Red Doc>

Red #2

by Anne Carson

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.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, LGBT, Mythology, Queer, Fantasy, Canada

171 pages, Hardcover

First published March 5, 2013

About the author

Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of Classics. Carson lived in Montreal for several years and taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton University from 1980 to 1987. She was a 1998 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She has also won a Lannan Literary Award.

Carson (with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art) blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Ancient Greek literature. She has published eighteen books as of 2013, all of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non-fiction. She is an internationally acclaimed writer. Her books include Antigonick, Nox, Decreation, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Economy of the Unlost; Autobiography of Red, shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, and Glass, Irony and God, shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Carson is also a classics scholar, the translator of If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, and the author of Eros the Bittersweet. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her latest book, Red Doc>, was shortlisted for the 2013 T.S. Elliot Prize.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [mental health hiatus] · Rating 4 out of 5]

With a book as batshit bonkers as the ice bats bouncing through its narrative, Anne Carson once again proves herself a literary shapeshifter of sorts. Crafting work as extraordinary as it is elusive that to try and classify her is beside the point, Carson is less a “writer” and more a weaver of words whimsically threading tapestries with language and form. ‘Making a poem is making an object,’ Carson has discussed, and her work always transcends the space of text into explorations of visual and physical space as well as metaphysical insights through intense intertextuality. Red Doc>, Carson’s return to her story of Geryon and Herakles that began in the incredible Autobiography of Red, is another stunner in Carson’s inexhaustible creativity, craft, and complex scholarship of the Classics. The lovers from her original novel are back, haggard and world weary with Herakles battling PTSD from his time as a soldier and now referred to as Sad But Great (or Sad for the sake of brevity) and Geryon simply named G. It is a surreal tale that leads the reader across landscapes of ice cave and erupting volcanoes that will leave you as awestruck as the prose that constructs them, frantically following the erudite strands through increasingly bizarre and brilliant moments. With oxen enduring existential crises, mischievously maladroit oracle, depressed demigods, ice bats, and a plethora of psychological and philosophical inquiries on time, death, identity and alienation, Red Doc> is a heady and heartfelt work that can be a lot of work yet the rewards are like a gift from the gods themselves.

‘don't say you weren't
expecting a volcano those
red wings
that not even bad love can tame
must signify something's
somewhere
about to go up in flame or
(as Proust says) be
eternalized in pleasure
like the men
in a Pompeian house of ill
fate yet fame
is not ill
for all’

I’ve long read the title, Red Doc>, in my head as if it were a mathematical equation. Carson’s oeuvre reads as scholarship as much as it does avant-garde art and poetry and to title it with the mathematical “greater than” symbol > felt part and parcel to what I’ve come to appreciate in her stories. Carson, however, admits it is simply how her computer saved the draft and she stuck with it (Carson, who is known for sending emails with subject lines entirely made from punctuation and with an email body nearly as experimental and inscrutable as her work). While Red Doc > is, perhaps, not greater than its predecessor, Autobiography of Red, it is easily greater than most other works I’ve read and greater than reality itself. Which is what myth is all about. In her introduction for her retranslations in Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, Carson writes that myths ‘are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily,’ and the grandeur of myth is required to house their tales. In Red Doc>, however, Geryon and Herakles—I’m sorry, G and Sad—have not only shrunk in titles but stature as we encounter the “moral” of this tale: ‘to live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.’ The glory of the narrative arc, the momentousness of a moment, reaches an end yet time never falters in it’s eternal march into infinity:

’TIME PASSES TIME
does not pass. Time all
but passes. Time usually
passes. Time passing and
gazing. Time has no gaze.
Time as perseverance.
Time as hunger. Time in
a natural way. Time when
you were six the day a
mountain. Mountain time.
Time I don't remember.
Time for a dog in an alley
caught in the beam of your
flashlight. Time not a
video. Time as paper
folded to look like a
mountain. Time smeared
under the eyes of the
miners as they rattle down
into the mine. Time if you
are bankrupt. Time if you
are Prometheus…’

