Break Every Rule: Essays on Language, Longing, and Moments of Desire

Rating:
Summary: YES YES YES
Review: Buy this book along with Beckett, Celan, Stevens, Godard, Fassbinder, Diamanda Galas, Kathy Acker, Craig Owens, Pasolini, Thalia Field, James Baldwin, Gladman, Part, Blake, Gomez-Pena . . . and you will have many good friends.

Rating:
Summary: A Gorgeous Call to Arms
Review: 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.

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Summary: Glass Shattering Precision
Review: In this collection of essays about writing, avant-garde novelist Carole Maso discusses writing, life, music, and many other topics. This collection is a must for anyone who seeks greater insight not only into Maso's own novels (Ghost Dance, The Art Lover, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, AVA, and Defiance) as well as her collection of erotic etudes, Aureole. It is also an important book that addresses issues of representation and thus can help readers understand other postmodernist writers. These essays are a pleasure to read as they offer illuminations on the nature of art and the creative process. Maso writes what she calls "lyric novels," that is, novels that aspire to the luminous state of poetry. These essays also defy conventional expectations and achieve the lyricism of poetry. In "The Re-introduction of Color," Maso says, "How extraordinary to try and write oneself free." For all their emphasis on beauty, joy, and lyricism, however, these essays avoid flowery sentimentality. Maso attacks the dullness of much contemporary realistic fiction with sharp satire. She criticizes the stultifying effects of publishing conglomerates in limiting the range of writers. "You wonder where the hero went," she writes in another essay. "You ask where is the plot?" Maso urges us to reclaim "our belief that language is capable of a kind of utopia, speaking to myriad versions of inner and outer reality." Several of the essays in this book have been previously published, but even previous fans of Maso are likely to find at least one new gem. This collection should be read by anyone interested in literary fiction and in contemporary avant-garde novelists in particular.

Rating:
Summary: Words as blooming
Review: 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.