What do you think?
Rate this book
The Carpathians
What happens when the town of Puamahara begins to profit from its legend and the astronomers discovering the Gravity Star predict an unthinkable future? Mattina Brecon, a New Yorker, arrives in Kowhai Street, Puamahara, where her painstaking study of her neighbours is interrupted by a new kind of cataclysmic event. Mattina finds herself in possession of a Kowhai Street that is without people, language or memory.This novel won the 1989 Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Ansett New Zealand Book Award. It was Janet Frame's last novel.
196 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
9 people are currently reading
598 people want to read
About the author
Janet Frame
64 books488 followersThe fate befalling the young woman who wanted "to be a poet" has been well documented. Desperately unhappy because of family tragedies and finding herself trapped in the wrong vocation (as a schoolteacher) her only escape appeared to be in submission to society's judgement of her as abnormal. She spent four and a half years out of eight years, incarcerated in mental hospitals. The story of her almost miraculous survival of the horrors and brutalising treatment in unenlightened institutions has become well known. She continued to write throughout her troubled years, and her first book (The Lagoon and Other Stories) won a prestigious literary prize, thus convincing her doctors not to carry out a planned lobotomy.
She returned to society, but not the one which had labelled her a misfit. She sought the support and company of fellow writers and set out single-mindedly and courageously to achieve her goal of being a writer. She wrote her first novel (Owls Do Cry) while staying with her mentor Frank Sargeson, and then left New Zealand, not to return for seven years.
She returned to society, but not the one which had labelled her a misfit. She sought the support and company of fellow writers and set out single-mindedly and courageously to achieve her goal of being a writer. She wrote her first novel (Owls Do Cry) while staying with her mentor Frank Sargeson, and then left New Zealand, not to return for seven years.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
July 26, 2013
“The human race is an elsewhere race and I am an imposter in a street of imposters. I am nothing and no-one: I was never born. I am a graduate imposter, having applied myself from my earliest years to the study of the development of imposture as practiced in myself and in others around me in street, town, city, country, and on earth. The imposture begins with the first germ of disbelief in being, in self, and this allied to the conviction of the ‘unalterable certainty of truth”, produces the truth of disbelief, of deception of being, of self, of times, places, peoples, of all time and space. The existence of anything, of anywhere and anytime produces an instant denial only in graduates of imposture; in most others who remain unaware of such a state, particularly in themselves, there may be little or no knowledge of their reality, their nonentity…Complete imposture, I repeat, leads to nothingness in which one inhabits all worlds except the world of oneself.” - Dinny Wheatstone (from page 51, The Carpathians, Janet Frame )
Something to think about—that’s what I love about Janet Frame, she writes books that expect you to think about them long after you set one aside on the nightstand, return it to the library, or put it on the shelf. The Carpathians is another complex book for me to explore and think about, and I will probably read it again because it is one of those books that will reveal more in a second reading — what an unusual book! A treasure. The magic of The Carpathians is how Janet Frame’s writing carries the story with distinct poise, the prose poetic and therefore mysterious, unique, and as always lovely—I dog-eared the shit out of it because I kept finding all this cool stuff to revisit. It is playful in some ways (having a self-proclaimed imposter for a character is hilarious), but with a hint of danger as there is a pleasant touch of the unknown and a surreal tweak of reality — at times, it’s unsettling.
Janet Frame is a consummate social observer — one of the most amusing moments of this I found were the assumptions of the residents of Kowhai Street that because Mattina was from the U.S. that she would know everything about Miami or San Francisco, only to find out that she knows about as much about these places as they do — it’s like people assuming that because I’m from New York State that I would know everything there is to know about New York City — I’ve only set foot in Manhattan once to see Christo’s Gates project in Central Park, otherwise, I have skirted the outer edges of it many times before that one trip. I’ve certainly read all about the Big Apple because American literature, film/television, magazines and the news is saturated with settings and events in the various locations of the city, but I still know about as much as someone from Indiana would. If you’re not from around here, one would think that New York State is just the city — let me assure you — there is the Upstate part of New York that is a whole world apart from the concrete and skyscrapers. I’m sure there are people in other parts of the world who think all of America is like New York City. America saturates its culture all around the world — not that there’s anything wrong with that—but I know not everyone is that impressed with us the U. S. Another world—another language, in some cases it seems we don’t speak the same language — and forget about seeing eye to eye about anything — everyone’s different, and no amount of social engineering is going to change that without causing a crisis of imbalance.
