This morning the Swedish Academy gave the Nobel Prize in Literature to Anne Carson. She is 76 and Canadian and has taught ancient Greek for a living most of her life. Her agent called to tell her. According to the agent, Carson said, “Yikes.”
That was the statement. A woman in a blue blazer stood up in Stockholm and read a sentence about a bold and inventive oeuvre, and the owner of the oeuvre had one word.
I have been watching clips of her all morning. She wears a tie in all of them. She does not seem to enjoy being interviewed, which is the correct response to being interviewed.
Writers love giving advice. It is most of what they do instead of writing. She has three words of it and has never asked for any back.
Most smart people would rather die than admit they didn’t know something. She said it into a microphone. The woman who just won the Nobel Prize never looked it up, and I would follow her anywhere.
Anne Carson is the type of person you fall in love with the second you hear her speak, or see her, or get taught by her. Every novel, poem and essay I have ever fallen in love with, I fell in love with whoever wrote it too. If you watch her and think oh God, I’m in love with her, you need to read this book.
Her first book came out in 1986. It is called Eros the Bittersweet and it is short. It grew out of her doctoral dissertation, which she titled in Latin: I hate and I love, therefore I am. She was rewriting Descartes in 1981 and got around to checking him this decade.
Anne Carson wrote an entire book proving desire only works if you can’t have the person. I read it at 22 and mistook it for dating advice.
God, so many of you reading this haven’t read Anne Carson, and that kind of life is sending you on a path to nowhere.
I have wanted to start a book club for a few years. I was thinking about it last night, actually. The plan was January, when my podcast comes out. Then this morning I saw the announcement. She is the nineteenth woman to win this prize, out of more than a hundred and twenty winners. That book is special and important, and it just made sense.
So I’m doing it now, before the holidays. This is the scariest and most depressing stretch of the year and I don’t know why. The end of October is haunted. I guess that’s why they put Halloween there, to be honest.
Eros the Bittersweet is the first book. It explains, with receipts from ancient Greece, why the person you think about most is the one who is never quite in the room.