Carson’s Red Doc> is ‘a sequel or / a retelling of a retelling,’ picking up years after Autobiography of Red. The Autobiography, Carson’s retelling of the all-but-forgotten work of Stesichorus on the mythical figure Geryon, reconfigures the tale of the Labours of Herakles into a delightfully queer romance with Geryon as a chronically depressed teen who meets the gorgeous hero in ‘one of those moments / that is the opposite of blindness,’ and the two explore love until Herakles ultimately absconds the affair on the pretext of ‘I want you to be happy.’ This new work finds G tending to his herd of oxen and caring for his ailing mother, but an encounter with Ida, who is ‘innocent and filled with / mood like a very tough / experimental baby’ (her name a reference to “idea” and that she is one letter short of sanity herself) leads to a reunion with a very sad Sad (the artist formerly known as Herakles) and a road trip that is a lot less Thelma & Louise and more like the drug addled and chaos of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. Buckle up because this is quite the ride with the narrative delivered in narrow “poems” that feel like they are sending you cascading down the page not unlike the way Io plummets off a cliff when some psychedelic grass gives the belief they can fly. ‘What is the difference between / poetry and prose,’ Carson queries in an authorial aside, ‘prose is a house, poetry a man in flames running / quite fast through it.’ Which is not unlike the experience of reading Red Doc>. Like I said, this book is WILD.

‘So much
human cruelty is simply
incidental is simply
brainless. Simply no
common sense. You could
take the entirety of the
common sense of humans
and put it in the palm of
your hand and still have
room for your dick.’

Carson always hits so hard for me with her balance of the bizarre with the beautiful and the heady with the heartfelt that is able to conjure incredible emotional resonance. It works the mind, heart, and soul all at once and to read Carson is to feel your entire existence glow the way your muscles ache with post-workout euphoria. G finds ‘something more / than Ida has moved out of / his control’ and is as weighed down by the despair of his dying mother as he is the lovelorn memories for Sad as the pair flit around accompanied by a carnival of characters like Hermes, Io, and 4NO—a rather inept oracle who can see five seconds ‘ahead of / time all the time’—to find a psychiatric clinic that is somehow also a car repair shop and ice cave. Sure, this book is more vibes than logical narrative, but its one you can’t turn from or stop thinking about, and flows the way dream logic makes sense while you are in it and haunts you as your mind unwinds it during your morning coffee. But it is also very tender with the story driven by desire and danger towards an opaque destination with many stops along the way to contemplate the self. ‘“Comparison / makes you less interesting / to yourself doesn't it,’ Carson observes in one of the many moments on the vulnerability of being perceived:

‘To feel anything
deranges you. To be seen
feeling anything strips you
naked. In the grip of it
pleasure or pain doesn’t
matter. You think what
will they do what new
power will they acquire if
they see me naked like
this.’

Though perhaps the heart of the novel is the mother son interactions. ‘I look awful don’t I,’ his ailing mother asks. ‘No you look / like my ma’ G replies in one of the most heart wrenching scenes. Carson can really dive into emotion with grace:

’And the reason he cannot bear her dying is not the loss of her (which is the future) but that dying puts the two of them (now) into this nakedness together that is unforgivable. They do not forgive it. He turns away. This roaring air in his arms. She is released.’

Carson’s ability to be esoteric and erudite while still effortlessly emotive is always impressive. While G ‘weeps thinking of Proust’ we weep thinking of G, even if that thought requires a lot of work (and possibly a lot of googling to “get” the multitude of references). But its that work that makes it stick closer to the heart. In his novel The Prisoner, the fifth volume of his In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust writes that ‘one only loves what one does not entirely possess.’ It is this way with my love for Carson’s work, it is something that is elusive not unlike how Proust’s Marcel yearns to possess Albertine in what Proust describes as a ‘thrist for knowledge,’ and the grappling with it becomes part of the joy. Carson frequently alludes to Proust in Red Doc> and a year after this would publish The Albertine Workout, her essays on grappling with Proust’s work and asking why we love which eludes us and gravitate to the puzzles we can’t solve but can’t stop thinking about. Carson has an uncanny ability to affect the same.

