Defiance

by Carole Maso

A Harvard professor sentenced to die for the murder of two students, Bernadette O'Brien looks back on her life as a lonely, erotically charged genius who left her working class, Irish hometown in Massachusetts for the halls of academia. 17,500 first printing.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, American, Feminism, Crime, Literature, Womens

264 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Carole Maso is a contemporary American novelist and essayist, known for her experimental, poetic and fragmentary narratives often labeled as postmodern. She received a bachelor’s degree in English from Vassar College in 1977. Her first published novel was Ghost Dance, which appeared in 1986. Her best known novel is probably Defiance, which was published in 1998. Currently (2006) she is a professor of English at Brown University. She has previously held positions as a writer-in-residence at Illinois State and George Washington University, as well as teaching writing at Columbia University.

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I don't normally read poetry, but..."
"I don't normally read plays, but..."
"I normally prefer plot-driven novels, but..."

But what? What are you expecting from this book, anyway? Defenestrate your expectations, cast them into the fire. Strap them into an electric chair. I defy you to give Maso a try. Slip into her prose, lush and loamy, only to come up for air when the weight of desolation has you gasping for breath.

Before reaching the halfway point, I ran out to the used bookstore to snatch up two more of her books before they disappeared from the shelves. Oh, how hopeful that fear! Maso is so little read that I should've been happier to discover that her gems had fallen into the hands of another reader.

Tinged with melancholia, frenzied accretion of scenes from a wretched childhood, Book of the Dead that stands in for the would-be love letter written by one nigh incapable of love. Words of other writers, Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot and who knows else, sounding bells of recognition. Yet so unlike anything I have ever read.

Stretch a bloody veil of feminism and social justice overtop this bubbling brew and breathe in the heady fumes of this dark place borne of poverty.

I know I am condemned to death in part for the crime of being unable to bear children. I know. Bloody placenta I pull around me and crawl in and assume that old position.

I haven't been this in love with words in awhile.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

This notebook has been more of a companion than I could have imagined. How strange that I have come to know it at this late hour. One more thing to lose in this chronicle of loss. And to those of you who will read this later, with a kind of magnifying glass, combing it for clues—What is its message, blurred, in a cloud bottle, washed onto a strange shore. I am broken tonight. More than usual even. Into your hands, Liz. The brunt of my bewilderment.

A clusterfuck, in the most deliciously visceral sense of the word. Change the hovering 'it was amazing' to 'it is important', and you'll be getting somewhere.

I have to wonder how many turned tail at the sight of 'Feminism' hanging out in the Genres section of the book page. This is the same train of thought that bemuses itself over the word 'polemic' being bandied with witless ease as an excuse for plunging the rating downward. Along with political, subjective, obscene. Don't even get me started on the word hysterical.

Try anger on for size. Fury, virulent coursing of blood and bone, seething in from unearned malice and spewing out in all forms and succulent fecundities. Whether 'tis just or not, unfortunately, depends on the perpetrator, and the 'Feminism' floating just above the 'Literary fiction' and sinking just below the 'Novels' should give you enough of an idea of just who fits the bill of 'righteous fury'. Patriarchy, anyone?

So, this particular tract does not let us escape. Suspension of disbelief is rampant, yes, what with the child prodigy and the Harvard professor and the murder and the sadomasochistic spurts and schizophrenia and the female. Yes. Female, with boyfriends cooling in the fridge. If they were male? Too common, been there, done that, got the t-shirt and the slogan and the society wide acceptance for that particular strain of human discordia. Boys will be boys.

Gender, class, race, intellect, sexuality, did I forget anything else? Religion, but in the barest sense of the phrase. Funnel the poor into hospitals and institutions and execution chambers unless they are very, very special. Special enough to merit that special cocktail of disbelieving glee, that dumbfounded savior complex that marvels at the genius that proved too much for all kinds of systematic oppression to contain. A gate breaker, for the realm within which she was supposed to stay has no place for her, not if she insists on doing as best she can. Yes, she. I'm afraid I must emphasize that till kingdom come and all the world's a stage for all players. You can have your white boys in lace and silk and person of colorface if you like that sort of thing but it's no substitute, what with its added tax of rape culture and involuntary female circumcision (notice the involuntary) and the lot.

