Reviews

Mother and Child by Carole Maso

screen_memory's review against another edition

2.0

I should have shelved this and gone with Lispector while I had the chance. I tore through this on a plane ride home and didn't have much fun doing it. For as *natural* as the setting and the imagery is, this novel did not seem rooted in anything. It's a series of surreal and disjointed narrative vignettes. "A meditation on life and death"? Okay, sure. I didn't really see it. The novel "follows a mother and child as they roam through wondrous and increasingly dangerous psychic and physical terrain" - but to what purpose? The novel is plotless, which I would be a hypocrite to complain about, but it seems directionless as well. The novel seems as though I could skip about the pages and still have as good an idea of what the hell's going on as opposed to reading it page by page, which is to say most of the time I had no idea what the hell was going on. Maso's prose stylings are admirable, and her imagery is vivid and inventive, but I'm not often an advocate for elevating style above all. I’m not much interested in a novel that seems as though it could have been written by drawing cut-out narrative snippets from a hat. It's a stylistic mosaic that doesn't produce a coherent image. I feel like I should’ve liked this. OOPS - oh, well. That's all. See ya.