WHERE YOU headed /
bit further along the road /
why

you running / oh I often do
/ are you

meeting someone / yes
/ who / a stranger / how
will

you recognize each other /
in a strange way / strange

to both of you / that

would have been a
problem / it’s no longer a
problem / no

While perhaps not as strong as Autobiography of Red, Carson’s Red Doc> exceeds its former narrative in terms of experimentation and linguistic range. It was a work that took Carson a long time and one she admits was a struggle to bring together in a successful form, finding it ‘a mess, obstacle course, uphill grapple in the dark, almost totally disoriented and discontented experiment.’ Yet the hard work pays off and so too will it for the reader and, as Carson learned from Proust, that yearning for the elusive understanding becomes part of the love and joy itself. Red Doc> is a strange, surreal and surprisingly emotional read that shows the possibilities of language, literature and poetry have far greater reaches that we could have imagined. Carson is a genius and I will not rest until I have read everything she has ever written.

4.5/5

And yet they
wipe one another’s tears or
sweat they have good days
they roll in the snow.
Caution is best. Luck
Essential. Hope a
Question. Down the street
she notices a man in his
yard in his undershirt
standing looking up at the
rain. Well not every day
can be a masterpiece.
This one sails out and out
And out.

[jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

benightedly i gave this 4 stars i'm sorry/you are/yes/why
did you give it 4 stars/i wanted it to be like Aof
R/ poetry is never the same/as i'm learning mostly
from the reviews i am too inexperienced to learn from
the book itself/some of these poems are surreal/they
are/you don't like surreal/i like surreal but it doesn't
quite talk to me the language seems gimmicky
to me without/ i've heard this before/wisdom i guess/poetry's
curse/insight quotability a light/we fumble in the
dark/there's a glacier then there is a volcano polar
opposites/which pole/i'd say the north pole/it's the easiest to
assume/there is no life at the south pole except of course
that which the explorers bring basically themselves/you
mean native life but then how would we know/i mean
currently/ah, temporality/i loved io/she's feathery and
magic/thank you/you're welcome/i hate war/me too

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

In one of her formalist asides, Anne Carson writes, "prose is a house poetry a man in flames running quite fast through it" - a striking image, but neither half really describes the writing of "Red Doc>." If I elaborated on that analogy to find a place for Carson, I might describe her as the one who wanders through the darkened house, lighting her way with a series of matches she discards without making sure they have gone completely out.

The book foregrounds its severe structural choices: Thin vertical ribbons of justified type whose thicker left and right margins serve as a visual reminder of the way the words in between amount to only a sliver of the world, the lives to which they point. A complete absence of the comma, that most human, most fallible punctuation mark. Dialogues sheared off with slashes rather than quotations and he-said, she-said.

But I was equally struck by the way the writing gave the impression of being almost irresponsibly arbitrary and yet as well-worn, as organically placed as river rocks. There is a story that swims in and out of focus in "Red Doc>" - a story we believe is the loosest of sequels to Carson's "Autobiography of Red" largely because she tells us that's what it is - but at least after the first reading, I would say the story is as much a device as the typesetting. All is in service of an experiment in the porosity of language - the unexpected moments when language stops being the customary barrier between one interior life and another, and bits of unfiltered life actually pass through intact to scare us, harm us, and jolt our hearts out of the rote exercise of beating. The fact that many of those unfiltered moments deal in grief, mortality, and chaos makes the experience all the more wrenching.

There is a fair share of truly poetic writing here; as one character ponders how musk oxen (one of whom also happens to be a mythologically transmogrified character) might regard humans, Carson writes of animals, "Do they experience the entire cold sorrow acre of human history as one undifferentiated lunatic jabberwocking back and forth from belligerence to tender care?" But most of the work of this book is done with incredibly utilitarian words, phrases, and sentences. The sublime does not come out of linguistic fireworks but basic speech, which, after all, is the currency of the real world and real life.

I have a sense of Anne Carson as a writer too fiercely independent, too resolute to care whether her reader follows her or not. As "Autobiography of Red" did, "Red Doc>" gives the impression of a most personal story, verging on a language all its own, that the reader discovers and then handles carefully, respectfully, finding it fulsome even as it eludes him, and hoping it will continue to reveal itself over time.