It's not me spinning my wheels here. Defiance splays it dressed to the nines, admittedly plunged in the swirling cacophony of thought seizing upon thought in the glory of intersection and mental blockages, but all you out there gaping for your next fix of 'difficult', that listy list of Shandy inspired and its so few women, come. Here's one reddening to rot on the vine for your perusal, and as an added bonus, I will even namedrop. Lessing, Morrison, Jelinek. You have no excuse.

Leave your despised alone for once. Your feared, your wretched, your quarantined. Your homosexuals, your African-Americans, all your others, your women, your children. Your tired, your poor. Your refuse. Leave us be. You laugh. You choose to miss the subtext. You minimize everything. Nothing but hate and fear and ignorance. We hold these truths to be self-evident.

My amoral moody aristocrats. Your wars, your drugs, your thousand assaults on the poor. War without end, amen.

My eagle scouts. My heads of state. My government.

Step right in. The water's ripe.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

With trepidation to add words after reading a novel titled Defiance.

Only a tentative and bold thesis.

Defiance is the novel that we have been waiting for to set down beside Lolita. Perhaps a response? An answer? An antipode? But worthy of such a reading, with no hyperbole.

And I hesitate to add my second thesis :: a novel like Defiance is the true inheritor of the tradition of novelistic realism ; that Realism looks like Defiance at the end of the twentieth century.

You will want to read this and others from Maso’s pen.

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is what a work of post modern literature looks and feels like. An experience unreachable in any other way.

Please read GR Friend Lisa's review. It gets to the essence of this book much better than I ever could.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lyrical, brutal, and kaleidoscopic, a maximal life-study through repetition and pressure-fragmentation. Written at the end of the 90s, Maso's death-row-told story, of a Harvard professor who seduces and murders two of her students (and for what reason?), could be seen as a response and corrective to a decade of cultural fetishization of (mostly male) serial killers. Whatever most other accounts were up to, this is an entirely different beast,:as harsh and desperate as beautiful, collage-composition approach creating strange echoes and complicities or turning to total fugue-state, and pursuing broad cultural assessments. This my first brush with Maso, but she's an unsung wonder (besides being sung by Coover and many others on the back jacket -- so those in the know have clearly been knowing all along).

[Kansas · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2023...

“My parents worked together well, for they were partners in resignation. There was an agreement there. A value system. A way of seeing. Or perhaps I give them to much credit. They remained together because they lacked what it might take to do anything else. There were financial aspects as well, I suppose. Neither could make a go of it, a go as they liked to say, alone. In unison, the leapt for the awful bones the governement and anyone else threw. The idea of finding someone else, of making some other sort of arrangement after so many years was no longer imaginable, let alone possible.
I, having arrived late on the scene, was the witness to my parent’s later fatigue, their despair, their particular brand of famine…”


Leyendo esta novela de Carole Maso he podido entender la causa por la cual esta autora no ha sido publicada todavía en España aunque por supuesto no hay nada que pueda justificar que no nos llegue una autora tan inmensa, tan libre y única pero es incómoda, no tanto por los temas que trata, sino por cómo se atreve a abordarlos,; deconstruye toda una narrativa tradicional obviando ese cliché del comienzo, nudo y desenlace y la convierte en una historia que no parece ficción pero es ficción en el más puro sentido del término; y es ficción a flor de piel si consigues ponerte en la tesitura de su personaje protagonista. Es una autora inquietante porque va por libre y si conectas, y te dejas arrastrar por ese estilo único en el que las palabras van ensambladas con los pensamientos de Bernadette la narradora, llegará el momento en que emocionalmente también conectes con el interior de Bernadette. Ya en “Ava” hacía algo parecido pero con otro ritmo… en Defiance el secreto está en el lenguaje, en cómo mimetiza las diferentes capas argumentales bajo la premisa de la mente de Bernadette pero mucho más descarnadamente, aquí es más implacable que en Ava. Es una experiencia yo no diría tanto como agotadora, pero absorbente dejarse arrastrar por la mente a mil por hora de la protagonista femenina.


