Wrong Norma

by Anne Carson

As with her most recent publications, Wrong Norma is a facsimile edition of the original hand-designed book, drawn and annotated by the author. Several of the twenty-five startling poetic prose pieces have appeared in magazines and journals like The New Yorker and The Paris Review.

Anne Carson is probably our most celebrated living poet, winner of countless awards and routinely tipped for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Famously reticent, asking that her books be published without cover copy, she has agreed to say this: “Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night, Sokrates, writing sonnets, forensics, encounters with lovers, the word ‘idea’, the feet of Jesus, and Russian thugs. The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them ‘wrong’.”

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Short Stories, Nonfiction, Canada, Contemporary, Female Authors

192 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 6, 2024

About the author

Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of Classics. Carson lived in Montreal for several years and taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton University from 1980 to 1987. She was a 1998 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She has also won a Lannan Literary Award.

Carson (with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art) blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Ancient Greek literature. She has published eighteen books as of 2013, all of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non-fiction. She is an internationally acclaimed writer. Her books include Antigonick, Nox, Decreation, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Economy of the Unlost; Autobiography of Red, shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, and Glass, Irony and God, shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Carson is also a classics scholar, the translator of If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, and the author of Eros the Bittersweet. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her latest book, Red Doc>, was shortlisted for the 2013 T.S. Elliot Prize.

Reviews

[kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

UNFOLLOW ME NOW THIS IS THE ONLG THING IM GOING TO BE TALKING ABOUT SCREAMING CRYING THROWING UP ANNE COMING IN CLUTCH WITH A NEW WILL TO LIVE BYE

[Ruby Payne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not joking - This has changed how I think about literature and what it can do. Like Sebald. It's fallen into my lap as I am writing an essay on poststructuralism and I am convinced she is a genius. It's like a game, and it's so sparse but there is so much to be found and dug out and I will reread it in a year and reread it differently completely. Read it in order, it is not an anthology, the threads get thicker and stronger as you go through and the universe all winds up and everything is explainable and this is the best book ever for now

[Jillian B · Rating 5 out of 5]

This fantastic collection blurs the lines between prose poetry and literary fiction. Each of the short narrative pieces included is bizarre but also beautiful. This definitely isn’t going to be for everyone, but it is a master class in poetic writing.

[Ken]

A collection of unrelated writings, more prose than poetry, Anne Carson's Wrong Norma comes across like journal entries, entertaining because they are so different and unpredictable. Some are in the form of verse, others as dialogue/plays, others still as letters. At the end we even get illustrations with lines of poetry pasted over them. That one's about Paul Celan (poet) visiting Martin Heidegger (German philosopher and Nazi sympathizer).

Weirdly wonderful, though I freely admit not all pieces entertained equally. Some were rather "meh" while others kept my constant as in attention. That said, I like this sort of thing, especially when it's by an author I respect and have previously read (Anne Carson fits the bill). If Anne handed me her journal and said, "It's not ready for prime time, but if you want, take a look," I'd happily comply. And here I am, after the happy fact.

[michal k-c · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carson’s commitment to the avant garde is compelling and it makes me quite sad to think that we are firmly in her late style period. Even still, she’s as inventive as ever. Five stars for the Heidegger drawing alone.

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 5 out of 5]

“What are you reading?” my wife asked. How to explain Anne Carson to someone who has never read any of her work? “She is a Canadian classicist,” I said, “she translates Ancient Greek writers, playwrights and poets, and then she also messes with things. She wrote Norma Jean Baker of Troy, mashing together the myths of Helen and Marilyn Monroe.”

There are twenty-five short pieces in ‘Wrong Norma’ plus numerous illustrations also by the author. Some pieces are only a page long, others are as much as thirty pages of connected story.
One chapter is a letter. “Dear Krito’ is supposed to be from Sokrates to Krito, written from prison. The philosopher thanks him for the hemlock. I don’t know that much about Sokrates, but I do know that nothing he wrote himself has come down to us. Pretty much everything we know of his philosophy comes from the writings of Plato, but this first page of the letter has an authentic feel to it. Turn the page and Carson starts riffing on Bob Dylan and Iggy Pop, so no, it probably isn’t a really authentic letter, just one that might have been written had Sokrates lived in contemporary times.

