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aegagrus's review against another edition
3.5
In terms of literary craft, Autobiography of Red is a tour de force. Carson writes gorgeous sentences, careful and serpentine or elegant and clipped. The frame device with which she brackets her story is highly inventive. She has a keen eye for vignettes. She treats her classical source material with a reverent unorthodoxy.
As a coming-of-age story, Autobiography of Red dwells on interiority. Geryon muses on the gap between his internal and external worlds; the novel captures this fixation by consistently creating a sense of dreamlike disconnect. Photography, philosophy, and volcanoes are all interesting motifs Carson finds ways of applying to this theme. I enjoyed the subtlety with which Carson treats Geryon's wings, as well. Many queer coming-of-age stories directly center the awkwardness of holding a non-normative identity. Here the wings, always present but rarely the focal point and only occasionally noticed, are an effective way of striking at the quieter ways that we carry identities with us (without neglecting a more direct discussion of queer experiences, which the novel also provides).
I preferred the first half of Autobiography of Red to the second half. As Geryon travels to South America, Carson gets somewhat bogged-down in the trope of foreign-travel-as-self-discovery. The unfamiliar landscapes. The cultural barriers. The final, climactic moment of finding self-knowledge in the traditional beliefs of a far-away people. Carson sometimes does interesting things with these tropes, but none of this is quite up to the standards of her earlier work. Some of the characters, notably Herakles, suffer in being transplanted to a novel environment (the young adult Herakles being far more exaggerated and far less interesting than the adolescent Herakles). None of this is really necessary. While Carson's prose is far from dense, her conceptual work is extremely dense, meaning that there are many compelling directions the story could have gone without getting a bit muddled and losing some urgency by getting into the business of this sort of travel narrative.
Though this change of direction is a drawback, in my opinion, the novel's concluding portions are hardly "bad", and the lasting impressions this book is likely to leave with me are much more likely to reflect its many virtues than its one significant defect.
As a coming-of-age story, Autobiography of Red dwells on interiority. Geryon muses on the gap between his internal and external worlds; the novel captures this fixation by consistently creating a sense of dreamlike disconnect. Photography, philosophy, and volcanoes are all interesting motifs Carson finds ways of applying to this theme. I enjoyed the subtlety with which Carson treats Geryon's wings, as well. Many queer coming-of-age stories directly center the awkwardness of holding a non-normative identity. Here the wings, always present but rarely the focal point and only occasionally noticed, are an effective way of striking at the quieter ways that we carry identities with us (without neglecting a more direct discussion of queer experiences, which the novel also provides).
I preferred the first half of Autobiography of Red to the second half. As Geryon travels to South America, Carson gets somewhat bogged-down in the trope of foreign-travel-as-self-discovery. The unfamiliar landscapes. The cultural barriers. The final, climactic moment of finding self-knowledge in the traditional beliefs of a far-away people. Carson sometimes does interesting things with these tropes, but none of this is quite up to the standards of her earlier work. Some of the characters, notably Herakles, suffer in being transplanted to a novel environment (the young adult Herakles being far more exaggerated and far less interesting than the adolescent Herakles). None of this is really necessary. While Carson's prose is far from dense, her conceptual work is extremely dense, meaning that there are many compelling directions the story could have gone without getting a bit muddled and losing some urgency by getting into the business of this sort of travel narrative.
Though this change of direction is a drawback, in my opinion, the novel's concluding portions are hardly "bad", and the lasting impressions this book is likely to leave with me are much more likely to reflect its many virtues than its one significant defect.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual assault, Sexual content, and Physical abuse
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