Ava

by Carole Maso

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 ordinarily associated with fiction to emerge. AVA's theme is the poignancy of mortality, the extraordinary desire to live, the inevitability of death&amp—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.

Genres: Fiction, Poetry, Novels, Literature, Contemporary, The United States Of America, American

220 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Carole Maso is a contemporary American novelist and essayist, known for her experimental, poetic and fragmentary narratives often labeled as postmodern. She received a bachelor’s degree in English from Vassar College in 1977. Her first published novel was Ghost Dance, which appeared in 1986. Her best known novel is probably Defiance, which was published in 1998. Currently (2006) she is a professor of English at Brown University. She has previously held positions as a writer-in-residence at Illinois State and George Washington University, as well as teaching writing at Columbia University.

Reviews

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reread

Ava expands the form of the novel’s future while living within it. The verse supplemented and interwoven into new configurations by a poetry so sensitive it draws the reader into experiencing Ava’s experiences but to now also carry a wider net of perceptiveness and consciousness through ones life. This could only be carried out by Maso’ non- linear experimental style progressing a narrative through its fragments.

But only 39 years old she lays in a hospital bed traversing the labyrinth of her memories, her desires met and missed, what love has meant and its erotic portrayals, while dying of a rare blood cancer. In no way written sentimentally by the end I realized it will take the surgeons years to collect the pieces of my heart before even planning how to put it back together.

One of the great reasons to read and one of the great writers to be read.






Review of First Reading Below







Each time I brought pen to paper the pen was empty of ink. Different makes, colors, styles made no difference. I always liked pens and thought they liked me. It took me a while. Ava was not a story, a text, a narrative; it is a work beyond words; much closer to music in circling closer to the unnameable, to that which is just beyond our outstretched reach.

Maso brings this about by traversing us through time and space; living what occurred in the past, recalling from her hospital bed where she, Ava Klein, is dying from a rare blood disorder, a cancer, at the age of thirty nine. The pages unfold with sentences spaced apart from each other running down the page. Sometimes a short paragraph. Linearity is absent. These spare poetic sentences spaced apart are not connected with one another. Yet an open mind is opened further as the writing unfolds into meaning, message(s) through the faith of accumulation.

A rare journey and Maso lets us in on this experimental art better than anyone I have thus read. An opportunity to join the notes of music in circling closer to what cannot be reached, glimpsed, but gives the artful attempts meaning enough to fill a life.

[Kansas · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2022...

“Ava Klein, you are a rare bird.

Ava Klein, you are a wild one.”

Cuando empecé esta novela, tras las primeras págínas me sentí impactada, no por lo que estaba contando (todavía era pronto para eso) porque todavía no sabía nada de nada sobre su argumento, pero sí que ese impacto vino producido por la forma, por la extremada belleza de las frases fragmentadas que Carole Maso iba desplegando. Y una vez terminada, ese impacto continua reverberando en mi cabeza y no tengo duda de que continuará acompañándome, porque es una novela sin principio ni final, circular como la vida misma. Además, que como libro físico, es conveniente no volver a separarse de él y tenerlo siempre muy cerca para poder echar mano de él de vez en cuando, abrirlo por una página cualquiera y, dejarse empapar por alguna frase elegida al azar porque cualquiera de ellas podría ser una celebración a la vida.


"A terrible longing, a nostalgia, a restlessness. For air. For ocean. For the ability to see.
Set me free."

[…]

"Precious. Disappearing things.
Your black hair like music.
I will never see you again."

[…]

"I swam across the lake. He followed me in a boat."

[…]

"Rain and L'Avventura in the Manhattan afternoon."

[…]

"The maid had stolen the blue satín wedding shoes while Ana Julia slept. Woken from a dream where the exact same thing was happening, Ana Julia rose and flew down the street after her.”

