Bernadette O'Brien: child prodigyprofessor of physics at Harvardsentenced to die in the electric chair for the shocking murder of two male students. In her journal--her "death book" as she calls it--Bernadette takes a dark look back at the unfolding events that led to the extraordinary crime for which she stood trial. Defiance pulls us into the world of a lonely, defiant, brilliant woman--a misfit child, a girl-genius who left the working class, Irish Catholic world of Fall River, Massachusetts--a stone's throw away from Cambridge--who entered the halls of academic privilege at the age of 12, and stayed to rise within its ranks. In the incandescent, erotically charged prose for which she is known, Maso probes the depths of a female psyche--inextricably embedded in a uniquely American matrix of sexuality, violence, and the clash of class difference--as no writer before her has done. * Carole Maso has galvanized audiences across the country and won critical esteem and literary awards. * Compare Defiance to current hits like A.M. Homes' The End of Alice, Cronenberg's movie Crash, and Susanna Moore's In the Cut.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Harvard physics professor Bernadette O'Brien lies in a Georgia prison cell, awaiting execution for the murder of two students, killings that were performed as the culmination of intricate sexual ensnarements. As she prepares to die, Bernadette writes her life story in a notebook. That is the plot of Defiance... but this is not a novel that can be reduced to its plot; Carole Maso, in fact, repeatedly undermines efforts to glide through a straightforward narrative, plunging readers into the mind of her narrator. The novel's power comes not from its events, although those are certainly jarring enough, but from the ways in which those events are filtered through Bernadette's perspective--the juxtapositions of childhood traumas, mathematical puzzles, and cynical death row reflections (more than a few of which are inspired by the well-meaning social worker assigned to her case: "Not another stereotype at this late date. Please no."). Playing with various forms--symbolic logic, self-help literature, and sexual fantasy, among others--Maso takes a lurid tale and transforms it into a stunning glimpse into the mind of a woman who became a killer without, for all her sarcastic and unrepentant bravado, ever quite ceasing to be a victim. --Ron Hogan
From Kirkus Reviews
A vivid rendering of the psyche of an unregenerate murderess breathes life into this impressive if typically irritating sixth novel from the prolific author of such postmodernist misfires as AVA (1993, not reviewed) and Ghost Dance (1996). Narrator Bernadette O'Brien, incarcerated in the Georgia prison where shell be executed, describes in an ``elaborate confessional'' (which she also calls her ``death book'') her troubled upbringing (in Irish-Catholic working-class Fall River, Mass.), precocious brilliance (which led her to Harvard at age 12 and early eminence there as a professor of physics), andin hair-raisingly explicit and vainglorious detailher seduction and then murder of two of her prize students. Maso tells Bernadette's lurid story in a calculatedly disjointed narrative that leaps forward and back in time and is composed of fragmentary remembered experiences and conversations, classroom lectures, diagrams (which mischievously parody scientific and mathematical formulae), poems, aphorisms, and amusingly grandiose quotationsand misquotations (mostly from Shakespeare). What emerges is a superb portrait of an unwanted daughter born to a 40-year-old mother and alcoholic father, and of a grieving sister (whose brother Fergus went to Vietnam and found ``an untimely, violent demise in an absurd cause'')a sister who would steel herself to become a powerful woman impervious to indignity and loss. That's all to the good; what isn't is the tiresome reiteration (familiar in Maso's fiction) of diatribes against American materialism, complacency, and intolerance; ``the peculiar behavioral habits of the heterosexual''; and, more generally (and more stridently), the ways in which men exercise power over women. The final pages, though, where Bernadette's rages are subsumed in her intimations of solidarity with other women prisoners and of reunion with her brother, are the most affecting Maso has written. Masos still a writer burdened by an agenda, but here shes grounded her protagonist's fulminations in a recognizable reality and in a manner that makes this at once her most convincingly textured and technically accomplished novel. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
LITERARY FIREWORKS,
By A Customer
This review is from: Defiance (Hardcover)
If you miss Fassbinder's mercurial dramaturgy, or Diane Arbus's stunning imagery, you're in luck, because Carole Maso's "Defiance" will put you right in the middle of a mammoth literary garden with fragrance so strong that it will make your head spin. The book deals with issues regarding gender inequality, oppression, familial tragedy, and sexual obsession with impressive emotional depth. Carole Maso does not shy away from presenting the readers with the most provocative angles on humanity; this writer takes risks--it is as if she has determined that her role in life is not to write easy stuff. For that, we salute her!
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Defiantly Difficult (but so worth it),
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Defiance (Paperback)
This is not a book that readily yields its secrets. For some people (myself included), it takes a couple reads to be appreciated. You'll get along much better in this prison inside the protagonist's head if you think for a moment about everything you know about the way fiction is "supposed" to work, about plot, setting, and character, then just wad that up and throw it away. Plot, character, and setting flow into one another and close in on the reader and the protagonist. It is a difficult book to just sit down and read. It lulls in spots and occasionally gets completely incomprehensible. But it starts speeding toward its terminus in the last 25 pages or so, and then it ends, exactly how you think it's going to. But that isn't even important. In this book, it's the winding, horrifying road the narrator takes you down. You're not going to understand everything the moment she gives it to you. But stick with it, read to the end, and you'll be able to say "I get it---I think." Like any really good book, the most important thing about it is not necessarily what you get on the page, but what you think about after you're done reading.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The incredible possibility of language.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Defiance (Hardcover)
This novel's brilliant exploration of society's mores, is encompassed in a young woman's mind. An intelligent expose into the conditions of class, sexuality, gender, religion and the penal system and those individuals who are at once priviledged and also marginalized on those very unstable conditions. A novel very significant as we enter the end of the century. And, how appropriate that its setting takes place in a prison cell. Maso is indeed one of the most important and seminal writers today.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
