Book Review
Autobiography of Red
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson is a short "novel in verse" that retells the story of Herakles slaying Geryon as twentieth-century coming-of-age story about a passive and inward-turning boy/young man who falls in love with a dismissive oaf. It's an engaging human-interest story, though it left me with nothing in particular to chew on the moment I stopped reading. Geryon's interiority is well developed, and the language is often lovely. I tend to think the classical conceit was wasted as the story has very little to do with the myth. It's a quintessentially postmodern book in many ways, but I think I'd class it post-postmodern.
The book has the postmodern characteristics of alienation, fragmentation, instability, fiddling with our concepts of reality (shades of magic realism), experimental language, feeling trapped/lost, and a somewhat self-congratulatory refusal to fire several guns on the walls. However, my gut wants to say it's nearer Modernism insofar as the protagonist has a fairly stable sense of identity. The overall feel is less "everything is confusing and meaningless" than "society is confusing and hostile and doesn't understand me or I it." In that regard, the book is closely tied to Ulysses, though Ulysses probes the classical myth AU thing far more deeply.
At its core, the novel a love story--about a solid identity who can really love, and for me this pushes it past the high postmodern into the movement G, in her never-completed dissertation, described as reclaiming meaningful human identity and relationality without reinscribing the traditional social roles that defined it in 19th-century psychological realism. A shorthand for this might be "it's slashy." It certainly also falls into that strange, loose category of stories by women that seems to use male homoerotic relationships as a paradigm for exploring women's experience outside rigid gender presumptions. Certainly, Geryon's character functions in traditionally feminine ways: passive, exploited, loyal, self-reflective, somewhat invisible.
I'm not a fan of postmodernism, and there were moments in this novel when it pressed on my pomo peeves. That said, the story feels real and emotionally engaging if brief and not hugely substantial. And the poetry is genuinely elegant and creative. I give it a mild-ish thumbs up.
(Note: The book was published in 1998, a fact I checked several times because the story is clearly set some time before this, not later than the '80s, I'd say. I wonder if it was written then or is looking back at the near past?)
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