Granted, I don’t really know enough about New Zealand or its history, so I did a bit of research along the way to help me grasp the ideas being addressed. What happens on Kowhai Street is symbolic of the contemporary issues of New Zealand in which JF nods to the Maori movement to reclaim their language and their culture in the 1980’s. The narrative regarding the legend of the Memory Flower and the mysterious influence of the Gravity Star — the book is an allegory in the tradition of such — yet more. The Memory Flower is the metaphor of the lost cultures, the lost languages of conquered nations — the Gravity Star is the ‘event horizon’ of the conquerors, absorbing the land, the resources, and the people.
It’s a book about language — the midnight rain of letters — Mattina brushing a few off her arm and finding some the next day on a table to remind her that it really happened that it wasn’t a dream — or a nightmare. The loss of language — the imposing influence of the Western World culture and economic thrust is robbing the post-colonial people of New Zealand of their identity. It is an ongoing war it seems — and unfortunately, they’ve become dependent on the infusion of money from outside forces — with money comes influence, and with that influence comes the inevitable loss of what made them unique. The murder victim, the Penultimate Madge is revisited early on in the book and I nipped out this sweet tidbit:
“I don’t understand your language, Aunt Madge,’ she said.
“I speak the language of another age,’ Madge replied, knowing that indeed her time had left her, her own words had left her and were no longer used in their old meaning. These were the desertions you didn’t anticipate. You knew about the body and the mind, the growing irritation with the world, the anxiety to lose it and the terrible feeling of grief that you were losing it, but you forgot about the ordinary seemingly inanimate states and objects and concepts that died away, withered in hour hand. Like time and your words. (from page 12, The Carpathians, Janet Frame )
In her enthusiasm Madge had moved into the present tense. She became aware of the lapse, but what did it matter, she thought. She had no obligation, now, to remain within her ‘correct’ time. The tenses belonged to her. (from page 30, The Carpathians, Janet Frame )
Time, place, language — the Gravity Star according to Dinny Wheatstone: ‘—annihilates the concept of near as near and far as far, for the distant star is close by, puncturing the filled vessel of impossibility, overturning the language of concept, easing into our lives the formerly unknowable, spilling unreason into reason—’ (from page 52, The Carpathians, Janet Frame )
With this in mind, I want to introduce the character, Hercus, a retired sergeant-major and former POW from the war with Germany, he spends his time looking at the mountains through binoculars, bringing the faraway nearby and remembering while he was imprisoned far from home; he once mused about the abolishment of distance with his fellow prisoners… “…that you’ll have problems if you interfere with the perception of distance. You’d interfere with time. You’d have yesterday and tomorrow breathing down your bloody necks; not to mention the Ancient Greeks and Romans…you’d have cities and rivers of today in your backyard; and you’d have the Carpathians, the Carpathians in your garden…Yes, we could touch the Carpathians.” (from page 66, The Carpathians, Janet Frame .) Stunning. Each character brings their piece — their memory — to the table for consideration, the most ordinary human beings suddenly become extraordinary once they are revealed.
I must stop here — but with one more thing to say, regarding the life of a writer and the act of writing — the inspirations of a writer is an intimate life with emotional ties that can be despicable, frustratingly fickle and in those rare and beautiful instances in perfect harmony. The mental immersion required is treacherous at its best — I admire Janet Frame for going ‘out there’ (or should I say going ‘in there’) and bringing this novel into being, she did a fine thing. This book is full of buried treasure, read it, read into it, learn much from it — it is timeless and timely—a classic.
Something to think about—that’s what I love about Janet Frame, she writes books that expect you to think about them long after you set one aside on the nightstand, return it to the library, or put it on the shelf. The Carpathians is another complex book for me to explore and think about, and I will probably read it again because it is one of those books that will reveal more in a second reading — what an unusual book! A treasure. The magic of The Carpathians is how Janet Frame’s writing carries the story with distinct poise, the prose poetic and therefore mysterious, unique, and as always lovely—I dog-eared the shit out of it because I kept finding all this cool stuff to revisit. It is playful in some ways (having a self-proclaimed imposter for a character is hilarious), but with a hint of danger as there is a pleasant touch of the unknown and a surreal tweak of reality — at times, it’s unsettling.
Janet Frame is a consummate social observer — one of the most amusing moments of this I found were the assumptions of the residents of Kowhai Street that because Mattina was from the U.S. that she would know everything about Miami or San Francisco, only to find out that she knows about as much about these places as they do — it’s like people assuming that because I’m from New York State that I would know everything there is to know about New York City — I’ve only set foot in Manhattan once to see Christo’s Gates project in Central Park, otherwise, I have skirted the outer edges of it many times before that one trip. I’ve certainly read all about the Big Apple because American literature, film/television, magazines and the news is saturated with settings and events in the various locations of the city, but I still know about as much as someone from Indiana would. If you’re not from around here, one would think that New York State is just the city — let me assure you — there is the Upstate part of New York that is a whole world apart from the concrete and skyscrapers. I’m sure there are people in other parts of the world who think all of America is like New York City. America saturates its culture all around the world — not that there’s anything wrong with that—but I know not everyone is that impressed with us the U. S. Another world—another language, in some cases it seems we don’t speak the same language — and forget about seeing eye to eye about anything — everyone’s different, and no amount of social engineering is going to change that without causing a crisis of imbalance.
