Nox by Anne Carson - Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists

Jan 04, 2011 Ceridwen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-about-books, memoir, o-canada, omg-were-all-going-to-die, poetry, pomo-a-go-go

I've been tossing around like an insomniac deciding what to read next. I've been off fiction for grown-ups for a while, for various personal reasons. I had cause to push Autobiography of Red into someone's hands this weekend, which gave me cause to pull this artifact out and consider it again. I know it's going to kill me; I know that. But it is winter, and the snow falls glittery and insulating over the back porch, and it may be the best kind of sarcophagus in which to consider Carson and her g...more

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Feb 11, 2011 Elizabeth rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, poetry, reviewed

And, so,

one day after reading this, I am still trying to stop feeling it.

It kept me up last night.

Focus: Hope

I woke up with it this morning. Thinking about the definitions of words as the phone rang for my 6:30 call with Bangalore. How is meaning conveyed? Is it just a list and explanations from the dictionary? Do we feel them because of the way images rise around them? A definition. A torn photo. Streaks of color. There is meaning. I think. It's vague and fuzzy now. I was listening to the BBC'...more

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May 27, 2013 Jonathan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: university, own, favourites, quirky, non-fiction

If, possibly, one could describe what Nox is as a work of abstract poetry it could possibly be considered a kind of meta-elegy. Because, in many different ways Nox is a haunting work that talks about the elegiac mode while existing as an elegy in and of itself. The title itself appears to be from the Latin for different variations of 'night' or 'nightfall' therefore reflecting the age-old idea of death being like sleeping or passing into shadow.

The book itself is structured like a journal with...more
If, possibly, one could describe what Nox is as a work of abstract poetry it could possibly be considered a kind of meta-elegy. Because, in many different ways Nox is a haunting work that talks about the elegiac mode while existing as an elegy in and of itself. The title itself appears to be from the Latin for different variations of 'night' or 'nightfall' therefore reflecting the age-old idea of death being like sleeping or passing into shadow.

The book itself is structured like a journal with the interesting gimmick of accordion folded pages set inside a box, rather than a true hardcover. There are scraps and fragments of Latin dictionary definitions alongside handwritten and typed notes. At the same time a poetic commentary from Anne Carson herself exists intermittently and in many regards this fragmented, fractured prose poetry seems to show a sense of grief and loss to a far greater extent than any structured eloquent piece of work could. That is not to say that Carson lacks eloquence, indeed, she is very well versed in how to utilise language, it is simply that her work possesses a raw emotionally jaggedness that comes across to the reader.

The fact that Nox does not even appear like a true book is the most obvious statement made by Anne Carson to the reader. Though there is a sense of the gimmick as noted above there is also the sense that Carson attempts to school the reader that grief destroys all sense of form and the known. That, when night falls upon a soul, there is a sense of total destruction of normality or formality, at least initially.

Anne Carson herself describes the book as being "'based on a poem of Catullus...whose brother died in Troy when Catullus was living in Italy...In my book I printed out the text of the poem, and then took it apart...I dismantled the Catullus poem, one word per page, and I put the Latin word and its lexical definition on the left-hand side, and then on the right-hand side a fragment of a memory of my brother's life that related to the left-hand side of the page. Where the lexical entry didn't relate, 1 changed it. So I smuggled in stuff that is somewhat inauthentic. But it makes the left and the right cohere, so that the whole thing tells the story of the translation of the poem, and also dismantles my memory of my brother's life'(sourced here)." In retrospect it is apparent as to how Carson has used form and her sensibility to convey this other poem in respect to her own experience. Isn't that how all readers must take literature? In connection to their own experience?

Other reviews have also noted the form of Nox transforms the book into more than a book. It becomes a document or an artefact, a work of memory and a monument to a lost life. All of which is in general the aim of the elegy. Yet the fact that Carson can talk about other elegies and about mourning as an act makes this work a kind of meta-elegy as already noted. So this book becomes more than merely a work of non-fiction where Carson describes her reactions to hearing that her almost unknown brother (who hurt her mother) has died. It becomes a work of non-fiction for all those who have lost someone in their lives. And therefore it becomes a work for all those who read literature because it is concerned with both life and death.

"The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance."
- Isaac Bashevis Singer
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Oct 05, 2010 Jimmy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: female, canada, poetic-essay, and-a-half-stars, year-2010s

"History can be at once concrete and indecipherable. Historian can be a storydog that roams around Asia Minor collecting bits of muteness like burrs in its hide. Note that the word mute is regarded by linguists as an onomatopoeic formation referring not to silence but to a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding."

Good, but not on par with her other stuff, but it's also a very different kind of book. There is something unsatisfyin...more

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Mar 27, 2013 Derek Emerson rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013-books-read

Some books just do not work as books. So what is a writer to do when they want to express something which does not fit into the usual binding? It helps when you are Anne Carson, an established poet and classicist, and you are writing on an usual subject.