Realmente no sabría si calificar Ava como novela, podría ser, pero funciona más en otro nivel porque hay momentos en los que este texto se asemeja a un largo poema; es una lectura totalmente sensorial e incluso son tan fuertes, tan poderosas las sensaciones que Carole Maso logra transmitir a través del lenguaje, que durante esta lectura casi que tenía la impresión de poder tocar, ver o escuchar cualquiera de estos momentos a través, de los recuerdos de Ava Klein, que a sus treinta y nueve años en una cama de hospital, en su última día de vida, la recuerda en breves piezas sensoriales. Es el cerebro de Ava, que en un último intento por agarrarse a la vida, rememora sus tres matrimonios, sus numerosos amantes, sus continuos viajes por todo el mundo, su familia y su experiencia traumática con los campos de exterminio, lugares y tiempos del pasado y del presente, guerra y paz, canciones y películas, gastronomía con sus sabores y olores, todo se entrelaza para formar un collage de vida, amor y desamor. al mismo tiempo salteado por su intima conexión con la música, el arte y la literatura.

"How are you? I've been rereading Kleist with great enthusiasm and I wish you were around to talk to and I realize suddenly,

I miss you."

Otro hecho que convierten este texto en una joya son las referencias continuas a otras voces literarias, los referentes de Ava Klein y por supuesto de Carole Maso, cuyas citas salpican el texto mimetizándose con la vida de Ava: Max Frisch, Virginia Woolf, Rilke, Ingeborg Bachmann, Samuel Beckett, Garcia Lorca, entre otros y por supuesto Helene Cixious, cuyas citas reinvindicando esa sexualidad femenina libre y transgresora, las hace suyas la misma Carole Maso a través de Ava, porque Ava es una novela que desborda deseo y sensualidad por los cuatro costados:

“The ideal, or the dream, would be to arrive at a language that heals as much as it separates. Could one imagine a language sufficiently transparent, sufficiently supple, intense, faithful, so that there would be reparation and not only separation?”

[...]

“Almost everything is yet to be written by women about their infinite and complex sexuality, their eroticism.”


El texto está formado principalmente de párrafos de una sola línea, a veces incluso de una sola palabra, todos separados por líneas en blanco, fragmentos de un instante de la vida, momentos desordenados que a medida que el texto va avanzando, podremos ir encontrando la conexión de las diferentes historias que forman el Todo de la vida de Ava Klein. Es una novela en forma de poema, que también puede funcionar como una pieza musical porque la sonoridad del texto es continua. Unas ideas fragmentadas que van definiendo la abrumadora personalidad de Ava Klein, sensual, apasionada en todas las facetas de su vida, que no se privó de vivir la vida en toda su plenitud con sus éxitos y fracasos: Francesco, su primer marido y la promiscuidad, Danilo su amante novelista y los libros, Ana Julia y los zapatos de boda de raso robados por la criada, su tía Sophie que murió en Treblinka...y asi sucesivamente imágenes que se quedarán grabadas, tal es la fuerza del lenguaje usado por Carole Maso. El uso que hace la autora de la repetición de palabras o de frases completas en momentos decisivos va contribuyendo a hacernos una idea cada vez más afianzada de lo que fue la vida de Ava Klein.

"You want to wear a shield over your heart, when you finally understand how fragile it is.

A helmet.

Start with how his hair caught the light.

You want to wear a shield. But not really."

Ava Klein es una mujer a punto de despedirse de la vida pero lo que más puede impactar es que contrariamente a este hecho, es un texto que está celebrando la vida continuamente, en toda su plenitud. Ava Klein siempre fue una mujer hambrienta de vida, de vivirla con todas sus consecuencias y esto se refleja continuamente en un texto que en ningun momento se vuelve sentimental ni morboso, sino todo lo contrario, a través de los pensamientos que surgen de su cerebro la única constancia que nos puede dejar esta memoria es que la vida puede ser deslumbrante tal como deslumbra el aura que envuelve a Ava.

"There is a necessary melancholy that comes over one when it is realized that there will remain places unseen, books unread, people untouched. Ferocious, hungry, amorous as I imagine myself to be-."

