Friday, August 20, 2010

Rearranging

Lorrie Moore has edged her way into my top authors. She is funny, clever and emotionally sophisticated (as icky as that phrase sounds) and Gate at the Stairs was one of my favourite books last year. Consequently I've been working my way through her back catalogue starting with Short Stories, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital and most recently finished Anagrams.
What's fascinating about Anagrams is the way Moore uses the characters the way someone like Nabokov rearranges letters to form new words, in this way she makes new scenarios. A few central characters - Gerard, Benna and Eleanor - appear in different versions of themselves through discrete parts of the book. Expect, as always, Moore's signature slices of truth served cold, her supreme smarts and her mastery of the pun.

1 comment:

  1. If you get the Vintage edition, may I recommend you avoid the blurb. It's an example of all that's wrong with book copy; it tells too much and what it does tell is wrong. Faber does a much better job on their version.

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