Carole Maso is a writer of sumptuous, word-smitten prose. In this, an ecstatic's manifesto, the author declares that the future of the novel (if the form is to have a future) rests in the hands of women, gays, blacks, and all the other heretofore marginalized voices in our literature and our culture. Her words practically quiver on the page and anyone who, like me has had the desire to write but been stymied time and again by their inability and unwillingness to conform to the established bonds of the form will find a heartening warrior-ally in Maso.

These essays about literature (Maso's and other writers's), the act of writing, about Maso's own life are essentially an awakening, an alarm call to a new way of envisioning stories. I'm not familiar with William Carlos Williams, whom she credits as an influence, but I am familiar with Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, whose influences are apparent in the novels I've read by Maso and in the techniques she uses to express. With each essay I was astonished at the innovative and dazzling approaches to language. In the essay "The Re-introduction of Color", Maso explores her struggle to find her writing self against the pressures of conformity and convention. This book is inspirational, educational, exquisite. Any writers or serious readers looking for ways to shake the trees of literature's stale greats will delight in this collection of essays, and each reader will find herself or himself challenged, seduced, and ultimately released.

The venerable Carole Maso has just reminded us how literature "can be" and not "ought to be", and detailed her convincing arguments in this book, "Break Every Rule". The stern Rule-Makers would have us believe that, as writers, we can't do this and that, and must adhere to some "nifty" little rules invented by rigid minds. Well, here is a voice so clear that it can shatter glasses, and it is telling us to set ourselves free. How absolutely liberating!

To read Carole Maso is to endure and survive much- passion, love, loss, anguish, doubt, and pain. Readers will bear witness to one of the most marvelous, daring writers of our age. This memoir is a celebration of the universe's most profound mystery- the brewing of a human life and the phenomenal vessel that brings forth this magnificence with ferocity and might. Maso's words dance, pulverize, and enlighten. A bold mixture of sweet delirium and mind-shaking realities. Reads like a prayer.

What does a journal of a writer's pregnancy have for a male reader? Plenty, at least for this one. I read the book in one evening and came away thinking how lucky the child Rose is to have this beautiful letter from her mother. Portions of this book made me sad. Maso writes: "I think of my mother often these days. That she did not have a mother to talk with, to console her, to reassure her as she went through her pregnancies." I remembered my own mother whose mother died when my mother was twelve, just entering puberty. I cannot fathom her loss. But I do understand all too well Maso's remembered grief over the death of her beloved friend Gary from AIDS. "That I had walked at 4 a.m., most terrible hour of the day, of the night, in utter fear and dread, in utter sorrow, scarcely breathing, to kiss my dead friend good-bye. . . The worst possible thing had already happened, so what else was there to fear?" Too many of us said too many unnecessary good-byes in that first onslaught of AIDS deaths in part because of a government that did not care about those of us who were different. More Maso: "Why shouldn't the old models, which are working with less and less success, be challenged--the world reimagined? Heterosexual privilege and power--and all its attendant rigmarole. Such a system, if it were to be taken seriously, would have precluded me from having a child. Luckily I have never taken it even the least bit seriously. But I have been outside of everything from the beginning--except the system of love." Passages like this one make this book wonderful. Besides the sorrow, there is so much joy, so much hope, so much honesty, so much love here.

As always, Maso paints with words. She has created a beautiful book, from its title to the last sentence with the image of Rose's pointing a finger "upward toward the heavens, like the infant Christ, in the renaissance paintings." This book will not disappoint you.

To open any book by Carole Maso is to begin a journey of pleasure, and this book is a perfect example. While chronicling her pregnancy, and the birth of her daughter, Maso also ruminates on life and death, on literature and art, on every minute detail of living. Each word, each sentences is a flower in a garden of joy, and when the birth begins, the expansive field of flowers is breathtaking, moving, exhilarating, and we the readers are there with her, through the frightening, beautiful, expansive moments of childbirth. Her many lucid moments of whimsy, and the terror of bringing a child into this dangerous world, make this book so real, so endearing, so utterly felt. This is an experience like none other, a writer creating a new work within her body and birthing not a book, but a beautiful daughter named Rose, a beacon of beauty.

Carole Maso brings us into the character's mind through a fresh blending of prose and poetry that does more than tell a story; it wraps the story around these lifelike characters in a way that invests us in their lives. I came away impressed by the nonlinear structure, touched by the characters, and identifying with some.

I look forward to catching up on the rest of Maso's work.

Unexpected after the spectacular flameout that was "Ghost Dance", this is the signal work of perhaps the finest living American writer. A more intense, devastating, meticulously constructed work you will not find if you read every book on offer at Amazon. "The Art Lover" is like a shattering, vivid dream of another lifetime. Perfect.

