Reading Carole Maso’s AVA

The only way to read Carole Maso’s Ava, perhaps, is to forget the form that novels have taken traditionally, to forget the way language has been manipulated before, to immerse yourself completely in the text. The content and form – so much like the sea water that Ava Klein’s mind keeps going back to – flows over the reader, ebbs and crashes and shifts to reveal first that “blood and sea water have identical levels of potassium, calcium, and magnesium” (7), and finally that the sea lives “in our veins” (250), that there exists an “ocean of blood” (251). Blood, then, becomes more complex than a bodily fluid, more than what measures Ava’s disease, more than what courses through her veins.

If blood is a sort of fingerprint, we must wonder what becomes of the things we touch: do we absorb them through the flesh, into the body, or do we leave behind our imprint on these things? In Ava’s case, I believe, the answer is both. Not only has she drank the world in through her fingertips, but she has pressed fragments of her life into the skin of the world.

The reader sinks into Ava’s rich and varied sensory memories, the memories of a woman “determined to reshape the world according to the dictates of desire” (6): the taste of food and wine, the pleasure of sex, the sound of music and voices, the “smell of rosemary and thyme in a young man’s hair” (13), the colors and textures of flowers, the way “olives hang like earrings in the late August” (47) – but to live, one must die. Similarly, Maso writes, “the poem demands the demise of the poet who writes it and the birth of the poet who reads it” (65). The poem that describes Ava’s life celebrates her as it condemns her, kills her as she remembers what it is to live.

Perhaps, then, we must conclude that not only is the individual the sum of their blood, but that the individual is comprised also of the earth, and the earth of the individual – that without one, the others would lose any sense of meaning.