Pero Ava es sobre todo una novela impactante porque llegado un momento y cuando estás sumergido en este texto tan luminoso y lleno de vida, hay atisbos, ráfagas que nos enfrentan a nosotros mismos, a nuestra percepción de cómo vemos la vida y de su fragilidad y lo refleja la misma Ava en un momento dado "How was It posible I took everthing for granted?" La inevitabilidad de la muerte, ese tema tan tabú, tan incómodo, tan silenciado es aquí quizá el tema cumbre, sobre todo para el lector cuando realmente toma conciencia de este momento crucial porque estará ya tan implicado con Ava, que esta toma de conciencia, de que Ava/Nosotros somos mortales, será como una bofetada. Ava es un texto pero a través del lenguaje de Carole Maso, se ha convertido en algo vivo pero la vida es fugaz y es este detalle tan palpable, tan a flor de piel, lo que convierten esta novela en algo sumamente conmovedor en el pleno sentido de la palabra. El hecho de que lleguemos hasta el final junto a Ava es lo que de verdad hace grande esta novela tan a flor de piel. .

"Dear Francesco,
Much is expressed in the interval. Do not worry so much about our silences when they come. I hear you even then."

♫♫ ♫ Superstar, Beach House ♫♫ ♫

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I happen to really like associational books, books built of fragments and images and repetitions, which build themselves in their accumulation in your head rather than as a linear narrative, and AVA is a classic--a passionate and well-travelled, well-read, sensual woman, a singer, a writer, a teacher of comparative literature, dying at 39 of a rare blood disease, as she dreams back through her life in phrases and images.

It requires a bit of detective work to tease out who these images are describing and to layer them into three dimensions as the book goes along-- that the first husband, Francesco, was a filmmaker and her true match, a relationship that drowned in promiscuous sexuality of both parties. It is to this husband her thoughts return and return. "Determined to reshape the world according to the dictates of desire--"

Other characters include a friend who died of AIDS, Aldo, a fellow singer; Anatole, her French second husband, whose child she miscarried; Carlos, a very young Spaniard who she married on a whim; her current lover Danilo, a novelist, Czech or Polish, the worrier. "Danilo laments the U.S.A. He says we have forgotten how to be American."

There are also a host of women whose separate identities are are less clear though no less beloved; Carlos' mother (grandmother?) Ana Juiia and her satin shoes that someone steals; Marie-Claude and Emma--Anatole's mother perhaps? "The giant head of Francoise Gilot in stone. We took photographs, though photographs were not allowed. Marie-Claude and Emma and Anatole and me, smiling in the bright light and so much sea, in the room called Joie de Vivre."

And the images and voice of her mother, a survivor of Treblinka, who in turn meditates on her own family, her sister Sophie who did not survive the camps. There are lines from other writers throughout, including Eliot and Paul Celan and Lorca, as well as refrains of feminist thinkers Monique Wittig and Helene Cixous and the overarching figure of Collette.

What I love most about this book is the rich sensuality of Maso's writing. it is not primarily an intellectual book, like David Markson's, written in similar style, but a book of passion for the things of this world:

I had gone in search of Colette, the great writer. 9 Rue de Beaujolais.

Not perhaps the menage a trois he had in mind

And the smell of mushrooms--and apples.

Nathalie Sarraute, Helene Cixous, Monique Wittig.

Winter roses.

Lonely, beautiful Anatole. Ashes. I was Madame Forget. For awhile.


In Ava, Maso has created a woman who burned through her life, in travel, in the pleasure of the flesh--to live, to sing, to eat--she remembers the spaghetti bolognese she and her lover ate, almost more important than the lover. Her awareness of death looks more like this:

The Bleecker Street Theater closes for good. And suddenly it is clear,

We are losing.

The scales tip.

Please invoice me. Input me. Format me. Impact me.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Despite my abiding interest in extending he language of film, I find that people tend to pay more attention to the content--perhaps out of a longstanding, misguided notion that women, unlike men, are more concerned with content than with form.

Which is the reason I admire Carole Maso so much. And in AVA her attending to form, her risk in attending to form, produces a melancholic, pleasant, meditative effect approaching the condition of music. Perhaps one is tempted to say poetry, but in truth her form is prose, a revolving and recurring prose. Silence and rest woven between the spare lines.



