Ava Klein—thirty-nine, lover of life, world traveler, professor of comparative literature—is dying. From her hospital bed on this, her last day on earth, she makes one final ecstatic voyage. In fragments and vignettes, Ava's life unfolds in a spectacular dream theater, populated by the familial ghosts of all her life’s loves. We hear the voices of her three former husbands: Francesco, a filmmaker from Rome; Anatole, lost in the air over France; Carlos, a teenager from Granada. The voices of the literary loves that shaped her life: Woolf, Eliot, Nabokov, Beckett, Sarraute, Wittig, Lorca, Frisch. The voices of her parents, who survived the Treblinka death camp, and of her Aunt Sophie, who did not. War permeates the text, for on Ava Klein's last day Iraq has invaded Kuwait. And above all we hear Ava's voice. Hers is the voice of pleasure, of astonishment, the voice of regret, the voice of gratitude as she moves closer and closer to the "music that is silence."
AVA is an attempt, in the words of French feminist philosopher Helene Cixous, "to come up with a language that heals as much as it separates." Unafraid and unyielding, Maso lays bare the poignancy of mortality—the extraordinary desire to live, the inevitability of death. The things never done, never understood; the things never said, or said right, or said enough. A moving, symphonic masterpiece that laid the foundation for decades of feminist experimental writing, AVA “reconfirms Maso's reputation as one of our most refined and daring novelists.” —Booklist
