Carole MasoReseñas

This book sat on my shelves unread over nine years, so I'm not entirely clear any more on what led me to add to my TBR list. I think I've read another of Maso's novels before, but I don't remember much about it either.

And when I picked up this novel, I wasn't sure how I'd get along with it as it was more unlinear and fragmented stream-of-consciousness than anything else I'd read recently, but the rhythm of the writing soon pulled me in: this is Ava Klein, dying, while thousands of thoughts and memories and allusions to the literature she's loved and worked with pass through her mind.½

Very thoughtful. Beautifully written.

I read this seven months after I gave birth, but I wish wish wish I had read it while pregnant. Maso's situation is unconventional, but she focuses mostly on her feelings about pregnancy, which are largely positive. She does, however, question her decisions at times, and doesn't (seem to) pretend to feel what she doesn't actually feel. That is to say, some sections, like her descriptions of the postpartum period covered in the journal, are almost shocking in their honesty (yet I completely related to what she describes).

One of the primary tensions she highlights is writing vs. mothering ("Already I have had moments of genuine mourning for my old life"). She's very concerned that she won't be able to continue her creative life. In this the book is similar to others like Sarah Manguso's Ongoingness, but Maso's book touched me far more deeply.

Negatives for some readers might be a) The vagueness of her disclosures - this isn't a tell-all diary or a frank description of her personal life. The focus really is on her feelings about pregnancy, and sometimes she leaves the reader with a lot of confusion about what actually may have happened. b) Sometimes the free-association can be slightly grating, at least to me ("I'm dreaming of France again").

These are very minor issues, though, and more of a description of her style than a criticism. For me, the high points were the description of the birth (stunningly gorgeous writing, and expressive of something I have found impossible to express) as well as the searing honesty of the aftermath.

A couple of my favorite passages:

"What was I thinking? To create a being who is going to suffer. To be responsible, utterly, for someone's death. A grave indictment. It was not a lark. Did I take this all too lightly? How else was I to take it and still go forward?"

"How was I to know that I was always just a shell? It keeps returning. How was I to know that I carried an emptiness so large, so wide inside me, like a child? Would the night devoid of stars realize it? Would the day without light? And that after those nine precious months I would become a shell again - only now to be so aware of it. How to know that the world would leave me this way forever - bereft."

This notebook has been more of a companion than I could have imagined. How strange that I have come to know it at this late hour. One more thing to lose in this chronicle of loss. And to those of you who will read this later, with a kind of magnifying glass, combing it for clues—What is its message, blurred, in a cloud bottle, washed onto a strange shore. I am broken tonight. More than usual even. Into your hands, Liz. The brunt of my bewilderment.

A clusterfuck, in the most deliciously visceral sense of the word. Change the hovering 'it was amazing' to 'it is important', and you'll be getting somewhere.

I have to wonder how many turned tail at the sight of 'Feminism' hanging out in the Genres section of the book page. This is the same train of thought that bemuses itself over the word 'polemic' being bandied with witless ease as an excuse for plunging the rating downward. Along with political, subjective, obscene. Don't even get me started on the word hysterical.

Try anger on for size. Fury, virulent coursing of blood and bone, seething in from unearned malice and spewing out in all forms and succulent fecundities. Whether 'tis just or not, unfortunately, depends on the perpetrator, and the 'Feminism' floating just above the 'Literary fiction' and sinking just below the 'Novels' should give you enough of an idea of just who fits the bill of 'righteous fury'. Patriarchy, anyone?

So, this particular tract does not let us escape. Suspension of disbelief is rampant, yes, what with the child prodigy and the Harvard professor and the murder and the sadomasochistic spurts and schizophrenia and the female. Yes. Female, with boyfriends cooling in the fridge. If they were male? Too common, been there, done that, got the t-shirt and the slogan and the society wide acceptance for that particular strain of human discordia. Boys will be boys.

