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Loading... Autobiography of Red (1998)by Anne Carson
it's about the bread and the fire and the little dog, and i really miss that dog. (  ) usefuljack | May 17, 2013 |  it's about the bread and the fire and the little dog, and i really miss that dog. ( ) usefuljack | May 17, 2013 | "Told in glimpses and snatches of verse that walk the line between myth and modernity almost every line." read more: http://likeiamfeasting.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/autobiography-of-red-anne-carson.h... (  ) mongoosenamedt | Feb 28, 2013 | Despite the innovative format, I expected more profound writing. Short, sensitive, heartwarming. (  ) g0ldenboy | Jan 16, 2012 | I've never read anything like this. It was described as a verse novel. A modern story, yet using characters from Greek myth, Herakles and Geryon, a red, winged creature. It was relatively thin book, but thick with content. I read each section twice and thought some more. The whole story is metaphorical about something. Identity, love, isolation. I'm not sure what exactly. But some searing emotional images. I wonder if the Brokeback Mountain person read this. And some scenes from Peru reminded me of our trip there. Seeing soccer on the beach, Inca Kola, a roasted guinea pig. ( ) yarkan | Nov 29, 2011 |
 ...Carson writes in language any poet would kill for: sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender, brilliantly lighted.  It is a novel, all right; a story which creates characters that are surprising but credible, involves them in an action that works to what seems an appropriate if somewhat mysterious end and, in this case, leaves the reader with a feeling that it contains depths which only rereading and reflection will sound. But the reader cannot help wondering: Was the decision to tell the story in verse justified?
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 037570129X, Paperback)Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red is a novel in verse, the author's first. A classicist by profession as well as a poet, Carson has drawn on antiquity for her cast, updating the myth of Geryon and Herakles. In the original version, of course, Herakles killed the red-skinned, winged Geryon. In Carson's very contemporary retelling, he merely inspires, but does not return, the monster's passion. By choosing Geryon as her central character, Carson can bring up the questions of existence as if they hadn't been asked before. After all, the monster's instincts have not been numbed by civilization. Fires twist through him. We feel the pain of learning the most elementary things, and then the volcanic intensity that comes with that more advanced thing, love. Yet Carson doesn't so much tell the story of Geryon's love as mediate his very being through semiological surfaces: cafes, video stores, lipstick, a library where he shelves government documents with a "forlorn austerity, / tall and hushed in their ranges as veterans of a forgotten war." Carson seldom satisfies herself with an image of the world. Instead she atomizes the world, leaving it broken down, refracted, and glinting. At times her verbal pyrotechnics manage to render pure energy:A little button at the end of each range activated the fluorescent track above it.No novelist could have gotten away with that last line. Yet it's very much to the point: Carson's Geryon is, among other things, a camera freak who doesn't understand that an observer must inevitably alter the nature of the thing observed. Here is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, cheek-by-jowl with the ancients! And indeed, Carson's achievement is to interweave the archaic and the modern so seamlessly that by the time we finish reading Autobiography of Red, the entire landscape looks inside out. --Mark Rudman (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 04 Jan 2013 14:42:53 -0500) "A stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present." |
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