So that the form takes as many risks as the content--

Chrysanthemums.

Come quickly, Ava. There are finches at the feeder.

And I am pulled toward the irresistible music of the end.

She loves finches. She fed a horse.

We create a language that heals as much as it separates.

You are dreaming, Ava Klein.

Three husbands. Comparative literature. I do not mean to be summing up.

You are a rare bird, Ava Klein.

Sing to me of lost things:

Chrysanthemum, almond tablet

Somewhere a young girl learns her alphabet.

So much is yet to be written--

There are so many things I would like--

The girl draws an A. She spells her name:

AVA

You are ravishing

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spare and poetic fragments trace a life, from the death bed, mixing memory and found epiphanies from other authors. Maso does this sort of thing so excellently, that I have to wonder why other writers get all the credit for this technique in general. Or why Maso isn't so much better known than she is.

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book of deathbed reveries, memories evoked in fragmentary phrases and occasional cloudbursts of paragraphs, filled with literary quotations, free associative and yet somehow easy to follow.

A formally audacious novel that feels like a kissing cousin to David Markson's brilliant "narrator" tetralogy, slyly funny and obsessed with mortality, only in a more lyrical and sensuous register.

A catalog of a stunningly privileged life that often left me bristling with class resentment, having to remind myself that the richness of one's inner life isn't necessarily depleted by wealth.

A masterful meditation on what matters and what remains, a musical transformation of last breath into lieder.

4.5 stars

[may · Rating 5 out of 5]

Comparisons between Ava and many of my favourite books could be made in this review, but to stop it becoming a pages-long celebration of a whole pile of books, I’ll keep it short and focus on the ones that help highlight why you might (or should) read Maso’s Ava.

The structure of Ava as a novel feels far more closely aligned with poetry, where breaks between lines allow a breathing of the mind and freedom for each block of text to be interpreted as its own entity.

Through this ‘breathing room’, sections of the text seem to asynchronously and slowly seep into memory. Rather than grasping the narrative utilising a clear linearity of time (or in the case of more traditional uses of nonlinear narrative, the ability to construct the complete text in your head as you read along), key points in the narrative are recalled and transformed in the text often and the time flow helps build a convincing language structure of the unconscious.

Digesting this framework is somewhat like reading David Markson’s prose, offering up a mixture of story and event, trivia and quotations, and a healthy dose of confusion within the prior two to build a story that is unique to each reader based on their experiences in literature and life. Like Wittgenstein's Mistress, Ava doesn’t force the reader to acknowledge anything more than the bare minimum about our setting and characters.

Unlike Markson who tends to ‘hard attribute’ his trivia/quotations to create a very literature-oriented experience (a damned fantastic one too) and confusion between fact and fiction, Maso rarely attributes her collage-like use of excerpts, constructing a dreamscape of literature, the academic world, and the life of Ava Klein. In Ava you are rarely told ‘this is an allusion’ (which Markson handles in a very unique way to play with the reader’s expectations of truth – really, go read him), but instead are left to process the information freely so these streams of textual information (in Maso’s own words) “in no way interrupt the trance of the text”.

Quotations and lines now seem to flow through memory like water, flicking tiny switches wherein you recall the general feel of a work or quotation, compared to the ‘I get and recognise that reference’ you tend to feel with more direct, forceful uses of allusion, and in more strongly attributed texts.

As for the content and subject of the book, it is a text form of ‘Life flashing before our eyes’.
Ava almost parallels in reverse one of my favourite novels: Joseph McElroy’s Plus*. These two books centre around narratives that aim to rebuild a textual encapsulation of love (their individual intimacies and experiences) and life in a form that is best described as ‘pure memory’.

Through these elements Ava presents a truly ethereal reading experience, and when paired with PLUS serves to provide a forwards-travelling female perspective (showing just how close we people of all sexes are) to that of the backwards-travelling male perspective shown in PLUS **.

