Bøger af Carole Maso

First reissue in more than aa decade; Reccently retired from Brown University, Maso has a strong cult following; Predecessor to lyrical, feminist, experimental works of today

From one of our most daring writers comes this intimate and seductive book: a working journal of pregnancy that was both a Lambda Literary Awards finalist and a Village Voice pick for Best Books of 2000. Maso chronicles with great tenderness and awe the months of her pregnancy, from its charmed conception through the auspicious arrival of Rose.

Originally published in 1986, Ghost Dance is the first in a line of relentlessly experimental and highly esteemed works by Maso. In her elegy for a family broken apart and for a country wounded by injustice and corporate greed, Maso skillfully draws parallels between the personal tragedy and the larger tragedies unfolding in the country.

Mary Campbell-Sposito, CANIS MAJOR: Introducing Raymond Queneau/Gilbert Sorrentino, Variations for Raymond Queneau/* Raymond Queneau, Interviews with Georges Charbonnier -- No. 5?/Raymond Queneau, Technique of the Novel/Raymond Queneau, From Children of Clay/Harry Mathews, Charity Begins at Home/Gilbert Pestureau, The Art of the Novel in Saint Glinglin/Jacques Jouet, 'Interludes' from Raymond Queneau/Claude Debon, Queneau and Poetic Illusion/Barbara Wright, Translating Queneau/Andre Blavier, Droles de Drames/Jacques Roubaud The Birth of a Form: Elementary Morality/Selected Bibliography/Selected Translations of Queneau's Works into English/Victoria Frenkel Harris, Carole Maso: An Introduction and an Interpellated Interview/Carole Maso, Except Joy: on Aureole/Carole Maso, Traveling Light from The Bay of Angels/Louise DeSalvo, 'We Will Speak and Bear Witness': Storytelling as Testimony and Healing in Ghost Dance/Charles B.Harris, The Dead Fathers: The Rejection of Modernist Distance in The Art Lover/Victoria Frenkel Harris, Emancipating the Proclamation: Gender and Genre in AVA/Nicole Cooley, 'There's Not One Story That Will Change This': The American Woman in the Chinese Hat/Jeffrey DeShell, Between the Winding Sheets: The American Woman in the Chinese Hat/Steven Moore, A New Language for Desire: Aureole/A Carole Maso Checklist

Carole Maso's stunning, erotic fourth novel chronicles the dark, irresistible adventures of an American writer named Catherine who has come to France to live. Set into motion by a single act of abandonment-Catherine's lover of ten years has left her-she falls deeper and deeper into an irretrievable madness. With passionate abandon and detachment Catherine pursues her own destruction. Forcing the boundaries of identity and the limits of her eroticism, she enters a series of blinding sexual encounters with a poet, a fascist, a young Arlesian woman, a fireman, and three thieves. Eerily she splits herself in two so that she is both the one who watches and the one who is watched, creator and creation, author and character, as she observes herself from afar "And I would like to help her", the one who watches says, "but I can't". Finally she meets Lucien, the solitary, cynical, beautiful man with long hair who looks as though he has "stepped out of an unmade film by the dead Truffaut", and through this mysterious, doomed, bittersweet liaison Catherine makes one last attempt to halt her decline through the redemptive act of story-telling. She begins to invent the story of their lives, telling it to him half in English, half in French, joining their solitudes for a moment before losing forever her belief that the shapely, hopeful prospects of narrative make sense of expenence. "She notices how everything is given up or taken away" as she loses the power of the imagination or memory or the body to console, and finally of language to convey meaning. This mesmerizing drama of sex, betrayal, and dissolution with its shattering inevitable conclusion is played out against the dazzling backdrop of thebeautiful, indifferent Cote d'Azur in summer. Written in a dwindling lexicon with a simple, warped musicality, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat is a dark, uncompromising, seductive work of art.

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 emerge: Francesco, a filmmaker from Rome; Anatole, lost in the air over France; Carlos, a teenager from Granada. The ways people she loved expressed themselves in letters or at the beach or at the moment of desire return to her. There is Danilo, her current lover, a Czech novelist, and others, lovers of one night, as she sings the endless, joyous, erotic song cycles of her life, because "Dusk and the moment right before shapes are taken back is erotic. And the dark". The voices of her literary loves 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. We hear the voices of her parents, who survived the Treblinka death camp, and of her Aunt Sophie, who did not. War permeates the text, for on Ava Klein's last day Iraq has invaded Kuwait. And above all we hear Ava's voice. Hers is the voice of pleasure, of astonishment, the voice of regret, the voice of gratitude as she moves closer and closer to the "music that is silence". Ava is an attempt, in the words of French feminist philosopher Helene Cixous, "to come up with a language that heals as much as it separates". The fragments of the novel are combined to make a new kind of wholeness, allowing environments, states of mind, and rhythms not ordinarilyassociated with fiction to emerge. Ava's theme is the poignancy of mortality, the extraordinary desire to live, the inevitability of death - the things never done, never understood, the things never said, or said right, or said enough. Ava yearns and the reader yearns with her, struggling to hold on to all that slips away. "I came to celebrate. I came to praise", Ava says, and on every page she does just that - marveling at the mystery of her precious, disappearing life: the pressure of the tide, the sea-soaked steps, wild roses and rose hips, the finches at the feeder, the way the swing swung. "We took the overnight train", she says. "You kissed me everywhere. A beautiful, passing landscape. Imagined in the dark".