Nox (Latin for "night") is an elegy, or as Carson says, and epitaph, for her estranged and now deceased brother, Michael. Battling drug use, Carson says he left the United States in the late 1970's in order not to go to jail. She would never see...more

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Dec 20, 2012 Jane rated it 5 of 5 stars

(The following was written for The Millions' A Year in Reading feature, 12/20/12, occurred to me I should also post it here.)

Published as poetry, Anne Carson’s Nox is closer by far to W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz than to any book of pocketable lyrics. Ultimately uncategorizable, this physically onomatopoetic facing of the death of a long-absent, long-estranged brother comes (as effects or ashes do) in a box. The pages not sewn, not glued, but accordion-folded into one inseparable, extendable fan of...more

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Jan 09, 2012 Kasey rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry

I read this in one sitting... really a lovely way to approach this book, if you have the time. The first striking thing is that it's such a beautiful physical object; holding it and looking at it were as moving to me as actually reading the words. It's an accordion book (I think that's the right term) and it comes in a box; it's also a photocopy, or looks like one, of a scrapbook. Some pages have dictionary definitions of Latin words (part of the project described in Nox is translating a poem; p...more

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Jun 07, 2011 Tomiko rated it 5 of 5 stars

Super dense, difficult to access, but freaking awesome and totally worth the investment.

When I began reading it, I was prepared to hate it. Its entire being seemed ostentatious, and when I cracked it open and saw that nearly every other page was filled with definitions of Latin words (and what language is more pretentious than Latin?), I was truly ready to despise it. Even getting through it the first time, I found myself rushing and bored. By the second read, though, I was blown away by what C...more

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Jun 03, 2011 Nikitabanana rated it 3 of 5 stars

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. The book concerns her older brother, Michael, who in adulthood fell into drugs and, finally, drifting under false identities. (In her words, he “ran away in 1978, rather than go to jail.”) Carson recalls her...more 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. The book concerns her older brother, Michael, who in adulthood fell into drugs and, finally, drifting under false identities. (In her words, he “ran away in 1978, rather than go to jail.”) Carson recalls her mother “standing at the kitchen sink scraping carrots. For years after he left, she would glance up every time a car came spinning along the road.” Under an assumed name, Michael wanders in Europe and India for a while, sends an occasional laconic postcard to his mother and slips into poverty, drink and homelessness. From his one letter — it is reproduced in fragments over several panels — we learn that a woman he loved named Anna, “a blonde delighted girl,” died during a period when he was locked up in a foreign jail. Her memories are not straight nonfiction, but rather poems becoming dialogues, essays becoming memoir, single words becoming sentence fragments. Nox is a public facsimile of a deeply private object: a scrapbook Carson put together as a memorial to her older brother, Michael, reproduced this unique collage, in full color, with such thorough devotion that some pages show nothing but the backs of staples.

Nox is a brilliantly curated heap of scraps. It’s both an elegy and a meta-elegy, a touching portrait of a dead brother and a declaration of the impossibility of creating portraits of dead brothers. The book opens with a puzzle: a wrinkled square of yellow paper containing a ten-line Latin poem—untranslated, unattributed, and unlabeled save for the Roman numeral CI. Anyone who is not (as Carson is) a classical scholar will most likely be stymied. But, right away, Nox begins to help. Its next page offers a dictionary definition of the poem’s first word, multas (“numerous, many …”), and this continues as the book moves forward: Most of Nox’s left-hand pages give dictionary entries that lead us, word by word, through the poem. It’s like a linguistic detective story. She describes translating as being in “a room . . . where one gropes for the light switch”; it’s her own nox. But Michael, whom she still does not understand, is her night as well, her dark room whose light will never go on. (“A brother never ends,” she writes.)

Meanwhile, Nox’s right-hand pages keep piling up the scraps: photos, paintings, handwritten letters, passages from Herodotus, transcripts of conversations, international stamps. Carson threads these together with writing of her own until, little by little, a shadowy portrait of her brother begins to emerge. She treats her brother like a figure from antiquity who just happens to have grown up in the same houses she did and to have died 1,500-odd years after the fall of Rome. They weren’t close. As children he called her “Professor” and “Pinhead” and as adults they rarely spoke; in 22 year, he only called a handful of times. When she finally gets a hold of him to tell him their mother died, his only response was “I figured.” He was, in short, a total mystery. When he died, Carson didn’t find out until two weeks later. She never addresses any anger she might feel toward him for divorcing his family and destroying their mother, but it seems hidden beneath the surface of some of the stories she had chosen to show.

