Sign in with Facebook
Loading...
14th out of 38 books
—
7 voters
The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (Cape Poetry)
by
Anne Carson
The Beauty Of The Husband is an essay on Keats’s idea that beauty is truth, and is also the story of a marriage. It is told in 29 tangos. A tango (like a marriage) is something you have to dance to the end.
This clear-eyed, brutal, moving, darkly funny book tells a single story in an immediate, accessible voice–29 “tangos” of narrative verse that take us vividly through ero...more
This clear-eyed, brutal, moving, darkly funny book tells a single story in an immediate, accessible voice–29 “tangos” of narrative verse that take us vividly through ero...more
Paperback, 160 pages
Published
February 19th 2002
by Vintage
(first published 2001)
Friend Reviews
To see what your friends thought of this book,
please sign up.
Community Reviews
(showing
1-30
of
2,116)
Cross-posted on Readerling
“Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irrestistably real and attractive to us – for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pas...more
Aug 07, 2007
Regina
added it
VIII. IT WAS JUST NIGHT LAUNDRY SNAPPING ITS VOWELS ON THE LINE WHEN MOTHER SAID WHAT'S THAT SOUND
Poets (be generous) prefer to conceal the truth beneath strata of irony
because this is the look of truth: layered and elusive.
Was he a poet? Yes and no.
His letters, we agree, were highly poetic. They fell into my life
like pollen and stained it. I hid them from my mother
yet she always knew.
Lover, merciful one
you write me but you
do not come to me. This one my mother did not read.
Rabbis liken the Tor...more
Poets (be generous) prefer to conceal the truth beneath strata of irony
because this is the look of truth: layered and elusive.
Was he a poet? Yes and no.
His letters, we agree, were highly poetic. They fell into my life
like pollen and stained it. I hid them from my mother
yet she always knew.
Lover, merciful one
you write me but you
do not come to me. This one my mother did not read.
Rabbis liken the Tor...more
This entire book is one progressive poem, told from the point of view of the wife. She is a totally unsympathetic figure, except for maybe when she is remembering how she first met her husband, how she was first ensnared. Carson has written a complex and melancholy tale of the pitfalls of beauty, presented in 29 Tangos, or interconnected poems. The poems build upon eachother, grow from eachother, and I would gladly be rating this 5 stars if the final poem had not felt so limp when compared to th...more
* to what extent does TBOTH succeed as a book-length piece of fiction? I had difficulty sympathizing with the protagonist, who seemed to love her spouse for no other reason than his alleged "beauty." The character for whom I felt the most sympathy was Ray, and I felt that he was under-utilized. But perhaps I'm not supposed to approach this work the way one approaches a novel -- Achilles is one of the least sympathetic protagonists in all of fiction, but that doesn't make "The Iliad" a bad book....more
I maybe would have given this four stars but upon reading the last poem I shut the book and uttered "ah, that was great!" and my boyfriend quickly snagged it from my hands.
This is the first Anne Carson book I've read and I doubt will be the last. I anticipate reading this one again as well. As it is deceptively a quick read, I read it quickly. Which is, I would suggest, the best way to read it at first. But, there are so many crevices and lowlit alleys to explore between the blunt ridges and in...more
This is the first Anne Carson book I've read and I doubt will be the last. I anticipate reading this one again as well. As it is deceptively a quick read, I read it quickly. Which is, I would suggest, the best way to read it at first. But, there are so many crevices and lowlit alleys to explore between the blunt ridges and in...more
1 like · like · see review
Quick. Before everybody gets here with their foaming and fawning, I'll tell you that the book is yes still a book. It has its on's and off's and it doesn't really try to release itself from the constraints that are laid out in the beginning. That its pulped in a way. That its sadnesses are very hard and while it's not about mastery, it's about something akin to the suffering that comes from mastery. That the thinking takes the poem hostage in parts and yeah, that's sort of the point, but that po...more
The New York Times magazine recently ran a profile of Anne Carson. Despite having read much of her work over the last decade, I hadn't read much about her as a person, and the piece made me start grabbing her books off the shelves again. I had forgotten just how intense an experience this is. The Beauty of the Husband in particular makes me grope for words other than, You have to read it. It's painful and stark, the story of a woman's obsession with a man she should never have married but would...more
I bought this book around the time I got separated from my ex-husband. I didn't quite know what to expect. I just knew I liked the title and subtitle: husband and tango. It sat on my shelf for a while.
I re-read it during my recent poetry streak, and this time I found it absolutely haunting and daring. I don't think it's a book you sit down to "understand"; rather, it's a work to feel, to resonate with, to weep with.
I re-read it during my recent poetry streak, and this time I found it absolutely haunting and daring. I don't think it's a book you sit down to "understand"; rather, it's a work to feel, to resonate with, to weep with.
V different from the only other Carson I've read, Autobiography of Red (& looking forward to its sequel, < Red Doc, coming in March, 2013! How's that for a little itty bitty winking free ad, Mz Carson?).
