Anne Carson's Nox was not, at first sight, the best choice to read in the sunshine, on the grass, beside the Thames, last Sunday afternoon. It is a book in a box shaped in homage to a coffin, a concertina of pages that would have been easier to handle in a chair and bears an eery resemblance to sheet for wrapping dead bodies, an assemblage of artful lexicography and personal memoir, fractured and reconstructed around a melancholic Latin poem.
Not only did I consume it at a single river-bank sitting but I found myself peculiarly compelled to stay on the summer lawn and write about it too. By the end of the evening I had learnt, relearnt and remembered a good deal, some of which I did not much want to remember - and finished the review that is in the TLS this week.
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