Granted, I don’t really know enough about New Zealand or its history, so I did a bit of research along the way to help me grasp the ideas being addressed. What happens on Kowhai Street is symbolic of the contemporary issues of New Zealand in which JF nods to the Maori movement to reclaim their language and their culture in the 1980’s. The narrative regarding the legend of the Memory Flower and the mysterious influence of the Gravity Star — the book is an allegory in the tradition of such — yet more. The Memory Flower is the metaphor of the lost cultures, the lost languages of conquered nations — the Gravity Star is the ‘event horizon’ of the conquerors, absorbing the land, the resources, and the people.
It’s a book about language — the midnight rain of letters — Mattina brushing a few off her arm and finding some the next day on a table to remind her that it really happened that it wasn’t a dream — or a nightmare. The loss of language — the imposing influence of the Western World culture and economic thrust is robbing the post-colonial people of New Zealand of their identity. It is an ongoing war it seems — and unfortunately, they’ve become dependent on the infusion of money from outside forces — with money comes influence, and with that influence comes the inevitable loss of what made them unique. The murder victim, the Penultimate Madge is revisited early on in the book and I nipped out this sweet tidbit:
“I don’t understand your language, Aunt Madge,’ she said.
“I speak the language of another age,’ Madge replied, knowing that indeed her time had left her, her own words had left her and were no longer used in their old meaning. These were the desertions you didn’t anticipate. You knew about the body and the mind, the growing irritation with the world, the anxiety to lose it and the terrible feeling of grief that you were losing it, but you forgot about the ordinary seemingly inanimate states and objects and concepts that died away, withered in hour hand. Like time and your words. (from page 12, The Carpathians, Janet Frame )
In her enthusiasm Madge had moved into the present tense. She became aware of the lapse, but what did it matter, she thought. She had no obligation, now, to remain within her ‘correct’ time. The tenses belonged to her. (from page 30, The Carpathians, Janet Frame )
Time, place, language — the Gravity Star according to Dinny Wheatstone: ‘—annihilates the concept of near as near and far as far, for the distant star is close by, puncturing the filled vessel of impossibility, overturning the language of concept, easing into our lives the formerly unknowable, spilling unreason into reason—’ (from page 52, The Carpathians, Janet Frame )
With this in mind, I want to introduce the character, Hercus, a retired sergeant-major and former POW from the war with Germany, he spends his time looking at the mountains through binoculars, bringing the faraway nearby and remembering while he was imprisoned far from home; he once mused about the abolishment of distance with his fellow prisoners… “…that you’ll have problems if you interfere with the perception of distance. You’d interfere with time. You’d have yesterday and tomorrow breathing down your bloody necks; not to mention the Ancient Greeks and Romans…you’d have cities and rivers of today in your backyard; and you’d have the Carpathians, the Carpathians in your garden…Yes, we could touch the Carpathians.” (from page 66, The Carpathians, Janet Frame .) Stunning. Each character brings their piece — their memory — to the table for consideration, the most ordinary human beings suddenly become extraordinary once they are revealed.
I must stop here — but with one more thing to say, regarding the life of a writer and the act of writing — the inspirations of a writer is an intimate life with emotional ties that can be despicable, frustratingly fickle and in those rare and beautiful instances in perfect harmony. The mental immersion required is treacherous at its best — I admire Janet Frame for going ‘out there’ (or should I say going ‘in there’) and bringing this novel into being, she did a fine thing. This book is full of buried treasure, read it, read into it, learn much from it — it is timeless and timely—a classic.
August 15, 2016
The Carpathians by Janet Frame
I always feel a bit dumb when I read Janet Frame. I feel like I am missing the main message—as though I’m really only scratching the surface and missing out on all the layers underneath of rich and complex meaning.
The Carpathians is a story about language. I think it’s a story about the power of language and the importance of words and language. Mattina is an independently wealthy New Yorker with a penchant for ‘learning’ about other cultures. By this I don’t mean she is an anthropologist (although she might think she is). She will go and ‘live amongst’ people from a culture different to hers for a couple of months in order to ‘get to know’ the people. She also has a habit of acquiring real estate. These two pastimes hint at an absence in her; in her life, in her heart. But there is nothing in her life lacking. She wants for nothing at all. She has so much money that she is able to buy an island; she is married to a man who she loves and who loves her; she has a son and at some stage in her life also enjoyed a lover.
