I finished Autobiography of Red. It's my third Anne Carson and it might also be my favorite. It made me want to get better at writing sentences. My sentences are usually the same length and have similar rhythms and I've always wanted to master the long, sprawling sentence. I should read more stream of consciousness writing. My thoughts on the book? It's definitely one of my favorite queer works. It limns heartbreak while being philosophical. It's about desire and the self, but it's also about narrative. I wonder if in order to write narratives and capture a self in that narrative you need to learn how to make people disappear.
I think about disappearance a lot in narratives. I'm so used to the notion of capturing what is 'real,' what is authentic to oneself when constructing a story. After all, to be a Real artist it needs to resonate, it needs to capture something real and something ultimately profound. But I think in the pursuit of 'the real' our own selves can get lost. Sometimes the pursuit of 'the real' is just an effort to conveniently avoid our own reflection. A way to avoid being aware of ourselves. And sometimes a story is more about what you choose to leave out than what you put in.
Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, a story based off of an ancient poem translated from shattered fragments, plays a lot with these gaps. With what we see and can't see in an archive, in our own stories. And as heavy as the story itself is, it plays with narrative, it plays with translation, with what a poem is, what a story is, what narrative is, what a character is, what a photograph is, what time is, what seeing is.
And I'm realizing that I love books that do this--stories that ask themselves what they are.