Is it verse or is it fiction? What a question. The most essential
fact is that this is a story, a love story told by poet and
novelist Carson ("Men in the Off Hours", 2000, etc.) in 29 brief,
lyrical "tangos" (which are kind of like stanzas, only a lot more
romantic) that have little quotations from Keats in front of each.
Basically, it's Girl-meets-Boy, Girl-gets-Boy,
Girl-and-Boy-grow-old-and-get-tired-of-each-other. A marriage, in
other words. Narrated mostly by the wife, it becomes quickly
lugubrious in a sort of Liv Ullmann/Sylvia Plath - ish kind of way
("I believe / your taxi is here she said. / He looked down at the
street. She was right. It stung him, / the pathos of her keen
hearing"), but it is a vivid portrait all the same, razor-sharp and
as quick as a flea. The lightness of touch is the saving grace -
narrated in standard prose, this would be at once unremittingly
drab and thoroughly old hat - that makes this doomed marriage
different from all other doomed marriages we have read about. It
even makes it feel somewhat less doomed..Slight, and slightly
weird, but worth a look. . (Kirkus Reviews)
Upon publication of her most recent collection of poems, Men in the Off Hours, Anne Carson was hailed by the New York Times Book Review for her 'great intellectual and emotional knowledge, to every bit of which she brings powerful perception and a freshness as startling as a loud knock on the door'. In her brilliant new book, as in her acclaimed verse novel, Autobiography of Red, she tells a single story. A long-time love, now a crumbling marriage, unfolds in 29 'tangos' of narrative verse, informed by the romanticism of Keats, the wisdom of the classical world and, most importantly, by Carson's own unique sensibility. The unnamed narrator - sometimes 'I', sometimes 'the wife', speaks of the man she calls only 'the husband', illuminating moments that are by turn sensual, erotic, painful and heartbreaking.
The Beauty of the Husband is a work that explores these oldest of lyrical subjects - beauty, desire, love, betrayal - with freshness and devastating power.
Winner of the 9th TS Eliot Prize for poetry.
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