Maso’s philosophy on writing, and perhaps her idea in the process of writing, is sprinkled throughout Ava: “Shifting voices and constant breaks of mode let silence have its share and allow for a fuller meditative field than is possible in linear narrative or analysis.”[break]
“Artist’s statement: I certainly admire many narrative and documentary films, but instead of re-creating or reproducing the familiar world it’s been more exciting to collect an odd assortment of images, both scripted and shot from real life, Today you could step off the end of the world and float.”
A work of experimental fiction, Ava is a book of wonder, with phrases of excruciating beauty and moments of spacious thought. It leaps. It leaps from word to word, moment to moment, across a network of memories that make up Ava’s life. It is at once a tragic and a celebratory book. It is a book that celebrates her life, her loves, her literary loves, her musical loves, the places she’s traveled, the people she’s known. Experimental fiction is not for everyone and the criticism leveled against it is usually that too much focus is made on structure or highly-stylized writing takes away from the depth of the narrative.
Maso’s Ava walks that thin line in between, and successfully too, being a highly-stylized paratactic fiction that is charged with emotion. It moves as our memory does from one subject to another, not like Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness, but rather as spurts of memories strung together by poignant silences. Less of a stream, more like rain.
The first few pages can be bewildering because it disregards the traditional swathing form of the literary narrative and jump starts with poetic phrases. But there is something compelling in the writing, something that is beautiful and instinctive, that cannot be figured out, or written about, but can only be shown, because when you finish the book, you wonder at the form that is so large but is able to work on word/sentence level –
Come sit in the morning garden for a while.
Olives hang like earrings in late August.
A perpetual pageant.
Come quickly.
The light in your eyes
Precious. Unexpected things.
The poetic phrases become refrains as the pages progress but in repetition, they accumulate meaning from the different contexts they are strung in. The reader quickly learns to read the book, to read it slowly, to pause, to think, to reread sentences, to wonder, leave, and return again like Ava’s refrains. It is a dance of the mind and as Danilo says, “I make no apologies... for these texts: unorthodox but not extravagant, self-indulgent but only slightly, and refuting, I hope, all that is pretentious, misleading, and false. I make no apologies.”
Ava can appear pretentious because of such seemingly disconnected phrases but with the refrains, we get to know Ava better and get to know of what she thought of specific things and who she is as a person – a hopeless romantic, “a rare bird”, someone who lives “close to what one feels deeply: literature or science, languages. The whitewashed wall, the fragrant myrtle, music, the fountain.”
We travel through Italy and France with her and meet her friends, her lovers, the people she met in passing. And always there are her literary influences – Samuel Beckett, Pablo Neruda, Garcia Lorca, Virginia Woolf, Anton Chekhov, Paul Celan, and Helene Cixous – mentioned many times, in thought, and in images. For instance:
Samuel Beckett in a tree...
Or Samuel Beckett learning to fly.
...Samuel Beckett waiting for reinforcements. It’s the war. But no reinforcements come.
And
Neruda believed poetic form to be as dynamic as the processes of transformation and discovery. Form and content constantly shape each other like the elements of the ecosystem and this allows truth, infinite possibilities for expressions.
The stated Neruda’s belief holds true for Ava as a character and as the book: the content is dictated by form and the form by content. To fill in the spaces or to demand a traditional narrative is to write a different book and not one that matches the spirit of Ava. And Ava is spirited, celebrating the life in the mind and the memories of a person still so vibrant with life. We follow her to Cafe Pourquoi Pas, to Cafe de Rien, and to Cafe Tout Va Bien.
Like her and like everyone else, we hold on to brief glimpses, bits of dialogues, and moments of feeling,
As we struggle to make meaning,
Where maybe there is none
And so one let it all go.
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