Mere Anarchy

Woody pushes you over the edge constantly - with every line! With every sentence! I laugh so hard reading it it's a struggle to maintain any sanity. Woody grips you and throws you into his insane world. You have no choice but to dwell there with him for a little while while you laugh hysterically at everything written. The master of comedy in his greatest work! I just wish Woody would write MORE. This is Woody's best writing to date! HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend this book!

Fãs de carteirinha de Woody Allen vão se deliciar. Nesse "Fora de Órbita", que chega agora ao Brasil, o humorista comprova sua habilidade também nas palavras. Mas, atenção! À primeira vista, soa um tanto estranho o vocabulário aparentemente rebuscado de determinadas frases. Tal qual um Anthony Burgess, Allen parece criar uma língua própria que, na verdade, encobre um humor fino e rebuscado, valorizado aqui pela competente tradução de Rubens Figueiredo. E todos aqueles personagens absurdos (um anão que ainda não se assumiu, um homem que se desmaterializa), terrivelmente engraçados, povoam as histórias. Impossível eleger a melhor. Prepara-se para momentos de muitas gargalhadas.

Many may only know Woody Allen from his films . . . but he has also written three very funny collections of short stories: GETTING EVEN, WITHOUT FEATHERS and SIDE EFFECTS. Over 25 years have passed since the publication of that last book, so when I saw he recently came out with MERE ANARCHY, I quickly got my own copy to see if he has lost his touch . . . I'm happy to say that he has not. MERE ANARCHY, like his earlier efforts, covers a wide range of topics . . . you'll find yourself laughing when you hear his observations about sex, food or even how parents deal with the rejection of their son into the best nursery school in Manhattan: * In the days following the rejection, Anna Ivanovich became listless. She quarreled with the nanny and accused her of brushing Mischa's teeth sideways rather than up and down. She stopped eating regularly and wept to her shrink. "I must have transgressed against God's will to bring this on," she wailed. "I must have sinned beyond measure-too many shoes from Prada." She imagined that the Hampton Jitney tried to run her over, and when Armani canceled her charge account for no apparent reason, she took to her bedroom and began having an affair. This was hard to conceal from Boris Ivanovich, since he shared the same bedroom and asked repeatedly who the man next to them was. I also liked what Allen had to say about moving into a new property: * It all began with the purchase of a small brownstone on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Miss Wilpong, of Mengele Realtors, promised us it was the buy of a lifetime, priced modestly at a figure no higher than the cost of a stealth bomber. The dwelling was drumbeat as being in "move-in condition," and perhaps it was, for the Jukes family or a caravan of Gypsies. And on the subject of crime, here was his take: * At the trial Stubbs chose to act as his own lawyer, but a conflict over his fee led to ill feelings. I visited Beau Stubbs on Death Row, where numerous appeals kept him from the gallows for a decade, in which time he used prison to learn a trade and became a highly skilled airline pilot. I was present when the final sentence was carried out. A great sum of money was paid to Stubbs by Nike for the television rights, allowing the company to put its logo on the front of his black hood. Whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent remains questionable, although studies show that the odds of criminals committing another crime drops by almost half after their execution. MERE ANARCHY is Allen at his absurdist best . . . read it, if for no other reason than it will put a smile on your face--something we all need to do more often.

The two funniest books I ever read were "Without Feathers" and "Getting Even", so my expectations were impossibly high for "Mere Anarchy." But almost to my surprise, Woody Allen's new book at least equals and maybe surpasses them both. Allen's writing skills are off the charts, whatever the genre. At times, his sentence structure is so intricate and precise, his vocabulary so eccentrically obscure, that his setups become funnier than his punchlines: "I was supremely confident my flair for atmosphere and characterization would sparkle alongside the numbing mulch ground out by studio hacks. Certainly the space atop my mantel might be better festooned by a gold statuette than by the plastic dipping bird that now bobbed there ad infinitum..." This particular vignette, "This Nib for Hire", is particularly hilarious: the story of Flanders Mealworm, a pretentious, out of work novelist writing a novelization of a Three Stooges short. In the later chapters, Allen drops the highly stylized prose and reverts to earlier form, where he simply piles absurdities on his paragraphs like pastrami on rye. This too is sidesplitting: "How could I not have known that there are little things the size of 'Planck length' in the universe, which are a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter? Imagine if you dropped one in a dark theater how hard it would be to find. And how does gravity work? And if it were to cease suddenly, would certain restaurants still require a jacket? ..." Allen is funny on every level: Funny premises--"Frederich Nietzsche's Diet Book", Savile Row suits impregnated with fragrances, a lighting double kidnapped by Indian terrorists while on location. Funny, perfectly drawn metaphors and similes--"I have also reviewed by own financial obligations, which have puffed up recently like a hammered thumb." Or, "With that, he scribbled in an additional ninety thousand dollars on the estimate, which had waxed to the girth of the Talmud while rivaling it in possible interpretations." Funny character names--Hal Roachpaste, Reg Millipede, Agememnon Wurst and E. Coli Biggs, to name a very, very few. Funny words--Myrmidon, crepescular, succubus, screed, vigorish, on and on. And of course, funny jokes, everywhere--"She quarreled with the nanny and accused her of brushing Misha's teeth sideways rather than up and down." "As we know, for centuries Rome regarded the Open Hot Turkey Sandwich as the height of licentiousness ..." Allen is the absolute master of fusing the sublime with the absurd. The result is a book that makes you think as well as laugh. That's a combination you don't often see these days!

Woody Allen's writing has never been consistent, and that's as true as ever in Mere Anarchy, his first book in several years. Some of the stories, while still full of his trademark phrasing--whose rhythms seem, gloriously, transplanted directly out of an old-time radio show or a screwball comedy--never take off, content to throw out funny one-liners at a breakneck pace. But the best stories in this collection show Allen in peak form. "This Nib For Hire", in which Serious Artist Flanders Mealworm is hired to write a novelization of a Three Stooges movie, ends in a truly stunning existential sequence between Moe, Curly, and Larry and is altogether as good a set-up as anything Allen's written since "The Whore of Mensa." Some of "Mere Anarchy"'s parts are better than others, but the book itself is the funniest that will come out this year. Believe me, it has no competition from the "Three Stooges" novelization.