Also, this is all on me, but I'm unlikely to follow any deep Stein allusions. I kind of dig, but am a little nonplussed by, the before-and-after material here, which provide a kind of fragmentary, context-less framing for the main text-recreating some of the feeling of being translated from partial texts.

At club, we talked a lot about color symbolism throughout, and identified Ancash (Herakles' Peruvian lover) as a possible metaphor for the arrow that killed the mythological Geryon. This is a beautiful and image-heavy text Geryon's photography and synesthesia suffuse it. Loneliness and longing are the bedrock of the text, with the volcanoes throughout providing what one person at club called 'conceptual rhymes': an embodiment of Geryon's sexuality, fear, and alienation. Growing up on an unspecified island at some unspecified time (seemingly the latter part of the 20th century), Geryon falls in love with his Herakles, eventually running into him again in South America. The way the content is organized and presented is seamlessly smooth, innovative, and comprehensive. Everything you need for every book you read. Geryon is still, perhaps, a monster-completely red, and bearing wings-but also just a boy, and the novel pushes playfully at our belief/disbelief in Geryon's physical monstrosity. Our Teacher Edition on Autobiography of Red can help. The enjambment throughout made me really slow down it allows the imagery to strike with more force than if it had been written as straight prose.Ī re-telling of the myth of Geryon (a monster killed by Hercules), Autobiography of Red recasts the tale as a coming-of-age story. Mostly it's structured as 'long line/short line'. It's a novel-in-verse, but to my fairly-untrained-eye not too heavy on formal poetic structures: no rhyming or fixed meter.

This was full of delights, so I'm glad I got around to it. I've been meaning to read this for quite a while, and one of City Lit Books' clubs was reading it, so I finally did!

Autobiography of red