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Aureole
Men and women who share the same erotic cravings explore the sensual world while exploring one another
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 28, 1996
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405 people want to read
About the author
Carole Maso
24 books172 followersCarole 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.
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February 3, 2015Bibliography ADD’d below.
____________
Well now that didn’t go so well... Now to adjudicate blame.
Some folks are putters-inners ;; other folks are takers-outers. What we have here I thinks is a severe case of a taker-outer. Take this much out and what’s left is a preponderance of white-space which either risks a case of snow-blindness or a threat of a prose turning into poetry. Or wishing that it rather be poetry. Which is not what I was going for.
White space works some times. In AVA it worked. There it worked like rests in music.
Maybe it’s not the white space. Maybe it’s the paucity of words. Even I thought maybe the paucity of prose. I mean there is here an outnumbering of syntax by just mere words. I thought.
Or really maybe it’s the prose that would rather be poetry. You see how a directionality like that might allow these eyes of mine to just fall off the edge of the bottom of the page with nothing catching it.
And this is a) a literary erotics and b) a lesbian version of literary erotics. So, this should be really good.
And even Mr Moore thought this thing awesome like pyrotechnics are awesome. But he also liked that white space monster, The Fifty Year Sword. No accounting for that.
In other words, more words please!
______________
Texts and films upon which and within which these pieces were written ::
The Oysters of Locmariaquer by Eleanor Clark.
The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary Biography and Collected Works, Volume 1, Part II by Clark, Hodson and Neiman; Anthology Film Archives, 1988. (specifically, "At Land" and "Meshes of the Afternoon")
India Song by Marguerite Duras.
Grimms Fairy Tales, Nine Stories by J. & W. Grimm; Penguin, 1995. (specifically, "The Twelve Dancing Princesses")
The Case of Anna Kavan: A Biography.
Sappho.
Something from Gertrude Stein.
Maso's own Ghost Dance and The American Woman in the Chinese Hat.
"Exultation is the Going" by Emily Dickinson.
A letter from Bhanu Kapil.
[thanks to Friend Michael for pointing me to Maya Deren and putting in my head to provide this bibliographic nugget]
____________
Well now that didn’t go so well... Now to adjudicate blame.
Some folks are putters-inners ;; other folks are takers-outers. What we have here I thinks is a severe case of a taker-outer. Take this much out and what’s left is a preponderance of white-space which either risks a case of snow-blindness or a threat of a prose turning into poetry. Or wishing that it rather be poetry. Which is not what I was going for.
White space works some times. In AVA it worked. There it worked like rests in music.
Maybe it’s not the white space. Maybe it’s the paucity of words. Even I thought maybe the paucity of prose. I mean there is here an outnumbering of syntax by just mere words. I thought.
Or really maybe it’s the prose that would rather be poetry. You see how a directionality like that might allow these eyes of mine to just fall off the edge of the bottom of the page with nothing catching it.
And this is a) a literary erotics and b) a lesbian version of literary erotics. So, this should be really good.
And even Mr Moore thought this thing awesome like pyrotechnics are awesome. But he also liked that white space monster, The Fifty Year Sword. No accounting for that.
In other words, more words please!
______________
Texts and films upon which and within which these pieces were written ::
The Oysters of Locmariaquer by Eleanor Clark.
The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary Biography and Collected Works, Volume 1, Part II by Clark, Hodson and Neiman; Anthology Film Archives, 1988. (specifically, "At Land" and "Meshes of the Afternoon")
India Song by Marguerite Duras.
Grimms Fairy Tales, Nine Stories by J. & W. Grimm; Penguin, 1995. (specifically, "The Twelve Dancing Princesses")
The Case of Anna Kavan: A Biography.
Sappho.
Something from Gertrude Stein.
Maso's own Ghost Dance and The American Woman in the Chinese Hat.
"Exultation is the Going" by Emily Dickinson.
A letter from Bhanu Kapil.
