Autobiography of Red | 
 enlarge | Author: Anne Carson
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 14469
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 160
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.5
ISBN: 037570129X
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN: 9780375701290
ASIN: 037570129X
Publication Date: August 1, 1998
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Amazon.com
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.
A yellowing 5 x 7 index card
Scotch-taped below each button said EXTINGUISH LIGHT WHEN NOT IN USE.
Geryon went flickering
through the ranges like a bit of mercury flipping the switches on and off.
The librarians thought him
a talented boy with a shadow side.
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
Product Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
National book Critics Circle Award Finalist
"Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting poet writing in English today."--Michael Ondaatje
"This book is amazing--I haven't discovered any writing in years so marvelously disturbing." --Alice Munro
The award-winning poet Anne Carson reinvents a genre in Autobiography of Red, 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.
Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent. By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is.
"A profound love story . . . sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender."--The New York Times Book Review
"A deeply odd and immensely engaging book. . . . [Carson] exposes with passionate force the mythic underlying the explosive everyday."--The Village Voice
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| Customer Reviews: Read 23 more reviews...
 Framing and Layers of Life May 22, 2008
"Autobiography of Red" by Ann Carson is worth the read simply because of its unique genre: a novel framed within a poem. The layers begin as the reader is drawn into the world of Geryon, a young red winged creature, trying to figure out his place in the world and in love. Autobiography of Red" is a scrapbook of sorts with emotions cut out and pasted next to visual images of events that shape his life and opinion of himself. The whole work has a tenderness and an uneasiness about it that frames itself around his life. All of this framing makes the reader feel like there were always more layers to pull back and explore and gives the poem a momentum.
The poem begins with snapshots of Geryon's childhood, his incomplete relationship with his mother and his sexually abusive relationship with his brother. Carson uses sculpture, photographs, thoughts and color-the color red and the many shades and forms it reveals itself during his life to shape Geryon's autobiography.
The poem continues from focusing on Geryon's childhood artwork as a form of expression to his focus on photography as he approaches adolescence and experiences first love. The craft choices Carson uses in the poem show the innocence and intensity of the romance between Geryon and Herakles, his lover. The language Carson uses in these lines show this affection through small actions :
"Your cold, said Herakles suddenly, Your hands are cold. Here.
He put Geryon's hands inside his shirt."
It is these moments or vignettes between them that frame and build the poem's depth. Carson captures their youth through the conversations in the book with a genuine voice of uncertainty about life and love that captures the reader.
The poem then takes the reader through Geryon's struggle to deal with a broken heart after Herakles leaves and he tries to find a place in the world and ends up full circle, crossing paths with Herakles' again. The poem ends with Geryon's realization of reality about love and its shortcomings.
The sincerity and depth of the work will have any reader feeling a bit wiser than before they have red this work.
Respond
Wanting to return February 13, 2008
A few years back a friend loaned me a copy of this book. At first I was dubious that I'd find much enjoyment in it, but after a few turns of the pages I was hooked. Since then the story has haunted me. Now I wish to return to its pages, reacquaint myself with its landscape, language, and characters. I searched for this title on Amazon because I intend to buy a copy and read it again. After that I intend to loan it to a few friends of mine. Maybe they will become believers too. Try it. See.
"Autobiography of Red" Is A Modern Masterpiece September 22, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
What I loved about this book is her statement that the everyday ritual of living is as important, and is in reality, a myth in creation. At every moment we are the heroes of our OWN myth and that if we choose to accept OUR destinys, we then can become MYTHIC. Double entendres abound in this book beautifully and the double speak is brilliant. People write about the begining being difficult or too "artsy", but if you are reading carefully, you can see the sublime artistry of WHY it is there and WHAT she is REALLY saying. To read more into the rest of the prose (written also in classical style... for fuller effect) you MUST digest the begining bits and of course the last section of the book. I could go on at length about the technical aspect of this book or the heavy concepts within, but I'd rather just simply say, that her writing skills are clearly masterful. Her prose is beauty in san serif! It's subtley; the great trickster and flaming sword. A modern day masterwork for admirers of poetry...
 The Human Custom of Wrong Love August 19, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Stesichorus [stee sik' ur us] ancient Greek poet is credited with the inspiration for this story about Geryon [jerry on], the main character in the book, who may have been named for the triple-bodied, winged giant in Greek mythology, but that is debatable, although Geryon seems to be a young man who has wings that he keeps tucked away except for one possible flight during the story.
Okay, that is the background, somewhat illusory, but this is a story about an abused homosexual photographer, an interesting character. He suffers from narcolepsy, among other things, loves volcanoes and the color red, but he has a hard time living in this world. So if any of these descriptions fit you, this may be just the book you are looking for. There is sex, ambiguity, poetry, adventure, geology, betrayal, and some memorable lines like on p. 42, "Up against another human being one's own procedures take on definition."
Herakles [hair' a kleez] is the antagonist, lover, big jerk in the story, not to be confused with his namesake in Greek and then Roman mythology, Hercules, who performs 12 near impossible labors. Some of the best lines in the book come from having tangled with Herakles, like on p. 75, "...Geryon's whole body formed one arch of a cry--upcast to that custom, the human custom of wrong love."
This book is unusual, and a good springboard for adventurous thinking and creative writing, not an autobiography, not a novel, not a book of poetry, not mythology or narrative, but some kind of hybrid of all five. It closes with a funny, fictitious, anonymous interview with Stesichorus, who says, "So glad you didn't ask about the little red dog."
Amazed March 4, 2003
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
This is one of the most interesting books I have read in a while. It moves beautifully between a mysterious, mythic presence to a heavy, all-to-human narrative. And this is to say nothing of its form! The economy of the writing is precise and exacting. The Verse was strangely magical, projecting me into the nebulous space beyond what Carson had written. I will certainly have to read this a few more times, because I think there is still much to be revealed even after one pass.
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