Her yearning to learn about other cultures takes her to Puamahara, a small town in New Zealand. She is on a quest to discover more about the legend of the Memory Flower and Galaxy Star. She moves into Kowhai Street (we learn at the end of the story it is pronounced Korfai!) and over the course of two months gets to know her neighbours. They are a pretty standard bunch—elderly widows, young families and the like. They all claim to be from somewhere else (not here), leading Mattina to sense an atmosphere of impermanence and rootlessness.
From early in her stay in Kowhai Street, Mattina feels a strange presence in her rented house but learns to live with it. One night towards the end of her stay something quite horrifying happens. And I’m not entirely sure about the symbolism of it. It’s something to do with the disappearance of language and memory.
As a writer, Janet Frame’s raison d’étre is based on words, language and memory, or the memory that words and language create/express. So she herself is perhaps in this book, maybe in Mattina’s husband, or in Dinny Wheatstone, the slightly unhinged ‘imposter’ author. Mattina’s husband Jake was a writer who wrote a bestseller in his early 20s and then struggled for 30 years to write his next. It was Mattina’s son, John Henry, who wrote a book 30 years later, also in his early 20s.
I enjoyed getting to know the characters in this book and I also found the story intriguing. A couple of times, especially towards the end, I thought, ‘I’ll have to read this again because I don’t know what she’s trying to get at here’. I still don’t fully understand what the Memory Flower or the Galaxy Star are. Postmodernists would love this.
I always feel a bit dumb when I read Janet Frame. I feel like I am missing the main message—as though I’m really only scratching the surface and missing out on all the layers underneath of rich and complex meaning.
The Carpathians is a story about language. I think it’s a story about the power of language and the importance of words and language. Mattina is an independently wealthy New Yorker with a penchant for ‘learning’ about other cultures. By this I don’t mean she is an anthropologist (although she might think she is). She will go and ‘live amongst’ people from a culture different to hers for a couple of months in order to ‘get to know’ the people. She also has a habit of acquiring real estate. These two pastimes hint at an absence in her; in her life, in her heart. But there is nothing in her life lacking. She wants for nothing at all. She has so much money that she is able to buy an island; she is married to a man who she loves and who loves her; she has a son and at some stage in her life also enjoyed a lover.
Her yearning to learn about other cultures takes her to Puamahara, a small town in New Zealand. She is on a quest to discover more about the legend of the Memory Flower and Galaxy Star. She moves into Kowhai Street (we learn at the end of the story it is pronounced Korfai!) and over the course of two months gets to know her neighbours. They are a pretty standard bunch—elderly widows, young families and the like. They all claim to be from somewhere else (not here), leading Mattina to sense an atmosphere of impermanence and rootlessness.
From early in her stay in Kowhai Street, Mattina feels a strange presence in her rented house but learns to live with it. One night towards the end of her stay something quite horrifying happens. And I’m not entirely sure about the symbolism of it. It’s something to do with the disappearance of language and memory.
As a writer, Janet Frame’s raison d’étre is based on words, language and memory, or the memory that words and language create/express. So she herself is perhaps in this book, maybe in Mattina’s husband, or in Dinny Wheatstone, the slightly unhinged ‘imposter’ author. Mattina’s husband Jake was a writer who wrote a bestseller in his early 20s and then struggled for 30 years to write his next. It was Mattina’s son, John Henry, who wrote a book 30 years later, also in his early 20s.
I enjoyed getting to know the characters in this book and I also found the story intriguing. A couple of times, especially towards the end, I thought, ‘I’ll have to read this again because I don’t know what she’s trying to get at here’. I still don’t fully understand what the Memory Flower or the Galaxy Star are. Postmodernists would love this.
July 28, 2011
I really liked this book. It's actually a kind of optimistic Janet Frame book! Shock horror! Plus about two thirds of the way through the book takes a sudden left turn into surreal magic realism which I thought was both ballsy and awesome.
September 26, 2023
Five starts for sheer audacity. Janet Frame is just such an original writer she creates a universe all her own and there's no way to compare it much to other books, other writers, other realities. It's her clarity of vision you cannot find fault with, nor should you. Literature isn't a competition anyway. This novel is fabulous and startlingly unique. I wouldn't want to spoil its many surprises by saying anything more specific about it.