If you like plot-driven stories, then this novel is not for you. However, don't get me wrong--there is a story here. This non-linear tale of a woman's life and the people around her is exquisitely written, and incredibly well-crafted. I've read all of Maso's novels now, and this is most certainly my favorite. A wonderful wonderful book.

After having read Kahlo's diary she kept in her final days, Maso became inspired by not only Kahlo's art, but by her vision of the world, and has created in "Beauty Is Convulsive" a marvelous series of prose poems. Incorporating aspects of Kahlo's life into meditations on suffering and pain as art, these poems weave a tapestry of Kahlo's artistic mind, which was deeply affected by her physical ailments that persisted throughout her life. This is not a biography, but rather a side dish for readers enthralled by Kahlo's (or Maso's, for that matter) powerful art. Reaching back to the styles used in her previous book "Aureole", Carole Maso has written a fascinating, complex, and unique book celebrating a passionate artist.

This work adds to Maso's reputation as one of the most significant writers today. As Maso has suggested in the past, why are less known artists ignored in media, at the expense of well-known writers. Hopefully, this smart, beautifully engaging, and funny text will introduce a new audience to two influential and important artists.

Vanessa is a young woman drifting through her memories and imagination, while struggling to come to terms with her mother's death. Her mother was a famous poet whose private spiral into madness held the family together as it forced each person into her/his own separate world. After her mother's tragic death, Vanessa's often-silent father disappears and her brother shifts from place to place, sending cryptic postcards to his sister. Even Vanessa's mother's lover Sabine seems unable to embrace her own grief. Through it all, Vanessa struggles to resurface through the pain, through the family dysfunctions, through the wavering and tenuous hold on reality. She struggles to come back to living and not plummet into madness like her mother. Carole Maso's amazing and brilliantly woven story plumbs the depths of grief in a style totally her own. Swinging from reality to memory to imagination, Maso charts Vanessa's mental state as she climbs back to living. I was often reminded of Virginia Woolf's works while reading, and found myself wondering about possible connections. "Ghost Dance" is truly a book to behold.

I first read this book in the eighties and was literally haunted by it. After reading Defiance this winter, I went back and reread it--and wasn't disappointed. It's all here--the cold war, the world's fair, the theme of madness and redemption, the wonderfully cadenced sentence--and Maso reinvents the orphan's search for the mother. She does for mothers and daughters what (too) many male authors have done with the lost father/lost son.

From the reviews, I thought I would love this book. After 40 pgs I found this book to be choppy and disconnected. What about all the french in there that most people would not understand. I did not care for it and did not finish reading it.

Catherine travels to France to write and to mourn her brother. Her lover Lola tells her she's now seeing someone else (briefly), and this sends Catherine into a depression. She sleeps indiscriminately with both women and men she encounters, acting out her detachment and self-destruction. She ends with Lucien, a man who's her equal in beauty, intelligence, and solitude. Their doomed affair must inevitably end, and each must regain their life back, hopefully before they destroy each other. Maso's style is lyrical and erotic, and is rooted in Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. It's a novel of longing, of desire, of France, and of the world of writers. It also reminded me somewhat of Violette Leduc's work, where it's an honest, unflinching writing that does not shy away from personal pain. Quite electrifying.

carole maso's depiction of a woman writer on the edge of madness, alienated from her own self and suffering with the aftermath of love, is an intense portrait of love/loss. the reader watches catherine slowly descend into madness as the line between her writing and her reality blurs. her relationship with the frenchman lucien (one of the most heartbreaking relationships in recent fiction) further pushes her over the edge and causes her to realise her own loneliess. i recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of poetic prose filled with erotic imagery, especially those who are writers themselves. i look forward to reading more work by maso.

Carole Maso's Ava is an attempt to build a symphony out of words instead of musical notes.

Like a symphony, it is comprised of discrete themes, many repeated over and over again, sometimes with slight variations of rhythm, instrumentation, and harmony. Like a symphony, it has specific sections. However, unlike a symphony, Ava does not resolve in a meaningful manner. Perhaps Maso is trying to make the point that death does not resolve in any key.

Maso takes the fascinating subject of what a sick woman thinks during what the narrator, Ava Klein, expects might be one of her last days to live. She is only 39 and she is dying in a New York City hospital on August 15, 1990. As she floats through the day, few things impede her thoughts. Nurses asking her to roll over, talking about going to the park, and discussing the invasion of Kuwait are some of the few notes of the outside world that bleed into her consciousness. Some number of her ex-husbands and lovers are (or may be) in the room with her, but a description of her environment is sketchy. Her thoughts vary from the mundane ("The child draws the letter A"), to ruminations on music, Europe, and literature ("Just once I'd like to save Virginia Woolf from drowning"), to the philosophical ("We live once. And rather badly"), and to thoughts of the men in her life ("I would have married you, after just one night. Had I not already been married at the time").

