Red Doc> - Hardcover

Carson, Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307960587 ISBN 13: 9780307960580

Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group, 2013

Synopsis

Some years ago I wrote a book about a boy named Geryon who was red and had wings and fell in love with Herakles. Recently I began to wonder what happened to them in later life. Red Doc> continues their adventures in a very different style and with changed names.

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.

About this title

Review

"A startling picaresque unlike one might have read or imagined . . . [Carson's] real inventiveness is the oddly engaging, oddly distancing story told in fragments that don't want to end in a moral. . . . Essential reading for poetry sophisticates." --Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (starred review)

"Red Doc> is a clock that takes the measure of its readers and their world by entrancing them with anachronism and myth. . . .Carson explores questions like: can studying the past help us to understand the present or to prepare for the future? Do we need hindsight? Are the past and present continuous? Carson shows us that what stands between contemporary readers and the ancient world only appears to be substantial. Peering into the prose 'documents' that account for history from a safe distance, Carson suggests, we risk falling into [an] abyss, a volcanic past that promises to flow into the present and freeze itself over our shapes. Our mythic heroes suffer from PTSD. We're about to be covered up with ash, even though no one smokes anymore. Red Doc> manages to tell, along with Geryon's story, something of the toll the last 15 years have taken all of us, and the earth. The characters' grief for losses sustained in their anachronistic, mythic world becomes an elegy of losses in our own." --Emily Anderson, Full Stop

"Striking . . . Exhilarating . . . Carson has a reputation for difficulty, which is actually identical to her sense of playfulness. . . . Whimsy and obliquity dance hand in hand. . . . Red Doc> remains lucid and accessible, vernacular, friendly even, without sacrificing its iridescent, surrealist sheen. . . . Reading [it] is like being plunged under an iceberg: same world, same old friends, strange new light. . . . Carson bends time. She contracts universes . . . Red Doc> is a consummate love story, a book about friendship, companionship, motherhood, sex. It charts the failures of mutations of love, their imperfections, their infidelities and deflations: the strangeness of how they actually manifest. . . . Autobiography of Red was a story of dawning to your own peculiar monstrosity. Red Doc> is what happens when that peculiarity finds its full form, when it stretches, unfurls, lives beyond the confines of your life." --Camden Avery, The Rumpus

"Red Doc> may find Geryon all grown up and answering simply to 'G, ' but Carson's red-winged anti-hero is still the crown prince of erotic, melancholy foibles, and the crew he assembles in this long-awaited sequel is as stunning and strange a cast as the one introduced in 1998's Autobiography of Red. Red Doc> maintains love triangles and terse metaphors that drove the first book . . . but also finds a way to push Geryon into new territories of dry, vaudevillian Americana. Whether she's talking war vets, flying cows, Latin etymology or Elvis, Carson once again blurs the lines of prose and poetry, and challenging both genres within a single poem." --American Poet

"With Red Doc>, Carson revisits her readers' favorite red-winged monster, but some things have changed. . . . One could call Red Doc> a road-trip story, but as is true with most of Carson's writing, it belies any kind of label or category. A majority of the text slices down the center of each page in a single column, looking like an unswerving road in the middle of nowhere. With this book, Carson demands more from her readers in terms of concentration and patience (in a good way) than her previous books. Unexpected leaps of time, place and perspective occur frequently; throughout, Carson interjects short sections which operate as something of Greek chorus, or meta-commentary on the narrative itself. During other moments, the author moves in to the dreamlike point of view. As in Autobiography, familiar preoccupations emerge in Red Doc> the Proustian movement of time, aging, love triangles, desire, trauma. Dramatic plot points propel the adventure forward--a robbery, a riot, a death. With each unexpected turn, Carson's lyrical language effortlessly lifts pure moments of hope and despair off the page . . . Autobiography of Red and Red Doc> can be read together, or apart. The latter certainly serves as a sequel of sorts, but the strange, elliptical narrative also bends into something else altogether. It stands on its own--and takes the reader on a singular journey of longing and grief. In an interview published in the Paris Review in the fall of 2004, Carson said, 'I write to find out what I think about something.' It is her readers' very good fortune that she does." --S. Kirk Walsh, San Francisco Chronicle

