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Summary: not for everyone
Review: This book did not meet my expectactions- I found it very pretentious and hard to tolerate.
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Summary: Song of exhilaration
Review: 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.
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Summary: Beauty in the enigma of self.
Review: 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.
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Summary: Love is all we know of love
Review: 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.
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