One or two pieces that really impressed me:
From the story called ‘Flaubert Again’,

Where would you put a third arm? is a question asked in creativity assessment tests, or so I have heard. Will this different kind of novel be like that, like a third arm? I hate creativity (she said). Certainly not like a third arm. It would be less and less and less, not more. Barthes died, he never got there. She named other attempts, Flaubert, etc. Other renunciators, none of them clear on what to renounce. This chair I’m sitting in (she thought). Its fantastic wovenness, a wicker chair, old, from the back porch, brought in for winter. Me sitting here, by a lamp, wrapped in a quilt, beside the giant black windows, this December blackness, this 4:30 a.m. kitchen reflected on the glass. The glass too cold to touch. The loudness of the silence of a kitchen at night. The small creak of my chair.

Carson brilliantly traverses the territory between the distant fantasy of writing a different kind of novel all the way to the very immediate sensations of the 4:30am kitchen and the ‘loudness of the silence’ around her.
And then she continues with more that places all of us who claim to dabble in writing right alongside her:

To be a different kind of novel it would have to abolish something, abolish several things – plot, consequence, the pleasure a reader derives from answers withheld, the premeditation of these. Abolish, not just renounce them. To renounce is weak, reactive, egotistic. If she were ever really writing it would pull her down into itself and erase everything but her decency. She would correspond at all points to her story but her story would not be a story of heaven, hell, chaos, the world, the war at Troy or love, it would be just telling itself. It would have no gaps, no little indecent places where she didn’t know what she was talking about. Because (she wanted to say) it would be a story of nothing and everything at the same time, but by now, while only dimly realising she was more or less quoting Flaubert’s 1852 letter about “A book about nothing” that everyone quotes when they have this idea the first time, she knew she had lost it, the murmur, the trace, the nub where it was her own and (whatever “own” means in a world where it is also “again”). She was forfeit, foolish, flailing, inexact and rattling on, it had eluded her, it lets me go! I cannot bear to be let go, clenched in my quilt, a phantom receding, it rustles off, the dawn barely blueing the air, the static stopped.

In one of the other longer pieces called ‘The Visitors’ a film crew turns up in the house where the author is living, taking over several rooms for a couple of days. The experience is chronicled under the headings of the days of Friday, Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday afternoon the author learns that the film crew is from Iceland and this sets her off on a memory which I love:

Sneaking about the halls, eavesdropping here and there, I learn a few things. They are from Iceland, these visitors, which explains a lot. Perhaps you’ve been to Iceland? I went once, I couldn’t stay. There is nothing there but emptiness. A gigantic empty wind wails along the edge of every minute and tosses the odd dazed seabird out onto the empty beach. When you drive the single lonely highway, a huge piece of emptiness drives along beside you and goes wherever you go, then piles up in your driveway at home on top of the emptiness from the other days. You see horses standing in the fields so soaked with emptiness they can’t move, they’ve been there for years, they might as well be waterfalls. Of course all this exerts a psychic pressure on inhabitants – the whole soul frays. I made lists while I was there. I took photographs too, but later at home found the emptiness had vanished from each one, leaving a tiny print. Pawprint, handprint, mouthprint, I can’t tell.

One final section that I must mention is the story called simply ‘Threat’. This is just a stunning piece of short fiction. There are so many great things about it – the very simple premise of a woman on her way to the gym who every day observes a man sitting reading a newspaper as she walks past. When he is suddenly not there, something alerts her to the need to understand more. All that remains where he had always been sitting was a pile of letters cut from a newspaper and a splatter of blood. Then we discover that our narrator is a pathologist, an expert in such splatters. And on we go into small town crime and drugs, petty criminals and revenge. The story pours out. She adopts a crow, who becomes her partner in crime. It is so inventive, so plausible, that I loved every minute of the story. A brilliant example of a flight of fantasy and a gripping plot. This is how to write short fiction.

[Kurt Neumaier · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this weird little book. Shout out all the weird little books out there.

[Kidlitter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ridiculous to give Carson stars - I can feel her withering gaze straight from Canada as I type, or perhaps icy indifference from her new abode in...Iceland? Ha! You either love Carson in all of her gnomic splendor, or are irritated beyond endurance by those brief little utterances, the quotes in original Greek that you'll never understand, her refusal to play the game. Will she win the Nobel Prize one day? I suspect her fans are few on that committee, despite her move to even more simpatico Nordic climes than a warming Canada can offer.