"Breathtaking . . . Stunning . . . Personal, necessary and important. Anne Carson has a history of doing unpredictable and genre-crossing things. . . . [Her] palatable, popular, sophisticated and who-cares approach may have done the most and best work in the last two decades to stop people worrying so much about what's poetry and what's not. . . . She's among our most exciting poets . . . reliably ingenious, full of charisma and surprise. Lesser poets who behave more predictably and risk less are easier to praise--and not as important. Each new Carson project comes with new parameters. Autobiography of Red is whimsical, dark, interestingly creepy and moving. It seems to me--though many readers disagree--to be created out of willed obsession. Geryon and Herakles [of Autobiography] reunite in Red Doc>; middle-aged, Geryon is now G, still a cattle-herder if not much of an artist, though he reads Proust and Daniil Kharms, the Russian Soviet-era surrealist-absurdist. Herakles is now called Sad But Great--'Sad, ' for short--a traumatized veteran of a recent war. This adds a welcome political dimension. G and Sad take a road trip, ending up in any icy northland. A handful of other characters derive from Greek mythology. Hermes, a mysterious man in a silver tuxedo. Io, the nymph turned into a cow by Zeus, is the loveliest member of G's herd, a sexy musk ox. . . . Carson has, over the years, moved closer to bizarreness for the sake of bizarreness--but she still pulls it off, mainly because the impulse behind it is mischief. 'Can I get away with this?' she seems to ask. And she does--because it's fun. She's having fun. Here's what else she gets away with: Most of the poems are delivered in narrow strips of type, a format that speed you down the page, as if creating a chute for language. It also constricts in ways that put useful pressure on the poems' wild music and wilder state of mind. Carson remains a master of idiosyncratic figures, delivering metaphor and simile casually and suddenly, while keeping her language idiomatically oddball. . . . To read Carson is continually to be disoriented and reoriented, grabbed and dropped. . . . Serious poetry readers like to be put off balance, feel their stomachs drop. Red Doc> invites confusion, and invites us to read for plot. . . . It succeeds as linguistic confrontation. Read this book. You'll find it hard to forget." --Daisy Fried, The New York Times Book Review

"Bittersweet . . . More than any other living writer, Carson thrusts against the confines of genre, language and poetic convention, generating something that, however dense and difficult, is spectacularly thought-provoking. Red Doc>, a sequel to Autobiography of Red, is yet another example of Carson's supreme ability to incinerate literary preconceptions and, out of their ashes, produce a masterful piece of writing. . . . [Red Doc>'s] tidy rectangular columns that shoot through the center of the page . . . give the book an uncomfortable sense of urgency, claustrophobia and personality. In Red Doc>, Carson tends to her words with the care of a poet but constructs its narrative with the imperfect hand of a novelist. The resulting product is disorienting at times, emotional at others, and almost always sublime. While Autobiography of Red--with its long lines and plain syntax--seemed like prose on the verge of verse, it is the poetry that wins out as the overly dominating force in Red Doc>. Powerful . . . beautiful." --Max Radwin, The Michigan Daily

"Red Doc> continues a conversation Carson has been having throughout her long and storied tenure as a poet, translator, essayist and novelist or, most often, as an alloy of all four. Carson lays claim to the title of trans-genre laureate, a writer who blurs lines so adeptly that librarians and booksellers must spend grueling hours contemplating shelf space for her books. Red Doc> is neither a novel nor a poem nor a Greek tragedy, but rather some recombinant heterotopia, a space where ideal forms of genre exist only as fragments and echoes of the whole. It unfurls like a tapestry, colored with neoclassical heroes, albino musk ox, ice bats, homicidal cucumbers, choral interludes, oracles, madmen and quacks. Carson has returned to a subject clearly near and dear to her, the refiguring of Greek mythology, specifically the story of the red-winged monster Geyron and his lover-cum-nemesis Herakles. . . . Carson pits simple, everyday language against atypical formatting. She elides common punctuation and subverts formal expectation, squeezing most of the book's text into newspaper like columns or using elements borrowed from concrete poetry. Yet the story remains compelling at the same time. The reader is flummoxed, intrigued, pulled along and, above all, curious about what's coming next. Minimalist details, playful wit and unorthodox typography control not only the pacing of the story, but also the perspective and characterization of its players. . . . Carson asks us to think deeply as we read; to travel, to feel, to change. She generates offbeat and peculiar storylines. The language and form charm us like potions, drawing us further into this strange world. Trying to make explicit sense of the 'events' only gets in the way of appreciation. Far better to be enchanted than to understand. . . . [A] careful reader, one willing to pay attention and reread, will be rewarded. . . . Carson soars above the tedious complaints of her critics who say she's not poetic enough to be a poet and nor focused enough to be a novelist. Heretical, inventive, daring and dazzling, Carson challenges the settled principles that try to define literature, and in so doing, pushes her vision forward into uncharted worlds. And she does all this while maintaining a sharp sense of humor. . . . What Carson accomplishes in her writing is an upheaval of expectation. She pulls at meaning, at definitions, at connotations and denotations of words, at the very fabric of language, unraveling that wonderful tapestry she sets out to create. . . . Reading anything by Carson is a journey, fraught with peril, difficulty and, yes, a hint of fear. . . . By excavating ancient myths, by reconfiguring monsters and villains and gods into contemporary characters, Carson reminds us that literature may not possess answers. Mere words may not comfort us from our fears, but they can help us ask the big questions. . . . Carson's not writing poems or novels, she's dancing a tango on the page. . . . Perhaps this is the great wisdom: there are no instructions, only a bewildering cleansing, a rain of words to obscure the tears. Carson leaves us alone to ponder the mystery. She offers no answers, only provides the glorious space for that pondering." --Richard Farrell, Numéro Cinq

