Anne Carson
From as early as the mid-1990s, Canadian reviewers have been asking why Toronto-born poet and classicist Anne Carson is not known to a wider readership. One would imagine that the recipient of so many prestigious awards - the MacArthur genius, the Pushcart, the Lannan, the T.S Eliot, the Griffin - would be more loved. That a body of work featured in the first episode of The L Word , when mention of Carson's scholarly essay Eros the Bittersweet sparks an erotic encounter between straight-girl Jenny and sophisticated restaurateur Marina, would garner some prime-time readership. Or that someone so controversial among the literary community - a critic for Britain's Guardian labelled her work "doggerel" and a Canadian poet was quoted calling her "our poetic Enron … incompetent" - could break out into the mainstream.
But to ask that question today would be naive. The answer should be clear by now: There just aren't that many people out there interested in prose poetry about the intricacies of human love seen through the lens of ancient Greek and Roman culture, the author's academic specialty. If you love Anne Carson, tell your friends. Maybe they'll buy her books. If you hate her, don't worry about it. She's not that well known.
Carson defies classification with her books, which are part poetry and part essay, and which blur the lines between fact and fiction, scholarship and whimsy. The Autobiography of Red, her most popular, is a coming-of-age tale about a young gay monster with red wings, loosely based on the fragments of the Stesichorus poem Geryoneis. In The Beauty of the Husband, the narrator recounts her marriage and divorce using passages from the Romantic poet John Keats as chapter starters. These lofty references have both delighted and enraged audiences and critics.
Her latest title, Nox: An Epitaph for my Brother, will further fan these flames. On the back, Carson is quoted: "When my brother died I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book. This is a replica of it, as close as we could get." Inside is a series of photographs, drawings and anecdotes concerning Carson's brother Michael, who had been estranged from his family since the late 1970s and died in 2000. The physical book comes as a box that contains a giant strip of paper folded neatly into just under 200 pages (it can be spread out on the floor of a long room). Depending on the critical camp, this could be considered the most exciting literary errata of the year or a glorified coffee-table book.
The narrative of Nox - Latin for "night" - is delivered in brief paragraphs describing Michael's childhood, love life, marriage and personal troubles. Carson portrays Michael as a restless soul in constant flight, difficult to pin down in writing. "We want other people to have a centre, a history, an account that makes sense."
Carson's attempted centre is a poem by Catullus concerning a brother's funeral. Translating it and reprinting it in the book, she uses the poem as her anchor to Michael. She likens the task of remembering her brother based on their sparse correspondence to translating obscure material. "Because our conversations were few (he phoned me maybe 5 times in 22 years) I study his sentences, the ones I remember, as if I'd been asked to translate them."
All of the narrative content appears on the right side of each two-page spread. On the left side, Carson takes a Latin word that has appeared in the Catullus poem and gives its definition.
At first glance, the definitions seem bland, as if they were copied from a textbook. But the example sentences used at the bottom all incorporate night, sometimes very poetically. An example use for atque: "just like him I was a negotiator with night."
Despite its innovation in form and autobiographical context, Nox is classic Carson. At the beginning, the reader feels subjected to a series of tedious and unrelated facts (Latin definitions, tidbits about Michael's life), but at the end comes to realize they all circle a consistent core that leaves a strong emotional impression. The core in Nox is the regret Carson feels at not having known her brother, and the harrowing fact that, now he is gone, this cannot be altered.
Carson's narrative goals have never been to relay memorable plot points, but to vividly convey how people feel during common human experiences, such as the loss of a sibling. Much of ancient literature is like this, narrowing in on one human experience and battering its protagonist with emotion until the character's only option is to wail in agony alongside the chorus.
Nox is a moving elegy on how difficult it is to fully understand and love your family. Its beautiful physical attributes make it a great gift for lovers of literature.
Toronto writer Anthony Furey reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, among other publi<HH>cations. He is completing his first book of fiction.