The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (Vintage Contemporaries)

Anne Carson divides the collapse of a marriage into twenty-nine tangos in a poetic prose work. Using Keats's aesthetics as a starting point, it studies attachment, deception, and fixation with unusual precision.

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Work Information

A sharp book that compresses the relation between love and beauty into the story of a marriage coming apart.

Using Keats's 'beauty is truth' as a touchstone, the book traces the collapse of a marriage in twenty-nine tangos. Its controlled language binds intelligence and pain into a dense, memorable shape.

Review Summaries

Readers often respond to the sharp metaphors and the cool precision of the observation. Its blend of emotional force and intellectual structure is admired, even when the density of references feels demanding.

Book Information

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2002-02-19
Pages: 160 pages
Language: 英語
Size: 13.21 x 1.02 x 20.27 cm
ISBN-13: 9780375707575
ISBN-10: 0375707573
Price: 3105 JPY
Category: 洋書/Arts & Photography/Performing Arts/Dance/Tango

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.

ANNE CARSON was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over thirty years. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.

Reviews

The story of a marriage from its beginning to its end. Each "tango" is a dance that swirls you through the doubts and difficulties of marriage. Sometimes the wife leads, sometimes the husband takes the lead, sometimes both dance together, many far apart. It's a poem, it's prose, it's a song... I could not put it down!
Its the best written lyrical lines We empathize with the sadness of writer The journey of marriage that every body has expectations of joy, commitment, trust, chastity and love. Beauty is truth and that all i know.
Stunning writing
Quite intense story written in poetic format
Great read for lovers of poetry or romantic word play