"A monstrous amalgamation of antiquity and post-modernism, caught somewhere between poetry and prose, lies Anne Carson's stunning new book Red Doc>. Carson strikes an impressive balance between all the themes and ideas that Red Doc> is built from and manages create a devastatingly relatable tale steeped in Greek myth. . . . Plot-wise, Red Doc> is a difficult, fantastical, read, but Carson imbues her characters with remarkably human ideas. Geryon may be a monster, but struggles deeply with human relationships, memories, and loss. . . . Carson certainly sequences her words like a poet, but maintains a remarkably fast, prose-like pace through Red Doc>; it's surprisingly easy to slide down these chutes with reckless abandon and tear through sets of lines as if they were simply a spaced-out sentence. She uses this sense of speed much to her advantage . . . Just as Carson's story exists between monstruous and human, her use of form toes the line between prose and poetry and creates a new kind of novel in verse. It's entirely fresh and possesses a poignancy that beautifully mirrors the peculiarity of what actually goes on the story: repeated themes of doors, shadowy hallways and plumes of rising smoke and foam give these pages another fascinating dimension . . . Perhaps Carson's vertiginous columns are meant to lift her readers and transcend the boundaries of form and genre. Or perhaps they're simply another dark corridor, leading to some unexplored depths." --Jeff Alford, About.com Contemporary Literature

"A mischievous blend of genres that is difficult to classify, but a joy to read. . . . A companion piece to the now-classic Autobiography of Red, [it] continues her effort to revive the pleasures of narrative verse, and, facing the dread of mortality, to create spaces that are suspended in time. . . . In Red Doc>, which can [like Autobiography] be read as fiction or poetry, darkly whimsical moments abound, and they charm. . . . Carson delights in the kinetic energies of danger and desire that drive most novels, [and] shuffles the book's real-time narrative with memories and dreams . . . Her poetry lets us surrender to the moment, then it surprises with action . . . Since the end returns us to the beginning, in a sense, with G revisiting his mother on her deathbed, it all may as well have been a dream. Either way, it's a memorable ride." --David Varno, Cleveland Plain Dealer

"[Carson's] phrases and images . . . swoop and beguile like hidden messages. Cryptograms from other civilizations, or hoaxes perpetrated by pranksters by moonlight? Say what you will about Carson, she doesn't play it safe. [Her] imprecision tickles my mind. Carson doesn't skirt preciousness, she plows through it on an ATV, kicking up shadows and moons and 'the ancient smell of ice.' . . . . Her preciousness usually doubles back on itself. When she goes for beauty--whether it ends in a swish or an air-ball--she follows up with a prophylactic does of demotic. . . . In Red Doc>, it's G's dying mother who provides the all-too-human relief. . . . Red Doc> is about the transition to adulthood once youth is just a dream song, a downgrade from Herakles to Sad. From poetry to prose . . . She is writing the poetry that remains, once our equations start making sense. A house > being on fire." --Michael Robbins, The New York Observer

"It's been a decade and a half since Carson published Autobiography of Red, that ambitious novel in verse that tells the modern-day story of Geryon, the red-winged monster meant to be slayed by Hercules. This month, Geryon (now simply called 'G') stars in Carson'...

Book Description

A literary event: a follow-up to the internationally acclaimed poetry best-seller Autobiography of Red (‘Amazing’ – Alice Munro) that takes its mythic boy-hero into the twenty-first century to tell a story all its own of love, loss, and the power of memory.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0307960587
• ISBN 13: 9780307960580
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 167