The Nobel is "a recognition of a unique work that moves between reality, dreams, and fantasy and that sometimes approaches science fiction," according to the verdict. However, explaining Carson is a task that is partly simple and partly complex.
The simple version says that the Canadian poet applies the gaze of 20th-century experimental literature to classical myths, which are her academic area of expertise. This is more or less what Autobiography of Red is about, a long prose poem that sometimes tends towards a novel, and that speaks of the contemporary world through Geryon, grandson of Ocean and Tethys, of Poseidon and Medusa, the result of violations and aberrant loves, a deformed and solitary giant, a freak with red wings on his back and noble lineage, who had resigned himself to being a shepherd on an island near Cadiz with no other company than his sheep. In Autobiography of Red, Carson turned Geryon into Red, a teenager lost in the modern world and abandoned after his parents' divorce. His view of the world is fractured between outward life, which is hostile and incomprehensible, and inward life, which is full of sweetness and fantasy. Then, another kid appears in his life, a friendly and brave version of Hercules, who leads Geryon/Red to a moment of reconciliation with reality. By his side, Anne Carson's protagonist learns to accept reality and to love life with all its harshness.
The complex explanation of Anne Carson is detached from her themes and refers to her strategy and challenging attitude towards everything we take for granted in literature: the ideas of genres and themes, the implicit pact between authors and readers, the interplay of weights between ideas and images... Carson has said that her first fascination with poetry came from the sight of a bilingual edition (English and Greek) of Sappho's poetry. The two pages before her eyes, one readable and the other not, seemed beautiful to her like paintings, and that visual dazzle may be the core of Carson's idea of literature.
"All of Carson's books seek to recreate that youthful experience of being faced with an enigmatic, perhaps impenetrable text, but of great visual beauty: a text that arouses others' curiosity while also shying away from it. Books that blur the boundaries between genres and move freely through that marine delta where poetry, fragment, essay, narrative, and even academia converge," wrote critic Jordi Doce in the pages of La Lectura. In her interviews and public appearances, the Canadian writer uses the same evasive, almost challenging attitude. Some of her books have appeared with no biographical data other than "Anne Carson was born in 1950 and lives in Canada." She herself has said that she is more interested in drawing than writing and that her work is not valuable. "My personal poetry is a failure," she stated in EL MUNDO in 2020, when she won the Princess of Asturias Award. In that interview, Carson appeared with a tie and an almost masculine, black suit. The image seemed designed to scare off timid readers.
The idea of failure probably refers to her Red. The book had been conceived in its author's mind as a novel, but she had not managed to find the narrative flow expected of the genre. The text then disintegrated in Carson's hands into poetic prose.
Last year, the prize went to Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, and among the names in the running this year were Jamaican-American Jamaica Kincaid, Mexican Cristina Rivera Garza, Spaniard Enrique Vila-Matas, American Thomas Pynchon, and Australian Gerald Murnane. Her selection also represents recognition for a woman in an award historically dominated by Western male writers. Of the 122 Nobel Prize in Literature laureates, only 18 have been women.