[li.reading · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had no clue what was happening for a solid 60% of the time but I enjoyed it all the same

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

The truncation of Geryon’s name to an astringent, almost elemental “G” seems to me rather indicative of Carson’s underlying strategy in the transition—“continuation” doesn’t seem quite the right term—from Autobiography of Red to Red Doc>; if there was an impulse to humanize the mythological in the earlier text, here there is a movement back toward the stark, unexplicative outlines of myth noted from somewhere afar. To some degree I expected this, for as Daisy Fried has rightly noted “each new Carson project comes with new parameters,” and as a longtime Carson admirer I’ve become accustomed to forcibly acclimating to the unique terrain each text presents (never moreso than when I saw her in person, where she read in quiet monotone a longform prose short story that was something of a riff on a suburban true crime/mystery narrative—indeed?).

But it’d also be disingenuous to claim that this inevitability didn’t still leave me a bit disappointed: Autobiography, as my user profile will attest, is one of my most beloved books, and I really was hoping for some new insights into Geryon and Herekles’s chronically—and poignantly—tangled relationship. And while Red Doc> does unveil additional nuances, they weren’t exactly of the type I nonetheless hoped for. To my great regret, there's not much that can be considered queer, which is all the more frustrating because I think the Autobiography is one of the most insightful representations of the puzzling and arduous aspects of the coming out process and a first crush/love that I’ve ever encountered.

But at one point G is asked about happened to that autobiography he was “always fiddling with” back “in the old days,” and he resignedly admits he “gave it up” because “nothing was happening in [his] life.” That offhand admission ended up being key for me, for no longer are we dealing with the autobiographic form with its associations of intimacy and revelation, but something drastically different, something instead more dispassionate and objective and remote. This dynamic is rendered visible via the austere structure many of the poems take, though rather than creating a sense of stasis, it is consistently a surprise and a pleasure to see how Carson deftly uses language to embellish and rend the architectonics of her chosen poetic forms.

In the end my feelings after a first reading of Red Doc> can be summed up by Parul Sehgal’s ultimate assessment that it is “a slender offshoot of a major work.” Which in my mind isn’t at all a knock: the pleasures of minorness can be and often are multitude. And while I suspect this will not be a volume taken off of the bookshelf for repeat readings nearly as often as its predecessor, I do look forward to returning to it sometime in the future to chip away some more at its many mysteries and riddles.

[withdrawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

Two weeks ago I shifted over two times zones to move my mother out of the hospital and my parents out of their home into an "assisted care facility". I had been asking them to make that move themselves so that I wouldn't need to be the one to push them out of their home and tell them what they were leaving behind. They left me firmly on that hook.

I arrived back home to find 'red doc>' awaiting me. Anne Carson can resolve everything.

So Geryon is now G and has moved on. He lives on his own and cares for his herd of musk oxen. (Not really oxen. Not really musk.) Herakles, now SAD, is a returned war veteran suffering from PTSD, having blown a woman's head off. Geryon is handling it.

I was pretty stressed with my 92 year old father who kept behaving like a 92 year old. His old self except with the good naturedness taken out. Grouchy! My mother kept getting things mixed up. Post life stress forgetfulness.

As in most Greek myth, a la Joseph Campbell, there is a 'going down', a voyage into the unknown, in this case, a car trip north through an ice cave, replete with ice bats. They arrive at a garage cum therapy clinic where they are joined by G's friend Ida and SAD's old army buddy, 4NO. They are finally forced out by the approaching lava of a volcano after the riot. G carried a note someone had left telling him to contact his mother who had pushed him out into the world.

My parents seem to be settling in but it will take a while to forgive each other this intrusion. While going through their belongings to see what they would be allowed to keep of their old lives, I came across traces of lives long since lost...now only old photos from the early 20th century, notes of gifts given and received and birth dates of people long since gone into nothing.

And so G goes to meet his mother. "He brings lilacs from the bush by the corner of her house to which she will probably not return this time." [I won't go on due to possible spoilers. Read this book.]

Mothers ashamed and Ablaze and clear
At the end
As they are
As they almost always are, and then
Mothers don’t come around Again
In spring


As I have indicated in the past, I do love reading Anne Carson. G is the most human red-winged boy/man in literature. Harold Bloom tells us that Shakespeare invented the human. Anne Carson has perfected the type with Geryon/G and his friends. I don't supposed that he will come back to us again but I will be ready if he does.

