Overview
Two women leaf through a book of French slang, with its delicate and delicious mixing of food and sex. A man and a woman sit in a Parisian dive, caressing each other's hands. Two lovers take late-night refuge in a beach cabana, their lovemaking lit by the lights of his automobile. These are glimpses of some of the haunting scenes and characters that people this sometimes wild, sometimes elusive exploration of desire's magical and subversive qualities.Editorials
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 linesthose that manage to make language itself corporeal, performative and sexyare 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 sleepin others it will induce it firsthand. (Oct.)Library Journal
The author of such offbeat titles as The American Woman in the Chinese Hat here enters rarefied territory, and some readers won't be able to follow. Categorized as a novel, this book is in fact an extended prose poem on eroticism, with only the hint of character and plot to guide the reader. Two women make love in Paris, and when the curious (male) lover of one asks for an accounting, he hears a list of lovers reeled off alphabetically. An encounter on a beach, the life of a lonely lighthouse keeper-all emerge from the prose, scattered like petals in single-sentence fragments across the page: "When her lips devour the pulsing oysters of the woman, they read from The Book of Dreams"; "Women are so beautiful in their curiosity"; "It is the madness then, the extravagance of roses opening in December"; "and your breats-cup of milk cup of mysterious universe." Some readers will find writing like this stirringly poetic; others will choke on the overripeness. For ambitious collections only.-Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"Kirkus Reviews
An astonishingly vapid pornographic fantasy, from the Brown/Columbia professor whose previous labors in this vineyard (The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, 1994, etc.) have been praised by some as masterly.Maso does not so much write books as collate fragments. Like The American Woman, this is a collection of poetic riffs and very short vignettes drawn together by voice rather than narrative, thus lacking a strongly sustained unifying element. Such stories as emerge are imagistic, slight, and entirely hermetic: "The Women Wash Lentils" portrays two women discussing food in bed, whereas "Exquisite Hour" and "The Changing Room" are straightforward recollections of sexual encounters. Erotic fiction, as a rule, is a train that can't carry much literary freight without getting bogged down in pretension, and here the game is given away in the very first line ("When they are French, which they often are, especially in bed they say derangement"). The exotic settings (usually French), the epicurean obsession with food (usually oysters), and the kinky sex (usually on a beach) are pornographic clichés along the lines of stiletto heels or fishnet stockings, and little is added to them by Maso's rambling meditative digressions ("You're in love with the crazy white-haired girl. She's sewing poems into her sleeve, they read: `dreamy lighthouse keeper mild Steven' "). Although the poetic sequences contain striking passages and vivid images, they can't convey a story in any recognizable sense, running the high risk of rapidly coming to seem pointless. Unfortunately, they form almost the whole of the book.
In all, turgid and pompous.