Autobiography of Red
Anne Carson'sAutobiography of Redis 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 pureenergy:A little button at the end of each range activated the fluorescent track above it.A yellowing 5 x 7 index cardScotch-taped below each button said EXTINGUISH LIGHT WHEN NOT IN USE.Geryon went flickeringthrough the ranges like a bit of mercury flipping the switches on and off.The librarians thought hima 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 readingAutobiography of Red, the entire landscape looks inside out.--Mark Rudman--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.