As the elegy rolls on, suspense builds around the most unlikely things. Will we ever see a picture of Michael as an adult? Will we ever find out how he died? Who was Anna? But Carson never offers any truths or solutions, maybe because she doesn’t have them. I’m not someone who loves poetry, or even understands it a lot of the time. But Nox is something special, that everyone should pore over.
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Apr 25, 2011 Linda added it

First time I read it, I didn't get much out of it at all, except that her estranged brother had died. Okay, and she teaches ancient Greek, has a facility or fascination with languages and lexicography.
Second time I read it, 4/25/11, a week later, I got a little more. It is a sad story, but I do not get the idea that it is something so out of the ordinary. There does not seem to be much here that could or would apply to the rest of the world. It seems very personal. The form of the book itself is...more First time I read it, I didn't get much out of it at all, except that her estranged brother had died. Okay, and she teaches ancient Greek, has a facility or fascination with languages and lexicography.
Second time I read it, 4/25/11, a week later, I got a little more. It is a sad story, but I do not get the idea that it is something so out of the ordinary. There does not seem to be much here that could or would apply to the rest of the world. It seems very personal. The form of the book itself is unique and interesting; it is like a photocopied scrapbook. It is presented in a giant accordion book, which comes in a box. I make little accordion books with different themes. Mine are much more cheerful than this.
That is not to say that every book must be cheerful. That is not to say that every book must be happy or that any book must be universal to be worthwhile. It is not saying I don't understand her book; I do. I think I do. I understand her comforting herself with the dissection of language. I understand her lexicon entries and how they apply to the story she is telling. I understand her frustration at not seeing her brother all those years, and mostly, her frustration that it upset her mother so. I understand the sense of loss, only really fully realized when the ending came.
But it is a story sparingly told of an intimate situation. Perhaps the appeal for all the critics is the format? I just don't understand why everyone is making such a fuss about it. I like it, it appeals to my tactile sense, the way the paper looks crinkled and so on. And while it is brilliant perhaps to conceive of presenting it this way, the guts of it are something that happens all the time. It just happened to her.
I like what she had to say about translation, though of course that doesn't seem to apply to the story, except for how she is trying to understand her brother. But then, aren't we all translators? She says translation is like being in a dark room, a not unfamiliar room, and fumbling for the light switch. Now that is beautiful.(less)

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Jan 20, 2011 Greg rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry, new-directions, girls-girls-girls

I'm pretty thoroughly depressed after reading this. Actually after reading it twice in one sitting and after watching the second half of Kieślowski's sixth film in the Decalogue series I'm now feeling pretty fucking bleak.

Both the film and this book deal with the unknowableness of the other. In the film a young man is in love with an older woman whom he spies on from his bedroom. He watches her with lovers, stalks her, steals her mail, makes phone calls to her and then hangs up and does other c...more I'm pretty thoroughly depressed after reading this. Actually after reading it twice in one sitting and after watching the second half of Kieślowski's sixth film in the Decalogue series I'm now feeling pretty fucking bleak.

Both the film and this book deal with the unknowableness of the other. In the film a young man is in love with an older woman whom he spies on from his bedroom. He watches her with lovers, stalks her, steals her mail, makes phone calls to her and then hangs up and does other creepy things before he finally approaches her and tells her what he has been doing. Something intrigues her about the man and they end up going on a date of sorts where she asks him what she wants from him and he tells her nothing that he loves her and wants nothing from her. She laughs at him and tells him there is no love and later in the evening they have an awkward sexual encounter that leaves him ejaculating in his pants after he touches her thighs and she tells him that all that love is what just happened and he can go clean up the love with a towel in the bathroom. He runs home instead and tries to kill himself (I'm butchering this plot synopsis). After he leaves her apartment she has a change of heart about her feelings and spends the rest of the film trying to find him. She falls in love with him but is as far from being able to let him know how she feels as he was when he was in love with her from afar.

Neither then man or the woman ever really know the other person and there is an impossibility to their feelings. There is something solipistic at play, the other to each character is something of their own devices and the gap between the idealized and the real is insurmountable. I'm really doing a terrible job with this. What each wants is impossible for the other to give and in both cases it isn't even necessarily love that they are looking for but a knowledge about the other person.

Nox is a eulogy for Anne Carson's brother, Micheal. In 1978 he ran away to Europe to avoid going to jail. For the next 22 years he communicated sporadically with his family. Some letters and postcards with no return addresses and a handful of phone calls were all that Carson knew of her brother. After her brother dies it takes his widow a couple of weeks to track down a phone number for Carson to let her know about her brother. The book is a meditation on the unknownableness of her brother, the wanting to be able to fill in the gaps of his life but having no way to bridge the gap between the person who was as distant from her in life as in death.

