On Lorrie Moore's Anagrams

"Life is sad. Here is someone." 

If I were to talk about my experience while reading Lorrie Moore's strange, poetic, chaotic, funny and heart rending book "Anagrams" it would be of how I suffered with it's seemingly mashed-up stories containing only 3 or 4 characters that have either real or imaginary connections with each other. The story between Benna Carpenter and Gerard Maines just wouldn't stop shifting in every chapter. One time she is a nightclub singer and he an aerobics instructor to pre-schoolers, then on the next she is an assistant to him who is an art history graduate student, she was also mentioned as a teacher of poetry and he a pianist aspiring to be an opera singer. There was also a mention of a daughter "Giorgianne", a thought up child, like an invented life amidst broken loves, deceased relations and just basically the things that failed and refused her an ounce of happiness. After reading about this daughter whom she doted on, imagine my frustration when alas! she owes up to her nonbeing "Sometimes," she sighs into the stream, "I feel like I'm right in the mist of things". It is all a muddle of stories, abstract in a sense, where you won't know if the people (aside from Benna and Gerard) or things existed or happened in a real-life aspect or just a figment of Benna's seemingly deprived life. It was such a struggle that despite having admitted a "Moore" fan myself, I had to put it down and thought of picking it up after exactly 5 months, right about that time when I finally have nothing else to read. But I found myself absorbed into her little chaos of the heart and mind, still. This book, though hard to digest and follow through it's jumbled narratives (a mere flaw or an overfeed of Moore's literary gifted-ness, perhaps?)  renders each characters, despite their loneliness and unhappiness and their constant plight to survive every faulty turn, with bursting poetic qualities. A certain elevated way of writing is something I've always admired of Lorrie Moore. It held a charm of its own. Anagrams is a profound piece of work wrought with puns, never at a loss for wit and needling honesty, a straight blow to ones guts where it will stay for good, or at least the spirit of her work. This may not be the best work of fiction by her that I have read but it does not fall short of a masterful craft that made Birds of America, Self-Help, Like Life a worthwhile read. 

****

 "I missed him. Love, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that." 

****

“I count too heavily on birthdays, though I know I shouldn't. Inevitably I begin to assess my life by them, figure out how I'm doing by how many people remember; it's like the old fantasy of attending your own funeral: You get to see who your friends are, get to see who shows up. ”

**** 

 "Our laughs grow louder and hazy. Soon we are kissing. Soon we are unbuttoning. I haven't kissed or unbuttoned in a long time and it's like, at long last, a meeting of friends, falling into a familiar, ineffable dance we've both learned elsewhere, long ago, but have revived here, a revival! 

****

"And soon we are upstairs, pulling down the bedspread, something in us pounding and accomodated, a mashing of hips, a pressing of faces, a slow friction of limbs and chests and lips against the sheets, this argument that is sex. Sometimes his chest moves up from mine with a soft sucking sound from the damp, trapped space between our sternums-- something wet and reluctant, like marine life or a heart that can't stop beating no matter how it tries. We are gasping, quiet, in the dark, and then the wash of violet and night tornadoes through my legs and up behind my eyes, plumbs and spirals my spine, and I know if I can keep feeling like this I'll be okay, if I can feel like this I'm not dead, I won't die. Life is sad. Here is someone. 

****

“All the world's a stage we're going through.” 
Anagrams, Lorrie Moore

Call Me By Your Name

"He came. He left. Nothing else had changed. I had not changed. The world hadn't changed. Yet nothing would be the same. All that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance."

" ... if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don't snuff it out, don't be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we'd want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything --- what a waste!"

---- Call Me By Your Name, Andre Aciman

P.415

"I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality." --- Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence

P. 191

"When two people love each other as we do, no one can come between them, no one," I said, I am amazed at the words I was uttering without preparation. Lovers like us, because they know that nothing can destroy their love, even on the worst days, even when they are heedlessly hurting each other in the cruelest, most deceitful ways, still carry in their hearts a consolation that never abandons them. Trust me that after tonight I'll stop this, I'll sort this out. Are you listening to me?" 

"I'm listening." 

--- Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence

Snow White and The Huntsman

I enjoyed this dark, sensual and gritty adaptation of the classic fairy tale. Dubbed “Snow White and The Hunstman”, it is a bundle of action, light humour, magic, eye candies, even a hint of romance and of course heart stopping violence that had me ogling at the projection screen hard enough till my eyes water.  Somewhat a stark contrast to the Walt Disney version released 75 years ago, Rupert Sanders’s first effort on feature film deviated from its classic mold, giving it an exciting, terrifying and triumphant toll to it. Charlize Theron was commendable as the voodoo queen and troublemaker extraordinaire that fed on human hearts (she's so evil, you'll love her). Kristen Stewart whose effortless beauty (and deadpan acting) played the locked-up-princess-turned-warrior in a way that made me admire her more than in “The Twilit Saga”. I especially love the “post- modern woman" attitude as she resurrects from the poison of the evil queen’s death bait and fulfills her destiny that is: to slay the nefarious beauty who took her father’s life, attempted to take hers (too) and the throne which was rightfully hers. Chris Hemsworth stars as the beefcake huntsman, whose kiss broke the spell of Snow White’s deathly slumber (though, clearly enough, there was no love storm going on). Sam Claflin (who is he?) stars as Prince William, a childhood friend of Snow White, a very skilled archer, and an added attraction to the movie. There was also the appearance of the dwarves Muir, Beith, Quert, Coll, Duir, Gort, Nion, and Gus which served as a comic relief to its toe-curling horse chase and wrought violence (these dwarves, they still hold an important role on this myth). All in all I enjoyed this slightly different remake. I don’t see how this is the kind of movie anybody would try to bore a hole to. This is a good movie. This is a year of good movies.  

David Levithan's "Boy Meets Boy"

I have just finished reading David Levithan’s gay romance fiction “Boy Meets Boy”. What made this book interesting is that though this book dwells on the innocent and fluffy love story of Paul and Noah, it doesn’t lack depth and do not pass out as a juvenile account of “another gay love story”. At some point, I furrowed my brows over the story’s well done narrative and wondered where the juicy bits are, only to be reminded that I was after all reading a Gay Teen Fiction. David Levithan wrote about a teen gay love story that didn’t make you despise it for being hackneyed or shallow (I was far from being nauseous at all). Instead, he makes you laugh and love each character in all their many splendored queerness: there is the well-adjusted queer- Paul, the closet queer- Tony, the bi-curious-Kyle, the artsy- Noah and the drag queen- Infinite Darlene (I know I am missing an entry to other existing kinds, I am not at all an expert on queer nomenclature). But this is not about queer hormones, on the brink of discovering love and the possibilities of sex, this about different struggles: in life and of finding love, the one that works and the one that redeems one’s self from the failure of the previous one or of many previous ones. This is also about friendship, too, its beautiful and tough moments, its many ups and downs and the unspeakable magic that makes it work in the end. David Levithan didn’t fail on keeping the barometer of reading pleasure at a certain height. It is a clean, twinkling novel, gushing with beautiful prose and romance that warms the heart, dead ringer for Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower. True, there are things in life that requires a certain amount of bravery in us, we are lucky to have faced them alone yet we are even luckier to have faced them with the right people, with friends and family.