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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an...
True love flares between two people, but they find that circumstances always impede it.
On a winter day in London, Laurie spots Jack from her bus home and he sparks a feeling in her so deep that she spends the next year searching for him. Her roommate and best friend, Sarah, is the perfect wing-woman but ultimately—and unknowingly—ends the search by finding Jack and falling for him herself. Laurie’s hasty decision not to tell Sarah is the second painful missed opportunity (after not getting off the bus), but Sarah’s happiness is so important to Laurie that she dedicates ample energy into retraining her heart not to love Jack. Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful. Perhaps she would have total success, but the fact of the matter is that Jack feels the same deep connection to Laurie. His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms? Laurie finally begins to move on, creating a mostly satisfying life for herself, whereas Jack’s inability to be genuine tortures him and turns him into an ever bigger jerk. Patriarchy—it hurts men, too! There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions.
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an emotional, satisfying read.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-57468-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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