[prashant · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5.

untouchable

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

A restless, perplexing read that isn’t always pleasurable per se, but endlessly stimulating & ultimately rewarding. Carson’s writing has, for lack of a better term, an uncanny quality, as if she translates her writing into ancient Greek and then back into contemporary English again, a game of linguistic telephone that alters & expands meaning each step along the way. The result often feels slightly awkward, intuitively wrong—& yet iridescent too?

A line like “Washington’s eyes flapped open like a soul on a clothesline” is a good example of this; somehow it feels both utterly contemporary and like a random utterance snatched from a fragment of ancient text. As is the case with most of Carson's writing, most everything here feels like it jangles somewhere outside of time, staticky reclamations from an alternate historical timeline. To my mind "Lecture on the History of Skywriting" is the best illustration of this, & is my favorite piece collected in this brilliantly "incorrect" collection.

"I say this now to remind myself how words can squirt sideways, mute & mad; you think they are tools, or toys, or tame, & all at once they burn all your clothes off & you're standing there singed & ridiculous in the glare of the lightning."

[Matt★ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the honor of seeing Anne read from this collection at Dia in Chelsea last week. she claims these pieces are unrelated, but I believe any fan of hers will be able to find the faint threads that connect these pieces to each other and to all of her previous works: the clever wit, brutal imagery, and deep sympathy for the human condition. another banger, she can do no wrong!

[Matthew Boylan · Rating 4 out of 5]

You'll find very few writers alive today who have remained as authentic to their style and craft as Anne Carson. For decades now, she has forged her own path in a litany of mediums whilst writing in a distinctly unique style. Wrong Norma is no different. Her first published original work in 8 years, it is at points an Autobiography of a writer in symbols & metaphor, at other points a mass of disorganized notes and drawings, and at others Philosophic and meditative. Some things I grasped, some I did not, but I find it best to read on in spite of any confusion and let your subconscious fill in the blanks.
There are callbacks to previous creations, such as the beloved Herakles of Autobiography of Red , where a passing romance with one Alkmene, nymph of Argos, unusually tall, married, with light brown hair, spawned the inspiration for the characters creation, "Herakles was a thing of ordinary substance, a thing with specific life and limits in space and time. In other words he had to die."

In her words you find meditation on Time and aging, and aging as an artist alongside your work.

"Unfortunately I overlooked the essence of death as an event: it happens in time. For a mortal creature death is instantaneous - you're alive one minute, dead the next. But for a creature who exists (like myself) outside time, death has no instant. I have no instant. I am at all times. I have to watch my most beloved child burn to death at all times. And I always will."

At times a memoir, it often feels like a farewell. I find it hard to imagine she could ever give up writing completely, but moments in the book lead me to think otherwise.

"Every writers week arrives at a Saturday, a day when he wishes it were Monday again and he could start over with the innocence of his first sonnets. Or even the relative rectitude of Tuesday, when the enlightenment was dawning and Immanuel Kant was writing sentences like, "Two things moved me to wonder: the Starry sky above me and the moral law within me." Those Starry skies don't come back.

So now it is Sunday.
Creation rests. I close my notes. Like every author, when I come to the end of a piece of writing, it is quite clear to me that I will never write again. The upper air, the middle air, the lower air, is blank. Blankness plunges out of it. Blankness plunges out of it and goes elsewhere. And, I suppose, it will arrive."

And If the starry skies never return, we were at the least better off for viewing them in all their wonder.

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Warfare has grown increasingly faceless throughout its history. Surely Hektor and Akhilles looked into each other’s eyes on the battlefield, but in 1092 Pope Urban II found it necessary to outlaw the crossbow as being inglorious due to its distance from death, and by the 21st century a soldier in Nevada can push a button and have five people in Pakistan burst into flame. Without the face, no ethics: this is an old idea. But also, without the face, no function for me, nothing to write about. No one can make sentences using only verbs. No one can tell a story without believing in the reality of others.”

Anne Carson does whatever she wants!

A playful collection of microfiction, meditations, poems, scraps, collages, and all manner of other prosy ephemera. Worth reading for "Lecture on the History of Skywriting" alone. (Passage above from that piece)

[Icarus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carson is forever showing me the things a poem can be, and I cannot thank her enough for that. To attempt to describe her work feels akin to imitating the wind with breath.

