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Overview
Ghost Dance is the first book in a line of relentlessly experimental and highly esteemed works by Carole Maso. Like the poetry-mother in this debut novel, Maso works to ensure her readers understand and come to accept sorrow as a knowable and tactile presence. Narrating a family story through the voice of a young writer whose mother has recently been killed, Maso invites readers to experience firsthand both women's love and courage, capabilties of imagination, their persistence of memory, and generosity of spirit.It is this same generosity that allows readers the transformative intimacy Ghost Dance has to offer. Like her artist-protagonists, Maso's subject as well as medium is language, and she is brave and dangerous in her command of it. She abandons traditional narrative forms in favor of a shaped communication resembling Beckett and rivalling his evocative skill. Immersed in dilated and intense prose, the readers view is a privilege one, riding the crest of clear expression as it navigates the tangled terrain of loss and desperate sorrow.
Editorials
Library Journal
This haunting, often surreal first novel vividly captures the struggles of a young woman, Vanessa Turin, as she attempts to recover her family and her past. At the novel's outset, Christine, Vanessa's talented and tormented poet-mother, has disappeared. In time, both her father and brother also desert her, in separate but equally inexplicable ways. Overcome with loss, Vanessa turns to her inner world, and through her imagination re-creates her life, both past and present. Maso's prose is repetitious and dreamlike, and her poetic images are sharp and evocative. Unconventional and intense, this novel tells a harrowing tale of the human search for love and understanding. Recommended for most fiction collections. Jeanne Buckley, ERIC Clearing House, Syracuse Univ., N.Y.Book Details
Published
September 25, 1996
Publisher
W. W. Norton & Co.
Pages
288
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780880014090