[thanks to Friend Michael for pointing me to Maya Deren and putting in my head to provide this bibliographic nugget]
January 17, 2009
Mercy -- just choosing a shelf for this magnificent genre- & gender-bender is a task beyond the oversimplifications of agate type! Carole Maso has brought the baroque to American fiction, baroque to break your heart, in a number of splendid fictions, my other favorite among which might be, hmm, THE ART LOVER, perhaps her most Italian. Perhaps. But this may be her most American, in the sense of her most self-inventing & out in the wilds, & anyway who needs a nationality when the subject is sex? "Really f*cking," as she puts it [she doesn't use an asterisk, but I don't want Goodreads to hiccup at my post:]? The syntax works like poetry, & not just because of the broken-line poetry-typography she uses throughout this story sequence, or is it a novella sequence -- or what do you call these episodes, anecdotes, dream-tales we all live w/, as we assemble & reassemble a sex life? Those episodes are Maso's subject in AUREOLE. The title's the penumbra around erectile tissue, yes, like the shards of our orgasms, spiraling away from the shattering pleasure at their center. Each story is a sex story, that is, mostly lesbian but hetero in healthy doses, & all possess some aspect of the chance encounter, the irresistible one-night or -afternoon stand that then rocks out of bounds, just as the form of the prose itself rocks towards poetry, the line-breaks having less to do w/ sentence-structure than w/ rhythm & intensity, w/ the enhancement of image & moment. Not that there's anything precious about this emotion recollected in tranquillity -- that last phrase may be Wordsworth, but the spirit here is more Whitman: urge & urge & urge. I mean that Maso gets down to the glandular tug, including terminology like the one w/ the asterisk above, & the other FCC-forbidden as well (she knows exactly where & when to drop the word "clit"), yet she renders the sighing & heaving & coming through a fine scratch-&-go scrim, she combines indirection & the grind, brilliantly. In the end AUREOLE suggests, what's more, the emotional sweep of sexual sway & its dissolution. By the time we reach its greatest, longest fragment, "Anjou Flying Streamers After," we can, if this literary mind- & body-bending has done its job, experience anew the explosiveness of sexual awakening, & believe again, no matter our age or our distance from virginity. Thanks to literature like this, the next body we brush against may change us for good.
October 9, 2023
The senses, disordered by desire, reconstituted by ink-stained hands.
I read the first of these, "The Women Who Wash Lentils," on the last day of Pride, by chance, my favorite of these pieces, and it was ideal.
More a collection of short pieces, Maso's spare list-writing interweaving disparate sources into dialogue, reflections, call and response, with a distillation bordering poetry. Sections reconfigure Duras, Deren, even Kavan (long, long before the resurgence of interest in her writing), along with Maso's earlier books. These are stories that feel better read aloud, to eachother, as her protagonists do, perhaps in bed. A singular and graceful set of assemblages, as in any such set with some more memorable than others, which I shall return to.
I read the first of these, "The Women Who Wash Lentils," on the last day of Pride, by chance, my favorite of these pieces, and it was ideal.
More a collection of short pieces, Maso's spare list-writing interweaving disparate sources into dialogue, reflections, call and response, with a distillation bordering poetry. Sections reconfigure Duras, Deren, even Kavan (long, long before the resurgence of interest in her writing), along with Maso's earlier books. These are stories that feel better read aloud, to eachother, as her protagonists do, perhaps in bed. A singular and graceful set of assemblages, as in any such set with some more memorable than others, which I shall return to.
May 29, 2023
Eroticism that feeds on feeding, tastes like honey, salt, words and blooming desire.
Maso never stops surprising me at how many ways she can reinvent and trigger longing. Pure synesthesia.
Maso never stops surprising me at how many ways she can reinvent and trigger longing. Pure synesthesia.
April 8, 2007
years ago, i was searching for a jeanette winterson book when a boy in a bookstore came up to me, asked what i was looking for, then took me by the arm and led me to this book, placed it in my hands, saying, "you will love this." i went back to that bookstore to thank him, only to find out he didn't even work there. _aureole_ pulled at something inside me and had me swimming in its language by the first page, which had me in tears. this book validated the way i write--knowing the rules, and then breaking them. it is sensual and dreamlike and unlike anything else i've read.
October 4, 2024
'Longing at the threshold of story’.
In Carole Maso’s own words, Aureole ‘is the story of a woman who wants’.
Rooted in an idea born out of the epiphany of one sentence, from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse:
‘Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty’.
That language could just maybe ‘express the extreme, the fleeting, the fugitive states that hover at the outermost boundaries of speech’.
To get tangled up in the sheets of Maso’s poetic incantations, language dripping with sapphic sensuality, ink-stained hands, and a cornucopia of fruit and legumes.
‘In the liminal space. In the hanging, gorgeous, strange place between poetry and prose.’
‘In the space between letters, in the shape the white makes, the fire, where the real word lives but we cannot see.’
In Carole Maso’s own words, Aureole ‘is the story of a woman who wants’.
Rooted in an idea born out of the epiphany of one sentence, from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse:
‘Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty’.