[Suli Scatchard · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW.

I would love to climb into Anne Carson’s brain, I’m sat here thinking… this person is just so stupidly intelligent. This book blurs the lines between prose and poetry, it’s packed with endless references of all kinds and ultimately a book I’ll definitely return to. I feel as if there will be far more to unpick every time I read it in the future, I have a weird itch to return to it with a pencil and excitedly circle things. Carson’s handle on words is insane, and she is definitely deserving of being referred to as a wordsmith. Her ability to mash up historical/classical figures with the modern banal was amazing crafting, and Carson has nailed the art of short fiction (my fave!).

Reader beware, however, that this is not a book for those who like structure, clarity and coherence. It’s a collection of ideas, which at times makes it a difficult read, but always stimulating. This is the kind of literature I wish I could write lol.

Favourite sections:
- Dear Krito
- Eddy
- Lecture on the History of Skywriting
- Short Talk on Homer and John Asher’s
- Thret (Parts I-III)

[Katharina Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

this cursed (meant as compliment) collection feels like a “late work” in the way that it’s just SO meandering no fucks given (NOT saying she won’t publish more just like miyazaki hasn’t retired after boy and heron which was extremely “late work” coded) (assuming for a mom this genre is real and not just a criticism fad, which i can’t assert) AND sounds like a 20 y/o writer at the same time -
her language is so unguarded - i jolted pleasurably!!!
became increasingly interested in the use of 1st person - is it her? not her?
My favorite wrongs: LECTURE ON THE HISTORY OF SKYWRITING, POVERTY REMIX (Sestina), MEXICO!, SNOW. THRET is dark but so riveting. Generally some parts felt unexpectedly dark (Grimaldi will haunt me) - at some point i had to stop reading at night time - and crows reappear - and esp in THRET i was reminded of miyazaki when the narrator enters an ambiguous working relationship with a super-intelligent bird contemporary.
Controversial (maybe): I didn’t care much for the typewritten parts and collages, felt too dusty

[Jessamyn Duckwall · Rating 4 out of 5]

No one does it like Anne Carson.

Autobiography of Red and Nox will always be big favorites of mine. Wrong Norma had pieces I deeply deeply loved (“1=1” and “Lecture on the History of Skywriting”) and others that I struggled to connect with (the “Thret” series and “We’ve Only Just Begun,” for instance). Such is the nature, I suppose, of a collection of “not linked” (as Carson puts it) short pieces. Still gets four stars because of the undeniable presence of Carson’s distinctive poetic and rhetorical voice, which I adore.

[Mack · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started this when my brain was being weird and bad so it was hard to get into at first but then it got so good and one day i’ll read it again

[Brooks Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really good!

Second Carson book I read "this" year (technically finished in 2025 but started in 2024) and the one I preferred. Phenomenal sequencing and book design. Nice assortment of long pieces with short pieces; cryptic pieces with more accessible pieces (although anything by Carson always has some pleasurable currents of cryptic running through it, to be sure); and more traditional poetic forms with less traditional.

In this book, Carson once more makes a compelling argument that she is the smartest person alive (who's to say she's not), and yet is also capable of being silly, superfluous, and earnest. There are some really beautiful moments in this book, made all the more beautiful by how brilliant Carson is, if that makes sense.

Fav pieces:

1 = 1
An Evening With Joseph Conrad
Eddy
Fate, Federal Court, Moon (stunning)
The Visitors
"We've Only Just Begun"
Todtnauberg

Fav Lines

"The fate of the silveriness of the moon that no words can ever describe." (F, FC, M)

"Memory is a novelist, it saturates the data with its own toxins." (Mexico!)

"According to Emerson, who visited him in his cottage, Wordsworth offered guests one piece of bread and one cup of tea for dinner, if they wanted more they had to pay." (Poverty Remix)

"... when out of a pause she said, "It's funny to have no home" - funny being a funny word for what she meant. I say this now to remind myself how words can squirt sideways, mute and mad;" (Snow)

"I can read your trace." (Thret)

"Start in the middle... so as not to end up there" (What To Say Of The Entirety)

