Mother and Child
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A literary mediation on life and death, being and non–being, and the intense mystery and beauty of existence between a mother and child.
“Heartbreakingly perfect” (San Francisco Chronicle), Maso’s moving, dreamlike novel follows a mother and child as they roam through wondrous and increasingly dangerous psychic and physical terrain. A great wind comes, an ancient tree splits in half, and a bat, or possibly an angel, enters the house where the mother and child sleep, and in an instant a world of relentless change, of spectacular consequences, of submerged memory, and uncanny intimations is set into motion. What was once hidden is now in plain sight in all its splendor and terror as the mother and child are asked to bear enormous transformations and a terrible wisdom almost impossible to fathom. As the outside can no longer be separated from the inside, nor dream from reality, the mother and child continue, encountering along the way all kinds of characters and creatures as they move through a surreal world of grace and dread to the end.
“The tough–mindedness, originality and wit of her perceptions are intoxicating.”—Publisher Weekly
“By giving the conflicts in her life a fictional context, she tries to bring order and beauty—and some degree of understanding—to chaos.”—Library Journal
“Fully coherent, moving and elegiac, a genuine consolation.” —The New York Times Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Maso's first novel since 1998's Defiance, a mother's fears for her young daughter are revealed through dreams and surreal events woven haphazardly between reality and illusion. After a great wind, an enormous winged creature appears in the house; mother and child are unsure whether it is kind, malicious, a bat, or an angel, but the mother knows that her move to the idyllic valley of her childhood to shield the child from life's dangers has failed. "Life and Death before our eyes shall vie for the Mother and Child," the godlike Vortex Man proclaims. Together and separately, they traverse the magical arrivals and departures of the Grandmother from the North Pole, the grief of September 11, the sleeping left ventricle of the child's Aunt Inga; "Each beat of the heart is triggered by a surge of calcium ions that cause millions of overlapping filaments in a heart cell to pull against each other and contract." In exploring the intricate mother-child bond, Maso overly romanticizes suffering and grief, detracting from the lyrical prose and leaving her book feeling unanchored. Still, this plotless but not directionless novel beautifully contemplates the treachery of the world that motherhood exposes, and the child's ignorance of it.