Books like these, though short in length, pack a whole lifetime into their pages in such a condensed way that you really do feel like you have experienced or witnessed these memories in person.

True textual-healing,
“You are ravishing”.

* Somebody seems to have picked up on this and I have a copy of The Body of Writing: An Erotics of Contemporary American Fiction on the way.
** Forwards- and Backwards-travelling toward a zero point of death/unlife/the end of a ‘human form’ existence.

[Note: linking books/authors here seems to be broken for me, I'll edit it later to include those fixed]

[cycads and ferns · Rating 4 out of 5]

“You are a wild one, Ava Klein....
Tell me everything you want....
My heart is breaking....
The scales tip.
Please invoice me. Input me. Format me.
Impact me.”

Thirty-nine-year-old Ava Klein, a professor of comparative literature at Hunter College, was dying from a rare blood cancer.

“Just once l'd like to save Virginia Woolf from drowning. Hart Crane. Primo Levi from falling. Paul Celan, Bruno Schultz, Robert Desnos, and for my parents: Grandma and Grandpa, Uncle Isaac, Uncle Solly, Aunt Sophie, just once.”

She recounts her three marriages to Francesco, Anatole, and Carlos, and then describes her current relationship with Danilo.

“Late one night he woke me, shivering awfully, and asked to sit on my bed. He was in the grip of panic from the sense of the vastness of space....
We rotated on our axes.
Celebrated the alignment of the planets.
This ecstatic voyaging.”

The loves and losses are laid bare, as is Ava’s refusal to apologize for her choices, and her defiance persists as she meets her end.

“No character in Beckett has ever admitted that existence is other than a cruel joke. But here in Company Beckett reaches into a darker dark than he has hitherto plumbed, to ask if the poor jokester didn't, after all, create us, his joke, to keep his lonely self company? This is a way of asking if in our profound and agonizing loneliness we have invented the jokester, God, to keep ourselves company?”

[Ronald Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

No character in Beckett has ever admitted that existence is other than a cruel joke. But here in Company Beckett reaches into a darker dark than he has hitherto plumbed, to ask if the poor jokester didn’t, after all, create us, his joke, to keep his lonely self company? This is a way of asking if in our profound and agonizing loneliness we have invented the jokester, God, to keep ourselves company?

ls there salvation for you when a film is finished?

And what is company? What have we not done for its sake? For everything human we have made up, beginning with our names. Our laws, our quaint systems of kinship, our cities, our technology, a Victorian clergyman’s carefully researched study of the Sumerian cosmology – fiction all. We’ve made it all up, to hide a mystery in an idiotically decorated box.

Even in Genoa sometimes a little parsley. Many mix in a little butter.ln Tuscany, pancetta in place of the butter, walnuts and pignoli.

The child draws the letter A.

The only reality is that we became aware of the world on our back in the dark (the womb, the cradle), with a voice speaking to us, and will end on our backs in the dark (deathbed, grave). Beckett in Company connects these two points of existential helplessness. We are forever on our backs in the dark, listening to a voice (dreams, the imagination, philosophy, religion, Walter Cronkite). But, as he says, the voice is company,

Or we are company for it.

Whisper in my heart, tell me you are there.

Every bit as good as the excellent The American Woman in the Chinese Hat and only reinforces that I simply must read the rest of Maso's books.

This is basically the narration of the last day of Ava Klein's life - it is told in short bursts; paragraphs consist of single sentences or some times only fragments, actual traditional paragraphs with fully developed narrative are rare. But the fragments and the staccato bursts of memory (and letters, and sensations) build over the course of the book to sketch out Ava's life. It is (much like the other Maso book I've read) at times deeply erotic, at others it is melancholy, or anguished, but at the end it seems to be at peace.

Original and moving, the details that make up the book are rewarding and deserve to be discovered by the reader - the pacing is perfect, and the life revealed is well worth exploring.

