love Maso's awareness and affection for language and for being with the page, and the plot was wild, brave and womanly, However, I gave it three for the weight of emotion the text was entrenched in, It was heavy and slow in areas I thought wasn't necessary, This is what a work of post modern literature looks and feels like, An experience unreachable in any other way,
Please read GR Friend Lisa's review, It gets to the essence of this book much better than I ever could, This is one of those books that was so depressing that it seemed to affect my mood, so I stoppedpages from the end, The writing was not really my cup of tea, I like things written much more straight forward I felt like I was deciphering this as I went along.
"Defiance" is written in the format of a journal/stream of conciousness of a mentally unstable genius who has murdered two young men, It follows her thoughts as she sits in prison on death row awaiting her execution, At times this book can be hard to follow as it jumps around from one subject to another, . . but you truly do feel as if you are reading the ramblings of a psychopath, It's definitely a challenging read,
My book group read "Defiance" as one of our selections, Most people in the group did not enjoy the book and found it hard to follow and very disturbing,
This book was much better than Ava in terms of structure and getting me to care for the characters, Ultimately, however, it began to have one of the same problems: it couldn't sustain my interest or concern for the main character / narrator,
Because these are supposed to be her prison writings, it would make sense that the book would have some repetitions in it, some "ramblings, " But it wasn't writing that was done with enough good language or good imagery to pull me through, Repetition, as Hejinian or Stein do, can work throughout a long volume if it becomes new each time, But Defiance didn't do that for me, I waitedpages sometimes for one of the jewels of story and description that Maso can do,
I came so close to
the end withinpages by forcing myself to continue reading, but I never finished it because I lost total interest, The rewards were just not worth the act of reading, An uncomfortable read. The delicious arrogance of the prose, . . any legitimate review would be one's magnum opus,./quite possibly the most difficult book Ive ever read, . magnificent !!! With trepidation to add words after reading a novel titled Defiance,
Only a tentative and bold thesis,
Defiance is the novel that we have been waiting for to set down beside Lolita, Perhaps a response An answer An antipode But worthy of such a reading, with no hyperbole,
And I hesitate to add my second thesis :: a novel like Defiance is the true inheritor of the tradition of novelistic realism that Realism looks like Defiance at the end of the twentieth century.
You will want to read this and others from Masos pen, eh not her best. I'm not all that tolerant of Maso in the first place though, Harvard Physics professor murdered two of her male students and writes about it from deathrow, Stream of consciousness, a send up to victim/therapy perspective "I don't normally read poetry, but, . . "
"I don't normally read plays, but, . . "
"I normally prefer plotdriven novels, but, . . "
But what What are you expecting from this book, anyway Defenestrate your expectations, cast them into the fire, Strap them into an electric chair, I defy you to give Maso a try, Slip into her prose, lush and loamy, only to come up for air when the weight of desolation has you gasping for breath,
Before reaching the halfway point, I ran out to the used bookstore to snatch up two more of her books before they disappeared from the shelves.
Oh, how hopeful that fear! Maso is so little read that I should've been happier to discover that her gems had fallen into the hands of another reader.
Tinged with melancholia, frenzied accretion of scenes from a wretched childhood, Book of the Dead that stands in for the wouldbe love letter written by one nigh incapable of love.
Words of other writers, Shakespeare and T, S. Eliot and who knows else, sounding bells of recognition, Yet so unlike anything I have ever read,
Stretch a bloody veil of feminism and social justice overtop this bubbling brew and breathe in the heady fumes of this dark place borne of poverty.
I know I am condemned to death in part for the crime of being unable to bear children, I know. Bloody placenta I pull around me and crawl in and assume that old position,I haven't been this in love with words in awhile,
"Class: we have a sealed cat inside a steel chamber, together with a "diabolical device": in a Geiger counter there is a bit of radioactive substance, so small that the probability is only half that an atom decays and one half that no atom decays.
The Geiger counter is connected to relay so that if it detects an atomic decay, a hammer smashes a flask of deadly cyanide gas, If it does not detect a decay, the flask is not smashed, Thus, if an atom decays, the poor cat dies, If it does not, the cat lives, We all know perfectly well what we would see at the end of an hour if we were cruel enough to carry out this hellish experiment: the cat would be either alive or dead.
According to the mathematics of quantum mechanics, however, the cat is neither, At the end of the hour, the wave function of the cat is not the wave function of a dead cat, nor is it the wave function of a cat.
Rather, it is the wave function of both a dead cat and a live cat, The true wave function is the sum of the dead cat and the live cat, Quantum mechanics says unequivocally that the cat is simultaneously dead and alive, " Carole Maso, Defiance
Much of the beginning of book reminded me an over dramatic version of Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace flippy language and a hard to follow description of a woman's pain and anger, good, but I felt that I'd read it before.
When the book heated up it got spectacular, I read the "apocalyptic" ending with sun streaking down on me looking out over the sparkling ocean, What a trip. Is this a novel A poem perhaps An ode or an elegy "An Elegy on Pain and Suffering", A prelude to Buddhism. The world of pain and suffering where the compassion has not entered, A world where compassion is meaningless because it is not, cannot be, understood, Indeed, compassion in Defiance is not real, This is a world where life lacks any possibility of sense, Much like the one we live in,
This is the Fall of humankind, perhaps more correctly, of womankind, because the suffering is tied to being a woman, It is a response to the horror of male betrayal, to male betrayal of the very possibility of compassion, The only salvation lies in death, death and revenge, beyond more exploitation by those who want to bring about a resurrection to continued suffering,
And what pain and suffering, . . it's all there if a human can feel it: unwanted birth, poverty, Irish Catholic parents, drunken father, religious mother suffering sexual abuse in front of her young daughter our heroine Bernadette, illiterate brother abused by Catholic priest and dies at war, genius protagonist who cannot fit into this family, this world.
Added to this is the betrayal of the one source of comfort, The betrayal that the reader is aware of in the tree house from the first page but must wait until the end to confirm, That betrayal, however, is there on every page, And then comes abortion, the sexual perversion, the resentment, the revenge, the violence, the murder, and it goes on, . . page after page. And the death wish that the reader seizes upon with every hope that Bernadette will die, I continued to read with a dread that she would survive, that there would be a stay of execution, The author, Carole Mason, keeps the reader suspended in the upper branches of the trees where the possibility of the fall into more life, more suffering, is always there.
This book is not for everyone but it is so well written, There is so much pain that it would seem to be too much for one book, for one life, but it isn't too much, It is so very real, I don't know how Carole Maso wrote this, how she continued to write someone's pain for page after page, .