Customer Reviews

Nox

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"No matter how I try to evoke the starry lad he was, it remains a plain, odd history."

More an experience than a read, "Nox" by Anne Carson splices abstraction--definitions, quotations, lessons in ancient Greek history--with the concrete specificity of family photographs, handwritten letters, and personal recollections that attempt to contain a fragile and fragmented relationship. Carson's brother, who led a transitory and difficult life, has died in Copenhagen. And now Carson, in the manner of Catallus (poem 101), must go to see her brother's widow, the city where he lived, and the church he was brought to when he died. In words and images, and in words as images, Carson creates a landscape that mirrors memory--a continuous accordion-folded page that backdrops black and white snapshots, yellowing letters, cancelled stamps, and cut-out text. Most striking are the photos that include shadows, and texts that Carson repeats, strikes out, or blurs. Also haunting is the way this collage seems so very real on the reproduced page: edges of paper-on-paper look sharp and true, or wrinkled from too much glue; staples seem raised, shiny and cold; even the reverse-embossing of handwriting forces this reader to touch and expect to feel the raised imprint of a ball-point pen, as if, in feeling, the question is asked: is this real?

Carson explains, "History and elegy are akin." In questioning, "are these staples real?" or "who was this brother?" we share in the act of asking, of composing the story and creating history. In her distilled and disjointed--yet accessible--way, Carson compels questions, collects facts--or shards of them--and assembles a beautiful, tactile, white-space filled elegy that honors a brother who, later in life, she barely knew. "You have survived it, " Carson writes, "and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself." Carson has fashioned a thing that carries itself, a work of poetry and prose that stands on its own as book and non-book, object and message: an account of one's life as an extraordinary ordinary thing.

Stunning. Carson is a poet and classicist who is truly sui generis. Her new work, Nox, is a scrapbook of pictures, drawings, stamps, scribbles, anecdotes and definitions of the words comprising Catullus' poem No. 101 ("for his brother who died in the Troad") that coalesce into a profoundly haunting, moving and surprisingly vulnerable elegy for the poet's brother. Ignore the obnoxious and narrow minded poetic purists, such as Robert Potts, who deride Carson's work as "doggerel". Her unique and eclectic voice is a breath of fresh air in a medium too often stifled by orthodoxy.

This is an astonishing work. To speak cursorily, the work begins with a latin poem of Catullus' and then goes on to provide a dictionary translation of each word over its course, with anecdotes and pictures interspersed throughout either abstractly or explicitly depicting her mother and more often her brother. Her goal, I suspect, is to show the plurality of language, and the numerous possibilities for any word and thus the infinite possibilities should they be put side by side and reified in another language. As she says "the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of [words] that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate" will appear when attempting to translate. When she finally does translate the poem, it is evasive, inexact, and, most importantly, entirely subjective. Just as we (at least in Northrop Frye's estimation) create works anew in our mind, so does she, concretely, in transmutating Catullus' words to English and Carson's grasp thereon. The book ends, finally, with her translation more vividly rendered inefficient in a bleeding, crumpled fragment (a rip at the top, its medium reasserted at the bottom of the page; that is, a blank piece of paper concluding the book) expressing her inability to translate that original poem and thus asking us to individualize the poem in her directed latin lesson constituting the work.

This is not an easy work to understand, and, as one previous reviewer said, it is not, in the conventional sense, a 'book.' It doesn't follow an expected path--she lays her brother to rest in its cascading first words
"NOX
FRATER
NOX"
overlaying a cursive, similarly cascading inscription of her brother's name--and thus concerns herself with how language associates with emotions, and the utter subjectivity of words which we often believe to express universal pains and joys. She is often terse, often distended, expatiating on matters of which she has little material (her brother's demise) and passing over experiences over which she presided (her mother's passing) but this is all to an overall goal, which is inextricably linked to that poem of Catullus' which opened the poem.

To consider its form for a moment, as it is unconventional. Whereas a normal work of literature is printed on a series of glued or sewn together pages which, if ripped out, don't disturb its physical sequence all too much, this is printed on a series of folded together panels, which, if separated in any way aside from first to last, would render the work a mess, with no page numbers to reorder it by. This work is a sequence of thoughts, a linear meditation driven by its material form and complemented by its content. Another note on this is an opening line of Carson's "I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds." You'll find this to be a rather dark work, but should you unfold the work and flip it over, you will find nothing but light; vacant, vacuous whiteness. She relegates that light to the obverse, acknowledging its insufficiency to express her purpose.

The work is elusive in spite of its subject matter--I don't feel that I know Carson for having read this--and it reminds me of a number of theorists I've read, who bicker between one another the ability or inability of words to express intangible things, but I don't know that any of them did such so capably as Anne Carson does in this work. She individualizes the work to herself but finally leaves it to her reader for conclusions, understanding the inability of words to universally reify what they nominally signify, and I cannot recommend this work enough to anybody, as I feel she realizes her goal beautifully.

Thank you for the courage to be yourself, hear your own voice, and to write this beautiful book of both wonderment, and reflection.Lovely.

Though intensely personal, sometimes to the point where I felt excluded from the text, Nox is a very beautiful and artfully wrought book. This is the future of printed books--detailed, meaningful, and one of a kind. Carson has a natural way with words, and her juxtaposition of definitions and her personal reflections creates a nice resonance that is unique from her poetry and essays. I highly recommend this book, but those looking for straight verse or a unified plot line might not appreciate it.

Anne Carson is one of the most unusual & thought provoking writers today. This original & poignant eulogy for her brother creates visual & tactile experience of the mystery of his life. It's a potent reminder of how little we know each other, even family, & ourselves. It is literally like finding a shoe box of memories, glimpses, scrapes, in an attic corner.

This book got a lot of very good press when it initially came out. Even the tough-as-nails poetry reviewer William Logan gave it a good review. And the concept of the book, written for Carson's recently deceased, long-lost brother sounded promising. So I was expecting something really great.

But, as you can tell by the two-stars that I gave the book, I was disappointed. While the concept was fascinating and sometimes touching, the individual "poems" just weren't memorable or substantial.

That said, this was a courageous experiment (at times touching, at times tedious). But unfortunately, the experiment (for this reader) just didn't succeed.

This work is quite perplexing. In some ways it is magnificent, but in other ways it may fail your expectations - depending on what you are expecting. Rather than giving just one rating, I'd prefer to give the book several ratings:
Book as physical and visual artwork: 5 out of 5
Book as conceptual poetry: 4 out of 5
Book as traditional novel: 2 out of 5

Personally I loved to skim the book randomly, but to read it trough from cover to cover (as I eventually did) was clearly not the best way to enjoy this book, at least for me. The fragmented memories of his brother were at times touching and full of complex emotions. The repeating definitions of latin words were a bit tiresome at times, but still quite educative and hence interesting.

I would say that this book is at its best as an experimental poetic artwork and surely is an unique and at times touching curiosity on any book-lovers shelve. But don't approach the book as a traditional novel - there it will fail you.

This book is such a wonderful artifact, and this media is perfect for Carson--little connect bits of thought on one central theme. I love the way New Directions produced it, with the accordion fold, but even better would have been to have each piece reproduced--kind of reminiscent of that McSweeney's that was a pile of mail. As is though--still beautiful, always so thoughtful.

In order to discuss Carson's latest work--a foldout, Jacob's ladder collage of letters, photographs, and poetry, all housed in a beautiful box--one must first address its resistance to being addressed. Rather, what Carson does (and with furious precision) is impress upon us her grief over a life she cannot recapture--for Carson, this life is her brother's, for whom this collection is both an elegy and a history. What results is a work of astonishing candor, in which Carson manages to define the elegy anew by exploring the lacunae of her brother's life. It is when you are asking about something, she writes, that you realize you have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself. Carson accomplishes just that, creating a physical record of a life in the form of a book that allows its fragments to carry her brother's absence. To call this art object extraordinary--more than a book, it's a reproduction of a scroll Carson made by hand--would be to understate. What Carson has given us is an act of devotion of such integrity that it carries its grief on its back.