sauris 's review for:

The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson

4.0

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the recurring theme in everything i've been stumbling upon lately seems to be eros. carson tells a story of marriage, desire, the seductive and deceitful husband, infidelity, passion, lies, breakdown... she offers a meditation on the nature of eros and beauty - "don't call it my choice, I was ventured: by some pure gravity of existence itself, conspiracy of being!" - eros as creative and destructive, love fatalistic, infidelity a ritual, marital collapse a myth - "desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness. madness doubled is marriage" - there's never resolution or redemption or catharsis, it simply is. carson exercises such restraint that every sentence demands you linger before continuing. i'm sure most of her metaphors, allusions and references are lost on me, it's one of those books you have to keep coming back to at various points in life to appreciate it more