Break Every Rule: Essays on Language, Longing, and Moments of Desire

by Carole Maso

Book Overview

In this groundbreaking work of ecstatic criticism, Carole Maso shows why she has risen, over the past fifteen years, as one of the brightest stars in the literary firmament. Ever refusing to be marginalized or categorized by genre, Maso is an incisive, compassionate writer who deems herself daughter of William Carlos Williams, a pioneer in combining poetry and fiction with criticism, journalism, and the visual arts. She is daughter, too, of Allen...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1582430632
• ISBN13: 9781582430638
• Release Date: April 2000
• Publisher: Catapult
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.7" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

A look at the mind behind AVA, Aureole

Carole Maso simply cannot be categorized. With books like AVA and Aureole, she shows how language can become an experience in itself, how certain sequences of words turn into moments of such beauty that you want to repeat them over and over, write them down, hang them on the walls so you can be surrounded by them. Break Every Rule does the same thing, although at times I found myself a little turned off by the author's obvious bitterness at a publishing industry that refuses to recognize her genius (I agree that she is a genius, but I wished she would harp on it a mite less). This bitterness turns up now and again throughout the essays included in Break Every Rule. It's a curious blending of modesty and arrogance. That being said, it was a lovely and invaluable experience to see how Maso conceives her work, how she thinks, and what she believes lies in the future for the novel. It's an unflinchingly feminine/ist, liberal plea for understanding and love.

YES YES YES

Buy this book along with Beckett, Celan, Stevens, Godard, Fassbinder, Diamanda Galas, Kathy Acker, Craig Owens, Pasolini, Thalia Field, James Baldwin, Gladman, Part, Blake, Gomez-Pena . . . and you will have many good friends.

Words as blooming

These essays about literature (Maso's and other writers's), the act of writing, about Maso's own life are essentially an awakening, an alarm call to a new way of envisioning stories. I'm not familiar with William Carlos Williams, whom she credits as an influence, but I am familiar with Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, whose influences are apparent in the novels I've read by Maso and in the techniques she uses to express. With each essay I was astonished at the innovative and dazzling approaches to language. In the essay "The Re-introduction of Color", Maso explores her struggle to find her writing self against the pressures of conformity and convention. This book is inspirational, educational, exquisite. Any writers or serious readers looking for ways to shake the trees of literature's stale greats will delight in this collection of essays, and each reader will find herself or himself challenged, seduced, and ultimately released.

Glass Shattering Precision

The venerable Carole Maso has just reminded us how literature "can be" and not "ought to be", and detailed her convincing arguments in this book, "Break Every Rule". The stern Rule-Makers would have us believe that, as writers, we can't do this and that, and must adhere to some "nifty" little rules invented by rigid minds. Well, here is a voice so clear that it can shatter glasses, and it is telling us to set ourselves free. How absolutely liberating!

Maso succeeds by Breaking Every Rule

In this collection of essays about writing, avant-garde novelist Carole Maso discusses writing, life, music, and many other topics. This collection is a must for anyone who seeks greater insight not only into Maso's own novels (Ghost Dance, The Art Lover, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, AVA, and Defiance) as well as her collection of erotic etudes, Aureole. It is also an important book that addresses issues of representation and thus can help readers understand other postmodernist writers. These essays are a pleasure to read as they offer illuminations on the nature of art and the creative process. Maso writes what she calls "lyric novels," that is, novels that aspire to the luminous state of poetry. These essays also defy conventional expectations and achieve the lyricism of poetry. In "The Re-introduction of Color," Maso says, "How extraordinary to try and write oneself free." For all their emphasis on beauty, joy, and lyricism, however, these essays avoid flowery sentimentality. Maso attacks the dullness of much contemporary realistic fiction with sharp satire. She criticizes the stultifying effects of publishing conglomerates in limiting the range of writers. "You wonder where the hero went," she writes in another essay. "You ask where is the plot?" Maso urges us to reclaim "our belief that language is capable of a kind of utopia, speaking to myriad versions of inner and outer reality." Several of the essays in this book have been previously published, but even previous fans of Maso are likely to find at least one new gem. This collection should be read by anyone interested in literary fiction and in contemporary avant-garde novelists in particular.