Coupled with the memories and 'story' of her brother is a lexicon of latin words and their definitions from Cattulus' 101st poem, a elegy to his own dead brother. The reader is silently invited to translate the poem a feat that I attempted to do for a bit but found it too difficult to make sense of all the various ways the words could be used and I ended up cheating and looking up the poem online, only to find that in about the midway point in the book Carson provides her own rough translation. Earlier she stated that she had been trying since high school to make a translation of the poem but she had never made one that caught the feeling of the original Latin. Even with all of the words and their various definitions and usages given there is a gap between the original poem and a real feeling of the poem in English. Not knowing Latin I have to take her word on how much better the original is, how it conveys something that her translation can't capture (and I'm guessing the translation on Wikipedia fails at too), I can get a glimpse of the poem but there a gap between it and me. Maybe if I were smarter and had learned Latin there wouldn't be, but would I be able to put to words the original poem into my own native language or would the original poem be something that could only be experienced through the medium of a language that would never be my own?

Mixed with the story of her brother is the question of what history is. Going back to Herodotus and the fantastical stories that fill his Histories she seems to be asking if the bits and pieces that she knows of her brother are fact or are they the almost mythological tales that Herodotus gives the reader of the lore and customs of people who were alien to him, never mind to someone reading translations of his words over two thousand years later. And does the 'falseness' of the stories make them any less important? Are our own stories true, or the stories we compose to give us understanding of the people closest to us, and do they need to be true? Can they be? Or will there always be gaps and inconsistencies. Is there always ultimately a refusal of the other to really tell us everything we want to know, a refusal of knowing. An ignorance. A darkness.

This is another shoddy review filled with words that mean almost nothing. A spilling of half-completed thoughts, a rambling of some of my favorite topics of meandering about. I know I'm not saying what I want to say and I don't think I even know what it is that I want to say. If I can't even figure out myself what I want to be saying how can I expect anyone else to understand me.

On a more concrete level, Nox is stunning in its design and appearance. After reading it a couple of times I kind of want to own it, instead of having to give it back to the library. The book intrigued me when I first saw it but the thirty dollar price tag and the size of the book made me just admire it from afar and usually be annoyed at the book when I'd be near it because of it's difficultly in getting more than a couple of them at a time on the shelf, the way it demanded so much space. At the gall I imagined New Directions and Carson at having for producing a book that stood so much outside the 'norm' of what a book should be like. But I still admired it too. And now after reading the 'book' I'm very impressed by its physicality, by the way it proclaims itself to be a book and exist within a very set medium. I'm sure this book could be offered in some bastardized digital format but something gigantic and important would be lost. This needs to be touched and handled while reading it, the accordion pages need to be turned and gone back to, the definitions used to re-inspect the Latin poem at the start of the pages. Without wanting to encourage gimmicks for the sake of gimmicks, maybe more books need to be created that assert the 'bookness' of the medium. (less)

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Jan 05, 2011 James rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry, memoir, non-fiction, scrapbook, itsownthing

In Nox, Carson achieves a sense of confused alienation that comes with grief. She seems to grieve the brother she lost, the loss itself, the years her mother lost waiting for her brother to return or communicate, and the last of her chances to figure him out. Some parts of the text are so personal, I felt I was being allowed to intrude. But the structure, especially the pattern of Latin words and definitions, makes it obvious that some attempt is being made to communicate something, even if the...more

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Dec 26, 2010 Nicola rated it 5 of 5 stars

As I read, I kept trying to touch the edges of the pages, scraps, fragments, collages pasted on the actual pages. It was an uncanny temptation that created a paradox of intimacy and repulsion. This facsimile is NOT the original, but something closer to it than your standard book. Having read relatively recently, Carson's translation of Sappho, I couldn't help but see the backside of the accordion pages as being equally important as the front side; the white space and its incredible, indeterminat...more

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Dec 16, 2010 Mike Lindgren rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry

To call Anne Carson’s staggering Nox a book of poetry is not quite accurate, for both its physical and psychic dimensions transcend traditional taxonomies of genre. Nox is many things: an artist’s book, a journal, a collage, an elegy, a meditation on grief, and a souvenir, in the literal sense. It is a powerful statement of personal loss couched in a language of classical rigor, a spiritual exorcism given artifactual manifestation.

To start with Nox’s physical attributes: the book is a careful fa...more To call Anne Carson’s staggering Nox a book of poetry is not quite accurate, for both its physical and psychic dimensions transcend traditional taxonomies of genre. Nox is many things: an artist’s book, a journal, a collage, an elegy, a meditation on grief, and a souvenir, in the literal sense. It is a powerful statement of personal loss couched in a language of classical rigor, a spiritual exorcism given artifactual manifestation.