That language could just maybe ‘express the extreme, the fleeting, the fugitive states that hover at the outermost boundaries of speech’.
To get tangled up in the sheets of Maso’s poetic incantations, language dripping with sapphic sensuality, ink-stained hands, and a cornucopia of fruit and legumes.
‘In the liminal space. In the hanging, gorgeous, strange place between poetry and prose.’
‘In the space between letters, in the shape the white makes, the fire, where the real word lives but we cannot see.’
December 31, 2018
there are some books that after reading, it makes me this question -- you're 24 and most of the men and women of your age are having tons of fun with their lives and loves and friendships. so, what the fuck are you doing with your fucking insignificant life, you fuckwad? this is why i love to read books like this one (i'm reading some breathtaking works of some amazing women writers). and, i'm so fucking grateful. from the acknowledgement page, this book has won my heart. so, nuff said, right? no.
this book is full of love (i mean, with the accounts of documentations of deeply professed/concealed love). this is what makes the book a great one. and, love is the only meaningful in this bleak world because it gives meaning to our lives. just like adam driver's eponymous character in jarmusch' "paterson" said, "without love, what reason is there for anything?". also, this book delves deep into two of my most favourite subjects -- sex and eroticism -- with an honest approach and an intimate touch. this book delightfully smells of them. so, this is one of the most intimate, delicate, carefully loved, human books ever.
maso blurs the realms of abstract and reality in here which is contextually related to the writing about the act of lovemaking and the act of lovemaking, respectively. furthermore, she tries to dismantle the margin between fiction and reality. both the mediums(?) were blurred or interchanged or overlapped. also, i love how love crossed the boundaries where it doesn't stay on heterosexuality alone. thus, it also shows how language fails to convey our innermost feelings and desires, and this fallibility of language also touches the realm of harmless imagination(s).
books like this make you stop, asks you to take a break, and take a deep breath to feel calm realising what you have just read now. the prose is told in fragmentary narratives and thoughts. sometimes, it felt like i was reading poetry. the book's texture is very experimental and the flow of the prose connects through the chapters. it returns with the stories in a circle, like it's a universal thing -- this thing called love or making love. but, i missed out certain portions in this book of what maso had conveyed because i've never known/experienced/shared intimacy with a woman. i've never shared the love in me with a woman. so, you know, all the loves and the acts of lovemaking that i know are what i read from the books, mainly. so, i missed them out. see, i told you before that it is that kind of a book that makes you feel like a human who (perhaps) have well lived like it should have. oh life! oh love!
this book is full of love (i mean, with the accounts of documentations of deeply professed/concealed love). this is what makes the book a great one. and, love is the only meaningful in this bleak world because it gives meaning to our lives. just like adam driver's eponymous character in jarmusch' "paterson" said, "without love, what reason is there for anything?". also, this book delves deep into two of my most favourite subjects -- sex and eroticism -- with an honest approach and an intimate touch. this book delightfully smells of them. so, this is one of the most intimate, delicate, carefully loved, human books ever.
maso blurs the realms of abstract and reality in here which is contextually related to the writing about the act of lovemaking and the act of lovemaking, respectively. furthermore, she tries to dismantle the margin between fiction and reality. both the mediums(?) were blurred or interchanged or overlapped. also, i love how love crossed the boundaries where it doesn't stay on heterosexuality alone. thus, it also shows how language fails to convey our innermost feelings and desires, and this fallibility of language also touches the realm of harmless imagination(s).
books like this make you stop, asks you to take a break, and take a deep breath to feel calm realising what you have just read now. the prose is told in fragmentary narratives and thoughts. sometimes, it felt like i was reading poetry. the book's texture is very experimental and the flow of the prose connects through the chapters. it returns with the stories in a circle, like it's a universal thing -- this thing called love or making love. but, i missed out certain portions in this book of what maso had conveyed because i've never known/experienced/shared intimacy with a woman. i've never shared the love in me with a woman. so, you know, all the loves and the acts of lovemaking that i know are what i read from the books, mainly. so, i missed them out. see, i told you before that it is that kind of a book that makes you feel like a human who (perhaps) have well lived like it should have. oh life! oh love!