[charlotte, · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rep: gay mcs

anne carson can fuck me up anytime

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

You could take the entirety of the common sense of humans and put it in the palm of your hand and still have room for your dick.

My disappointment with this was a surprise. (Carson is such a lodestar) Perhaps closer to two stars. Likely the error is my own. The personal collapses beneath the weight of the mythical, squinting just so, the result can be termed biography. Initially I felt the warmth but as the tale unfolded the wind blunted my awareness, garbled the quotes as I attempted to stuff my ears with the cascading images. I failed.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anne Carson it says.
Red letters on the
envelope. One hundred
sixty and something
pages flowing like
ice / no not ice /
flowing like red mist
/ better / in this
album. Prose or poetry
is what I am asking
myself. One look
betrays her intent.

A full-fledged story
indeed. Made up in
the weirdest stanzas.
But nonetheless quite
lovely he said it
flows nicely on the
page and in my head
the echoes form a
cacophonous sonorous
sound of Stille ja
silence immer wieder
und doch he said und
doch wirklich lesbar
das Ganze ja.

References
are going all over
the world but linger
in Ancient Greece
yes myths and mythology
and Prometheus and oh
Proust as well not
Greek he is not but
French might as well
talk about Proust
and memory and
remembering the
glacier and the life
and how it smelt in
there. The oxen fly
to Batcatraz. Asylum
and Labyrinth is that
Borges or just another
allusion to what / I
don’t know / yes it
is / if you say so /
I do / But / What /
Nothing / What about
Cézanne / French
painter Cézanne / Yes
/ What about him / Ask
Carson / Will do he
said and retreated.
Bearded flying icebats
oxen no musk ox especially
Io who is of course
nymph seduced by Zeus
or G or Sad But Great
but we don’t know and
Ida yes Ida is also a
part of the whole
lovely Ida with her
nicht vorhandenem
Orientierungssinn quite
lovely yes.

In the end. One of
the best prose poetry
proetry books I read yes.
Especially this she wrote
Carson wrote on page one
hundred fourteen “what is
the difference between
poetry and prose you know
the old analogies prose
is a house poetry is a
man in flames running
quite fast through it”
yes best passage to
describe Red Doc> and
read it / yes / read it
he said.

[Lise Delabie · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Woorden stuiteren,’ zegt Carson. ‘Als je woorden hun gang laat gaan, doen ze precies wat ze willen en moeten.’

(Soms een beetje ploeteren, maar) zoveel leesvreugde beleefd bij 'Rood'. Verwonderlijke taal, intieme portretten, diepe vragen waar je in kunt tuimelen. Op naar 'Eros, bitterzoet'.

[Liam O'Leary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow, this was impenetrable for me, so this review will suck. I didn't DNF it though, as it was very interesting to read to just try hold onto the thread of what was happening.

Very hard to grasp this form, yet it's still nice to try flow with it. Autobiography of Red and this were particularly challenging for me (I think I prefer Carson's other books, each are different).

This was hard as it was less realistic than her other poems, and it had been a while since I read Autobiography of Red.

Red Doc reads like a love triangle between three world weary and physically unwell people.

I was so outside of this I don't have much to say other than this is a difficult but very innovative read. Going 3* here as it's pleasant but more fragmented than I think it should be. Hopefully my next Carson will be easier because I found this harder than parts of The Recognitions!

[Abby · Rating 4 out of 5]

1. What the hell is going on
2. But I love it

My two reactions ^ to almost all Anne Carson poetry. I will always love her, even if I do not always understand her.

[Bob Jacobs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eerste vijf sterren van het jaar!

Anne Carson schreef met Rood (eigenlijk twee boeken van haar, die nu samen werden uitgegeven: ‘Autobiografie van rood’ en ‘Rood Doc >’) een bijzonder indrukwekkend werk.

De spilfiguur is Gerion - een mythologisch personage, dat meestal slechts een voetnoot is; ‘die ene die door Herakles wordt gedood bij één van diens opdrachten’. Carson verrijkt de schrale mythologische traditie die bestaat rond Gerion (het meeste dat over het personage werd geschreven ging jammer genoeg verloren) met een moderne vertelling die laat zien wat voor moois er kan ontstaan uit een vermenging van oud en nieuw. Poëtisch, ontroerend, vernieuwend en soms ook gewoon erg grappig: dit werk heeft het eigenlijk allemaal.