To start with Nox’s physical attributes: the book is a careful facsimile of a document the grief-stricken Carson assembled on the occasion of her estranged brother’s death. As such, it is essentially a replica of a scrapbook, containing pasted-in snippets of letters, photos, stained scraps of typing, lexical entries, a translation, and a smattering of jagged, abstract drawings; in the words of Joyelle McSweeney, “a {poetic} model based on an attractively varied set of transhistorical and cross-disciplinary examples.” It has been printed not as a traditional codex but as one uninterrupted accordion-style folding document, which in turn has been housed in a handsome if slightly forbidding case. Not your average book of word-slinging, to be sure.

All of this armature—and hats off to New Directions for a very pleasingly designed and printed volume indeed—would be peripheral, even self-indulgent, if the book’s unusual format was not mirrored by the strange beauty and emotional intensity of it contents. As glimpses of Carson’s relation with her troubled brother begin to surface through the textual and graphical chaos, the loss gradually accumulates a fatalistic inevitability worthy of Carson’s classical models. Carson’s brother, his life and his death both, were mysteries to Carson, and they remain mysteries to the reader, which is in part the source of their evocative and haunting appeal.

At first perusal Nox strikes the reader as capricious and disorienting, but as one progresses through the trajectory of Carson’s mourning some structural elements begin to recur and thus to emerge. The first of these is her use of lexical entries, as from a Latin dictionary, both as motif and as explicit manifestation of her fundamentally classicist, in the original sense of the word, outlook. For this reader, it was a revelation to find with what incantatory, onrushing velocity a lexical entry reads:

fortuna: the more or less personified agency supposed to direct events, Fortune…; ill-starred; the way in which events fall out, chance, hazard; a favorable occasion; what befalls or is destined to befall, one’s fate; (applied to persons whose destiny is bound up with one’s own); prosperity, good fortune; unfortunate circumstances, bad luck; social position, rank, station; greatness; wealth, property, fortune.

This particular entry is typical of the whole in that it is subtly but inescapably apposite to the death of Carson’s brother, whose life was “ill-starred” and “bound up with” Carson’s “own” indeed. Through repetition, both contextual and rhythmic, all of the lexical entries come to take on this strange, elegiac undertone.

The book’s second textual variant consists of short blocks of prose detailing the gradual disappearance of her brother: “All the years and time that had passed over him came streaming into me, all that history.” These sequences, numbered as neatly as examples in a grammar textbook, are harrowing in the disjunction between their tragic implications and their matter-of-fact tone. Commentators have frequently noted the unadorned nature of Carson’s work—it is often elastic, to put it mildly, in meter and line—and these passages attest to this plainness of approach. “I guess it never ends,” Carson writes, ostensibly of her attempts to make sense of a Catullan ode. “A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end.”

In contrast to these fairly straightforward entries stand fragments of verse (“I love the old questions”, “I am curious about the season of coldness you have there”) that dot the manuscript like snatches of a half-remembered poem or an overheard conversation. These phrases, elliptical, dreamlike, have the power to evoke Carson’s loss by indirection, partly in counterpoint to the prose segments, but also by their function as captions to the fourth and most dominant structural facet of Nox, which is its searing graphical elements. The pages contain many blurry, sepia-toned snapshots and snippets of typed or scrawled letters, often sliced into fanned-out ribbons, as if the collagist were deranged by grief. These last visuals prove in some ways to be the most jarring; there is something violent and desperate about the way they are splattered across the page.

The cumulatie effect of this multimedia assault is dazzling. The expression of grief that Carson delineates creeps up on the reader, its effect being all the more vivid for its subtlety and slow accretion. The ultimate source of Nox’s power is Carson’s deeply classical aesthetic, as she seeks to express a very modern—actually rather sordid and commonplace—loss in a way that is steeped in the alien sensibility of an ancient culture, what Sainte-Beuve referred to as “the vast living expression of a whole epoch and a semi-barbarous civilization.” This is a very unusual position from which to attack the craft; as a prosodic tactic it seems, to this reader, quite possibly unique. Carson’s poetic voice genuinely has more in common with the ancient poets of Rome than it does with her twentieth-century peers: although there are some very private and intensely personal emotions portrayed, one would never think to describe Carson’s poetry as “confessional” in the same way as Lowell or Plath. Even the towering elegies of Shelley and Tennyson, by comparison, seem a mite… soggy, when contrasted with the radical austerity of Carson’s reflections. All told Nox is a singular achievement, and if its strategies are a bit opaque, it nevertheless stands as an affecting document and the product of an original and fertile mind working in a highly distinctive vein. From Zoland Poetry Review online, Winter 2010.(less)

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Jul 16, 2010 Jon rated it 4 of 5 stars

