I don't have much to say about this work ... except that it is the highest/purest/most beautiful thing a human being can create to honor someone who has passed away. No other epitaph could surpass this one. 192 I read this text as part of the curriculum for a university-sponsored weeklong poetry seminar. I love poetry, but readily admit that I don't read as much of it as I should. My encounter with this book and the others from that week really broadened the horizons of my limited experience.
Anne Carson uses more than her words to create her elegy for her dead brother: she uses pictures and other relics of their childhood, interviews with people from their past, and the definitions of Latin words. All of these things work together to present a sketchy outline of the brother she had not really known. Part of her grief stems from his loss, part in the fact that he was lost to her long before his death. She leaves us, the reader, with questions of our own as she never reveals how he actually died. To me, this was symbolic of her own unanswered questions at the end.
192 29/5/21 Update:
I think I underrated this book, in retrospect from my original review below. Nox sticks in my memory. I think the ambiguity bothered me. But with time I've seen maturity and necessity for distance in a memoir. This wasn't meant to be easy to understand, but it's a beautiful book, and needs to be seen that way.
—
15/4/16 Original
-
On a sunny day like today I decided read the elegy by a writer I might be seeing down the road giving a reading tonight. Life can be strange.
Me: I spent my afternoon with Nox today
Anne: That's good [*signing my newly purchased Autobiography of Red*]
Me: I unravelled it on my floor, and then on my bed, it was...fun.
Anne: Do you have two stories?
Me: What? [I've barely started working on a story :S]
Anne: Your house, do you have two stories in your house?
Me: Yeah [sort of]
Anne: You should throw it from the top of the stairs!
Me: Oh yeah that'd be great [my stairs spiral...]
Anne: You can also write on the back, the pages are blank on the other side
Me: Yeah [I have a university library edition so maybe not]
*Farewell*
Signed Respectfully, AC 2016
The book design is very nice and encourages alternative reading postures. I unravelled it on my bed as far as I could, it was 'fun'. This will appeal to people who do not shy away from semantic analysis.
-Why 3*s?
A rating system seems inappropriate for an elegy, but it bothers me to not have rated every book I have read. So I will imagine this were fictional and base my rating on solely on my enjoyment of the work (rather than, as per usual, whether the author met what I believed was their intention, whether the source material was worth this intention and this all weighed by how much I think this might be biased by my personal perspective relative to what I think is a general reader perspective...or something). 192 I purchased this beautiful artefact for my girlfriend last Xmas and received not the rapturous response required. A year later, I had a look. Too many verso entries from the Latin dictionary fail to spoil this quietly affecting and visually calorific tribute to a mercurial dead brother. It is the sort of thing that one might appreciate more in the wake of a loss, as Michael Silverblatt explains in this Bookworm episode, on which Anne Carson reads a poem from the book in Latin. 192 Video review, along with The Trojan Women and H of H Playbook : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo4Mf... 192
An elegy for an older brother Carson grew up with but she didn't know as an adult, really. The last twenty-two years of his life, she had five phone calls from him. Two weeks after he died she was contacted by his last wife, who revealed that the love of his life was really another woman he had never married. We learn Carson's mother mourned his loss for much of her life. We don't know much about Carson's own relationship to her brother. Not really.
Carson is the amazing Canadian classicist and poet and maker of interesting non-traditional books, equally comfortable writing about Sappho as being Sappho in her passionate poetry.
One of the most attractive aspects of this book is its format, an accordion-like production that comes in a large box, which would appear to be the facsimile of a process: On facing pages she seems to have torn entries out of Latin-English dictionaries (and/or written her own translations?) of words such as loss and grief and brother and so on, and on the opposite facing pages we have entries in notebooks, copies of old (1950s) photographs of them together, quotes from Basho, various other thinkers and poets. She has scraps of letters from him, scraps of her notes from telephone conversations, a spare narrative pieced together, some reflections, very little there of substance about him. Ephemera of grief. Longing to have known. Some sketches, drawings. Feels fading and faded, much of it, as if it is moving steadily and inexorably to dust.
The point would seem to be that we and language itself are unknowable, untranslatable. Carson translates works from authors centuries old in ancient languages that would seem to be continually fading away, lost to an increasing number of us. The meaning of words in translation get lost. It's like trying to make meaning from some ancient archaeological dig. In the wind. In the dark! In Nox!
Carson's brother's words are few and reveal little about his life. He never contacted his mother in the last seven years of her life. I am reminded of Jack in Marilyn Robinson's Home and Gilead, the prodigal son missing for that same number, 22 years, but suddenly home, so we can now learn a bit in scraps and jots about why he was gone for so long. Carson's brother does not do Carson and her family the same favor, so we can't have a novel about him. Only scraps and jots. Part of the mourning is having and knowing so little, and now gone. Absence. What does it mean? What sense can you make of a brother, long gone, now dead?
Nox: Night, in Latin.
Nox: A chemical compound, nitric oxide, a free radical.
Nox: A counter to the Lumos charm in Harry Potter.
Nox: scraps of light in a box. [stole this from Lee, thanks!]
For a classical scholar, Carson seems to me always to be remarkably experimental and unstuffy, but I know she would probably tell me that my comment reveals my ignorance about some of the fiery and passionate and often free-form work from the antiquities. Like Sappho.
