The challenging and selective verses of Anne Carson, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

When she received a phone call informing her about the Nobel Prize, Anne Carson – according to the person who broke the news to her – was “in Iceland listening to the wind”. Either she is very absent-minded, or she is pretending to be. For years now, her name has featured among the possible Nobel Prize winners for Literature, always among the favourites. Alongside fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood, who wrote The Handmaid’s Tale. Meanwhile, Alice Munro was awarded the prize in 2013: a rare instance in which the tastes of the Swedish Academy coincided with those of readers who read for pleasure, rather than for study. A character in Anne Carson’s work records ‘the voice of volcanoes’ for a film project. The sort of film we’d never want to see. But academics – and not just those in Sweden – love them above all else. And after all, Autobiography of Red is a novel in verse, with references to Greek literature.

To the poet Stesichorus, who is not included in school curricula, and to his "Gerioneide", of which only fragments remain. Around eighty of them, none longer than thirty lines. We are in the 6th century BC, and to complicate matters – for the reader, this is what novels, whether historical or not, should aim for – the Greek scholar Anne Carson lists fragments and other details.

‘Autobiografia del Rosso’ – subtitled ‘Un’avventura d’amore’ – recounts in verse the story of Gerione on his first day at school. Small and red-haired, he clutches his schoolbag, sleeps in a room with his brother, and is ready from a very young age to write his own autobiography. Anne Carson tells his story in verse, as if to raise the barrier to entry. It is perfectly acceptable to choose one’s readership; but it is also perfectly acceptable, after a while, for the aforementioned reader to lose patience. These are days spent between school and family, then adolescence arrives and Gerione meets Heracles, who has just stepped off a coach arriving from New Mexico.

“There were two superior eels / at the bottom of the aquarium and they recognised each other as italics”. And then: “There was one of those moments / that are the opposite of blindness”. We quote from Sergio Claudio Perroni’s translation, which has just been reprinted – with perfect timing, it must be said – by La nave di Teseo. A heroic undertaking, especially as one nears the end of the book and reaches the ‘Photographs’. Described in words, the first bears the grandiose title ‘Origin of Time’. To put it in classical terms, this is ‘ekphrasis’, which means ‘to describe with elegance’ – the implication being: something that does not involve words, such as a painting. Here, it must be said, readers who are not particularly fond of these ‘postmodern’ revivals begin to get a little restless. Those who do appreciate them, however, will gladly wait until the end of November to read the sequel to Autobiografia del Rosso.

Not even a title such as ‘The Beauty of the Husband’, with its promising subtitle ‘A fictionalised essay in 29 tangos’, lives up to its promise of light-heartedness (that is to say, in the sense of Italo Calvino’s ‘American Lessons’; far be it from us to read merely for entertainment). Verses borrowed from John Keats, the Romantic poet, provide the backdrop for a story of infidelity.