"Father Donnelly, who teaches math, who hates me most, speaks first. Of course he's the one to speak first. Your daughter... Can't teach her... He is so miserable that this be so. Why her? Genius.
They treat this genius bit as just more bad news. And it is, of course.
And I'm exiled again. Cast off."


Carole Maso nos cuenta en 264 páginas la historia de Bernadette O’Brien, toda su vida compilada aquí… pero ¿cómo lo hace? Solo desde su mente, todo nos llega en un flujo de conciencia imparable mientras está encerrada en el corredor de la muerte por haber asesinado a dos de sus estudiantes después de haber tenido una relación con ellos. "What monstrous, remorseless creature lives in me?". No estoy segura de si a Bernadette se la puede considerar una asesina en serie, pero realmente esto no es lo importante, sino que lo que de verdad preocupa y ocupa a Carole Maso es hacernos llegar cómo ha vivido Bernadette hasta llegar hasta ese corredor de la muerte y realmente, aquí es dónde entra el milagro narrativo de la autora por cómo se adentra en la psique de esta mujer. Bernadette, hija de padres católicos de clase obrera a quien desde su infancia se le detecta un altísimo coeficiente intelectual, con doce años ingresa en la universidad y con 17 tiene ya un doctorado en Fisica y Matemáticas avanzadas en Harvard, es un genio, pero ser una niña prodigio es más una tara que un éxito y desde muy pequeña, se hace evidente que su inteligencia es un estigma para la familia. No hay tiempo para que el lector asimile la desesperación en la que vive Bernadette, una niña testigo de un entorno familiar patriarcal, donde la mujer siempre estará sometida “Woman, you are to be seen and not heard.” , y donde la religión es casi el poder patriarcal más peligroso. No hay salida para sus padres, y sin embargo, la salida que puede encontrar Bernadette gracias a su inteligencia, será una condena emocional, una esclavitud de la que nunca podrá liberarse del todo. Es aquí donde Carole Maso se hace grande, inmensa, por lo menos en la forma en la que a mi personalmente me conmovió todo ese entorno familiar que más que calidez será una carga emocional para Bernadette...


"Mother. Removes her shoes. Glimpses me cradling an enormous book. Startled, bewildered, Isn't she too young to read? It is something I think I should hide, something indecent, this reading. She catches me off guard. I am lost in Pascal's Pensées, in the icy ferocity of the intelligence. Infinite chaos separates us.
Mother, I think in defiance, but Mother, I am not like you."

[...]

“She wanders in my room late at night.While I am sitting whit a french book. She brushes the hair from my face, takes my papers away. You have chosen to be alone. Don’t choose that, honey.
And what have you chosen? I think.
I didn’t know I was choosing it. I thought marriage would be something different. I thought children would be something else. Company…
We are exiles in this sinking boat. Drowning. Then drowned. Exiles, church on fire. Then burned. “


La narración está fragmentada, Bernadette escribe un diario en la cárcel, una especie de diario de la muerte, y es a través de este diario donde descargará todos sus pensamientos, todas sus emociones (al principio parece que no las tiene); intentará revelar cómo llegó al asesinato y a medida que este flujo de conciencia se va liberando, lo hará por ramalazos de dolor, pasando de su etapa salvaje en la universidad, a su infancia, a su presente, no de forma lineal sino totalmente desordenada, todo estará mezclado y a medida que su caótica mente se va revelando, el lector irá ordenando estos fragmentos, poniéndolos en orden.


"I should have liked to have seen you one more time before you became unreachable.

And I? I should have liked to have known you, my daughter, but you were unknowable."


No es una lectura fácil pero este tipo historias en la que el lector tiene que tomar parte activa, sobre todo emocionalmente hablando, son quizás de las lecturas más gratificantes. Carole Maso no deja de recordarnos continuamente que en el lenguaje está el secreto, en este caso concreto, el secreto para que podamos llegar a a la mente de esta mujer brillante pero atrapada por su pasado. Y mientras avanza, Carole Maso no deja titere con cabeza y cuestiona la guerra, la familiia, la desigualdad social, los medios de comunicación, o esa educación patriarcal que LAS condena desde pequeñas y por supuesto expone a toda una sociedad que te llevará al exilio si no formas parte de la masa.


