American Woman in the Chinese Hat (American Literature) - Hardcover

Maso, Carole

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1564780457 ISBN 13: 9781564780454

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994

Synopsis

Carole Maso's stunning, erotic fourth novel chronicles the dark, irresistible adventures of an American writer named Catherine who has come to France to live. Set into motion by a single act of abandonment-Catherine's lover of ten years has left her-she falls deeper and deeper into an irretrievable madness. With passionate abandon and detachment Catherine pursues her own destruction. Forcing the boundaries of identity and the limits of her eroticism, she enters a series of blinding sexual encounters with a poet, a fascist, a young Arlesian woman, a fireman, and three thieves. Eerily she splits herself in two so that she is both the one who watches and the one who is watched, creator and creation, author and character, as she observes herself from afar "And I would like to help her, " the one who watches says, "but I can't." Finally she meets Lucien, the solitary, cynical, beautiful man with long hair who looks as though he has "stepped out of an unmade film by the dead Truffaut, " and through this mysterious, doomed, bittersweet liaison Catherine makes one last attempt to halt her decline through the redemptive act of story-telling. She begins to invent the story of their lives, telling it to him half in English, half in French, joining their solitudes for a moment before losing forever her belief that the shapely, hopeful prospects of narrative make sense of expenence. "She notices how everything is given up or taken away" as she loses the power of the imagination or memory or the body to console, and finally of language to convey meaning. This mesmerizing drama of sex, betrayal, and dissolution with its shattering inevitable conclusion is played out against the dazzling backdrop of the beautiful, indifferent Cote d'Azur in summer. Written in a dwindling lexicon with a simple, warped musicality, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat is a dark, uncompromising, seductive work of art.

About this title

About the Author

Carole Maso is author of the novels AVA, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, Ghost Dance, The Art Lover, and Defiance. She has also written several books of nonfiction. Maso is a professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.

From Kirkus Reviews

Exquisite stylist Maso (The Art Lover, 1990) pursues a form for her lushly hysterical phrase-spinning. You read this bisexual/lesbian novel with great sympathy for its fine writing and wait fruitlessly for its beautiful brushstrokes and wispy episodes to come together and grab the back of your neck. Catherine, a young American novelist hanging around the C“te d'Azur on a writing grant, is waiting to be joined by her lover of ten years when a phone call flattens her dreams. Her lover gives strong reasons why they can't go on: She can no longer be a slave to Catherine's genius, she lists Catherine's crimes, then adds that she's seeing someone else. Catherine's spirit, arched like a Wallace Stevens poem, collapses into a gorgeous puddle. She sits around cafes in Arles and Nice writing in her notebook and becomes known as ``the American woman in the Chinese hat who cries and writes''--and tear by tear goes nuts, drinks too much, and becomes what some readers might think promiscuous. She seduces a 17-year-old artist's model (a very well-done scene), gives herself to a poet, a fascist, a fireman, and is laid by three ticket- scalpers in one night. When she runs into Lucien, a shockingly beautiful, long-haired blond Frenchman drinking ``liquid light'' from a luminous stream of water at an outdoor fountain, all desire focuses on him. They talk, and talk, largely about their favorite films--he is someone who ``stepped out of an unmade film by the dead Truffaut.'' The reader knows this affair is star-crossed even as Catherine sits writing about it, clearly in the same rose- lighted words that Maso herself uses. All voice and no story. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 1564780457
• ISBN 13: 9781564780454
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 201