I didn't quite know how to write about this what?--book? poem? artifact? shared experience?, so I scanned over earlier Goodreads reviews. Some of them are amazingly good and will give you a better idea than I can of what this experience is like. I was drawn to it after seeing a main-stream media review that said it starts as a commentary on a very famous 10-line elegy by Catullus--numbered 101, a farewell to his dead brother. This is not quite accurate. The left side of every page is a word-by-w...more

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Jul 05, 2010 Tracy O rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry

I'm beginning to feel as though I need a new shelf called collage/art projects/painterly endeavors and that's where this book would go along with everything I've read by Maira Kalman. Anne Carson, for me, is the emperor has no clothes author - when I read the Autobiography of Red and Men in the Off Hours, I was reminded of how deeply uneducated and generally unintelligent I am - and, I say this without irony (meaning I don't think she meant to make anyone realie their level of general goof-dom)....more

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Jul 05, 2010 oriana marked it as to-read

Oh Anne Carson, you brilliant, inscrutable genius. This sounds spectacular.

From the Rain Taxi review via Powell's: Carson is neither seeking help with her own grief nor chronicling her own experience. In making the reality-based art of Nox , she attempts to render something beautiful from ugliness. She carefully selects and arranges the gathered shards, splinters, and fragments; the design, while still inscrutable in some ways, feels authentic, resonant with life's contingency, unpredictability,...more

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May 08, 2010 Rick rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, poetry

A scrapbook printed on accordion pages and tucked in a book-shaped box, Nox is not so much an elegy for Anne Carson’s deceased brother as a translation of grief spoken in artifacts and elusive, considered history. It is moving. It is poetic. It weighs, as history does, meaning in the meager remains of life…in Carson’s brother’s case, old photographs, childhood memories, a handful of remembered phone conversations, postcards, and (rarer) letters.

Carson, a classicist, translator, poet, and critic...more

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Feb 18, 2012 Sean Brower rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry

Well, “I’m confused,” is a simple way to put it. About multiple things. Having the Latin elegy (Catullus 101) at the start and slowly allowing the reader to find the meaning is a really cool way of bringing this whole project together… but I’m confused as to *why* Carson chose not to put a final English version at the back? [Edit: she did, it is just not labeled, and the full version is about 2/3 of the way through for some reason.] Isn’t it a bit… cheap? to make the reader keep a running “tally...more Well, “I’m confused,” is a simple way to put it. About multiple things. Having the Latin elegy (Catullus 101) at the start and slowly allowing the reader to find the meaning is a really cool way of bringing this whole project together… but I’m confused as to *why* Carson chose not to put a final English version at the back? [Edit: she did, it is just not labeled, and the full version is about 2/3 of the way through for some reason.] Isn’t it a bit… cheap? to make the reader keep a running “tally” in their minds of the translation? No, forget any supposed obligation to the reader; I’m simply talking about pragmatism; what’s the point of engaging in translation if the translations aren’t connected? I’m confused about what is actually “poetry” here; we have dictionary definitions, pieces of letters from the brother, occasional blurry – almost expressionistic – pictures / “artistically taken” photographs, and these numbered notes; of these, and to the best of my discernment, only the numbered notes are the work of the author, though perhaps she crafted the pictures and parts of the “definitions” as well. Whatever the case, I’m ambivalent about calling any of this “poetry”; perhaps a “flash memoir”? Perhaps, “amalgamated words”? Finally, I’m confused as to whether Carson is making a conscious effort to satirize her own efforts; for example, one of her pieces reads, “What if you made a collection of lexical entries, as someone who is asked to come up with a number for the population of the Skythians might point to the bowl at Exampaios.” Is this supposed to have any meaning at all?

Despite my significant disparagement for this… collection… I will not shy away from acknowledging the passion and innovation that moved this project into fruition. The lack of traditional binding, the foldout-style, the “book holder,” and the paper quality are all quite unique, of great quality, and well thought-out. The ways in which the pictures and scraps of paper are copied into the book are very realistic and 3D-looking. The idea of an elegiac memoir is a creative way of handling death, and I don’t doubt Carson’s authenticity or purpose.

In sum however, the issues I have create a barrier of misunderstanding between the beauty of the crafting and the meaning of the project. I cannot say I find this book to “work”. 1 star for content, 1 extra star for creativity.
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Feb 05, 2011 Charles Dee Mitchell rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry

Poet and classicist Anne Carson has created a beautiful thing here. And this is a remarkable achievement. I am going to sound snobby, but most often when poets produce an art piece, they more often than not get the art part wrong. So often, no matter the quality of the verse, the art that accompanies it looks either dated or intrusive, the work of an artist friend of middling talent who produces work that on its on is unlikely to ever receive serious attention. Even very good artists seem to flo...more Poet and classicist Anne Carson has created a beautiful thing here. And this is a remarkable achievement. I am going to sound snobby, but most often when poets produce an art piece, they more often than not get the art part wrong. So often, no matter the quality of the verse, the art that accompanies it looks either dated or intrusive, the work of an artist friend of middling talent who produces work that on its on is unlikely to ever receive serious attention. Even very good artists seem to flounder when brought into this kind of project. I know there are countless exceptions to this, but we've all seen this stuff.