Tackles, according to the back cover, Keats' notion that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty..." in his "Ode on a Grecian Urn." I don't know if that was actually Carson's project here - the "Urn" never appears in the epigrams to each tango; these are largely from some tragedy play he wrote that...more
Tackles, according to the back cover, Keats' notion that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty..." in his "Ode on a Grecian Urn." I don't know if that was actually Carson's project here - the "Urn" never appears in the epigrams to each tango; these are largely from some tragedy play he wrote that...more
1 like · like · see review
Anne Carson is simply the greatest word master of our time. All her works are deeply anchored in classical texts, poetry, and contemporary imagery. However, The Beauty of the Husband is a slim drama in poetic prose (dances) that moves like a Eugene O'Neill play through the senses and leaves you with a burned out mark where the heart used to be. Fantastic!
Probably the best blurb I have ever read: "The Beauty of the Husband is an essay on Keat's idea that beauty is truth, and is also the story of a marriage. It is told in twenty-nine tangos. A tango (like a marriage) is something you have to dance to the end."
The Beauty of the Husband's narrative follows a completely dedicated wife's attempt to enumerate the parts of her manically infidel husband's heart, their relationship, and their divorce. Carson's voice feels truly authentic: she illustrates...more
The Beauty of the Husband's narrative follows a completely dedicated wife's attempt to enumerate the parts of her manically infidel husband's heart, their relationship, and their divorce. Carson's voice feels truly authentic: she illustrates...more
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"
I love that she has chosen to investigate her subject on the lines of Keats' notion of beauty, and yet this isn't my favorite.
Usually I love her juxtapositions, but there is something about Keats, with his eternal desire, his ephemeral poetic life and his unconsumated love that just doesn't fit with her narrative. At first I thought that the irony would appeal to me, but I never really felt the connection.
That said, the tango like back-and-forth between the two is...more
I love that she has chosen to investigate her subject on the lines of Keats' notion of beauty, and yet this isn't my favorite.
Usually I love her juxtapositions, but there is something about Keats, with his eternal desire, his ephemeral poetic life and his unconsumated love that just doesn't fit with her narrative. At first I thought that the irony would appeal to me, but I never really felt the connection.
That said, the tango like back-and-forth between the two is...more
an incendiary, moving book of poetry. It reads on many levels, from the simple narrative (not completely simple because there are movements in time along with the movements of the heart)through language and structure. I finished it on an early September morning before walking to the top of Mt. Baldy in Sun Valley, where it shadowed my steps and even colored the fossil-scored shale I picked up. The book is highly approachable but lingering, much like I remember my discovery of Sharon Olds' Satan...more
Poetry at it's best. I read a lot of it aloud just to enjoy the beauty of the words. I loved all the ancient myth and classical references. Such a sad story buoyed up by the life and breath of gorgeous language.
1 like · like · see review
Anne Carson amazes me. Her voice seems to exhist and not exhist at the same time...she also can feel the pulse of desire and translates it in a way so comepletely structured with longing it's like a whisper.
This book is very lovely on the whole, but I had the same reaction to it that I often have to Joan Didion. I know the way I bristle at anything bourgie is some immature vestige of my punk rock past, but I could not escape the dreaded beige while reading. Still, I was fascinated that these poems managed to get me in the gut while also reminding me too keenly of a lifetime movie in which the protagonist wears cream and a french twist tucked with seed pearls. One of the "tangos" took place in a poo...more
Jul 15, 2007
Colie!
rated it
5 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
everyone, especially if you think you don't like poetry.
Hands down my absolute favorite book of poems, and one of my all-time favorite books period. Gorgeous, haunting, engaging, fucking amazing. AMAZING. READ IT.
I thought of Shelley Jackson, I don't know which one came first but it had those strange hypertextual leaps between very short fragments (at least they were in order). These were very interesting, and I'm pleased with the power of the title "A Fictional Essay" meaning the crazy lady and her crazy husband are not real and not Anne Carson and her ex-husband. OR are they? I don't really care. This is for re-reading, because the only effect of her using several different fonts is that I ignored the...more
Jun 17, 2012
Diann Blakely
added it
Anne Carson’s 1986 EROS THE BITTERSWEET: AN ESSAY won its author an instant, if small, circle of admirers when it was published in Princeton’s Classics Series. The Canadian author and McGill professor has since published four books of poems, with new work popping out each month in journals. Carson’s source material derives from the crossing of the poet’s life with her longtime means of interpreting life in general: literature, specifically Beckett, Woolf, Thucydides, and, in the new THE BEAUTY O...more
Mar 10, 2007
clara
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
anyone who as ever been in a relationship
Shelves:
oftheladies,
getsyouthinking
it is a very human story...
