Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
Wanted More from MooreLorrie Moore’s short first novel feels more like an amusing, extended exercise – a gimmick – rather than a full novel. Like letters in an anagram, Moore switches characters, professions and relationships. In the first section, for instance, Benna is a lounge singer and Gerard teaches aerobics to children. In the second, Benna teaches aerobics to seniors, while Gerard is working on a rock version of a Baroque opera. In another, Gerard is a lounge singer who wants to become a...
The concept of this book is intriguing and for the most part well executed. The relationship between a woman, Benna, and a man, Gerard, is described in six different "possible lives" or what Moore calls anagrams: jumbled up versions of the same people and ingredients, rearranged into six different plot lines. The last one is the longest -- maybe it is the "true" one, maybe it isn't, but it is unequivocally the saddest. I was just going along with this book for a while, enjoying the humor, and th...
"life is sad. here is someone."Don't let this book fool you. You might pick it up and be humored by intellectual puns and clever turns of phrase before you realize you are reading what appears to be the highly conventional story of a woman in an unfortunate relationship. Like Todd Solondz's film Storytelling this novel plays with notions of fact and fiction. It isn't as simple as having a reliable or unreliable narrator, it's that everything said can mean something else, and perhaps even people
Not only does Moore have the rare talent of being able to pull off a long series of puns with panache and grace, but she's pulled off a structural coup that has crushed my heart. This book, a blend of impeccable comic timing and sadness that loops back and references itself repeatedly, and a net of repeated phrases that build on themselves Vonnegut-style, merits a one-sitting read to catch all the nuances.
The first couple iterations of the cast of characters are cute, witty in the way Lorrie Moore seems to consistently be, but this is a complete and utter trainwreck of maudlin gaucheness. A boring flop of a novel masquerading as something containing multitudes through its titular experimental formalities, but it really could not feel more vacuous.
Firstly, I am biased not only because I love Lorrie Moore but also because my first name is an anagram (I am named after my Grandmother, whose name was Edna). ***This book is strange without being alienating, and while I was nervous that the "anagramming" of characters would annoy me, I actually got into the rearranging of facts and desires that Moore plays with--it reminded me very much of the process of writing, of those moments when your character can do this or this or this, and you have to
I laughed out loud so many times while reading Anagrams that my sister became curious and I had to read passages to her. But in the end it much more than comedy, a deep and moving experience. I am still puzzled by the way the book is structured, but I wouldn't want to lose any part of it, so I guess it worked well.
I'm now at a point where I have so much love for Lorrie Moore that I'm not entirely sure that I'm able to review her that incisively now. Anagrams is an early novel/linked short stories and it definitely has a less polished feel to her more recent collections of short stories, which I find hard to fault. This lack of polish and sense of trying things out is perhaps why it has slightly mixed reviews. And I would agree that the concept of Anagrams - looking at roughly the same character, Benna, fr...
This book was devastating – devastatingly funny, devastatingly honest. And its denouement, or the final unraveling of plot complexities, is devastatingly sad. Let me back up for a minute. "Anagrams" rearranges and frames three characters dynamically against each other, first in a sequence of short scenes, then in a longer sustained story. So the key characters – like letters in an anagrammatic word – function differently, contribute to a separate-though-equally-plausible reality, when located in...
An extremely well-written, provocative, witty, and thought-provoking novel about the vagaries of modern life. I couldn't write like this even in my dreams. The fact that anyone can is a marvel to me.I am indebted to Stephanie for her insightful review of this book, without which I would not have known about the magical prose of Lorrie Moore. I will certainly read more of her work in the near future. Here she paints a complex, layered picture of the real and not-so-real aspects of three lives. In...
This is both the best and saddest book I've ever read. Actually, I'm not sure why we aren't all spending all of our time reading this book forever. I can't say why because, well, pretty much anything I'd say would be a spoiler, and this book is too good to spoil. Seriously, this book is so good that I might get a Lorrie Moore-themed tattoo.
Margaret Atwood has a great short story called "Happy Endings" that I kept thinking about as I read this book. Read it here and then continue with the review. Did you read it? Seriously guys, it'll take you like two minutes. I'll wait. Okay, good. So I don't know which came first, "Happy Endings" or Anagrams, but I feel almost sure that one of them had to influence the other. Anagrams is about two people, Benna and Gerard, who are in love - sort of. When we first meet them, they are living in ad...
Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams is nothing short of a masterpiece––the perfect book to save me from of a recent string of novels that didn’t cut the mustard. A befitting analysis would require a high degree of literary scrutiny, something I am probably too many years removed from my college days to muster. But I will trot out what I can.As one might expect from the title, Anagrams is a hard book to pin down. In its simplest form, it is a novel about love and loss, and how those things are just as much i...
This is the Lorrie Moore I love. There is essentially nothing wrong with this book. You couldn't find a flaw if you tried.Anagrams follows the stories of Benna and Gerard, who, in a strange mash-up of scenarios, are poetry teachers, lounge singers, piano players, neighbors, parents, friends, lovers. In love and not in love. Together and then alone. The book plots the course of their relationship as it might take place if Gerard was in love with Benna, fully-clothed in his bathtub and listening f...
You know the simultaneous feeling of sad and happy that an airport gives you? That's this book in a nutshell. It reflects the weary while making you laugh harder than you expect to. It's ideal for lovers of language and puns, for those who prefer to deal with words and invent entire worlds in their head than deal with the inevitably disappointing reality of everyday life.
an•a•gram ( n -gr m ) 1. A word or phrase formed by reordering the letters of another word or phrase, such as satin to stain.However, here in her first novel, short story writer Lorrie Moore (born 1957), reordered not letters but the different scenes in order for her reader to choose the one that he or she likes best. I have seen this approached in a couple of movies but my first time for a novel. Moore’s contemporary and humorous prose makes this approach not only crisp in its freshness but al
Today I thought I'd lost my copy of Anagrams and a little voice asked me if that would be so bad a thing to happen. As I said in my update, I was getting the idea that Moore is less. (Er, is that still funny?) Sorry Lorrie. I am the swine before which you cast your pearl. Oink.Anagram : List your novel really though quite Christmas and smirky monotonously please so aggravating make mine a Harvey Wallbanger is an anagram of I thought your novel was monotonously smirky and quite aggravating but I
I struggled with this book a lot. The beginning was good but then around the middle it got really confusing to me. What was real, what wasn't? I'm still confused, actually, about when Gerard was her teaching assistant? I don't know. But, in the end it really all paid off for me. At first I gave it 3 stars, then it crept up to 4, and now I'm putting it at 5 because it just keeps growing in my mind, even several days later. I do think the beginning and middle parts function more/better as short st...
I seriously think if I could choose to write like *anyone*, it would be Lorrie Moore.Moore does something amazing in the beginning of this book; she rearranges the characters' lives over and over in various short stories--hence the name Anagrams. Then, the last piece in the book is a novella using the same characters. Like all of Moore, it is by turns laugh out loud funny and heartbreaking.My only fear in recommending this book to students is that they will think I'm the main character in the no...
There are many funny bits in this comic multi-plot relationship diatribe, but make no mistake. This is a confusing read unless someone tells you what to expect...a do it yourself construction/deconstruction. Perhaps this would work better reading it with a group? I couldn't like it as a novel. I would include some of the funnier lines, but then it could mislead.