Nox reproduces in accordion folds a commemorative book the Carson made after the death of her brother, Michael. It comes handsomely boxed, and the reproductions of the original pages capture the subtlest line of pasted white on white paper, the wrinkling that has comes from either water or too much Elmer's glue, the stains and marks that come from incised letters on the preceding page. There are both typed and handwritten texts, collage elements, and family photographs that appear to be from the 1950's.

The first page has a typed copy of a Latin poem, titled or possibly labeled "CI." Other pages contain what promise to be a painstaking, dictionary definition of each word in the poem. These are possibly from an extant Latin dictionary, but the more one reads the language is at times too rich, the definitions to apposite to Carson's project not to expect she has worked on them herself. Other pages reflect on the beginnings of history with Herodotus, and photographs and stories introduce the theme of Michael's disappearance to avoid prosecution for dealing drugs. That was in 1978. Although he is heard from only a handful of times, the family knows he travels through Europe and India. He dies in Copenhagen in 2000, years after both his parents have died. Carson goes to meet his widow.

The Latin poem is Catullus 101, and elegy on the death of his brother. Carson says that she has had trouble translating the poem, but she does offer a translation a little more than halfway through the book.

I have recently heard the word "closure" a great deal, as though that is always what all of us are seeking. This is not a work of closure, it's a work of context, of complicating that context so that the reader of this intensely private material feels not so much comfortable in it, but at least free to move around.

Towards the end there are two more quotes from Herodotus.

So much for what is said by the Egyptians: Let anyone who finds such things credible make use of them. (2.123.1)

I have to say what is said. I don't have to believe it myself. (7.152.3)

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Feb 16, 2012 Mike Lemon rated it 4 of 5 stars

I really liked Carson's elegy for her brother, but just writing that does not do justice to where NOX takes the reader. Carson helps readers (at least, me) navigate through the muteness of death for those still living, the uncertainty felt for those away from us (in Carson's case, the brother living abroad), and the challenges of translating from one language to another.
The topic of translation, however, shifts from meaning solely lingual translation. Carson writes of the trouble of entering her...more

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Aug 05, 2011 Vicki rated it 5 of 5 stars

Anne Carson's Nox is gorgeously crafted, both as poetry and as a book and beautiful object. Carson collaborated with designer Robert Currie to create an extended accordion fold-out of a plump, substantial set of pages that have the feel and heft of a handmade scrapbook. The assembled and folded pages are stored in a sturdy, hinged box, in handsome, muted neutral tones with a family photo album snippet on the lid. The elegance of the outer package seems to be trying to contain the unravelled scop...more

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Mar 26, 2011 Kristin Boldon added it

Shelves: 2011, borrowed, the-morning-news-tournament-of-book

I'm not going to rate the book, because I'm not sure I understood it. This is a book-as-object, with a booklike box case which houses one long page stitched together. On the left pages, Carson has a Greek word, definitions and use in phrases; she is a Greek scholar and professor. On the right pages, she had snippets of letters and communications and history of her brother, who she hadn't seen in 22 years. Like memory, the right pages are fragmented yet relational. The pages are beautiful, and it...more

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Mar 16, 2011 Sherri rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry, family, death, tournament-of-books-2011

This book is a collage of fragments, and it is about the struggle to piece together a history of someone's life when you really know very little about them. Carson includes very few anecdotes from her brother's life, comments about Carson's own feelings about her brother, comments about the nature of history and lots of dictionary excerpts to illustrate her attempt to translate a Latin poem about grief. When she finally shares her translation of Catallus's poem about the death of a brother, it i...more

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Jan 10, 2011 Alastair added it

... I might have been disappointed, or (I suspect) the book takes some quiet time & some getting used to. It's a meditation on Carson's brother's death, via Catullus CI, in the form of an accordion-book, reproducing an actual physical object Carson made for her family. The crudity of the book definitely changes the experience of reading it (stranger still because some features of the original which might be considered undesirable, such as marks bleeding through the page & the imprint of...more

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Apr 09, 2011 Fred Moramarco rated it 4 of 5 stars

Nox
By Anne Carson, New York, New Directions, 2010.
Reviewed by Fred Moramarco

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” T.S. Eliot wrote at the end of The Waste Land, a poem which greatly expanded the boundaries of what poetry could be in the 20th century. As I was reading (or rather folding my way) through Ann Carson’s fragmented but moving elegy for her brother, Nox, Eliot’s line lodged itself firmly in my thoughts. And like Eliot’s masterpiece, Carson’s formal innovations stretch even f...more Nox
By Anne Carson, New York, New Directions, 2010.
Reviewed by Fred Moramarco

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” T.S. Eliot wrote at the end of The Waste Land, a poem which greatly expanded the boundaries of what poetry could be in the 20th century. As I was reading (or rather folding my way) through Ann Carson’s fragmented but moving elegy for her brother, Nox, Eliot’s line lodged itself firmly in my thoughts. And like Eliot’s masterpiece, Carson’s formal innovations stretch even further what we might think of as poetry in the 21st century.