[Ian Scuffling · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stacks of images thread Carole Maso’s AVA, repeating and looping in on itself as the title narrator sits in her hospital bed, dying from leukemia, reflecting. A kind of stretch of the “whole life flashing before your eyes” cliché, but extended into a rich tapestry of a life full of passion, regret, celebration, loss and meaning/lessness. A meditation on life and death, Maso’s novel is almost a poem more than a prose work, but both still function the same.

Ava Klein sits in her hospital bed waiting to die—as she reflects on her life, her loves, her travels, she captures the beauty of those halcyon days in a way that avoids the destructive idealizing of nostalgia, rather, she presents them as they are but in sensory snippets that bounce off one another, recur, trigger other thoughts, dreams, memories. Together, woven like a tapestry of her life, the end of the book has painted a three-dimensional character’s life, re-lived in the span of one final day this side of the veil.

What struck me the most while reading the book was how it eschewed nostalgia by presenting Ava’s recollections as pure memories, rather than emotional triggers, and further, how the book was less like an elegy than a kind of collage image of an entire life. Through it, perhaps Ava seeks meaning from her life, something beyond the sensory indulgences and wayward decisions. I don't know if she finds it, but I know that even if she can't, that that's okay.

[Steven Marciano · Rating 5 out of 5]

In one final, radiant burst of neurons, fragments of a life surge forth from the maze of memory—repeating, spiraling, casting incantations that soon will vanish into the unbreachable sea of nothingness. Once, there was light. Once, there was love. And it pulses here, joyfully and achingly, within these pages. But there will be no more light or love for Ava Klein.

And for us? There remains the plunge into poetic non-linearity—to reassemble Ava’s prismatic world of people, literature, music, love, and distant terrains. To yearn with her. To bear witness. And to remember: when our own day comes, we must be consumed by the beauty of remembrance—otherwise, what was any of it for?

What is this improbable, this unlikely lightness? This fluency? I am unburdened, dying, free.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carole Maso's novel is absolutely stunning. The language is beautiful and clearly demonstrates her mastery of the rhythms of English. An experimental novel close in spirit to "le noveau roman", Ava paints a portrait of Ava Klein in words as she drifts between past and present in her last day of life. Maso gives nods to Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Max Frisch, and Beckett to acknowledge their influence and to signal the novel's genre, but these references never distract from the narrative flow and are in character with Ava Klein's "passionate and promiscuous" reading habits. When one finishes the work, one has come to know and care deeply about the narrator, although this knowledge and empathy arise from the novelist's careful use of bricolage rather than from more traditional character study techniques. The sexuality and eroticism of the novel owe more than a little to the poststructuralist feminist theory of Helene Cixous, but form an integral part of the fabric of the narrative. I began the novel and after fourteen pages was so overcome by the beauty of the text that I had to put it aside for two weeks. I read the rest of the work almost in one sitting, and when I finished I wept for Ava Klein, for the beauty of Maso's language, for the beauty of life, and for mortality -- my own and that of the whole living world. At first I thought that I would describe Maso's use of language as poetry, but on reflection, I think that it is more like music, and like music, it should be experienced again and again. Ava will find a place on my bookshelf beside Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, so that I can dip into both as needed. I highly recommend it.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgy3k...

[sean]

i'm amazed this isn't more popular. at first i thought the comparisons to david markson might have just been superficial and based solely on the format, but the similarities go deeper: both writers play with this kind of cyclical repetition of phrases/ideas that works toward building a character's full consciousness. wittgenstein's mistress, to me, is the definitive portrait of total aloneness in literature, but ava is something different. for someone deeply anxious about death at the best of times, it was an occasionally painful read, even though it is very passionate and life affirming. it's about piecing together the fragments of past selves in an attempt to build something meaningful, just before they evaporate forever. and kind of a radical forbearer to contemporary feminist autofiction. a beautiful book.

[Justine Kaufmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ava Klein, you are a rare bird.

Ava by Carole Maso. Ava Klein, 39 years old, a professor of comparative literature, lies dying in a hospital bed on her last one on earth. The reader is submerged in the maelstrom of Ava’s conscious as she clings to the last remnants of her life, as she chases after memories, places, and loves, as she scours the literature and the writers of her life and work to find some way to save herself.