(Geef haar toch die Nobelprijs)

[Simon Robs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Road trip Mama dies.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Red Doc> is a kind of sequel to Autobiography of Red, both by poet Anne Carson. Autobiography is a reimagining of the story of Geryon, the red-winged boy and his dog. Red Doc> tells the story of G. and the various encounters with others in a time that is both now and not quite now. What follows is more my initial impressions of this wonderful text rather than a review. I do not feel qualified to give a review to Anne Carson but I am so overwhelmed by her talent in general and this text in particular that I feel I have to say something. So read what I wrote if you want to but more importantly, read this work.

An analysis of this work would be many times longer than the book itself, even if I were qualified to write one (which I am not). Red Doc> is, amongst many other things, transformations, animals/humans/objects. There are those who see far ahead into the future and those who see five minutes ahead (“Either way is a/mess-you/have no/present moment not/skinned shaved stained/saturated overrun outraged/by raw data from the /future.”
Red Doc> has many stories that seem to flow into each other; there is theater, there is literature (many references to Proust), there is the army, there are cows that fly, and many references to herds that follow. And G-like Geryon in Autobiography-is still a somewhat lost and searching character with his red wings and yearning heart.
There are many characters, G (of course) and Sad (the army sergeant) and Io (the cow) as well as CMO and 4NO and the Wife of Brain who narrates many sections. All of those floats tantalizingly together, near but not quite touching so that I had the sense that if I just read deeply enough (and this is certainly a text that requires more than a single reading) I would understand what was happening and it would all fit, if not neatly at least comprehensibly, together.
But more than anything, for me Red Doc> is all about the language. A few of my favorite lines include “To feel anything deranges you. To be seen feeling anything strips you naked,” “To be seen is the penalty,” “You shame victim after victim. They are all you,” “here is the holiness of mastery that was taught her by her father. It is to treat your enemy as an honored guest.”
But to begin quoting is to risk quoting the entire text. The lines stand out in their beauty but more powerfully they all hang together. There are glimpses into the psyches of disparate characters and moments of great sensual beauty (one in which a character eats a pomegranate was particularly stunning).
But Red Doc> is so full of incident that it is a distortion to choose some to report on and leave others (perhaps more important) out. It is a powerful poem and a meaningful text that withholds its meaning (at least to me) just enough to pull the reader further in. Like G, the reader is “outside inside or inside outside” and “has no bottom to his mind and both does and does not open the note that lies tossed on this bed.” A great deal happens, in a sense, so much that it feels as if nothing happens (“Time passes time does not pass”).
And in the end there is death and motherhood and some complicated relationship between them. As well as memory.
Writing this review is both exhilarating and frustrating. It’s like choosing which drop of water in a body of water to focus on. It feels both true and yet untrue, a tremendous distortion of the wealth available in this text.
I could write on and on or I could just stop. I guess this is as good a place as any to stop.
But I suggest you read this work. It’s a powerful experience.

[Elisabeth Orion · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am constantly thinking of this one quote which in itself refers to Proust:

"WITH RED PENCIL G
had underlined the
sentence where Proust
observes the momentarily
impaired surface of the
eye of a person who has
just had a thought she will
not tell you. It traces a
fissure in the pupil and
disappears back down its
own involuntary depths.
Watch the wake."

[Yifei Men · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anne Carson's voice is quite unforgettable -- there's an authority to the voice that can go from

Mothers at altitude
Mothers in solitude
Mothers as platitude
Mothers in spring

to

You could take the entirety of the common sense of humans and put it in the palm of your hand and still have room for your dick .

There's never really a straight line story in her pieces, it's always a morphing of emotions, a flow of lava taking shape of the vesicle, fluid, unpredictable. But to be able to pull the reader along such a unpredictable trajectory and maintain that hold is an achievement, and I think that is what make us so enamored with Anne Carson.

