H of H Playbook

by Anne Carson

Overview

A gorgeous facsimile edition (reminiscent of her classic book-in-a-box, Nox), H of H Playbook is a stunning re-creation of Euripides’s famous play, with illustrations by the author

H of H Playbook is an explosion of thought, in drawings and language, about a Greek tragedy called Herakles by the 5th-century BC poet Euripides. In myth Herakles is an embodiment of manly violence who returns home after years of making war on enemies and monsters (his famous “Labors of Herakles”) to find he cannot adapt himself to a life of peacetime domesticity. He goes berserk and murders his whole family. Suicide is his next idea. Amazingly, this does not happen. Due to the intervention of his friend Theseus, Herakles comes to believe he is not, after all, indelibly stained by his own crimes, nor is his life without value. It remains for the reader to judge this redemptive outcome.
      “I think there is no such thing as an innocent landscape,” said Anselm Kiefer, painter of forests grown tall on bones.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811231237
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	10/26/2021
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	1,035,025
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.60(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living.

Editorial Reviews

★ 12/20/2021

Carson’s latest translation of an ancient myth sees her interrogate the excesses and limits of heroism by bringing Euripides’s tragedy Herakles into a modern context. Updating the setting from ancient Greece to an airstream trailer, Carson uses a mixed-media approach complete with cutouts, handwritten text, drawings, and paintings to retell a story of madness while pushing the boundaries of poetry, translation, and the book form. In Carson’s version of the story, the protagonist is not Herakles but “H of H,” simultaneously the son of the god Zeus and a mortal father, Amphitryon, who wonders aloud how difficult it must be for his son to exist as this odd mix of human and divine: “What’s it like to wear an eternal Olympian overall// held up by the burning straps of// mortal shortfall?” The chorus of war veterans wryly consider H of H’s contradictory status as a hero figure who “likes to go berserk” but whose heroism “leaves him/ outsize and outside/ the civilization he’s saving.” Yet the hero remains blind to himself: “I look in the mirror and the mirror is uninhabited.” Weaving together a critique of masculine violence and cultish hero worship, Carson bridges the divide between ancient and modern worlds in this brilliant book. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote."

Susan Sontag

"A facsimile of Carson’s own personal playbook, “H of H” is a performance of thought, one that speaks not only to the heroic past but to the tragic present."

The New Yorker - Casey Cep

"Fans of Anne Carson, rejoice! From the iconic poet who penned Autobiography of Red comes a new retelling....Caron’s depth of knowledge about Greek mythology coupled with her poetic sensibility and illustrations is sure to breathe new life into this oft-told story."

Lit Hub - "Most Anticipated Books of 2021"

"Anne Carson’s shape-shifting powers are epic."

Vanity Fair - Elissa Schappell

"Carson’s visual sense for the dramatic is put to good use in a play that bends towards irony and philosophical meandering. The muted colors—broken up by the intrusion of bright red or blue—are used effectively throughout, adding emotional overtones to large expanses of silence and negative space, to violence happening offstage."

Arkansas International - Cal Paule

"Carson applies the habits of classical scholarship, the linguistic rigour, the relentless search for evidence, the jigsaw approach to scattered facts, to the trivia of contemporary private life."

New York Magazine - Sam Anderson

2021-07-14
Classicist and poet Carson produces a scrapbooklike rendering of a lesser-known Greek tragedy.

In Herakles, staged in 416 B.C.E., Euripides imagined the demigod returning home to Thebes to find his household under assault by usurper Lykos, who is bent on eliminating the royal house of Amphitryon. As with all tragedies, much of the context is provided by a chorus—here, of old men who, though wise, can’t do much about the situation. With a collagelike text incorporating drawings and sketches, some with splashes of color, Carson works a few plot points of the original, which contains about 1,425 lines as against Carson’s few score. It’s modernized, too; Amphitryon lives in an Airstream, driven from his palace by a “totalitarian cracker.” (It’s not hard to imagine whom Carson might have been thinking of there.) Although they have taken refuge at an altar, Lykos is so irreligious as to plan to burn out Amphitryon, Herakles’ wife, and their kids, “obliged to close our lids / before we’d like.” The chorus invokes V.I. Lenin and the dictatorship of the proletariat, while Lykos, entering with his goon squad, allows that he’s “a basically / outcomes-oriented guy.” When Herakles—H of H, that is, whose name is explained—arrives, he plangently recalls the labors he’s been set to do, again drawing on Bolshevik history and throwing in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park for good measure. Naturally, tragic things ensue; after a spasm of divinely induced madness that causes Herakles to distribute death a little more broadly than he might have wished, all he can say is “Alas” and long for death. Leave it to Theseus, his demidivine pal, to keep him on point: “What could be more useless than you limping offstage to die in a dead language?” Carson’s anachronisms, like those of Christopher Logue, are jarring but suggestive, and the language often attains a nobility worthy of the original tragedians, as when the chorus sings, “We go in tears. / So many swift and dirty years.”

An evocative, artful reimagining of the madness of an ancient hero.

Kirkus Reviews