[Mela Kanootti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Suosikkikirjailijan kikkailua! Rikosaiheiden toistuminen yllätti. Teoksessa on fanituotteen tuntua, vähän sekalainen/epätasapainoinen kokoelma, mutta ei ihme!! Olen fani… Goodreads-arvosteluissa näkee samaa pakahtumisen tunnetta mitä itse koin tätä lukiessa; käsittämätöntä että voi lukea jotain tällaista!! Luin ensimmäisen novellin kesällä ja menin niin kierroksille siitä että piti pitää pari viikkoa taukoa… Tuntu etten kestä miten kiihdyttävän miellyttävää voi olla lukea, miten pärjää yksin tällasen teoksen äärellä, tuntu että tulee vedetyksi elämään jostain ikiaikaisesta loukosta! Sama homma aiemminkin Carsonia lukiessa, kiinnostaa kyllä tutkia mistä tuo intensiteetti rakentuu!!

Carsonin tyyli on tiivistä, kepeää ja mäjäyttävää! Koskettavat ja naurattavat asiat iskevät yllättäen, ja kohta taas löydän itseni yrittämästä selittää jollekin jotakin hauskaa tai askarruttavaa mitä luin tästä, koska se tuntui lukiessa yksinkertaiselta ja osuvalta kiteytykseltä, mutta lopulta ne havainnot karkaa helppoa selitystä…

Kauttaaltaan hurmaava kokoelma, kestänee myös uudelleenlukemista!

[Fin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rusty Godot!!! Genius stuff.

The hymns of the Rig Veda contain the following suggestion: "Something only exists if consciousness perceives it as existing. And if a consciousness perceives it, within this consciousness there must be another consciousness perceiving the consciousness that perceives," and so forth. You can pursue this regress in an inward direction, as Vedic scholars do, or you can go the other way and find sky upon sky upon sky perceiving all the degrees of consciousness in the cosmos. You need to take a breath to think this. And your breath is the thinking. We think each other back and forth, your mind and me. We write one another.

[Suzy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Carson grounded, settled in the everyday instead of her regular habitat of the ancient. Still very much herself; calling for Beckett and Socrates but trying to make sense of modern tragedies - “What is the kiss for, Grimaldi? Grimaldi: To buy love. Putin: What are the mirrors for? Grimaldi: To bend evil. Putin: What are the scissors for? Grimaldi: To cut me if I sin.”

[Royce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eclectic.

[Gorrit-Cor Lootsma]

One of those books where I really wish I had an English teacher (come back Mr. McGowan) to analyze it for me.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://youtu.be/r_xnoaTb0ks

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of Wrong Norma refers to the lack of cohesion between the short pieces of prose/poetry it contains. They mix moments of transcendent beauty and insight with baffling fragments that I could not usefully interpret. Among the former:

Chilled and stale as the old night itself she stood up and folded the quilt, wishing she were hungry but she was not, wishing she was the kind of person who took baths but, as a rule, she did not bathe. Part of the reason for this was that at the exact moment of lowering her body into boiling hot water, for a split second, this always happens, she is five years old again and it is Sunday night and she is horrified. Horrified why? She doesn't know. School on Monday? But she did not dislike school. Or maybe she did at first. Not later. At any rate there is a rolling all-pervasive upwash of dread, one great hot shooting surge of dread-sensation through mind and body, a sense - perhaps? - of Time, carrying a body on from Sunday night to Monday morning to every Monday morning after that and on and on to extinction, this progress, this exasperating, nonnegotiable, obliterating motion forward into the dark, the dark what? And what about the sheer searing thrill of it - boiling hot bath water, this could not be denied, a brilliance shot up through it and the body fairly sang. Then it was gone. Is there a childhood sublime? Does it end where expectation begins? For the sublime is punctured by egotism, by the rapt, hard, small beak of my self demanding to be me. My self finding the words for that. If I can find the words I can make it real, she thought and that was when she sat down to be a writer.

It was worth reading the whole book for that paragraph alone. My favourite section, however, was 'Lecture on the history of skywriting', which asks such wonderful questions as:

4. Do hawks and falcons look so fantastic rising and falling because they have the sky as background or would they look equally good flying through mud or a piece of corduroy.
5. Ontologically speaking, is the sky something or merely what is left over because everything else has edges.

While there were pieces in Wrong Norma that slid smoothly in one ear and straight out the other, the most striking will linger for a long time. The presentation and artwork are pleasing yet provide no thematic insight that I could detect. Reading Anne Carson always feels like a treat, though. She is a wonderfully clever, playful, and original writer.