This book broke my heart more than a little...and I liked it. Anne Carson is such a distinctive voice in literature--utterly unique and ultra-academic. Sometimes I pull her books down from the shelf to marvel (and to make my head spin, in a good way). Although she likes to pepper her work with mythological references, there's very little of that in this book. Word on the street is that it's about her ex-husband, although Canadian Anne mostly keeps mum about her personal life. A powerful, unflinc...more
I love reading Anne Carson because she really demands that we slow down and be with her work, and that work is so interesting. In the case of this book, it follows the story of a couple and their unraveling marriage and how Keats' famous line "beauty is truth, truth beauty" affects its disintegration. I admit to losing my way in the narrative halfway through the book. So instead I just enjoyed the language and images that cobble together the narrative pathway.
Excerpt:
1. I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO K...more
Excerpt:
1. I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO K...more
I still don't understand much of this, but the writing feels uneven. This might just be because of the shifts from journalistic writing, to scholarship, to difficult poetry. Parts of the writing still feel like digressions. My other inchoate complaint is that talking about passion and obsession in an occasionally humorous and academic tone can, for better or worse, be a bit discomforting.
Regardless, there are many vivid moments and scenes. The best seem to be when the characters (the (speaker)...more
Regardless, there are many vivid moments and scenes. The best seem to be when the characters (the (speaker)...more
Amen, Sister. She captures it. She got it down: exactly how it feels to be betrayed by a lover and by the self for still loving the betrayer. The book was page after page of surprises on a not-so-surprising subject. I am amazed at how much she renders without a hint of sentimentality. It think this is because her images are brutally lucid. This helps because any abstract or intellectual investigation that happens subsequently are securely staked to the poem by such strong images. For example, I’...more
This was great! I was SO blown away by Autobiography of Red that I don't think any follow-up could have quite lived up to my hopes, but this was very impressive. For me, for some reason, it didn't pack as much of an emotional punch, but the writing was just breathtakingly beautiful. So much craft! But not in a showy "look at me I'm a Serious Writer!" kind of way. Just in a "oh my god this language is so beautiful how does she do it?" kind of way. I'm sold. I'll be back, Anne Carson.
An incredibly stunning work. Interlacing keats' truth and beauty with a marriage wracked by infidelity. What is love,truth and beauty explored in an intense and terse series of poems. I will read this book multiple times over the next few months, I trust more will unfold from the poem each time I approach it. I have read three of her books of poetry; this volume mixes genres in a postmodern triumph that is not arch or trite. Read Carson, then read bee again.
"a Babel
thrust between us at that instant which we would never
learn to construe --
taste of iron.
Prophetic. Her prophecies all came true although she didn't
mean them to."
There is something here to foist against the phantoms of heartbreak. A gut-wrenching book on the matchless power of love to be misled by the vain beloved's seductive frailty, which it is our fate to comprehend.
thrust between us at that instant which we would never
learn to construe --
taste of iron.
Prophetic. Her prophecies all came true although she didn't
mean them to."
There is something here to foist against the phantoms of heartbreak. A gut-wrenching book on the matchless power of love to be misled by the vain beloved's seductive frailty, which it is our fate to comprehend.
It's already gotten so that I'm going to expect to be overwhelmed by brilliance by every one of her books. I don't know of anyone else doing what she does. Genius in the lines, in the shifts, in the careful modulations between genres and forms at time within single lines. Not as formally striking as Nox, but the narrative strikes through to me even more clearly. Extraordinary.
letters made one day different from another, made if into sun.
this book is serious about love, serious about how stupid it makes us, how broken and bent over we are without it. keats, the ultimate romantic, but the one most willing to move within his definitions of love anchors the book with insertions of quotes, notes, bits of poems. titles of each tango are amazing.
this book is serious about love, serious about how stupid it makes us, how broken and bent over we are without it. keats, the ultimate romantic, but the one most willing to move within his definitions of love anchors the book with insertions of quotes, notes, bits of poems. titles of each tango are amazing.
8. The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson
Michael Symmons wrote in a Guardian review: "Canadian poet Anne Carson’s tracing of a single love affair through to the breakdown of a marriage has won her many admirers. This book is an amazing balancing act - classical and colloquial, surreal but rooted in telling everyday details." Concur.
Michael Symmons wrote in a Guardian review: "Canadian poet Anne Carson’s tracing of a single love affair through to the breakdown of a marriage has won her many admirers. This book is an amazing balancing act - classical and colloquial, surreal but rooted in telling everyday details." Concur.
There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
Be the first to start one »
A professor of the classics, with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art, Carson blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Ancient Greek literature. She has published fifteen books as of 2010, all of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation...more
More about Anne Carson...
Share This Book
No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »
“Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.”
—
13 people liked it
“You used to say. "Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness."
Madness doubled is marriage
I added
when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce
a golden rule.”
—
8 people liked it
More quotes…
Madness doubled is marriage
I added
when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce
a golden rule.”
Thanks Alan.
Apr 16, 2013 06:36am
So true. Oh my god, this is so good. You freak...more
Apr 16, 2013 07:23pm