A portion of the Geryoneis fragment.
The Book Beat reading group selection for April is Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse by Anne Carson. Our discussion will be held Wednesday, April 26 at 7pm online via Zoom. The Zoom link will be sent the morning or afternoon of the meeting to anyone interested in attending. Email bookbeatorders@gmail.com to sign up. Books are in stock now and discounted 15%. Please call (248) 968-1190 for more information.
Originally published in 1998, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse concerns a minor character from Greek mythology named Geryon, a winged red monster mentioned in the “Geryoneis,” a poem fragment by the Greek lyricist Stesichorus. Using the myth as metaphor, Carson reimagines Geryon’s life in the present day in a genre-bending bildungsroman. In this wholly original spin on the myth, Geryon begins writing his “autobiography” at age 5, and as the story unfolds we see him encounter abuse, neglect, heartbreak, and reinvention. As a teenage boy in search of love and identity, Geryon grows to find purpose through photography and an on-an-off romance with another boy named Herakles. Literary yet accessible, this “novel in verse” is a wonderful portrait of a burgeoning artist.
“Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.”
-Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
A wood engraving by Gustave Doré of Geryon for Dante’s Inferno.
“Carson’s achievement was to translate an obscure Greek myth into the idiom of contemporary adolescence […] a book her own character would likely want to carry around in his backpack and read on trains, when he wasn’t listening to Elliott Smith or Bright Eyes.” –New York Review of Books
“The best stories don’t have beginnings or endings, not really, but they do have great tellers. Carson is, simply, one of the very best.” –The Guardian
“She counterpoints domesticity with ecstasy, the profound with the bizarre […] Carson writes in language any poet would kill for: sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender, brilliantly lighted.” –The New York Times
“Autobiography of Red, like most of what Anne Carson writes, is a shape-shifter. It’s a blending of modern and archaic, mythic and mundane: part queer coming-of-age novel, part reimagined fragmentary poem…” –Ploughshares
“It is a tender and extravagant love story, a careful, poetic unspooling of what happens after you run into someone at a bus stop and have ‘one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness.’ Carson’s subjects are universal and timeless: identity, monstrosity, and ‘the human custom of wrong love.'” –Literary Hub
Anne Carson (b. 1950) is a Canadian poet, classicist, essayist, and professor. She has won numerous awards and honors throughout her career, including the Pushcart Prize, the Lannan Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.
Carson was the Director of Graduate Studies in Classics at McGill University and taught at Princeton University from 1980–87. She has also taught classical languages and literature at Emory University, California College of the Arts, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan. She currently teaches in New York University’s creative writing program.
Her other notable works include Eros the Bittersweet, The Beauty of the Husband, and Red Doc>, the sequel to Autobiography of Red. She currently resides in Iceland.