One huge mystery: in the short introduction Frame calls this "my second novel." The back cover and history proclaim it her eleventh, and last written novel. Can this be a misprint? Or is Ms. Frame telling us something?
One huge mystery: in the short introduction Frame calls this "my second novel." The back cover and history proclaim it her eleventh, and last written novel. Can this be a misprint? Or is Ms. Frame telling us something?
September 11, 2025
I need claudia to read this and explain this to me.
March 2, 2025
“The Carpathians” is an excellent tableau of New Zealand: from the elderly with cats and treasured plants, families with kids, gossips, to modern Maori families; observed by a long term visitor. My wonderful friend, Kerri sends me numerous perspectives of their country. I feel enriched acquainting a place I only knew by name. The lands we care for all harmonize on Earth. None should be unknown or feel distant to us.
When the synopsis showed that this 1988 novel was weird, I said bring it! I often spot genres hidden in another label, so I am used to a hodgepodge. Go ahead and mix science fiction, mystery, drama, government cover-up.... if it works. Instead, these were scraps thrown into a bag as Janet meandered; forgotten afterwards.
Janet Frame seems lauded for asking deep questions but her attitudes angered me. I am not the audience for “how could we function without words”. I value energy medicine, intuition, telepathy with animals and plants.... She actually called visiting a nonverbal orphan useless! Hugs and handholding are everything!
As a linguist fluent in other cultures and places, the second message too was insulting. Janet shamed travellers for wanting to acquaint locals. I counter that seeing beyond tourist attractions is how to appreciate places!
Mattina Brecon flew on vacation, while her husband struggled with writing in New York that did not materialize. She read of a “memory flower” in Puamahara and sought native keepers of stories stored in its seeds. There was no such recordkeeping inheritor.
Another avenue I hoped would yield fun was astronomy. A “gravity star” in the news, affected everyone on Kowhai Street.... except a cat and Mattina. There was no credibility about not notifying families. When Janet wasted my perseverance by dismissing everything as fabricated, I threw two stars at her.
When the synopsis showed that this 1988 novel was weird, I said bring it! I often spot genres hidden in another label, so I am used to a hodgepodge. Go ahead and mix science fiction, mystery, drama, government cover-up.... if it works. Instead, these were scraps thrown into a bag as Janet meandered; forgotten afterwards.
Janet Frame seems lauded for asking deep questions but her attitudes angered me. I am not the audience for “how could we function without words”. I value energy medicine, intuition, telepathy with animals and plants.... She actually called visiting a nonverbal orphan useless! Hugs and handholding are everything!
As a linguist fluent in other cultures and places, the second message too was insulting. Janet shamed travellers for wanting to acquaint locals. I counter that seeing beyond tourist attractions is how to appreciate places!
Mattina Brecon flew on vacation, while her husband struggled with writing in New York that did not materialize. She read of a “memory flower” in Puamahara and sought native keepers of stories stored in its seeds. There was no such recordkeeping inheritor.
Another avenue I hoped would yield fun was astronomy. A “gravity star” in the news, affected everyone on Kowhai Street.... except a cat and Mattina. There was no credibility about not notifying families. When Janet wasted my perseverance by dismissing everything as fabricated, I threw two stars at her.
March 26, 2021
Slogged my way through to the end feeling as though Janet Frame was writing down her ideas for a novel, only to get to the end with the "author" of the story stating: And what I have just written is the novel he spoke of; or perhaps it is merely notes for a novel?
I read somewhere that upon finishing Frame did not think this was her best novel, nor a particularly good novel, but then it was awarded the Commonwealth Writer's Prize in 1988, and so she changed her mind. She was right the first time.
The book has interesting ideas and elements that could easily be adapted into a David Lynch-like movie set in New Zealand. But Frame doesn't have the skill, or perhaps the motivation in this, her last novel published in her lifetime, to make more of those ideas, and so much of the novel lacks interesting dialogue that draws the reader into characterisations. For the most part, the characterisations are there, but they are mostly told to the reader rather than shown. What starts off with much promise about a newly discovered Gravity Star by scientists that causes strange contractions of distances across vast spaces, only tenuously has any effect and the idea that The Carpathians can be transplanted into the New Zealand landscape is only hinted at rather than fully seen as if memory itself was being disturbed by the Gravity Star. Early on there are some observational gems of people going about their ordinary lives, and this is what Frame is very good at - observing and writing down everyday life in a light philosophical way that the reader hadn't thought of, but there isn't enough atmosphere being built around the residents of Kowhai Street to make the penultimate event stand out. It was a weird event, but not particularly gripping; and the resolution through to the last pages doesn't leave a lot of mystery around it.
Can't recommend.