I would say that I liked Autobiography of Red better than red doc>. But I won't mind having red doc> on my nightstand for a long long time, and flip through the pages as and when my fingers sweeps over it, for I know that Anne Carson's writing has that lilt, that enchanting quality of beauty and distance.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are times where I decide to read something extremely out of my comfort zone, and I am occasionally rewarded for my efforts. This was such a case. Red Doc> defies any traditional concepts of structure or style, and in doing so it opens the mind to narrative possibilities which seem impossible even while the proof is resting in your hands. I won't pretend that I understand even half of what Carson has done here, but I am utterly inspired. It's like being given wings to soar above a story rather than tread through it.

[po's dad · Rating 5 out of 5]

lol

[Chaitanya Sethi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Damn it, Carson. I didn't cry but I came really close. Everyone, go hug your Mom.

Red Doc> is a spiritual sequel to Autobiography of Red (one of my favorite books). While Autobiography of Red was largely based on the Greek myth of Hercules's tenth labor, Red Doc> barely takes Greek mythology as a skeleton and expands the story into an atmospheric, miasmic saga of Geryon (G in this novel) coming-of-age. Here, he is an adult, managing his herd of cattle when he has to undertake a long road trip to meet his dying Mother in a nursing home. He is joined by his erstwhile, all-consuming love(r), Herakles, who is now a PTSD-afflicted veteran called 'SBG - Sad but Great', an Ida, a woman who is a mess and leaves a trail of psychological devastation everywhere she goes.

Red Doc> follows the same prose-poem style of writing but in comparison to Autobiography of Red, I found this tough going. I am not sure if it was intentionally written to be this dense but this had plenty of passages where I had absolutely no clue what the setting was, what was real/imaginary, and who was speaking to whom. The whole book felt like driving through fog where you glimpse seconds of clarity before everything vanishes again. There is also a recurring section called 'Wife of Brain' where a Greek chorus of sorts tells you what is coming in the next 10-15 pages or so. It took me a while to understand the flow and structure of the novel. I also felt there were many references that required the knowledge of relatively obscure Greek myths, a field that Carson has studied extensively. I don't think that this was the most reader-friendly book, and Carson does not give a hoot about the reader being able to follow where she is going.

But suddenly, in between all this confusion, Carson comes out with lines and moments in the characters' lives that ask of you to close the book and think for a while. Lines about the incidental cruelty of humans; about a semi-prophetic character that has lost his ability to live in the present because he can foresee 5 seconds ahead; about a dying mother making small talk to avoid what's imminent and close. That is what makes Red Doc> work for me. It is very hard to make a book work when the scenes switch between a flying flock of cows crashing on a car, and a mother asking her son to find better help if he is struggling in life. But Anne Carson does it.

[Quiver · Rating 5 out of 5]

Io is a golden-eyed, white-haired, much-beloved musk-ox of Anne Carson’s protagonist, G, in her 2013 verse-novel Red Doc>.

How to unpack such a sentence? Try.

If you had a slightly vertiginous, confusing, yet ultimately not unsatisfactory experience figuring out three compound adjectives and two compound nouns, as well as, that Anne Carson is a poet, G is the name of (presumably) a person, Io is the name of a musk-ox, and that an angle bracket at the end of a book title is not an impossible concept … Excellent! You now have an inkling what it’s like to read Carson’s verse on the whole.

Of course, she does it better, and for longer, and without resorting to hyphens at every turn to compactify her images.

Blood still
buzzing with gorse she
does not hesitate to
believe that a masterpiece
like herself can fly.
Should fly. Does fly.

She, in the Quote, is Io the musk-ox.

The prequel, Carson’s Autobiography of Red (1998), is also a verse-novel, albeit of different appearance and feel. Autobiography of Red follows the childhood and early years of Geryon, a boy with red wings; it is written in free verse, alternating visually between long and short lines on the page, and it reads like a dense, lyrical, unconventional novel—like a novelisation of poetry.

Red Doc>, published fifteen years later, returns to follow a middle-aged Geryon, now referred to as G. It’s a connected sequence of free verse poems contained within two-inch columns, justified on both sides, and it unfurls down the middle of the page like the chatters marks of a glacier or like the clusters of aa lava.

Speaking of which: glaciers and lava, flying red-winged monsters and oxen, love and army, hospitals and Ancient Greece—expect to find them all within the pages of Red Doc>. Bizarre can be beautiful, and meaningful. Carson ensures it is.

