Ghost Dance

by Carole Maso

Book Overview

"Although author Carole Maso follows the contours of fiction, style is everything in Ghost Dance, a strangely lovely and perplexing book . . . she has a fine ear and her literary gift is impressive."... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0865472394
• ISBN13: 9780865472396
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 275 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Ms. Maso deserves a wider audience.

The Topaz Bird is an elusive creature signifying many things, creativity, I think, and madness. Carole Maso weaves a beautifully written tale of grief, loss, and redemption too. Ghost Dance is about ideas and emotions rather than plot. Longing, loss, and the grief that comes from irremediable loss are, I think, the main themes of the book. The longing in the book is the longing for both familial and romantic love. The sort of longing the intensity of which is often inversely proportional to the intensity of feeling that is reciprocated. Or, if the longed for thing is not reciprocated feeling, perhaps the longing is for outward demonstrations of love. A mother sits on the heart of this novel. The weight of her beauty and absence oppresses everything and everyone. Her essence, like the Topaz Bird that is, it seems, her soul, is a beautiful and free creature that cannot be caught or caged. Those that love her are, therefore, doomed to a certain passivity in watching and waiting for her. Like a bird, she stays but a moment and then is gone. "Sometimes I think I have heard the fluttering of wings. Sometimes I think I have seen something: a tip of a tail, a piece of beak, a leg, one thin leg of that incredible bird. Sometimes I see the bare branch of a tree swaying in slow motion in my sleep and I know what that means. I try to get myself past the tree to see what's beyond it -- the field that opens like a great hand, the wide breath of sky. I search for a trace of the Topaz Bird. Only moments before it was perched on that bobbing branch. I am getting closer. I follow the horizon line of my dreams. I watch." Carole Maso's poetic prose conveys the orbit of various family members and lovers around the mother. The story circles around, approaching the central truth and flitting away again. Certain sections are repeated several times through the book, sometimes verbatim, sometimes nearly so. In this way, Ms. Maso returns and emphasizes certain themes, including the rhythms of love, longing, and grief. Absent mothers do, I think, create a craving in their children that cannot be satisfied. The same may be true to mismatched lovers. This aspect, the much-loved but oft-absent (both physically and emotionally) mother/lover, is portrayed beautifully, with a truth that is gripping. This book, because of its emotional power, will not be one that is easy to forget. It is, I think, worthy of remembering for its artistry as well as the technical achievement Ms. Maso manages. Carole Maso deserves a wider audience.

One of the best books I've ever read.

Yes, it's all here. This book stands up, time and time again. I first read this in 1995, when I owned a bookstore and a customer ordered it from me. I was taken with the jacket and looked closer. I was taken in, sideswiped by what language can do. I've read every Carole Maso book since, but none compares to this for me. Memory, longing, family, identity, and the white sadness that holds it all together. Such a shame that this is out of print when there is pure junk going into its fifteenth printing stacked to the ceiling at Borders. I should have been born in another place and time, when books like this were things you could build a life around. Buy this and read it. She is a master.

A song of grief

Vanessa is a young woman drifting through her memories and imagination, while struggling to come to terms with her mother's death. Her mother was a famous poet whose private spiral into madness held the family together as it forced each person into her/his own separate world. After her mother's tragic death, Vanessa's often-silent father disappears and her brother shifts from place to place, sending cryptic postcards to his sister. Even Vanessa's mother's lover Sabine seems unable to embrace her own grief. Through it all, Vanessa struggles to resurface through the pain, through the family dysfunctions, through the wavering and tenuous hold on reality. She struggles to come back to living and not plummet into madness like her mother. Carole Maso's amazing and brilliantly woven story plumbs the depths of grief in a style totally her own. Swinging from reality to memory to imagination, Maso charts Vanessa's mental state as she climbs back to living. I was often reminded of Virginia Woolf's works while reading, and found myself wondering about possible connections. "Ghost Dance" is truly a book to behold.

A lovely and haunting pomo classic.

I first read this book in the eighties and was literally haunted by it. After reading Defiance this winter, I went back and reread it--and wasn't disappointed. It's all here--the cold war, the world's fair, the theme of madness and redemption, the wonderfully cadenced sentence--and Maso reinvents the orphan's search for the mother. She does for mothers and daughters what (too) many male authors have done with the lost father/lost son.