonomies. Her writing (some say) is bourgeois in its focus, weird, and – worse – liberal. Her stories are uneven, unpredictable (some only a few lines long), aphoristic, wry, dream-derived, urban-neurotic, or absurd-hilarious, as here, in ‘The Language of the Telephone Company’:

The trouble you reported recentlyis now working properly.

What is worse, Davis is unrepentant. Refractory even. No surprise that the title story of her new volume (following the 733-page Collected published in 2009) should be ‘Can’t and Won’t’:

I was recently denied a writing prize because, they said, I was lazy. What they meant by lazy was that I used too many contractions: for instance, I would not write out in full the words cannot and will not, but instead contracted them to can’t and won’t.

The thing Davis does demand is an altered way of reading. She won’t ever send you to sleep with familiar or comforting tropes. Like a poet, she opens your eyes, enjoins vigilance. Her language is wielded with the deftness of a fencer: artful, playful, penetrating. Her many narrative voices amuse, dismay, tickle, and prod. Sometimes their/her understanding of the way we humans misunderstand, love, and deflect from one another is almost unbearable. ‘The Seals’, a long meditation on sisters and loss, which lies deep as an anchor in Can’t and Won’t, is one of the most devastating stories I have ever read – raw,

vulnerable, simple, and heartbreaking. I have no sisters, but I have two daughters. I read ‘The Seals’ sitting in the beach house of one of them, with the light glancing off the ocean. I shall wait until they are both my age before I let either of them read it. The story made me think of Emily Dickinson, and ‘There’s a certain Slant of light’:

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –

Davis’s narrator, in her puzzled, ordinary voice, winkles out meanings: ‘Maybe you miss someone even more when you can’t figure out what your relationship was. Or when it seems unfinished. When I was little, I thought I loved her more than our mother.

Then she left home.’If you read nothing else, look for this story.

Davis writes from traditions that are enriching, not constraining of her originality. Beckett is an influence. You hear him in her pared-down dialogue and juxtapositions. There are echoes of an east-coast American transcendentalist leaning in the way light strikes her mental and physical landscapes, as here, in a dream story, ‘The Low Sun’:

I am a college girl. I tell a younger college girl, a dancer, that the sun is very low in the sky now. Its light must be filling the caves by the sea.

Davis is delightedly self-conscious about language, unpredictability, and her own fiction:

The story is only two paragraphs long. I’m working on the end of the second paragraph, which is the end of the story. I’m intent on this work, and my back is turned. And while I’m working on the end, look what they’re up to in the beginning! (‘Two Characters in a Paragraph’)

What need a discourse on literary theory?

I read Davis’s stories as I do great artists’ sketch books and drawings: for their spontaneity, freshness and the flair, discipline and skill evident in the hand. These are no preparatory studies. Her body of work may be unlike any you have come across (don’t try to read it quickly), but it is extraordinary in its acuity and wisdom. In a world drowning in words, she is a lifeline.