"While my brother pretended to despise my father, it was in part my father's love he was trying to gain when he entlisted for the war. And I'm appalled by It still: what one man will do to win another. Their perverse pacts, their obscenities, their competitiveness, their borders, the protection of their property... They were in the end, the only ones that really mattered at each other. Women were inconsequential."


Hay libros y libros, y hay autoras, y está Carole Maso... por cómo se arriesga en derribar barreras narrativas enquistadas, y por cómo, argumentalmente hablando, toca temas que realmente nos exponen como sociedad deshumanizada. Quizás uno de los puntos que más han podido impactarme de su narración sea el que exponga tan descarnadamente la forma en la que nos sentimos las mujeres ante algunas conductas tan normalizadas, ¿ambivalencia, cobardía.. y a qué coste liberarse? Una novela que en mi caso concreto, va a ser difícil que olvide, especialmente algunos de sus momentos: Bernadette, la niña, escondida en las horas de trabajo de su madre, bajo una mesa, su hermano Fergus marchando a la guerra o Bernadette asistiendo al funeral de su madre desde el interior de un coche, y oyendo a través del cristal empañado, la desesperación de su padre golpeando esa ventana, ese sonido que dejará reflejado en el diario.... Bernadette está en una prisión física, sin embargo, su mente había sido hasta ahora su principal prisión: en el diario, en el lenguaje estará la liberación.


“This notebook has been a more of a companion than I could have imagined. How strange that I have come to know it a this late hour. One more thing to lose in this chronicle of loss. And to those of you who will read this later, with a kind of magnifying glass, combing it for clues… What is its message blurred, in a cloudy bottle, washed onto a strange shore. I am broken tonight. More than usual even.

[...]

“And what has this notebook been but the verification of my solitude? The document of my estrangement. This conjuring of something out of nothing. Darkness. A few trees. An arm.

The flaw on the narrative? Do you think I don’t know?"

[withdrawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is this a novel? A poem perhaps? An ode or an elegy? "An Elegy on Pain and Suffering". A prelude to Buddhism. The world of pain and suffering where the compassion has not entered. A world where compassion is meaningless because it is not, cannot be, understood. Indeed, compassion in Defiance is not real. This is a world where life lacks any possibility of sense. Much like the one we live in.

This is the Fall of humankind, perhaps more correctly, of womankind, because the suffering is tied to being a woman. It is a response to the horror of male betrayal, to male betrayal of the very possibility of compassion. The only salvation lies in death, death and revenge, beyond more exploitation by those who want to bring about a resurrection to continued suffering.

And what pain and suffering... it's all there if a human can feel it: unwanted birth, poverty, Irish Catholic parents, drunken father, religious mother suffering sexual abuse in front of her young daughter (our heroine - Bernadette), illiterate brother abused by Catholic priest and dies at war, genius protagonist who cannot fit into this family, this world. Added to this is the betrayal of the one source of comfort. The betrayal that the reader is aware of in the tree house from the first page but must wait until the end to confirm. That betrayal, however, is there on every page. And then comes abortion, the sexual perversion, the resentment, the revenge, the violence, the murder, and it goes on... page after page. And the death wish that the reader seizes upon with every hope that Bernadette will die. I continued to read with a dread that she would survive, that there would be a stay of execution. The author, Carole Mason, keeps the reader suspended in the upper branches of the trees where the possibility of the fall into more life, more suffering, is always there.

This book is not for everyone but it is so well written. There is so much pain that it would seem to be too much for one book, for one life, but it isn't too much. It is so very real. I don't know how Carole Maso wrote this, how she continued to write someone's pain for page after page.

