Jamie Hood on Carole Maso's AVA
by Jamie Hood
[from the introduction to the 2026 Dalkey Archive Essentials edition]
The conceit of Carole Maso’s Ava is simple: a single day—the last day—in the life of Ava Klein, a “rare bird” who, at thirty-nine, lies in hospital dying of “an extremely rare blood cancer.” No known cure. It is August 15, a day the book splits into three sequences, three (as Ava might call them) erotic song cycles: Morning, Afternoon, and Night, each filled to bursting with electrifying inkblots of desire; the shattered and shattering recollections of one woman’s life; and the tender, searching voices of other people, geographies, texts, and loves—all of which commune with and interpenetrate Ava’s own.
Ava was—is? After all, what is pastness to the shifting, provisional temporalities of Maso’s transportive visions?—a professor of comparative literature, a woman of two cities (Paris and New York), a “passionate and promiscuous reader,” and a boundless pleasure seeker with “Uncountable lovers” in her wake, “All unforgotten. All cherished.” Three times, too, has Ava been a wife: to the Roman filmmaker Francesco; to Carlos, a Grenadian teenager; and to “Lonely, beautiful” Anatole, a French pilot who “needed the sky” as a zone of incitement against the limits of his body and self—the same sky that will one day kill him. There is also Ava’s current flame, Danilo, the Czech novelist with a “deep mistrust of words” who she realizes will be her final lover. “Have I saved with some purpose,” she wonders, “his sad and hopeful country for last?”
While passion, eroticism, and joy animate the narrative, death rules Ava, haunted as it is by its heroine’s imminent demise, the AIDS epidemic, and the unremitting wars that have come to define the twentieth century. Anatole vanishes over the sea; Ava’s friend Aldo begins to suffer unmistakable night sweats; her mother, yes, survived Treblinka, but her Aunt Sophie (“black hair and such red lips”) was killed in the camps. As the day proceeds, Ava watches “on the tiny TV: the president draws a line in the sand.” Iraq invades Kuwait. Operation Desert Shield. The Persian Gulf War commences, another in “the lunar landscapes of the desert,” in countries and places that “do not seem real to Americans.” One more war happening—always—somewhere over there.
In the hospital, nurses poke and stick her, turn and prod her, addressing her by her full name, instructive and remote. Ava has endured chemo, reiki, and acupuncture, visualization and experimental potions, but nothing’s doing. No known cure. We meet Ava in the moment she at last begins assimilating the dream of her own death, though she isn’t ready yet, or not quite: “On the slight possibility that I should survive.” A one-night lover, Franz, calls Ava Madame Forget. He, the one who names her an extremely rare bird. You are a wild one, Ava Klein. How about Frau Müller, she teases. She might have married him, too, she thinks, had she not been married at the time. Memory and desire, coalescing as they do in this roving swansong, become her sole bulwarks against erasure, against the suffocating nonentity of what waits for us after. As death approaches, Ava with her “late last hope: Chinese herbs.” There are rumors, too, of a miracle horse drug from China, a drug I can only assume is Ivermectin—that supposed panacea so familiar from our own most recent plague—which was deployed in the age of Ava against symptoms of strongyloidiasis in patients with HIV/AIDS. Find a cure. In the end, though, Ava gives herself over. No more chemo. “So much is yet to be written—”
As in nearly all Maso’s work, disorientation surfaces not in plot but form. Ava looks and often reads like poetry, with its recursive images, sonic refrains, and “paragraphs” comprising lone, wavering lines. Its pacing is tidal. Maso insists she couldn’t have written Ava without proximity to water, to the sea, and the prose sucks at the shores of these pages, while voices eddy and bubble, then just as quickly recede. Ava is, unsurprisingly, a Pisces. Certain phrasings repeat and at last reveal themselves, as in the way the voice that says “Let me know if you are going”—a seemingly melancholic beckoning—surfaces, sinks, and again returns on several occasions before the reader realizes it’s Ava overhearing one of the nurses ask a colleague whether she’s walking to Central Park on her lunch break. How simple, yes, to scatter tone and longing into the lacunae of decontextualized half-sentences. And how lovely.
Where, in these fragmented utterances, does narrative accrete? Who, here, is speaking? The sources (unattributed in the body of the text) listed in the book’s back matter are many: Lorca, Eliot, Frisch, Sarraute, Celan, Colette, and Nin are all counted among the infinite symphony. I am reminded of Woolf’s theory—one I’ve subscribed to for many years now—that reading should properly be conducted in multiplicity: “one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.” Maso wonders—what of a hundred books feeling each other out? Wittig’s sense of woman’s riven relation to pronouns, too, hovers along the periphery; the originless quality of voice in Ava diffuses and democratizes the position of the subject as she encounters this text of her life. Ava Klein is a sort of specter tragically drifting through her own textured history, but she is also powerfully boundaryless, polyvocal, a sort of radical matrix of dialogic and tactile connection.
