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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811
EAN: 9780375707575
ISBN: 0375707573
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 160
Publication Date: 2002-02-19
Publisher: Vintage
Product Release Date: 2002-02-19
Studio: Vintage

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 erotic, painful, and heartbreaking scenes from a long-time marriage that falls apart. Only award-winning poet Anne Carson could create a work that takes on the oldest of lyrical subjects–love–and make it this powerful, this fresh, this devastating.

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: beautiful
Review: A book that captures the beauty and difficulty of love, relationship, and time, more than any I have read.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: What does the lover want from Love?
Review: The storyteller in the The Beauty of the Husband is a woman who may or may not be Anne Carson, recollecting a failed marriage with a beating mind. The plot is nothing but her ability to bring in everything is astonishing. Like other great stylists - Antonioni, Proust, Picasso, Paul Taylor, her way of telling a story is peerless. Because after you have grasped the story why go back except to relish in style. As Godard pointed out, "what is art except that by which forms become style."

"How sharp the point of this remembrance is" according to Shakespeare. So put on Piazzolla, read this book and answer for yourself what a lover wants from the beloved. Start with a little beauty and truth...

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Extraordinary Book from the Best English-speaking Poet
Review: This is Anne Carson's lastest book, and as with any wonderfully original talent, it is her best. Here there is her characteristic wry tone overlayed with a fine intelligence that only Seamus Heaney currently can rival. Do NOT miss this book!

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Certainly weaker than some previous work
Review: Through the first half of this book, I was disappointed. Although Anne Carson was continuing her interesting use of language and her use of Keats quotations was brilliant, the volume lacked universality. It presented a courtship and marriage every dependent upon the particular individuals and their peculiarities. The courtship and marriage of individuals unknown to the reader has limited interest.

Fortunately, through the remainder of the book, Anne Carson finally finds her voice for this book. It becomes an interesting exploration of beauty especially beauty in the context of marriage. In one brilliant chapter she gives quotations of elegiac couplets recording the view of a branch through her back kitchen window. After a sampling of seasons, she closes with "Well I won't bore you with the whole annal. Point is, in total so far, 5820 elegiacs/ Which occupy 53 wirebound notebooks, / Piled on four shelves in the back kitchen. . ." She succeeds in painting a picture of a year's psychological response in a truly innovative manner.

Any author continually expanding their repetoire will make some missteps. This volume includes some of Anne Carson's missteps but it also includes some exciting innovation. Read and enjoy but don't expect perfection.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: amazing
Review: beautiful and shocking. a piece for any reader. the essential beauty and shocking nature of the human is wonderfully conveyed in this piece. i participate in competitive forensics and placed 9th in the state with this piece, in my first year. the piece has so many levels that it can be understood and throughly enjoyed by the least literate, least educated and those with doctorate degrees in literature. while it may not have the same spirit as many of carson's other works, it has a beauty of its own as it creates a very complex comprehensive story of a husband and betrayed wife, with wonderful words in the 28th tango. remember "hold, hold beauty."

those who are still trapped in carson's other works remember to allow the writer grow too, don't confine her to what you think she should be doing. remain open to changes in carson... she has not yet reached her prime.

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