Gender, class, race, intellect, sexuality, did I forget anything else? Religion, but in the barest sense of the phrase. Funnel the poor into hospitals and institutions and execution chambers unless they are very, very special. Special enough to merit that special cocktail of disbelieving glee, that dumbfounded savior complex that marvels at the genius that proved too much for all kinds of systematic oppression to contain. A gate breaker, for the realm within which she was supposed to stay has no place for her, not if she insists on doing as best she can. Yes, she. I'm afraid I must emphasize that till kingdom come and all the world's a stage for all players. You can have your white boys in lace and silk and person of colorface if you like that sort of thing but it's no substitute, what with its added tax of rape culture and involuntary female circumcision (notice the involuntary) and the lot.

It's not me spinning my wheels here. Defiance splays it dressed to the nines, admittedly plunged in the swirling cacophony of thought seizing upon thought in the glory of intersection and mental blockages, but all you out there gaping for your next fix of 'difficult', that listy list of Shandy inspired and its so few women, come. Here's one reddening to rot on the vine for your perusal, and as an added bonus, I will even namedrop. Lessing, Morrison, Jelinek. You have no excuse.

Leave your despised alone for once. Your feared, your wretched, your quarantined. Your homosexuals, your African-Americans, all your others, your women, your children. Your tired, your poor. Your refuse. Leave us be. You laugh. You choose to miss the subtext. You minimize everything. Nothing but hate and fear and ignorance. We hold these truths to be self-evident.

My amoral moody aristocrats. Your wars, your drugs, your thousand assaults on the poor. War without end, amen.

My eagle scouts. My heads of state. My government.

Step right in. The water's ripe.

This book is true. True to the fragmentation and ragged edges of life. True to all the ways that we open ourselves up to grief when we love another person. True to the ways that we can use art as a shield, a barrier to hold loss and pain at arm's length -- as well as to the ways that art can help us to truly acknowledge tears and heartache among laughter and joy, restoring life to its complex, multidimensional whole.

I know that this is a book I will revisit time and again, when I need to remind myself of the lessons Maso explores through words, images, memories, a collage of stories within stories, with her own story eventually breaking through. As she finds her voice, we find our voices with her.

Maso published The Art Lover in 1990, and it is set from Spring 1985-Spring 1986. Through Maso's novel, I travelled back in time to that period, as she reconstructs the quiet, the all too quiet agony of the early years of the AIDS epidemic. She juxtaposes the lonely deaths of young men on AIDS wings of NYC hospitals with the very public deaths of the Challenger astronauts. And rather than keeping death and loss at an abstract distance, within the pages of a newspaper or on a television screen, Maso constructs frames within frames to tell more personal tales of loss.

The primary narrator of The Art Lover is Caroline, a writer who published one successful novel, but who is struggling to write her second novel. Caroline is mourning the recent death of her much loved and very complex father, Max. Her reflections on her recent loss lead her to grapple with other profound sources of grief and loss in her life, both in the past and in the future.

One way in which Caroline deals with her grief is by exploring loss in her second novel, through the whirlwind of emotions that surround a man's decision to leave his wife and two daughters for another woman. Maso skillfully moves us back and forth, from Caroline's present, to her memories of the past, to fragments from chapters of her novel-in-progress. Interspersed among these passages are newspaper clippings, star charts suggesting a search for destiny, reproductions of artwork depicting scenes of death and redemption, dialogues in which Jesus voices doubt and fear, not to himself in Gethsemane but to characters in the novel. The juxtaposition of these fragments of words and images leads to a subtle, insightful, honest exploration of loss, uncertainty, fate, love, and memory in which art can serve as a means to make pain abstract and distant, or can lead to deeper understanding and, perhaps, transcendence.

This is a beautiful book if you have the time to sit with it, and read, and reflect, and go where Maso leads. And just as she finds her voice in a breathtakingly personal section late in the novel, so you may find the courage to face your own grief and pain, finding love amidst the tears.

http://wineandabook.com/2012/07/30/review-beauty-is-convulsive-the-passion-of-fr...

