Carole Maso
Autore di AVA
Sull'Autore
Fonte dell'immagine: Dixie Sheridan
Opere di Carole Maso
Opere correlate
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales (1998) — Collaboratore — 298 copie
Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New American Writers (1995) — Collaboratore — 122 copie
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Data di nascita
- 1956
- Sesso
- female
- Nazionalità
- USA
- Nazione (per mappa)
- USA
- Luogo di nascita
- Paterson, New Jersey, USA
- Istruzione
- Vassar College (BA)
- Attività lavorative
- Professor (Literary Arts | Brown University)
- Premi e riconoscimenti
- Lannan Literary Award (Fiction, 1993)
Utenti
Recensioni
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."… (altro)
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."… (altro)
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.… (altro)
10 
Korrick | 1 altra recensione | Feb 26, 2014 |
Korrick | 1 altra recensione | Feb 26, 2014 | Liste
Premi e riconoscimenti
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Autori correlati
Statistiche
- Opere
- 10
- Opere correlate
- 11
- Utenti
- 1,086
- Popolarità
- #23,654
- Voto
- 3.8
- Recensioni
- 15
- ISBN
- 31
- Preferito da
- 8
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.… (altro)