Ava, at its base, calibrates itself around a desire of Cixous’s: “to arrive at a language that heals as much as it separates.”
A life refracted through the prism of one day constitutes its own singular canon. Time in such texts stretches like taffy; time splits its husk; time collapses. Joyce has his Bloom and Woolf her Clarissa; Isherwood did it, also, in A Single Man. Ian McEwan’s Saturday offers another variation, as does Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine or Michael Cunningham’s ode to dear, dead Virginia and Mrs. Dalloway in The Hours. Woolf haunts Maso in general, and Ava in particular, with “The Waves . . . to my mind being the precursor” to the book, as Maso writes in “Notes of a Lyric Artist Writing in Prose.” “Symbolic qualities are felt,” she adds, “perceived through voice and rhythm. Whole worlds are conjured in scraps of dialogue, a turn of the head, a pause, a deletion, a last extravagance.” Of The Waves, Woolf remarked in her diaries that it was, to her sense, a non-sequential collage of soliloquies; characters were to be made recognizable through gestural brush strokes, through caricature. “I am writing,” she considered, “The Waves to a rhythm not to a plot.”
“Just once,” Ava thinks, “I’d like to save Virginia Woolf from drowning.” What woman writer worth her salt hasn’t safeguarded such a dream? And what woman writer hasn’t pocketed a few smooth stones while suffering peculiar visions of the freezing Ouse. To don one’s coat and leave the house with purpose. Something imperturbable, also, in this plain motion.
That Ava should be named a novel at all seems to me a kind of thrilling provocation, but as Maso argues in “Notes,” the novel best functions as a “Container of the uncontainable. Weird, gorgeous vessel” for the “random, the senseless, the heartbreaking”—for, in other words, all the bizarre detritus undergirding a life. Too much of contemporary fiction, she continues, is orthodox and coercive, with writers (“commodity makers”) interested less in the mystifying and inarticulable than in an agreed upon, “recognizable reality, which they are all too happy to impart as if it were true.” In Ava, Maso seeks to disturb structural unity; she is fascinated by “an odd amalgam” of form that incorporates visual art and music, theory and dance, “even fiction sometimes”: “I felt at times more like a choreographer working with language,” she says of writing Ava. A lyric artist, yes, must refuse a narrowness of imagination; must feel everything; and detonate coherency. If we cannot do this, we must in all honesty ask ourselves if what we’ve created is just another dead object. A relic for the discard pile.
Again, Maso looks to Woolf, who considered that the future of the novel might be found in notebooks, miscellanea—writing that could repudiate rigidity and authoritarianism, writing that could try and fail, writing that could harbor “small, nearly imperceptible progresses.” Not to say Ava is concerned mainly with minor detail or the quotidian; in Maso, anyhow, no detail or experience is without significance, wonder, irreducibility. Any given moment may break open like another universe: “Truth be told,” Ava admits, “there is not one day that has gone by where I have not fallen in love with someone, with something.” This, then, is the tragedy of her dying, as Ava concerns also the desirous melancholia of life’s untrodden horizons, the “places unseen, books unread, people untouched.” How to wed an infinite number of husbands; how to get, after all, to China; how to elide the endless atrocities, the endless wars; how, god, to send one thousand thousand love letters. And to know with some surety that they will be read. That one’s love will be received.
At the close, Ava has been more collector than creator, a transliterator, for her students, of genius that will now never truly be her own. A young composer tells her she is a poet in her blood, and they set out to write an erotic song cycle, the countless, unrealized titles of which puncture her reminiscences. I like to imagine a drinking game in which I—and now you—list as many as we can remember. Les origines des langages, She Finds Herself on a Foreign Coast, The Alignment of the Planets, A Place We Can Still Go. I dream of a world where everyone has read and loved Ava so I might ask each and all of them which title is their favorite. (Mine I will keep secret for now.) If Ava dies without ever having completed her project, the novel, for Maso, is thankfully “a kind of eternity”—the body perishes, but something singular survives.
Ava is at heart a story of the bardo, understood in Tibetan Buddhism to describe the intermediary state of existence between death and rebirth. In the period after which her (previously in remission) cancer was labelled incurable, Eve Sedgwick wrote that hers was a position of deep privilege “with respect to reality.” The bardo feeling “does concentrate the mind wonderfully, and makes inescapably vivid in repeated mental shuttle passes the considerable distance between knowing that one will die and realizing it.” These are moments, as other Buddhist scholars have written, of profound liberation in consciousness, territories of radical indeterminacy, epistemic betweenness. Approaching death, Sedgwick continues, what the soul aches toward is “orientation amid the light shows and ostentatious projections of an anxious, dissolving identity.”
