Spain didn't get the memo

Thoughts on Zero Gravity by Woody Allen

You’re in Bilbao.

You finish your café con leche (risking intestinal turmoil because you don’t know how to ask for oat milk) and pop the cup back on its saucer.

You leave some euros on the counter and wander through the early morning streets, accompanied by the city’s cacophony: the opening of steel shutters, the hydraulic hiss of delivery vans, the catcalls of knock-off sports shirt salesmen setting out their stalls.

You’re heading to a bookshop you’ve identified on Google Maps.

As you arrive, it’s just opening.

Inside, it’s mostly Spanish language stuff, but you spy a shelf of English language books and navigate toward that.

It’s a single bookcase, so you start your perusal top left, alphabetically—it won’t take long.

But wait…

Allen? Woody Allen?

Zero Gravity?

What is this?

You take down the book from the shelf like some illicit magazine.

It’s the font.

There’s a picture of him on the back.

And yes, it seems like a book of short stories. A new book of short stories.

What’s going on?

It’s complicated (or not)

I know, I know.

Woody Allen is cancelled. Or he isn’t. But he kind of is. I don’t know. And frankly, neither do you—not really.

Let’s just say for now, whatever your feelings about the man, if you even have any, the fact is he’s made some questionable choices in his life.

I pointed out when I wrote about the book Monsters, my feelings about Mr. Konigsberg are complicated. His films have had a huge influence on my life. And perhaps even more so, his writing had a profound impact on me.

I write at all today in large part because I read Getting Even when I was a 20-something, figuring out what the hell to do with my life (I’d figured out it wasn’t auditing, but otherwise I wasn’t sure).

So, moral quandaries aside, if you’re me, and you’re in a bookshop in Bilbao, and you weren’t aware a new collection even existed…

You’re buying the book.

Interesting, I guess, that in Spain it seems it’s fine to stock the book. I quickly Googled it and found there was virtually nothing online about it in the English press. Yet every bookshop I visited after in Bilbao and San Sebastian, there it was, being boldly displayed in Spanish and English.

And this despite the fact that it was actually published back in 2022.

Strange how different cultures have different perspectives.

But anyway, I’ll buy you a drink sometime and we can discuss it (if you’ve not already spat out your milk and run a mile because I’ve written about a Woody Allen book).

The subtle art of not-so-subtle non-sequiturs

I remember Noel Fielding on Nevermind the Buzzcocks years ago, while it was still Lamarr maybe, or more likely, Amstell. Not single-consonant-at-the-end-of-your-name Davies.

The Mighty Boosh was at its height, and someone called out Fielding on his nonsense sense of humour, saying it was easy to just put random things together and they’d be funny. Like “chickpea serenade” (author’s own).

Fielding called their bluff. Go on then, he said, and invited the critic to invent something surreal off the cuff.

I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it didn’t work. It wasn’t funny. And a triumphant Fielding pointed out it wasn’t as easy as you think.

Reading Zero Gravity—in effect re-reading Zero Gravity (because neither Allen’s voice nor subject matter has changed one bit)—I was reminded of two things: a, how difficult it is to write in this way, and b, how no one else (to my knowledge) writes like it anymore.

Allen’s voice on the page is singular in this way.

Almost every sentence ends with a not particularly subtle non-sequitur or comical counterpoint, and thus makes almost every sentence (or paragraph) funny (or at least smile-inducing).

It also injects the writing with an incredible pace. There is a breathlessness to the prose that speeds you along at such a clip that you’re still able to follow a coherent narrative and consistent characters even though the intertextual references and often self-undermining sentences, taken in isolation, would appear nonsensical.

Allen’s voice on the page is similar to the voice you’re familiar with in the movies—it’s Groucho Marx with the philosophical references of Karl Marx. But on the page, it’s somehow amplified and accelerated.

I find it interesting. Entertaining, even.

And look, when all is said and done, as they would say on Love Island, Zero Gravity “is what it is.”

Sitting in the sun of the beautiful Basque Country, a cold glass of elaborately poured txakoli in hand, I smiled, I tittered, and I might even have laughed aloud once or twice.

Yes, dear reader, I LOL’d.

Whether you would, too, I don’t know. Maybe I’m programmed in a certain way to enjoy Allen’s schtick. Maybe I’m immoral. Maybe it’s because my Grandad looked a bit like him. Who knows?

Of course, whether you wish to be made to LOL by complicated old Mr. Konigsberg… that’s a different matter.

My recommendation: If you’re anywhere else but mainland Europe, buy a copy of National Geographic or The Economist and hide the book between its pages to avoid being sneered at in public. If you’re on the continent, you can apparently go for it. In fact, you can probably light up a cigarette inside too, and cavort freely with the several people you’re openly having affairs with.