Ghost Dance

Rating:
Summary: A lovely and haunting pomo classic.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A song of grief
Review: 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.