Decreation by Anne CarsonBorzoi Books (A.A. Knopf), 2005

I read this book last month, quickly, and loved it, though I didn’t yet have anything to say about it. So I took a break, read some lighter things, and then picked it up again. On a second reading, familiar with the arguments and names and allusions, I was more able to grin at Carson’s humor and wit and cleverness, of which there is plenty. Her language is precise, smart, and idiosyncratic. In “Every Exit is an Entrance,” she writes. “My intention in this essay is to burrow like a mole in different ways of reading sleep” (19). Later in the same piece, she remarks, “So let’s say in general Odysseus and sleep are not friends” (29). This book’s cast of characters is so broad: Sappho, Monica Vitti, Abelard and Heloise (these last two in a screenplay, Abelard absurd and pompous, Heloise sullen and touchy, more alive). And then there’s the title, the trouble of “decreation” (Simone Weil’s phrase), and the problem of wanting to make the self transparent while still being engaged in the project of writing: “a sort of dream of distance in which the self is displaced from the centre of the work and the teller disappears into the telling” (173).