What odd constellation of events has brought us here?

My passionate, promiscuous reading of the literature of this world.

In Ava, there is no linearity. Not even from line to line, separated by white space. Her thoughts drift between past and present. Between her own thoughts and the words and texts of others. Between reality and art. The traditional narrative structure has been shattered to pieces. A breakdown in narrative structure to mirror the breakdown of her body, leaving the reader to piece together the fractured fragments.

What is this ache, deep within, for something I do not directly remember, but which was mine?

Finally, it is the power of the individual lines that makes this book so stunning. Each of these lines or short blocks of text consists of words, phrases, sometimes a sentence or two. Each line, standing alone in a sea of blank space, demands to be looked at individually, forcing you to linger on the poetic brilliance of each line, before you grasp at possible meanings and connections to the juxtaposing lines, before you place it back within the larger picture and her life as a whole. Ava is a book filled with so much beauty— a spare and poetic beauty that has the power to haunt you long afterwards.

There is a necessary melancholy that comes over one when it is realized that there will remain places unseen, books unread, people untouched. Ferocious, hungry, amorous as I imagined myself to be—

And it will seem like music.

A blue like no other.

Ava.

You are ravishing.

[Phil · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think my take on it is very different from others'.

The lady (Ava) is dying. Now on her deathbed, she wanders through her web of memories, ostensibly bringing moments of “beauty” and “love” and “life” and “loss” to the surface.

In reality, she appears to be searching for some sort of legitimacy for her life. It was a life spent in near-uniform comfort, little real struggle. Many “love” affairs. Much art and knowledge (none of it of her own creation). Myriad “beautiful” memories, but little of accomplishment.

Her specialty in life was seduction, and she employs it here on her self and her reader. Her life was one of passivity. Her acts were typically parasitic, vampiric. She sought legitimacy from others. She lounged from her position of privilege and pretended to find truth, poetry, beauty.

I don’t know (and neither do I care) if this was the author’s intent. It’s clear this is not how most read the book. But I can’t escape it. This is not a celebration of life, beauty, and truth. This is an demonstration of emptiness, echoes across a hollow cavern. A siren's song.

Additionally, it feels like the book/speaker specializes in the haymaker punch. My general understanding is that good storytellers employ a variety of techniques (to continue the metaphor, jabs, feints, crosses, footwork, shoulder rolls, etc.) to set the reader up--seduce him--for the eventual haymaker punch. The thing about a haymaker is that if it lands, it's a KO, the reader's left reeling. But if it fails, the author's left exposed, naked, silly-looking. Here, it usually fails. Maso tried too hard to create poignant and profound poetry and left the reader with something empty and broken.

Ultimately, a tedious read. It's a self-sustained circlejerk, a cringe-inducing celebration of life. Sad, but not for the reasons intended.

[J.I.]

A professor of comparative literature is dying. This is her life. I suppose the best way to put this is imagine someone's life as a massive crystal ball that is hurled to the ground and broken up into minute pieces. The majority of it is picked up and thrown away. What remains of the shards is something mixed up and confusing, but still part of the whole. This is how Ava is told, a series of sometimes just sentences, sometimes paragraphs, sometimes repeating, sometimes being similar.

The effect is poetic and beautiful and while it can grate on the nerves form time to time, it is surprisingly successful.

[Fluffy Singler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will probably never finish this book. Not because I don't like it or because it's difficult, but because every time I pick it up, I put it down after a short while and go into a reverie about it. I love the non-linear style and one thing about all of Maso's books is the way they keep folding back in on themselves, returning to an earlier place. This is the most extreme of that style, but she does it in almost all of her books - at least the four or five that I've read. She's a beautiful author who always makes me want to write when I read her. (That's probably another reason why I will never finish this book!)