I read somewhere that upon finishing Frame did not think this was her best novel, nor a particularly good novel, but then it was awarded the Commonwealth Writer's Prize in 1988, and so she changed her mind. She was right the first time.
The book has interesting ideas and elements that could easily be adapted into a David Lynch-like movie set in New Zealand. But Frame doesn't have the skill, or perhaps the motivation in this, her last novel published in her lifetime, to make more of those ideas, and so much of the novel lacks interesting dialogue that draws the reader into characterisations. For the most part, the characterisations are there, but they are mostly told to the reader rather than shown. What starts off with much promise about a newly discovered Gravity Star by scientists that causes strange contractions of distances across vast spaces, only tenuously has any effect and the idea that The Carpathians can be transplanted into the New Zealand landscape is only hinted at rather than fully seen as if memory itself was being disturbed by the Gravity Star. Early on there are some observational gems of people going about their ordinary lives, and this is what Frame is very good at - observing and writing down everyday life in a light philosophical way that the reader hadn't thought of, but there isn't enough atmosphere being built around the residents of Kowhai Street to make the penultimate event stand out. It was a weird event, but not particularly gripping; and the resolution through to the last pages doesn't leave a lot of mystery around it.
Can't recommend.
September 26, 2011
If you love language you will love this woman's work. One of the greats.
March 23, 2025
Beautifully written, especially her social and cultural observations of small town Aotearoa in the 80s. I love the blur between all our social constructs, such an awesome novel.
January 1, 2025
Janet Frame: Modernism at the edge of the Alphabet
There is a something of a divide in Janet Frame’s fiction between the conventionality of her short stories (always excellent ‘slices of life’, sometimes lightly touched by the fantastic or fairy tale) and the, peculiar, modernism dominant in her novels. Her work is occasionally reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s lyrical modernism, sometimes of Beckett’s absurdism, but ultimately Frame’s is a pessimistic, primitivist modernism. Frame’s primitivism is an aspect of her frustration at literary prose to express human experience in the face of modernity – in contrast to this assumption in key modernists like Woolf, Beckett and Joyce. Frame despaired not only at the novel but at language itself as a means to adequately express the ‘dark’ elements of life she experienced. Frame continually knocks at the doors of language but ultimately only to state and repeat a modified Wittgenstein’ position where the limits of language limit not so much our understanding of the world, but of our ability to express feelings beyond the connotations of words.
Frame’s despair of language and her ultimate resort to modernist primitivism derives from her concern with two key and dark aspects of human experience: mental trauma and death. This combination of biographical concerns lying beyond the limits of language derives from Frame’s experience of the death of three siblings at an early age and her own episodes of psychosis and committal to asylums. Nearly all of her major novels address these key themes, but all ultimately despair at the novel as a vehicle to articulate them adequately. We find Frame pointing to how so often we find ourselves floundering at the edge of the alphabet in our everyday lives as words fail us to express what we are feeling or thinking. Frame turns this encounter with inexpressibility back on herself as a novelist dealing in words, and rejects the supposed (presupposed in the case of modernists like Woolf and Joyce) expressive plasticity of literary prose. These two themes appear so regularly they may at first appear as repetitious - but there are significant variations in how they are addressed across the range of Frame’s novels.
The title of Frame’s early novel The Edge of the Alphabet signals her position, the definite article and singular ‘edge’ pointing to her view of the fundamental limitations of standard and literary language – it isn’t ‘my’ language, as Wittgenstein has it, that is at fault, but the language. Frame’s alter-ego here is the novelist Thora Pattern who is said to have ‘dreamed-up’ the characters of Toby, Zoe and Pat (pps. 24, 270). However, all these central characters, but particularly the social isolate Toby (a would-be writer but never able to put down words) are described by Thora as her ‘creatures’, fictional beings but ‘living beyond the boundaries of words’ (36-7). At this time Frame still had some confidence in modernism’s ability to create a sense of synchronicity in order to enable the reader to experience something of Toby’s bipolarity, or of the sense of Zoe and Pat’s floundering in the sea of modern life. The young, incipient modernist Frame allows her prose to regularly become somewhat ‘haywire’, disruptive, poeticized, a highly metaphorical language and similes conjugated together in singular passages that spring-up and disrupt the novel’s narrative:
What shall I, Thora Pattern, make from the bottled material of these days? Snip measure charge pay and walk adorned with patches of cloud and frost and words, in a string of beads, around my neck; strong polished beads which do not break at the first tug of anger or confusion; there is no scattering of them in the room and blood-to-the-head search for them beneath furniture…I have one table, three chairs. No one visits me. why should I wear words, like beads, around my neck if no one will visit me? (270-1)
However, in her novel The Memorial Room, published posthumously but written in the early 1970s, we find the narrator starkly stating the limitations of literary fiction:
I told myself I was dreaming the literary dream of a literary blind man, just as those who write or dream fiction have invented a ‘literary’ madness which abstracts from the dreary commonplaces of thinking behavior a poetic essence and sprinkles it where the shadow of ‘the truth’ falls upon the written or printed page. (65)