January 12, 2018
Maso exhibits one of the most compelling attempts to fuse word and flesh, especially in the use of rhythm and repetition to evoke the feverish phenomenology of desire (qua hope, sense, loss, and LANGUAGE). It is unabashedly experimental (like good sex), which means (like sex) it doesn't always come without a hitch. I read this straight through and was pushing rope by the end, but that is most likely not any fault of the woman's talents and charms. Frequent and vigorous, a little at a time but often--perhaps that's the libidinal lesson of writing arousal.
yes, words were superior; they maintained a superior control; they touched without your touching; they were at once the bait, the hook, the line, the pole, and the water in between
-Gass
yes, words were superior; they maintained a superior control; they touched without your touching; they were at once the bait, the hook, the line, the pole, and the water in between
-Gass
May 29, 2025
4.5
Leí la edición de Cajón de Sastre en español, traducida por Juliana Borrero.
Me pareció un libro muy bello y delicado, así como muy fuerte y potente. Creo que es muy interesante ese contraste tan fuerte e incluso bello-horrible de la sexualidad. Quiero decir: esos momentos de deseo y también de violencia, a veces incluso ese momento tan tan gris entre los dos. Admiro siempre la pregunta por la libertad en relación con la sexualidad y, sobre todo, esa respuesta nunca-posible o, al menos, nunca del todo definida. ¿Cómo existimos en libertad incluso en la violencia? ¿Cómo nos hacemos alas para seguir? ¿Cómo encontramos la perla o la lenteja luego de ese espacio blanco? ¡Y qué dicha saber que es posible, experimentar la posibilidad vital de haberla encontrado!
Mis capítulos favoritos: Las mujeres lavan lentejas, Anju volando cintas al viento, Hora exquisita (lo sufrí), Las devociones y En el último lugar.
"Y ella imagina libre. Se imagina libre algún día" <3 qué lindo el español y sus verbos reflexivos que reflejan la imaginación y la libertad.
"un verso de Valéry. Que dice: y leen al unísono, arrastrando lentamente los dedos sobre cada palabra. *Amigo, no vengas aquí sin deseo*"
Leí la edición de Cajón de Sastre en español, traducida por Juliana Borrero.
Me pareció un libro muy bello y delicado, así como muy fuerte y potente. Creo que es muy interesante ese contraste tan fuerte e incluso bello-horrible de la sexualidad. Quiero decir: esos momentos de deseo y también de violencia, a veces incluso ese momento tan tan gris entre los dos. Admiro siempre la pregunta por la libertad en relación con la sexualidad y, sobre todo, esa respuesta nunca-posible o, al menos, nunca del todo definida. ¿Cómo existimos en libertad incluso en la violencia? ¿Cómo nos hacemos alas para seguir? ¿Cómo encontramos la perla o la lenteja luego de ese espacio blanco? ¡Y qué dicha saber que es posible, experimentar la posibilidad vital de haberla encontrado!
Mis capítulos favoritos: Las mujeres lavan lentejas, Anju volando cintas al viento, Hora exquisita (lo sufrí), Las devociones y En el último lugar.
"Y ella imagina libre. Se imagina libre algún día" <3 qué lindo el español y sus verbos reflexivos que reflejan la imaginación y la libertad.
"un verso de Valéry. Que dice: y leen al unísono, arrastrando lentamente los dedos sobre cada palabra. *Amigo, no vengas aquí sin deseo*"
dnf
September 28, 2024The author's way of writing about eroticism/lust is honestly one of the most unique and engaging I've read on the topic. She blends prose and poetry in a way that really complements what she's writing about. I took a course on fragmented writing in 4th year and since then I've developed a love for fragmentary writing, so the way this is written really worked for me.
I've read the first three stories (first one was my favourite) and generally enjoyed them, however, I can feel the book start to get a bit repetitive and that the writing style will lose its appeal if I finish it. Though I love the way this is written, I also tend to need concrete characters and plots to latch on to, so if every story is going to be about vague/unnamed narrators being horny for vague/unnamed characters in flowery/fragmented prose, I'm gonna get bored...
Also, I'm just not in the mood for this right now. I really should look up detailed descriptions of books before I pick them up smh..
I've read the first three stories (first one was my favourite) and generally enjoyed them, however, I can feel the book start to get a bit repetitive and that the writing style will lose its appeal if I finish it. Though I love the way this is written, I also tend to need concrete characters and plots to latch on to, so if every story is going to be about vague/unnamed narrators being horny for vague/unnamed characters in flowery/fragmented prose, I'm gonna get bored...
Also, I'm just not in the mood for this right now. I really should look up detailed descriptions of books before I pick them up smh..
June 17, 2022
Skirting the line between prose and poetry, these pieces are dreamy, lyrical, sometimes obscure but, when you do understand them, breath-catchingly erotic.