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a sequel to Carson's verse novel Autobiography of Red, the story of the adolescent Geryon, the red monster slain in myth by Herakles. Both it and Red Doc> are based, I understand, on The Geryoneis of Stesichorus, the ancient Greek poet. Again the myth is given a modern setting. Here Geryon has grown up. I like the poetry very much, not surprising for a Carson admirer. Here is the same elegant phrasing, biting observation, and breathtaking image I associate with her. However, as a continuation of Geryon's story I was unable to follow a narrative in these poems. What they become is a poem sequence about the winged young man named Geryon. Happily, that's good enough for me because each poem has enough artistic intention and graceful thought to stand on its own. And it's in a form which I think follows that of the Stesichorus fragments we have about Geryon. Moving sharply away from the Whitman long line of Autobiography of Red, these poems are lines of 3 or 4 words centered in the page so that they look like columns, helping to emphasize their debt to the Greek.

[Roy Kesey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one is maybe less accessible than Autobiography of Red, and I think it's less structurally compelling than many of her books, though I really liked the way she handled the back-and-forth dialogue. I think it maybe reads better as experimentally shaped prose than as poetry.

A few favored bits:

Together they inhale the
first blue of day as it starts
seeping out of hills all
around.

… Time smeared
under the eyes of the
miners as they rattle down
into the mine.

… Notices again a
hesitancy in the light as if
it were trying not to shock
you with how scant it is.

[Maja Svedlund · Rating 5 out of 5]

Om än inte samma femma som Röd #1

[Zoe Hannay · Rating 4 out of 5]

a rain with no instructions!

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wauw. Super interessant en uniek, dit leek echt op niks wat ik ooit eerder heb gelezen. Soms snapte ik er even niks van maar dan nog steeds vond ik het heel erg mooi. Ik denk dat ik hier nog heel vaak aan terug ga denken

[Ana · Rating 4 out of 5]

what is the difference between
poetry and prose you know the old analogies prose
is a house poetry a man in flames running
quite fast through it
or
when it meets the mind waves appear (poetry) or
both are defined by
length of lines and there are times
your life gets like that

You have no present moment not skinned shaved stained saturated overrun outraged by raw data from the future. Never a moment of naked eye.

The future is already. He cannot win. He cannot help. He cannot change.

And the reason he cannot bear her dying is not the loss of her (which is the future) but that dying puts the two of them (now) into this nakedness together that is unforgivable. They do not forgive it. He turns away. This roaring air in his arms. She is released.

They stare at one another all three of them wanting to grasp this moment where they are crowded like frozen travelers around a stove. Wanting a tiny burnished world and for a moment they glimpse it.

Tenía unas expectativas altísimas por la primera parte difíciles d cumplir y q d hecho no cumplió... Un libro raro un poco enrevesado pero increíble precioso

[Bookkaholic Magazine · Rating 5 out of 5]

(See our full review over at Bookkaholic.) Anne Carson's Red Doc> is a follow-up to her acclaimed 1998 novel in verse, Autobiography of Red . Part poem, part play/tragedy/opera, part novel, it is what we have come to expect from the genre-bending Canadian poet. Heroes and monsters of Greek mythology read Proust, break out of psychiatric clinics, appear on TV talk shows, and burst with humanity

[James Tierney · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incredible book but one that does not stand on its own.
Carson's light-touch erudition is completely at play but this does not prevent some of Red Doc>'s chief pleasures coming from a reader's knowledge of Autobiography of Red. Even given that, the later volume is simply not as peerlessly successful as AoR (what could be?).
My reservations/joys with Red Doc> were more than ably captured by Parul Sehgal in her Bookforum review.

[Edgar Trevizo · Rating 1 out of 5]

No sé si es tan extraordinariamente genial que no puedo entender nadq de lo que dice a causa de mi estulticia, o si de plano, una vez que construyó una enorme suma de genialidades pueda darse el lujo de escribir basura sin sentido ni sustancia. No solo me parece el peor libro de la Carson, sino uno de los más insultantes al lector que he leído en mi vida. El privilegio de un genio, quizás: se le aplaude aún cuando defeca en el escenario.