The Art Lover: A Novel

by Carole Maso

Overview

While her father and best friend are dying, a young American woman tries to find the limits of love and the power of art in the face of the inevitable.

What is the power of art in the face of death? In The Art Lover Carole Maso has created an elegant and moving narrative about a woman experiencing (and reliving) the most painful transitions of her life. Caroline, the novel's protagonist, returns to New York after the death of her fatherostensibly to wrap things up and take care of necessary "business"where her memory and imagination conspire to lay before her all her griefs and joys in a rebellious progression. In different voices, employing a collage-like fragmentation, Maso gently unfolds The Art Lover in much the same way the fragile and prehistoric fiddlehead fern unfolds throughout the novel, bringing with subtle grace the ever-entangled feelings of grief and love into full and tender view. Various illustrations throughout.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811216296
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	06/17/2006
Series:	New Directions Paperbook Series , #1040
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	260
Sales rank:	195,996
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Carole Maso is author of the novels AVA, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, Ghost Dance, The Art Lover, and Defiance. She has also written several books of nonfiction. Maso is a professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.

Editorial Reviews

Caroline, a novelist and poet, returns from an isolated artists colony to Manhattan, where her widowed, art-historian father has recently died. As one strand of the narrative follows her rediscovery of the city--and of a friend diagnosed with AIDS--another follows the characters she creates in her prose; interspersed throughout are reproductions of pictures and newspaper clippings that inspire her. This narrative cord ruptures with the introduction of ``Carole,'' the persona of Maso, and descriptions of herself at work on the novel while her own beloved friend is dying, Carole/the writer's art incapable of saving him. Despite its trendy structure and themes, this work is steered by anything but a narcissistic postmodernism. Maso ( Ghost Dance ) is not content to muse on the relationship between life and art; she brings to life a ``bombardment of images and sounds,'' fashioning a pattern of astonishing complexity and beauty. The tough-mindedness, originality and wit of her perceptions are intoxicating. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This nontraditional novel presents an experimental face to the reader: illustrations, newspaper clips, and art reproductions are interspersed with a story line buried within a story--perhaps within yet another story. The narrator, a novelist, has moved back to New York to settle her father's estate (he was an art historian). She struggles with her grief and guilt at her father's death and stands by a childhood friend who is dying of AIDS. She begins another novel: by giving the conflicts in her life a fictional context, she tries to bring order and beauty--and some degree of understanding--out of chaos. Interesting reading for those with a literary bent.-- Linda L. Rome, Mentor, Ohio

Library Journal