The novelist’s illusion is accompanied, underlined by frustration at conceptualizing death and time which stems from ‘the illusion of, the obeisance to, time, from birth to death…’ (91). Frame wrote this pessimistic novel despite the early success she had found as a writer with Owls do Cry, focusing instead on the ‘betrayal of the myths conveyed by language’ (94). She now despairs of novelists having to fall back on the ‘stuttering images and cliches of time’ (92). Symbolically, her novelist character Harry Gill becomes increasing deaf as the novel progresses (there are hints he is becoming perhaps dumb as well) in the face of the encaging contradictions facing the writer of fiction:
Poor chap, I thought. He’s already going to seed. Destroyed by his promising future. A man without a past or present. Was he not then a completely unmetaphorical man, deprived of time? […] Now that I was deaf I was becoming more and more used to interior monologues, of the type that always bored me when I tried to read fiction. Within the last few weeks, however, I had been so shocked by the banality of my paper conversations that I almost resolved to give them up… (194-195)
Similarly, in another of Frame’s novels from this period, the intriguing Daughter Buffalo (1972) inexpressibility of death is presented head-on in the encounter between the characters of Turnlung and Talbot Endelman. Turnlung is an aged poet, close to death whereas Endelman is a young scientist and ‘experimenter in death’. Turnlung has hopes that language ‘may give up the secrets of life and death and lead us to the original Word’ (24). But he soon realizes that literary language is inadequate for this task, that his poetic ‘excursion(s) into metaphor’ may be undermined by the nature of language itself:
I try to understand death itself, with inadequate language that is forced to make an excursion into metaphor and returns changed, emaciated, impoverished or enriched, often too powerful for its alphabet. (102)
In contrast, Edelman embraces death, practices cruel and needless surgery on his pet dog, and is shown to be sexually-aroused at the event of its death (127). Edelman expresses capital-D death in scientific and laboratory terms, as something that has developed in human culture as ‘an intractable state of nothingness’ due to long-term evolutionary developments in avoidance:
I began to think of death as a simple darkness and by that I do not mean the comparative ease of killing the embryo for I thought neither of agent nor instrument nor of object; I had in mind a pure personless darkness like the original void of the universe. It’s a romantic notion I had; it was unscientific, as the genes and chromosomes of the embryo had already been given a generous helping of centuries of humankind and it would seem to be too late to rescue or retrieve the simplicity of nothingness – supposing that nothingness is simple, or supposing that there were indeed room for nothingness in the fullness and complexity of the life cycle. (14-15)
In her 1964 novel Scented Gardens for the Blind rather than printed prose and its constituents, word, sentence and alphabet, Frame focuses on spoken language. Vera Glace is, eventually, revealed as someone who has dreamed up the other characters, like a novelist: Edward her husband and their mute daughter Erlene are both equally figures of her imagination. But Vera’s own mutism is very real, and the issue of the lack of communicability at the heart of speech is stated starkly at the start of this novel:
So I placed before me a diagram of the human head neck and chest, drawn to scale, with the tunnels of speech and breath so gay in their scarlet lining; and ignoring the arrows darting from right and left to stab at the listed names of the blue and red and pink territory, I moved my finger, walked it along the corridor, trying to find the door into speech, but the diagram did not show it , somewhere in the brain, the book said, an impulse in the brain letting the words go free, sympathetic movements of larynx lips tongue, the shaping of breath, and even then, the book said, it may not be speech which emerges, it may only be a cry such as a bird makes or a beast lurking in the trees at night, or, loneliest of all, not the crys of a bird or beast but the first uttering of a new language which is understood by no one and nothing, and which cause a smoke screen of fear to cloud the mind, as defense against the strangeness. (10)
For Erlene (but, really - Vera), speech is seen to have become ‘a bad habit’ (152) but nevertheless Frame suggests here and there that there may be a faint hope that words might develop, to become like ‘bombs’ (161). And speech may still deliver, develop, resources that could enable, reveal, truth:
Erlene, and all others who are mute, must learn to speak, not mere animal cries, demands for food, warmth, love, nor human pleas for forgiveness salvation peace of mind, but the speech which arranges the dance and pattern of the most complicated ideas and feelings of man in relation to truth… (153)
Vera’s creature – her historian husband Edward - is seen as dwelling very much in the past, and as such is a vehicle for Frame’s concern with Death and temporality. Edward bemoans the deadening legacy of language (in his case, conventional language but, the implication is clear, also literary language) as ‘the footprints of an extinct education in grammar and written expression’ (117). Foremost, however, Edward is presented as wanting to overcome time, to reevoke history, essentially the history of the, arbitrally chosen, Strang family. But this task of writing history is seen as formidable:
… why, he wondered, did I not use one of the new Death Rays, which are cleanest of the clean, laundering death into invisibility, shrinking the monstrous dead to tiny leftovers with which one can cope put in the palm of the hand, in an envelope, coat pocket, coin purse, walled, paper bag; a handful of ash? What should I do? Edward wondered. (35-6)
In light of all this despair at the limits of language, written and oral, of the limits of imaginative prose, the limitations of the ‘atoms’ (Frame goes well beyond, even, the smallest elements of meaning that Greimas refers to as ‘semes’) of language, the alphabet and the rules of grammar, ‘imposter typescript’ (The Carpathians 79) one might ask why Frame continued to write fiction. Frame relentlessly states the problem of language but offers very little by way of addressing it creatively as Woolf did in the lyricism of The Waves, or as Beckett’s absurd modernism articulated unnameability.