This elegy reminds me of the remembrance of David Foster Wallace by his wife, Karen Green, Bough Down, which also uses some art to express what the written language cannot seem to do. The ineffable. The source of the lyric, what we call the poetic, just on the edge of language meaning.
We don't get to know Carson's brother, but we get to know the sad Carson a little here, in grief for the brother she never really knew as an adult, now gone. Like us, faced with meaning-making in a (sometimes? always?) void, with precious words. Ineffable. Nox. 192 An exploration of loss, of death and absence, in Anne Carson's always unique cross-genre style. Here, Carson uses a poem famous in latin classes across the world, Catallus 101 (in which Catallus grieves the death of this brother) as a mirror in which to reflect the loss of her own estranged brother--who was himself haunted by the death of his one true love, and killed himself 4 days short of a meeting he and Carson were going to have to end a 20 year separation.
The technique is presenting the Catallus poem being translated word by word--you can see all the various meanings of each word a translator must select among to assemble a poem in a new language. Like translating the scraps of her brother's correspondence and memories of him into the poem of this book.
which in itself would have been enough. More than enough. But this book is more than a work of literary art, it's also a visual work, an art work, an object, where the concrete text is visually tortured and washed out and overlaid--it's a box in which the work is printed on an accordion-folded continuous page, so that as the story is unfolded, the book is literally unfolded. I spread it out down my dining room table to read it all at once.
Fragile, mysterious, assembled, exploded, full of clues and gaps, the form and the content are spectacularly in sync. It wasn't cheap, but I have it in a place of honor where I can just look at it and remember the experience of reading it.
I think that as content becomes so disposeable and presentation generally more and more utilitarian, as the e-book becomes the uber-paperback, there will be more and more an opposite force--interest in the physical book as an artistic object as well as a conveyor of meaning. I believe actual books, particularly hardbound books, will become more beautiful, more highly designed, tactile and intricate. As a type/book arts lover, it's the silver lining. 192
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
192 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. 192 I blabber a lot about hybridity in writing. Can poetry intersect nonfiction? Can fiction play a role in both/either? I like playing with form and genre and breaking concepts of what genre is expected to be. I came across Nox in some of my research on these sorts of topics but, as usual, didn't investigate it too much beforehand. I put in a request at my campus library and waited for it to arrive. When the notification showed up in my email that this was ready to be picked up, I was eager to get my paws on it. And when I got there and the work study student stared at the box on the counter and looked at me and looked at the box and then looked to her boss I knew I was in for a treat. Her boss called from her office, Yes, the box. She requested the box.
I requested the box.
I didn't know the book I ordered would come in a box. But there it was. The work study student picked it up, almost gingerly, and handed it to me. I don't think she stopped staring at the box by that point. It was like she expected it to maybe bite her.
Anne Carson wrote this for her brother after he died. It was a handmade book with paper glued to the pages and photographs and dictionary definitions. It was a way for Carson to make sense of her grief, it was part of her process. And here, for all of us, is a facsimile of the handmade book, Carson created. Perhaps to help us each with whatever we are grieving. We all grieve something. Someone.
The pages are accordion-style. You could stretch all the pages out on the floor if you desire to, and then walk from one end to the other. It works like that. Or just turning the heavy pages as though you're reading a typical book. You can jump in anywhere. Life is an accordion-style timeline.
Herodotos tells us the king made this bowl in order to leave behind a memory or monument of the number. The number itself who knows. 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 (from Latin mutus...) 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. (Compare the Latin word mutmut, representation of a muttering sound, used by Apuleius). In cigarette-smoke-soaked Copenhagen, under a wide thin sorrowful sky, as swans drift down the water, I am looking a long time into the muteness of my brother. It resists me. He refuses to be cooked (a modern historian might say) in my transactional order. To put this another way, there is something that facts lack. Overtakelessness is a word told me by a philospher once: das Unumgangliche - that which cannot be got round. Cannot be avoided or seen to the back of. And about which one collects facts - it remains beyond them.I can be a bit iffy on books that feel gimmicky. At times during reading this I wondered if it was more gimmicky than was necessary, until I remembered, again, this is a facsimile of what Carson created to deal with her grief. How dare I accuse that of being gimmicky?
My mentor this semester recently wrote in one of her feedback letters to me: I think the different points-of-view you use work, but I like quirky writing.
Quirky. Writing. I haz it?
I'm still processing that.
But that's the point. (Well, it's my point and since a lot of what I read is for my own research, that's the perspective I take when studying these things.) Genre is fluid. Let's break some boundaries. Let's cross some streams. Let's see what might happen. In my case, it won't be an accordion-style collection of writing, definitions, letters, and photographs tucked away inside a box. But I can appreciate why Carson did that. To her, that made sense.
Let's all write what makes sense to us. 192
Nox is an epitaph in the form of a book, a facsimile of a handmade book Anne Carson wrote and created after the death of her brother. The poem describes coming to terms with his loss through the lens of her translation of Poem 101 by Catullus “for his brother who died in the Troad.” Nox is a work of poetry, but arrives as a fascinating and unique physical object. Carson pasted old letters, family photos, collages and sketches on pages. The poems, typed on a computer, were added to this illustrated “book” creating a visual and reading experience so amazing as to open up our concept of poetry. Nox by Anne Carson