[Tuck · Rating 3 out of 5]

when you start this novel you may think, damn, this isn't going to be any fun watching this woman die in this bed. but it is completely redeeming and so beautiful to listen to her talk about her life. i guess my idea is that she had to die to tell me her story.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wittgenstein's Mistress + The Disintegration Loops

[Christine Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was gifted to me by my mentor! She thought I would love it and she was absolutely right. The book captures the last moments of a woman as she approaches death. It is very much a lyric novel and rejects traditional structure and plot. At first, the fragmentary style is confusing to read and challenges you to let go of the need for coherence. Once you do, you are free to relish individual sentences and indulge in the way certain words sound and roll around in your mouth. This is a book for people who delight in reading simply for the sake of words. As you begin to enjoy each line for itself, you begin to notice recurring phrases and lines. These motifs build in meaning and the threads of theme they create sew the story together. The phrases and lines are often taken out of context and situated to signify various interpretations. But as you read, more of the context is slowly uncovered and reveals details that flesh out the protagonist and the the people important to her. In this way, the book is written to reflect how memory is processed and how memories resurface in our mind. While it may seem to lack coherence, it is cohesive as it follows how our consciousness streams freely and often disregards logic. This book was wholly beautiful and Carole Maso is not only a serious master of her craft but dazzlingly playful.

[Charles Kell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterpiece

[Melanie Sweeney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite book, rivaled only by her first novel, Ghost Dance. I read AVA in a class last semester, and it was the first book I had ever read that matched my own experience of loss and fear of death and a pure love for life -- not through the plot, but the fragmented, lyrical style in which it was written. Maso captures so accurately the thought process of a passionate mind. Through Ava, she earnestly attempts to articulate a love for the world that would probably be sentimental coming from most other writers. Most notably, despite the very premise of the book, after the accumulation of so many examples of pain, she arrives at a hopeful note. It's more than a beautifully written book; it's an important one that reminds readers of our capacity for great compassion.

[Myriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, I own several copies of this book and have given some away and, no, I'm not willing to swap any of those remaining...I first read this book in the mid-nineties and have read it many times since. This is an experience, a song cycle, an epic poem, a novel without a beginning or end, all center. The story of a woman, not all that old, or all that young, dying, remembering and remaining alive to herself and to her others in shards of memory. It is what Debussy meant when he said that music exists in the gaps between the notes.

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

i often loved this book but had a hard time with the bourgie-ness of its main character/narrator - maybe i am misreading ava's cosmopolitanism as bourgeois but in any case i resented it. it's beautifully written, yes. i prefer crudeness. also, too many men. i prefer women.
maybe i only want to read books about myself. is that true? gosh.

[Fifi · Rating 5 out of 5]

A damn good book. So sad and emotional and poignant and beautiful.

[Joshua]

Entracing prose - looking forward to reading much more from Maso.

[Zach VandeZande · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stream-of-consciousness novel/poem about a woman dying from a rare blood disease. The language is sanguine and beautiful and sad all at once, with the knowledge that Ava Klein will die at the last word of the last page giving each sentence a kind of poignancy that a standard narrative probably could not. Evocative of Woolf at her best, and definitely not for a reader who longs for each thread to tie up nicely at the end, the book is full of starkly beautiful sentences that struggle with what we all want to be in life versus the reality of what we are able to be. "Tell them that you saw me--that it wasn't far--from here to the nurses station and back, but that you saw me, and that I flew."

[Sherry Hays · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book truly touched my heart in a way I have difficulty describing. I find it hard to write this review without revealing too many details. It is a story of a woman who is dying, and it is her last day on earth. The words are her thoughts as the day progresses. It is a beautiful, circular mantra that reveals the details of her life slowly, lyrically. Reading this book is really visceral for me. I read it for the first time while in college -- but I have come back to it so many times since then. Each time I read it, I am left haunted by it for days, but not in a sad or mournful way -- in a way that celebrates the idea of AVA, and her femininity and zest for life.

[Bridget · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ava is like floating through rolling hills of memory and dream. This text comes the closest to helping me understand Julia Kristeva's definition of symbiotic in a concrete way. The reader feels this text--experiences it with all five senses--maybe even a sixth. Take your time with this book. Don't move through it, but rather let it move through you. You will be grateful you made time for Maso's extraordinary relationship with language.