But the problem with Ava is that her thoughts are so scattered that they fail to come together in a cohesive way. Ava has clearly had an interesting life, and while she is in no hurry to die she is also unwilling to continue to endure treatments for the sake of having treatments since her condition is judged to be hopeless. And it is difficult to ascertain what really happened in her life, what happened in fiction she read, and what she wished had happened in her life.

At first, this novel seems incomprehensible and pointless, nothing more than a collection of random phrases and information, but after a while the phrases find echoes, the information finds order, and the ultimate effect is haunting and devastating. (Indeed, I soon found myself incapable of reading more than 20 pages or so at a time because it was emotionally overwhelming, though I've yet to figure out the exact source of this power.)

Maso has said elsewhere that this book is, in some ways, related to Virginia Woolf's "The Waves", and I would agree, though in many ways I think Maso's is a more compelling and perhaps even richer book than Woolf's. "Ava" bears a certain relationship to "Mrs. Dalloway" and "To the Lighthouse" as well, for Maso, like Woolf, has subsumed her narrative within the perspective of her protagonist. The story lies between the lines.

This book can't be read impatiently, nor can it be skimmed or speed-read or soundbyted, for its effect relies upon accumulation: the accumulation of ideas, events, and even the sound of the words. It requires an active reader, one willing to put forth effort of both thought and feeling. The effort is rewarded a thousandfold.

AVA has been one of those books that I return to on a regular basis. Each time I pick it up, I remember the first time I moved through it, sometimes crying, often laughing , but most often marvelling at its beauty. Ava Klein walks us through the fragmented recollections of her life -- things she tasted, lovers she's known, places she's visited and people who have left an impact on her. Maso writes in snippets of thought,her text reminding me of the way the human mind works (our thoughts rarely take a linear path, most often they're kind of all over, spinning around). I urge you to pick up this book and just flow through it, enjoying, if nothing else, the beauty and immediacy of the words. AVA is brilliant and wonderful; it is a work you will come back to often just so you can remember what a gift it is.

The fluctuation of being within and without this text, a sensation Maso's great manipulation of language induces, is very entertaining and the strength of this book. Interesting to read, with ingenious linguistic and literary devices - sometimes actual mathematic algorithms represented in diagram - that come from within the mind of the protagonist; disclosing her character is the process of this book. The almost interesting plot comes second to the protagonist's interiority. 'Perversely brilliant' are words that come to mind. I like that.

This is not a book that readily yields its secrets. For some people (myself included), it takes a couple reads to be appreciated. You'll get along much better in this prison inside the protagonist's head if you think for a moment about everything you know about the way fiction is "supposed" to work, about plot, setting, and character, then just wad that up and throw it away. Plot, character, and setting flow into one another and close in on the reader and the protagonist. It is a difficult book to just sit down and read. It lulls in spots and occasionally gets completely incomprehensible. But it starts speeding toward its terminus in the last 25 pages or so, and then it ends, exactly how you think it's going to. But that isn't even important. In this book, it's the winding, horrifying road the narrator takes you down. You're not going to understand everything the moment she gives it to you. But stick with it, read to the end, and you'll be able to say "I get it---I think." Like any really good book, the most important thing about it is not necessarily what you get on the page, but what you think about after you're done reading.

This is a masterful telling of a young woman's all to brief life. "Defiance" to that life's continuation is the emotional basis of the story and the springboard for revisting her traumatic life. As each layer is peeled away, we begin to see the psychological scars that lie deep within. This is a hauntingly emotional tale. I was propelled along by the extraordinary quality of the writing and the depth of emotions conveyed. Stayed with me for months. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys fine literature.

Carole Maso has an amazing gift for language. In some of the stories, like "Sappho Sings the World Ecstatic," she makes poetry, using rhythm and rhyme and unique combinations of words. So why is she trying to write prose? She has no talent for plot or dramaturgia; her "stories" go nowhere. They are most likely autobiographical, and real life does not make good fiction. Most authors who write from their own experience actually exert effort trying to turn life into art--but not Maso. Obviously, she is a talented writer. It strikes me as pure laziness--backed up by the postmodern notion of "challenging traditional structures"--that she makes no effort to use her talent to create anything resembling a narrative. I have read three books by Maso and I will continue to read her work because of its poetry. I look forward to a day when I can read a book written by her that does not leave me feeling irritated by her artistic arrogance and general self-involvement.

I bought this book at the recommendation of Amazon.com, but was very disappointed. It is more a collection of seemingly unrelated, unfinished sentences rather than a book with a story and a plot. I read the first third, but ended up skimming the remainder. I guess, it all comes together in the end, but I'm not really sure. I was expecting a good story about women, instead I got something very difficult to follow

Very different - but, very wonderful. It may not be a linear novel - with an actual 'story' - but it is an excellent read. Maso is an incredibly talented writer.