[Crease · Rating 5 out of 5]

The delicious arrogance of the prose...any legitimate review would be one's magnum opus.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is written as a stream-of-consciousness of a murderer. The way this murderer's brain sends her endless loops of the same information--memories, mathematics, arguments, wishes--the way anybody's brain does, makes you see that she could be anybody. But despite the universal form, the particulars of the content of her looping thought let the reader realize that in fact she couldn't be just anyone. She has to be someone who has suffered loss and humiliation at unflagging levels for most of her life. It's a riveting book.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://youtu.be/Ff65iEk5684

[Sue Davis · Rating 1 out of 5]

Harvard Physics professor murdered two of her male students and writes about it from deathrow. Stream of consciousness, a send up to victim/therapy perspective?

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

An uncomfortable read.

[Marcela · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.5/5) quite possibly the most difficult book I’ve ever read.. magnificent !!!

[Andrew Sare · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Class: we have a sealed cat inside a steel chamber, together with a "diabolical device": in a Geiger counter there is a bit of radio-active substance, so small that the probability is only half that an atom decays and one half that no atom decays. The Geiger counter is connected to relay so that if it detects an atomic decay, a hammer smashes a flask of deadly cyanide gas. If it does not detect a decay, the flask is not smashed. Thus, if an atom decays, the poor cat dies. If it does not, the cat lives. We all know perfectly well what we would see at the end of an hour if we were cruel enough to carry out this hellish experiment: the cat would be either alive or dead. According to the mathematics of quantum mechanics, however, the cat is neither. At the end of the hour, the wave function of the cat is not the wave function of a dead cat, nor is it the wave function of a cat. Rather, it is the wave function of both a dead cat and a live cat. The true wave function is the sum of the dead cat and the live cat. Quantum mechanics says unequivocally that the cat is simultaneously dead and alive." - Carole Maso, Defiance

Much of the beginning of book reminded me an over dramatic version of Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace - flippy language and a hard to follow description of a woman's pain and anger, good, but I felt that I'd read it before. When the book heated up it got spectacular. I read the "apocalyptic" ending with sun streaking down on me looking out over the sparkling ocean. What a trip.

[Kristin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was much better than Ava in terms of structure and getting me to care for the characters. Ultimately, however, it began to have one of the same problems: it couldn't sustain my interest or concern for the main character / narrator.

Because these are supposed to be her prison writings, it would make sense that the book would have some repetitions in it, some "ramblings." But it wasn't writing that was done with enough good language or good imagery to pull me through. Repetition, as Hejinian or Stein do, can work throughout a long volume if it becomes new each time. But Defiance didn't do that for me. I waited 30 pages sometimes for one of the jewels of story and description that Maso can do.

I came so close to the end (within 30 pages) by forcing myself to continue reading, but I never finished it because I lost total interest. The rewards were just not worth the act of reading.

[Jessica Haider · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Defiance" is written in the format of a journal/stream of conciousness of a mentally unstable genius who has murdered two young men. It follows her thoughts as she sits in prison on death row awaiting her execution. At times this book can be hard to follow as it jumps around from one subject to another... but you truly do feel as if you are reading the ramblings of a psychopath. It's definitely a challenging read.

My book group read "Defiance" as one of our selections. Most people in the group did not enjoy the book and found it hard to follow and very disturbing.

[Cherie · Rating 3 out of 5]

B Fascinating tale, and you really get wrapped up in the weakened mental state of the narrator. Bernadette, a lonely and somewhat crazy professor, murdered two of her students. This book is written in her journal from prison, and you see how her thoughts deteriorate, and the horrible downward spiral. Fascinating, but admittedly hard to follow at times.

[Bridget · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Maso's awareness and affection for language and for being with the page, and the plot was wild, brave and womanly. However, I gave it three stars for the weight of emotion the text was entrenched in. It was heavy and slow in areas I thought wasn't necessary.

[Rebekkila · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is one of those books that was so depressing that it seemed to affect my mood, so I stopped 63 pages from the end. The writing was not really my cup of tea, I like things written much more straight forward I felt like I was deciphering this as I went along.

[Michelle Ross · Rating 2 out of 5]

eh... not her best. I'm not all that tolerant of Maso in the first place though.

[Kristi Brendle · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's been a while since I read this. The premise was fascinating, a look into the mind of a criminal, but the lurid sex and strange childhood fixations were a bit much.

[Dearwassily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poetry, but...not.