A radiant delight for Carson’s many admirers.
A rich gathering of short works by poet and scholar Carson (An Oresteia, 2009, etc.), joining past to present and ancient to modern.
Carson is by temperament both experimental poet and traditional classical scholar (her bio line reads, laconically, “Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living”), heavy on linguistic parsing and close reading on the one hand and lightning bursts of metaphorical insight on the other. This collection, innovatively presented as a series of chapbooks that can be read sequentially or not as the mood strikes, highlights both interests. These chapbooks variously gather lectures, poems, notes, performance pieces (some written for and very much in the spirit of Laurie Anderson), and miscellanea—the last including, for instance, a list of the periods of the French experimental artist Yves Klein, among them “The Era of Taming the Cunning Ego” and “The Era of the Deciding That Line Is Jealous of Color Line Is a Tourist in Space.” The poems inhabit the country that lies somewhere between late modernism and postmodernism—“most people / blush before death / she just / steps off”—and they are often reminiscent of W.S. Merwin and, if he were more inclined to lyric, the late Guy Davenport. Readers of a more critical bent may enjoy her prose pieces more, since these touch on themes in classical literature and history, often as refracted through later eras: for example, one essay ponders the origins of our color term “purple” in the Greek name for a Mediterranean fish, the search for which gave the Greeks a lovely metaphor for hashing through dark thoughts, which then leads into Hölderlin’s insanity, Paul Celan’s private language, and other matters more or less arcane. Readers of whatever description will enjoy watching Carson’s nimble mind at play—and play is just the word, for Carson caresses words, winds them up and watches them go: “If Picasso’s curls could quote Napoleon’s curls then resemblance might all but rob the one gentleman of the other’s identity….”
A radiant delight for Carson’s many admirers.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94684-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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