First of all, there is the book’s format. It comes in a 2 ½ inch thick grey box that opens to reveal a thick, accordian-folded pull out that includes photos, scraps of letters, printed pages, stapled notes, drawings, smudges, false-starts, and several esoteric items a bit too arcane to identify. On the back cover of the book, the author has printed “When my brother died I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book. This is a replica of it, as close as we could get.” The “we” here is obviously the author and her publisher, New Directions, who worked together to produce this unique, unclassifiable work of art. It is a treasure to own, and to avoid any piffle about whether or not it is actually a poem, let me just say I suspect you will keep it on your poetry shelves.

The book is both a meditation on the death of Carson’s brother and a modern rendering of Catullus’s 101, an elegy on the death of his brother. When you open it past the title and copyright fold, you will find a fold with the name “Michael” scrawled across it six time and a slip of translucent paper with the words “Nox Frater Nox” seemingly pasted on it. The word “nox” in Latin (Carson is a classicist) means night or darkness and “frater’ is brother, so we have the darkness around her brother’s life. The second fold gives us a smudged Latin copy of the Catullus poem beginning “Multas per gentes” which is the basic building block of the work that follows. Almost every fold “annotates” a single word or phrase of the poem, underscoring what a tricky art translation is, since each annotation contains multiple possibilities. Even the smudging of the Latin printed version reminds us how difficult it is to get at the exactness of the poem’s language.

This is a book you really don’t read. You experience it physically, stopping at each new fold, taking in the full diversity of what you see and its relation to the author’s reaction to her brother’s death, and, of course, the universality of that experience as it is “pre-echoed” in the words of Catullus. She tells us why she is so drawn to the Catullus poem, which she “loved since the first time [she] read it in high school Latin class” and has tried to translate it a number of times. But an exact translation eluded her (although there is an attempt at exact translation included) as it does anyone who tries to convey a Latin sense of things in English. “No one,” she writes, “…can approximate Catullan diction, which at its most sorrowful has an air of deep festivity, like one of those trees that turns all its leaves over, silver, in the wind….But over the years of working on it, I came to think of translating as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch. I guess it never ends. A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end.”

Nox is the end-product of that prowling, and it too does not really end, but fades from view, like the trimmed photographs, faded and blurred text that conclude this remarkable volume. All things pass, but they leave their mark, and it is for us the living to acknowledge and record the presence they have left behind on our lives.
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Feb 02, 2011 Shappi rated it 3 of 5 stars

It seems lame of me to give this only three stars since it's such an amazing tribute to the author's dead brother, and so beautifully put together. As a book, though, I think it falls flat. There is too much dictionary-style listing, too much repetition of a single phrase. Reading it, I almost felt I was prying into her private diary (which I suppose is the point), but still. I will say that she does a good job of expressing many of the emotions (confusion, blankness, replaying conversations ad...more

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Apr 15, 2010 Elizabeth Scott rated it 5 of 5 stars

I've been trying to read more poetry and wow, am I glad I decided to do that. This very unusual collection--it comes in a box, and the pages unfold out--is like nothing I've ever seen or read before. Anne Carson wrote it in memory of her brother and talks about him through snippets of poetry, translations of other writers' works (Carson is a classicist and did the most beautiful translation of Sappho's poetry (what little is left, anyway), called, If Not, Winter), definitions (I know, but trust...more

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Jun 04, 2013 Ipsith rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

"Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate . . .
—Anne Carson, NOX

To read NOX is like unwinding an ancient scroll, or following a frieze around the porch of a temple, or tracing a history twisting...more

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Nov 30, 2010 Emily added it

Shelves: read-in-2010, favorites

Some straightforward observations about Anne Carson's elegy Nox: it comes in a large box, like a rectangular room. Inside the box is a free-floating accordion-style book, which though beautiful is difficult to hold comfortably in the hand; it bends and twists as one turns the pages. The book (the room) opens with an elegy by Catullus for his dead brother, in the original Latin, whose physical appearance is smudged and water-stained, and whose import is, of course, obscure to non-Latin-speaking r...more

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