#stesichorus

-Aelian's Historical Miscellany

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

🌕🌕🌕🌗🌑

A queer coming-of-age story based on loose fragments of ancient Greek poetry penned by Stesichorus (630–555 BC) about Herakles and the monster Geryon? Sign me up.

I honestly didn’t know what I was getting into when I picked this up; I have experience in neither poetry nor Greek mythology, but thankfully Carson’s reimagining (or renovation) of this ancient myth doesn’t really require knowledge of either to enjoy. Autobiography of Red blurs the lines between classicism and modernity and offers an easily approachable spin on narrative verse. Yes, Hades is an actual location in the novel, but so is Buenos Aires and Huaraz. There are airplanes and fast cars and towns built into the slopes of active volcanoes, and yes, Geryon has wings and can fly, but he is also just a moody, confused kid who is really into expressing himself through photography. And Autobiography of Red feels very much like a collection of snapshots—each short chapter starts with a single line that sets the scene, and then Carson goes to work with her visceral, multilayered prose to paint heartrending scenes of distance, insecurity, and tenderness. Instead of Herakles killing Geryon with an arrow to the skull as in Stesichorus’s poem, he kills him with emotional indifference, but this indifference leads to a sort of awakening in Geryon as he learns to embrace his true form as a beautiful, flying red monster.

Upon completion I wasn’t sure how much the verse structure actually added to the experience, especially considering Carson doesn’t follow any rhyme scheme or metering device, but I think the line breaks really helped me to slow down, and focus on the rhythm of each word—something I might not have done if everything was condensed into simple paragraphs. Either way, this story is packed with allegory and hidden meanings, and I really enjoyed how Carson was able to create such a potent sense of feeling and environmental pressure with so few words. This story might take multiple reads to fully unpack, but I look forward to doing so.