[Kendall McClain · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5, I love her writing style I really really do but a lot of the topics didn’t resonate with me in the way her other works have. Moments of oh my gosh this is genius and other moments of well yes this is pretty but also I’m not feeling it. But Anne Carson is still in my favs of all time don’t get it twisted!

ALSO! I love all the Freud shoutouts those made me giggle, and classic Carson Greek moments which is always a treat.

[Lucy]

some pieces in here definitely forgettable for me but those that weren’t…. wow

[Kyle C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wrong Norma is a happily misshapen book, full of typewritten fragments, surrealist vignettes, dizzying anachronisms, and an untranslated page of Arabic. It is an anthology of fictions, prose poems and meditations that is mockingly cerebral, playfully childish and skittishly disparate. In one piece, the Sky writes the journal of a week (atomic fissions, astronomical upheavals, theomachies, an interview with pebbles, a conversation with Samuel Beckett—who goes by the name of Rusty). In another piece, the narrator thinks she meets Joseph Conrad and Freud. There is a whimsical translation of Socrates' speech to Crito ("you're an odd one, Krito. You look like Bob Dylan with your little gold eyes and your skinny arms...Remember the old days when they'd play Iggy Pop all night to break the prisoners down?"). Later in the collection, there is an adaptation of Alcibiades' cloying encomium of Socrates in the Symposium. While it might seem like an inchoate miscellany, Carson interweaves the collection with subtle motifs and catchwords—references to jam, snow, visitors, the forensic science of blood analysis, Éric Rohmer, and the periodic question, "What is your philosophy of time?" It's a polyglottal funhouse, full of etymological observations and linguistic wordplay, akin to the works of Guy Davenport.

The tone of this heterogenous collection zigzags between parodic and elegiac. In "Fate, Federal Court, Moon", Carson tells the story of a Yemeni refugee who appears in federal court and whose life is litigated under obfuscatory legalese—phrases like "standing and merit", "jurisdiction", "relief", the precedent of "Al Shifa", all torturous verbiage that renders the refugees' plight amorally abstract. The whole piece is constructed as a hymnic chant, with almost each sentence beginning with the words "the fate of..." ("the fate of straining to hear what Faisal's lawyer, with his back to us, says to the the judges. The fate of him perhaps saying that the government is asking the court to refrain from judging, asking the court to step back without knowing what it is stepping back from. The fate of proportionality. The fate of what is or is not a political question.") Hovering between the ethereal idea of fate and the nebulous details of the case itself, Carson mystifies the proceedings of the asylum-seeker. It is a lament of human rights made into verbal rigmarole, justice not simply deferred but disfigured by legal quibbling. A few pages later, the tone shifts into something droll and zany. In "Lecture of the History of Skywriting", the Sky conducts an survey of all the pebbles of the world:

Here's a precis of the most interesting answers that the pebbles gave to my questions.
1. smoothness
2. The Krumbein phi scale of sedimentology
3. Mars
4. golf on Mars
5. put up signs expressing state of mind, e.g. Yes! I love you! Help!

My questions had been concerned with the following areas, respectively:
1. criteria for racial or class prejudice in your community
2. a better way to judge the National Book Awards
3. favorite vacation spot
4. favorite vacation activity
5. what would you do first if you had hands?

It's a bizarre, wildly entertaining piece of writing in which the Sky sees itself both as a mythological god and father of Hercules, and also as an aggregate of atoms, light and chemical processes. The Sky, who transcends time and experiences every instant instantaneously, is paradoxically writing a diary, recording the events of seven days of the week, before the planetary orbits of an earth "day" and human "week" even existed, before the idea of "diary" could even be intelligible (in this it is reminiscent of Calvino's Cosmicomics but more quixotic and eccentric). Although both pieces might seem absurdly different, they cross-examine the deceptions of language—the government lawyer who says that "relief is unavailable" and the Sky which tries to describe the Big Bang in calendrical time, both are using words duplicitously.

