Aureole [Hardcover]

Carole Maso (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1996

Presents a series of "deliriums," mysterious, radiant, spacious, wayward, and constantly changing, and a grand cast of characters involved in most unusual relationships in this strikingly original, frankly erotic collection of short pieces.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Carole Maso's Aureole is a brilliant, fragmented, overtly sexual novel of an American woman coming to terms with her sexuality, her lesbianism and her erotic relationship to the world. Maso's early work like Ghost Dance were precise, sophisticated linear narratives that explained how the world worked. She has been moving towards a highly personal and impressionistic style in AVA and The American Woman in the Chinese Hat that explains, through innovative use of language and cadence, how the world feels. Aureole is a textured, linguistic and measured journey in which Maso makes us experience the sound and taste of the word itself with an eroticism of language that is as sensual and tactile as touch itself.

From Publishers Weekly

Showing affinities with Jeanette Winterson, whose last novel (Art and Lies) was also her most experimental, Maso's fifth book (after The American Woman in the Chinese Hat) is a lesbian, erotic fantasia so drunk with language games, impressionistic imagery and self-referential play as to be almost plotless. "I want you in the liminal stage. In the in between place," announces one woman to her lover as they lie in bed in a Paris apartment in the first chapter, evoking the themes of desire and liminality that unite the chapters that follow. Blending fiction and verse, often set on the threshold of desire and its consummation, narrated in a trance-like voice marked by ellipses and kaleidoscopic imagery of oceanic objects, fruit and sexual couplings, each chapter showcases a different lesbian, bisexual or onanistic fantasy. "Make Me Dazzle" details the lusty romance of a female professor and a muscular woman athlete who meet at a seaside town in winter; "Dreaming Steven Lighthouse Keeper" depicts the sticky daydreams of a disconsolate man tending a lighthouse; in "Exquisite Hour," a woman injecting heroin watches her life flash past in a snow-shrouded haze. Maso's freewheeling prose-poetry and bawdy cataloguing technique suggest a lesbian updating of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." Yet her best lines?those that manage to make language itself corporeal, performative and sexy?are submerged in a stream of arch non sequiturs: "Let us wash together our rosy lentils. In the dusk. In the dark. We'll live on oysters there, and sea snails." In some readers this book will evoke the erotic, free-associative thought that occurs as one drifts off to sleep?in others it will induce it firsthand.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 214 pages
• Publisher: Ecco Pr; 1st edition (October 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0880014822
• ISBN-13: 978-0880014823
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,028,267 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful poetic non-sensical passion, September 9, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Aureole (Paperback)

Very different - but, very wonderful. It may not be a linear novel - with an actual 'story' - but it is an excellent read. Maso is an incredibly talented writer.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Inebriating Language of Desire., March 23, 2008

By 

DLK "DLK" (San Marcos, TX) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Aureole: An Erotic Sequence (Paperback)

Alright, so maybe not every page works to evoke the space before the moment of _____, but those that do are blindingly evocative, work up a fever. I'm thinking Anju Flying Streamers After.

The Women Wash Lentils. You'd seriously have to die in the middle of the chapter to put the book down.

It's language play, a hypothesis worth testing, worth reading. Think of jazz. It's not Coltrane's Ascension. It's that very same morning but with the shutters still closed. Maybe one day, Carole?

And as far as the stab at post modern notions by a previous reviewer. Just Wikipedia the subject. Why would a person ever want to write Aureole in the face of traditionalist criticism? And the answer is not, "to be cool/different."

10 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Please, Carole, DO something with your talent, January 19, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Aureole (Hardcover)

Carole Maso has an amazing gift for language. In some of the stories, like "Sappho Sings the World Ecstatic," she makes poetry, using rhythm and rhyme and unique combinations of words. So why is she trying to write prose? She has no talent for plot or dramaturgia; her "stories" go nowhere. They are most likely autobiographical, and real life does not make good fiction. Most authors who write from their own experience actually exert effort trying to turn life into art--but not Maso. Obviously, she is a talented writer. It strikes me as pure laziness--backed up by the postmodern notion of "challenging traditional structures"--that she makes no effort to use her talent to create anything resembling a narrative. I have read three books by Maso and I will continue to read her work because of its poetry. I look forward to a day when I can read a book written by her that does not leave me feeling irritated by her artistic arrogance and general self-involvement.