Autobiography of Red
A novel in verse on a homosexual romance between two boys. Geryon "understood / that people need / acts of attention from one another, does it really matter which acts? / He was fourteen. / 'Sex is a way of getting to know someone, ' / Herakles had said. He was sixteen." There is a strong mixture of whimsy and sadness in Geryon's story. He is tormented as a boy by his brother, escapes to a parallel world of photography, and falls in love with Herakles--a golden young man who leaves Geryon at the peak of infatuation. Geryon retreats ever further into the world created by his camera, until that glass house is suddenly and irrevocably shattered by Herakles' return. Running throughout is Geryon's fascination with his wings, the color red, and the fantastic accident of who he is. Anne Carson bridges the gap between classicism and the modern, poetry and prose, with a volcanic journey into the soul of a winged red monster named Geryon. There is a strong mixture of whimsy and sadness in Geryon's story. He is tormented as a boy by his brother, escapes to a parallel world of photography, and falls in love with Herakles - a golden young man who leaves Geryon at the peak of infatuation. Geryon retreats ever further into the world created by his camera, until that glass house is suddenly and irrevocably shattered by Herakles' return. Running throughout is Geryon's fascination with his wings, the color red, and the fantastic accident of who he is.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
3mentions
2people
2016–2026years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Trading insults back and forth isn't going to be very conducive to a productive discussion. Why don't you tell me a little about your theory of moral values in cultural expression and consumption and I'll tell you a little about mine?
My instinctual position is that one's character (moral, aesthetic, civil, political, emotional, etec) is strongly influenced by the cultural media one encounters. I think encountering the wide range of human emotions and contexts available in fictional literature makes one more resilient when faced with adversity, and better able to make an informed decision that will lead constructively towards one's desired outcome. I also don't think literature is the only way to be exposed to that range of emotions and contexts.
I think the shift from interacting with a predominantly printed media to an interactive/hypertextual media has been a net negative for society, although I'd struggle to define the exact metric on which it's a net negative. I think the impact on attention span would be one of those negative impacts, but I'm aware of no hard evidence of such an impact, and would ask citations if someone made such a claim in debate. I've witnessed friends and loved ones, through their habits of interaction with online media, end up in a worse place than they would were it not for online media.
I have a handful of friends with whom I exchange books and book recommendations, and I've noticed and been saddened by noticing that most of what I get recommended is somewhat pulpy sci-fi and fantasy, and while I recommend my share of that I also recommend a lot of books with, for lack of a better phrase, more "aesthetic value". Some of the books I've been pushing on people in the past few years, with varying success, include: A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, The Great Gatsby, Mind and Nature by Gregory Bateson, Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, (v.) by Anastacia-Renee, and Winter Mythologies and Abbots by Pierre Michon. They're all excellent books!
But you're right, I am somewhat of a moral relativist. I think it's very hard to objectively compare different cultural values or cultural habits of media interaction. I think it's easy to fool oneself that one's personal preferences are morally superior to one's personal dislikes, and I'm fairly hesitant to listen to someone propound on that topic without seeing evidence of some fairly rigorous introspection and attempts to overcome those inherent, inevitable biases.
- 2025: Krasznahorkai -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots
2024: Han Kang -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots
2023: Jon Fosse -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots
2022: Annie Ernaux -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots
2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah -- there are homoerotic themes in some of his work but the characters are not gay in terms of their identities, and homoeroticism has more to do with the ideas of power rather than sexual identities
2020: Louise Gluck -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots
2019: Peter Handke -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots
2018: Olga Tokarczuk -- I think her work is the one that fits your description best
2017: Kazuo Ishiguro -- no LGBT themes explicitely AFAIK, but queer readings of his work are a thing
2016: Bob Dylan -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots
Gurnah is an immigrant (a refugee to be more precise) who can be considered living "in a diaspora" and his work does focus on the topic prominently. Ishiguro is a British citizen who thinks of himself as British, I believe, his parents moved when he was very young IIRC. He didn't visit Japan until his adulthood. I don't think his works are "disapora-adjecent" thematically but I only read two of his novels, so not completely confident here.
The rest write in their native languages and live in their birth countries.
I believe when you mention Carson's LGBT text, you refer to Autobiography of Red, it was written in the late 90s, not this year.
Edit: fixing typos, punctuation, and wording
- Language in Thought and Action, S.I. Hayakawa
How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler
Gilgamesh
Beowulf
Snowcrash
High Output Management, Andy Grove
Hell's Angels by Hunter S Thompson
Programming Pearls, Jon Bentley
Walden, Thoreau
Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
Letters from a Stoic, Seneca
Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein
Tyranny of Words, Stuart Chase
Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon
Disrupted, Dan Lyons
Big Data, Nathan Marz
Practical OO Design in Ruby, Sandi Metz
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainier Maria Rilke
Anatomy of a City, Kate Ascher
Language and Thought by Chomsky
Hero of a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell
Language and Responsibility by Chomsky
Magic, Science, Religion by Malinowski
Meditiations by Marcus Aurelius
Oranges by John McPhee
The Dream of the Enlightement, Anthony Gottlieb
Nonexistant Knight/Cloven Viscount, two novellas by Calvino Italo
Deltoid Pumpkin Seed by John McPhee
Infrastructure by Brian Haynes
I'd recommend almost all of them, but especially the first two, and Autobiography of Red(poetry).