Wrong Norma breaks poetic and anthological norms. It is the consummate work of a translator turning the practice of translation into toy-play, making language into a game, and stripping the classics of academic pomposity. But there is also a thesis that interconnects the pieces. In one essay, the narrator describes a German translator of American crime fiction who was fired because he couldn't find a non-obscene expression in German for "she crossed her legs". Words are constantly slippery and unwieldy. In another piece, a woman reflects on how odd it is that "you use needle for addicts and syringe for medics". Carson's reflections make clear the capricious nature of language, the words and distinctions which we take for granted but which, nonetheless, are arbitrary. Later, Carson reflects on a conversation she had with her mother who had moved into a retirement facility: "it's funny to have no home", to which Carson thinks, "funny being a funny word for what she meant". What exactly is "funny" and "un-funny" about her mother's situation, one is left wondering. Funny is not the right word (but is there a right word to describe her new home, her frailty and her loss of autonomy?) "Funny" is a placeholder, waiting for a more exact alternative. Throughout the collection, words are untrustworthy tools, useful on an ad hoc basis but never fully right for the occasion.

Whimsical, bizarre, funny, and also serious, Carson's collection shows an artist playing with her food.

[Päivi Metsäniemi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anne Carson on kirjailija, jonka jokin työ on minulla aina kesken. Ja heti, kun se tulee valmiiksi, aloitan sen uudestaan. Siksi, että en ymmärtänyt lainkaan tarpeeksi siitä, mitä luin ja koin mutta ennen kaikkea siksi, että kukaan toinen ei pääse lähellekään ihmisen sisäavaruuksien kuvaamisessa. Kun uusi teos, Wrong Norma, ilmestyi viime vuonna, lähetin puolisoni Berliiniin kirjakauppaan, kun postitse se ei olisi tullut tarpeeksi nopeasti. Eros, Katkeransuloinen ilmestyi 80-luvulla, ja minulla on siihen jatkuva laina kirjastosta - uusin sen 5 kertaa, palautan, lainaan uudestaan, uusin 5 kertaa. Lyhyiden luentojen kanssa teen samalla tavalla (aloita tutustuminen tästä kirjasta, se on helpointa ja koukuttavinta!) Albertine-harjoitukset on pieni vihkonen, jonka luen uudestaan aina kun törmään siihen. Punaisen omaelämäkerta on ilmestymässä suomeksi näinä päivinä, sitä jonotan kirjastosta (ja palan halusta tietää miten Maggie Nelsonin Red parts liittyy tähän). Muotokuvia ja kuinka pitää niistä meni kunnolla yli hilseen, mutta sivisti sekin. Carson on aina hauska, siitä ei pääse mihinkään; et tule koskaan haukottelemaan hänen tuotantonsa äärellä, vaikka kirjallisuutena se on hyvin, hyvin korkeata.

Wrong Norma on proosaa, mutta siihen määrittelyn mahdollisuudet päättyvät. Osa teksteistä on esseitä, osa novelleja, osa tilannekuvia: kollaasi kaikenlaista, toisiinsa pääosin liittymätöntä. Carsonin tuotannosta tutut antiikin klassiset hahmot seikkailevat erilaisissa väleissä, mutta niin taivaskin, rikolliset ja jokin uimisessa, äidin menettäminen. On ihan turha yrittää selittää kirjan teemoja, niihin on sukellettava itse. Varmaa on yllätys, se että välillä tajuaa enemmän kuin seuraavassa hetkessä ja jotkut asiat on luettava moneen kertaan.

Oma suosikkini on essee tai ehkä pikemmin novelli ”Lecture on the History of Skywriting”. Kertojana on taivas itse, taivaan synnystä tähän päivään. Ei voi kuin ihailla Carsonin mielikuvitusta; kuka ensinnäkin keksii kirjoittaa tästä aiheesta, ja kuinka voi keksiä kaikki nämä tavat käsitellä aihetta? Taivaan ja maailmankaikkeuden tiede ovat tiukasti läsnä, mutta kirjoittaminen seurailee romantiikan ihanteita.

Kirjan taitto on liikuttavan ihana, tämä ei toimisi e-kirjana. Lukujen välissä olevat muistilaput kysyvät oleellisia kysymyksiä elämästä. Kuinka pidät moraalin yllä pitkän projektin aikana? Siinä kysymys, jonka kanssa tulen työskentelemään taas tänäkin vuonna ja ajattelen että siihen tiivistyy jokin ihmisyyden kypsyydessä. Yksi pitkä projekti on oman ihmisyyteni laajentaminen Carsonin avulla. Tätä on kirjallisuus parhaimmillaan. Käännän kirjan ympäri ja aloitan alusta.