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten Marcel Proust,” insists our dying Ava, in whose Recherche there are certain passages, “in particular a whole section of the Temps retrouvé,” mercilessly galvanized “by a sense of impending death.” During Ava’s final Night, Maso’s prose quickens, Ava’s thoughts become increasingly abbreviated. Mortality is not the only thing that exiles women from creation; we “have not made discoveries, because [we] have been kept from the scene—absolutely.” So much is yet to be written. Having once lost a pregnancy, Ava summons, in her last hours, a wondrous vision of matrilineal futurity, for “One feels the need in the end for hundreds of daughters.”
What becomes of us when we die? Are we broken up and reduced to energy that may pass into other atoms, other planes, other bodies? Will some diamond-sized kernel of light remain of us, to be reborn? The immensity of our bewilderment in the face of these unanswerables unmoors and unravels us, leaves us as infants again, adrift in the cosmos of our lives and utterly open. In The Room Lit by Roses, Maso’s maternity diary, she writes of pregnancy as the “attempt in part to keep the deaths of those one loves at bay. And in the case of the dead, to bring back—somehow.” Another cycle.
All year long I turned to Ava in a dream of my healing. I read and reread the novel everywhere: in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon, in Oakland, Portland, and Seattle while on book tour. I read Ava in Asheville when visiting my mother and sister, and in Boston, that dreadful city I fled thirteen years ago, at a conference. In Providence, I paged through the book again, and several times (of course) in New York, where I live, and where I read it in countless bars, three parks, on four subway lines, and on the Metro North, which every other weekend carried me to my boyfriend’s farmhouse in the Hudson Valley.
All the places I read it I cried, wholly without shame. My heart in this year has been broken and held; I too have been unmoored and unraveled and bewildered. Something happened in July. A horror. Ava was the only thing I could read for weeks. I have never been so porous—a perilous state in which to read Ava or any Maso. Her work, too, is porous, electrifyingly receptive: it allows desire, tenderness, and grief to pass through unimpeded. Maso describes Ava as a text in a state of “perpetual becoming”—another bardo sensibility.
At the time of this writing, it is August, in summer’s lateness, when (as Ava thinks repeatedly throughout her last day) “Olives hang like earrings” all around. I am between radiology appointments, trying to determine whether the lumps I discovered in my breasts early this summer are malignant. During my visit this week, the mammographer is tender; the radiologist cold. Come back in six months, they tell me, which isn’t a resolution of my trouble at all.
In Union Square, once more outside the clinic, I call N. I want to say, I am dying, maybe. I want to say, darling, it may be nothing at all. I want to say, let me know if you are going. Please don’t leave me. Find a cure. He is ninety miles off, but I feel I might as well be on another planet, circling a distant star. In my terror, there are light years between us.
With a lover, Ava drives from Manhattan toward the Taconic. I know the way the light falls now on this road. I have seen it bless N’s face, seen him golden, have cried at the very look of him. Have cried at even a thought of the very look of him. Love in the hallucinatory afternoon.
After an air raid, Woolf writes in her diary: “I said to L: I don’t want to die yet.” Woolf writes: “oh I wanted another ten years—not this—”
One can only hold on for so long.
In Treblinka, “Fifty feet high. Piles of hair. Nothing but women’s hair.” A thousand love letters become a thousand Chinese civilians killed in a square. Ava thinks how she might have married her doctor, Dr. Oppenheim. How many atoms, I wonder, are there yet to be split. “Danilo’s wish: to put back together somehow, all that was divided. A beautiful wish, after all.” A language that heals as much as it separates.
By the time this reissue is published, I will have just turned thirty-nine, the age Ava is on her last day. Signs and symbols. Tea leaves spreading themselves among the pages. I have been known in my day to astrologize, to palm read, and obsess over omens. I pull cards from my worn-out tarot pack. But I know nothing with certainty. Do any of us? Except that almost everything is yet to be written.
For her part, Maso has faith that death is not the end. We have at our disposal the hovering and beautiful alphabet; we live on in touch as well as memory. A haunting need not be a horror. In Break Every Rule, Maso writes of taking a house in the Hudson Valley, one inhabited by a ghost: Elizabeth “will wonder how my new work is going. She’s stretched out on the chaise longue, her hand keeping time to some irresistible music. Her beautiful voice drifts through this precious house. She closes her eyes—says she’s so happy about the prize—pats my hand, this drowsy angel, already two years dead on the first day we meet, whom I love.”
In Ava, Maso asks the question we must all ask ourselves, on every day, in each and every moment: Why save your songs for spring?