AVA (Dalkey Essentials)

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 as a spectacular dream theater with a cast of her life’s loves. We drift in and out of scenes involving her three former husbands: Francesco, a filmmaker from Rome; Anatole, lost in the air over France; Carlos, a teenager from Granada. Featured players include the writers that shaped her life: Woolf, Eliot, Nabokov, Beckett, Sarraute, Wittig, Lorca, Frisch. In a minor key, we hear 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 the whole chorus 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." Now with a new introduction by Jamie Hood, this classic of experimental prose awaits a new generation of readers.