When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent.īy turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is.

As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. Autobiography of Red is a verse novel by Anne Carson, published in 1998 and based loosely on the myth of Geryon and the Tenth Labor of Herakles, especially on surviving fragments of the lyric poet Stesichorus' poem Geryoneis. It is just as tempting to say, simply, she has translated the autobiography of a little red monster named Geryon. The conventional way of telling this story is from Herakles’ perspective, as he was a celebrated Greek hero.

Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. Geryon is a red person with wings, that is a baby, then a teenager, that goes to school, falls in love and is abandoned, takes up photography and travels, learns about volcanos and becomes. Anne Carson is a philosopher of heartbreak. The Geryoneis is ostensibly the tale of Herakles ’ tenth labor, the killing of a winged red monster named Geryon in order to steal his magical red cattle. sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender. The award-winning poet Anne Carson reinvents a genre in Autobiography of Red, a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional recreation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present. By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is.

Geryon autobiography of red