I found several benefitted from rereading, and some just don't work for me even upon rereading, but the ones that do work (especially the opening pieces, "The Women Wash Lentils" with its playful French slang and "Her Ink-Stained Hands") are worth the price of admission.
I found several benefitted from rereading, and some just don't work for me even upon rereading, but the ones that do work (especially the opening pieces, "The Women Wash Lentils" with its playful French slang and "Her Ink-Stained Hands") are worth the price of admission.
August 21, 2018
There’s a lot to love here. The lush prose, which reads more like poetry is truly stunning. Knocking off a star mostly because the text is kind of repetitive (this is intentional but ineffective after a while) and the text probably could’ve been about 40-50 pages shorter. Looking forward to reading more of Maso’s work, however!
February 13, 2018
No desire I have known.
October 6, 2019
This started out promising and exciting, but gradually turned into more and more of the same.....
September 19, 2022
2 of the stories were great.
Read
September 20, 2022DNF. I so much wanted to enjoy this book, but the fragmented, repetitive prose was too much struggle.
May 14, 2024
Un libro bellísimo, con una escritura experimental que teje la poesía con la prosa para llevar al lector en una montaña rusa sensorial del mundo queer de la autora.
September 4, 2025
Me costó mucho terminarlo.
October 18, 2025
I yearn but not like I used to
January 10, 2026
learned a lot of french slang....
April 5, 2013
My copy of Aureole (first edition 1996) is not subtitled "An Erotic Sequence." The dust cover identifies it as "part novel, part poetic journal"--so I read it more as a novel. It is almost as though to describe the book, one must somehow be reductive. Maso focuses on the sensual and the experiential. Rarely if ever does she describe, but she offers us clues:
"In the sensuous lexicon of falling, where I write, where I like to write, more and more often now. Charting a motion and its many permutations, its many fallings into desire, language--waywardness and hope…"
At times Aureole refuses to be anything other than a poem, at times it is a shot list lifted from Maya Deren films. Maso's characters make love while reading from books--some of them her own (though I would never have known without her endnotes) without ever sounding self-satisfied or cleverly referential.
The table of contents reads like a poem:
The women wash lentils/her ink-stained hands/make me dazzle...
Aureole is not easy, and maybe it is not for everyone. At times I found its richness almost unbearable though always exquisite, corporeal, and deliciously voyeuristic.
"In the sensuous lexicon of falling, where I write, where I like to write, more and more often now. Charting a motion and its many permutations, its many fallings into desire, language--waywardness and hope…"
At times Aureole refuses to be anything other than a poem, at times it is a shot list lifted from Maya Deren films. Maso's characters make love while reading from books--some of them her own (though I would never have known without her endnotes) without ever sounding self-satisfied or cleverly referential.
The table of contents reads like a poem:
The women wash lentils/her ink-stained hands/make me dazzle...
Aureole is not easy, and maybe it is not for everyone. At times I found its richness almost unbearable though always exquisite, corporeal, and deliciously voyeuristic.
July 11, 2010
This collection reads like prose poetry - or often just poetry - and, while somewhat described as a collection of stories, has no narrative thread. The descriptions are incredible and the poetry is full of symbols and imagery that are visual, visceral, and sensual. This collection caused the most discomfort and disjointed discussion in my class. It can be seen as pretty graphic - certainly not for the faint of heart who may be bothered by the clear lesbian overtones.
November 8, 2010
This book captures a series of erotic moments on the verge of consummation. It is to be felt, not read and intellectualized. For what it sets out to do, it is successful, but it's not my favorite Maso text. It is somehow simpler than I have come to expect from her. Still, the language is, as always, gorgeous and sensual.
September 24, 2012
why am i not giving this 5 stars? don't know. maybe that would make me seem (to myself mostly) too much of a voyeur. but hell, lots of stories are more explicitly sexual than this fine work.
it's so pleasing not to worry about understanding it in my head. it's such a fun read. pleasurable.
it's so pleasing not to worry about understanding it in my head. it's such a fun read. pleasurable.
October 5, 2014
I read this book because I expected it to teach me a lot about language and I expected it to be hot. I wasn't disappointed on either front. Find out how this book opened me up.
February 4, 2008
love this little erotic text.
February 2, 2009
Tedious and incoherent, like love.
November 3, 2012
beautiful, wandering, erotic...lovely for drifting into sleep....
Read
August 6, 2011Beautiful.
June 23, 2021
i dont know how to describe this other than it's intense, written beautifully, jolting, and wild.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews