H of H Playbook
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
'Fans of Anne Carson, rejoice!... Carson'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
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 "Labours 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
