Maude is an artist. Bruno looks after her. Or does he sponge off her? Is he her lover or her housekeeper? Is she an artist because he organises her life or does her art defy her fussy inventions? What is he to her? What is she to him? Are they simply insane? Suzanne Jacob's Maude develops two complex characters caught in a kind of prolonged, irresponsible adolescence. This intense novella explores the dynamics of this odd couple, a dynamics that transcends the otherwise pervasive apathy, depression and sense of powerlessness.
Maude is a strange, intense novella by Governor General's Award-winning writer/composer/musician Suzanne Jacob. It is a poetic psychodrama about Maude, an almost unimaginably unpractical artist, and Bruno, her barely pragmatic lover and business partner. In their shared house, Maude draws, while Bruno takes care of everything else, from doing her hair to selling her pictures and occasionally finding company to bring over. The same friends seldom visit twice, for the dynamics of Maude and Bruno's ménage are just too strange. Maude and Bruno live in a kind of floating stasis, but things begin to shift when an ephemeral attraction springs up between Maude and one of her guests, a café owner named Félix.
Guernica
This is a slim book, but it is written in densely poetic prose, and Jacob's impressionistic narrative demands fervent attention from its readers. The strange syntax and sensuous appreciation of the world recall Hélène Cixous and other practitioners of écriture féminine. Anyone who demands stark realism will want to avoid
Maude, but those who enjoy literature that revels in its own vagaries will relish this novella.
Jack Illingworth