"Something strange had happened. Frida was totally nude. The collision had unfastened her clothes. Someone in the bus, probably a house painter, had been carrying a packet of powdered gold. This package broke, and the gold fell all over the bleeding body of Frida. When people saw her they cried, "¡La bailarina, la bailarina!" With the gold on her red, bloody body, they thought she was a dancer." (p.33)

In college, I was three measly credits shy of a double major in Art History, and any lecture that focused on the work of Frida Kahlo was always a highlight. As an artist and as a woman she was vibrant, outspoken, honest, raw and incredibly talented.

Carole Maso's poetic exploration of Kahlo's life did for Frida lyrically what Julie Taymor did for her cinematically. Both were haunting, dreamlike, and pitch-perfect in capturing Kahlo's aesthetic.

Maso drew from Kahlo's own diaries, medical documents, and letters as well as her biography to craft her poetic exploration of/dialogue with Kahlo's life and art. I found Beauty is Convulsive incredibly hard to put down, as Maso managed to really appropriate Kahlo's use of startling, jarring, hallucinatory imagery in her work to create a piece that was moving and visceral.

"Beauty is convulsive or not at all." (p.124)

Rubric rating: 8.5 I am adding Room Lit By Roses and Break Every Rule: Essays on Language, Longing, and Moments of Desire to my epic "to read" list, and I'm adding Beauty is Convulsive to my "must purchase" list.½

I realize this book is meant to be experimental, but I think it needed quite a bit more editing to really work. The end of the work is more closely knit and clear, but for the most part, I found this work to be fairly self-indulgent and repetitive, and more along the lines of a fragmented memoir that needed editing, as opposed to an accessable narrative.½

It's hard to exactly classify Carole Maso's Ava. Calling it "prose-poetry" pigeonhole's it unnecessarily and perhaps makes it sound more difficult than it actually is.

But labeling it "avant-garde" or "experimental," appropriate descriptions each, might make it seem rather preciously pretentious, a book for hoity-toity muckety-mucks to show off how artsy-fartsy they are, which would be a damn shame, since the book, despite its unorthodox styling and unique narrative voice, is eminently accessible, readable, no matter its multilayered cinematic, classical musical, philosophical, and effusive literary allusions -- professorial, that is, and no surprise, since Ava's a comparative lit. professor -- foundations. I found it trance-inducing. And I loved its seamless poetics.

The rhythm of her fiction, the cadence of her diction, mesmerizes. One does indeed become entranced with even as little as a glance at her unique novel -- and let's call it that if we must call it anything, a "unique novel" -- a book that begins creeping up on you as you read it (if you let it drizzle in during long silent sittings and musings with it), flooring you (and never boring) with its terse visions and invocations of ... life ... loss ... longing ... love ... art ... looming death ...

Brief description from the jacket blurb sums the plot up best:

"Ava Klein, thirty-nine, lover of life, world traveler, professor of comparative literature, is dying. From her hospital bed on this, her last day on earth, she makes one final ecstatic voyage.

"People, places, offhand memories, and imaginary things drift in and out of Ava's consciousness and weave their way through the narrative. The voices of her three former husbands ...

"The voices of her literary lovers as well are woven into the narrative: Woolf, Eliot, Nabokov, Beckett, Sarraute, Lorca, Frisch, among others. These writers comment on and help guide us through the text..."

Below is an excerpt from Ava. And note the double-spacing is also Maso's; the spacing adding that extra dimensionality of empty-space effect, mirroring on the page Ava Klein's disjointed, and perhaps medicated, free-associative remembrances:

"I might turn the corner and there will be Cha-Cha Fernandez walking his Doberman pinscher.

"Or Carlos and Ana Julia in a boat.

"And there's Danilo, feeling mortal again, slipping his hand under my hospital gown to touch my breast.

"I remember the way she covered her mouth with her hand. Seventy now. Beautiful, flirtatious, when I bring up his name -- like a young girl.

"Matisse.

"Matisse gazing at her living flesh as I gaze now...

"Delphine, who once modeled for Matisse, now a sculptor in her own right.

"Maria Regina slicing a peach in the white kitchen.

"Preparing the meat for braciole. Laying the pasta for ravioli to dry on the bed."

[Pardon the interruption, and perhaps my stating the pointedly obvious: but note the subtle way, with the near internal rhymes of "peach" and "meat" and "braciole" with "ravioli" in the preceding two lines, how Maso ever so subtly (poetically) free associates, connects, her fragile strands of experience. The novel is replete with that type of artful association.]

"In the country she made proscuitto. Cured olives.

"All that was delirious and perfect. And how swept up in it all we were, Francesco: the films and choosing the music -- Khachaturian's Masquerade.

"The books read out loud to one another in our first languages.

"Pavese, Calvino, Canetti. Read them again, Francesco."

I could go on with the excerpt, quote the entire novel quite easily, it's all that good; but ... hopefully, that smidgen provides a good vibe, good feel for what I was attempting to describe and what you'll experience reading this evocative novel. The closest approximation to Ava, in terms of its narrative construct, that I've encountered, would be David Markson's, Wittgenstein's Mistress, a novel that also employs short, blunt declarations rarely exceeding three sentences, made by an unreliable narrator, to haunting, and foreshadowing, effect.

Carole Maso's Ava, a novel that's felt as much as it's read. In fact, facing death never felt so, oddly ... good.

For me, Maso's prose is addictive. I read and reread paragraphs like this one: "Often she tried to hold back despair, stave off depression with another affair. To lose herself there. In dazzling silence with a stranger. Where everything disappeared, every place, every name. Until she became a blank page." Maso loves the word "dazzling," the idea of the blank page, liminal spaces filled with possibility. I've tried teaching her books (not this one--too erotic), but my students always dislike her, finding her language too self-absorbed, too pretentious.

For me, Maso's prose is addictive. I read and reread paragraphs like this one: "Often she tried to hold back despair, stave off depression with another affair. To lose herself there. In dazzling silence with a stranger. Where everything disappeared, every place, every name. Until she became a blank page." Maso loves the word "dazzling," the idea of the blank page, liminal spaces filled with possibility. I've tried teaching her books (not this one--too erotic), but my students always dislike her, finding her language too self-absorbed, too pretentious.½

Caroline, the novel's protagonist, is living in her recently deceased art historian father's apartment, visiting a dying friend in the hospital, and writing a novel about a composer father leaving his wife and two daughters for a younger woman. Interspersed are New York Times star maps, paintings, and musings about the life of Jesus.

The Art Lover teeters on the edge of preciousness - the characters and emotion are real and present, but a novel about people seeing the world through art about artists risks being detached. On my second reading, now that I understand more of the references to independent films, classical music and gourmet food, it seems even more so. It's almost as if the two most important elements of the novel - a late 20th century conception of an artistic life, and grief - are warring with each other over connection with the reader.

I was very young in the '80s, but the pre-cocktail AIDS epidemic is very evocative. I think I might even remember the magazine covers Maso describes.

As a side note, the reviewer quoted on the back of the book as saying that "Maso breaks the fictive form" should be drawn and quartered.

I *hated* this incredibly depressing, pointlessly over-written book about a 'tortured artist'. Bah! I read Sylvia Plath in hs, thank you very much, and have no need to revisit *any* of that. Maso should use her powers of language for good, not evil. An American writer goes to the south of France to try to get over her depression, but simply spirals out of control into a world of self-conscious self-fashioning through sex, language, and madness. Not recommended.½

A great book to introduce Carole Maso, a difficult but worthwhile writer of the highest caliber. While some of her novels are hard to follow, this one has an actual plot and narrative sequence. Well worth the effort.½

Harvard math genious prof on death row b/c S&M murder; graphic & perverse

8.98