There are, however, certain elements in Frame’s novels that adopt, partially or fleetingly, some modernist tropes that are steps to a kind of imaginative, literary, response to the problems she grappled with. In Towards A (Frame, 1973)nother Summer Frame’s prose is reminiscent of Woolf’s, particularly when conveying a sense of redemption, of personal time captured in moments of being:
I must be careful, she thought. My mind is spread with a quick-growing substance, a kind of compost favourable to discarded moments which blossom so tall and suddenly like fairy trees, and before I can blink my eyes once or twice there’s a forest – birds, animals, people, houses, all sprouted from the carelessly dropped moment, it is quick and slow motion. (165)
Another creative response, briefly referred to earlier in this essay, are the figures of ‘imposter narrators’ that occur regularly in Frame’s novels. Frame’s narrative often ‘leads the reader on’ with what appears to be an omniscient narrator that is only to be revealed later as another character, such as Vera Glace in Scented Gardens for the Blind or Mattina Brecon’s son John the narrator/writer featuring in the late novel The Carpathians (1988). In this novel selections from the work of another novelist – Dinny Wheatstone – are also encountered, thickening the layers of imposter narrators:
I, Dinny Wheatstone, author of this imposter record, divine the activities of Kowhai Street, the street of the Gravity Star among the ordinary extraordinary people, while I study the primer of possible impossibility, the meaning of the meaningless… (57)
Towards the end of many of Frame’s novels one comes across denouements that seem to suggest a throwing in the hand of the writer - surrendering the narrative to a precipitous conclusion. Sometimes this takes the form of deux et machina – found at the end of The Adaptable Man when the Baldry’s chandelier crashes down and kills-off three of the principle characters. Frame had been cajoled by her editor into writing a, light, murder mystery but the final novel became anything but, the whodunnit sub-plot of the murderer of the Italian migrant worker being superficial, at most. Similarly, in The Carpathians, there features the murder of Madge McCurtle but that, again, is incidental. And, after the mysterious disappearance of the residents of Kowhai Street three-quarters of the way in, the voice of the ‘real’ author John Brecon (after the two, other, ‘imposter authors’, of Dinny Wheatstone and Mattina Brecon fade away) becomes dominant. But just soon as John’s authorial voice dominates it coincides, also, with the novel losing momentum and petering out. Frame’s concern with the paradoxes of time and death symbolized in this novel by the images of the Gravity Star and Memory Flower are simply abandoned, supplanted by pedestrian passages relating the biographical background to Mattina’s life prior to her appearing in small-town Puamahara.
At other places Frame’s novels sometimes exhibit elements of modernist absurdity. In Scented Gardens for the Blind we find the following example:
When people moved about me I found that they left their shape in the air, as if they had been wearing the air as clothing which stayed molded even after they struggled out of it, for make no mistake, one struggles out of air because always it fits too tightly, ever since the first tight squeeze of it zipped into the lungs at the first breath… (16-17)
The characters Turnlung and Edelman in Daughter Buffalo are inherently absurd, their conversations have affinities to those of Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Similarly, the following passage from In the Memorial Room has the darker tone of Kafka’s absurd (one is, also, reminded that Kafka lost his voice at the end of his life):
He passed the paper over to me. I read – As I said before, Mr Gill, you are at the point of bisection of circumstances, opportunity, characters, time; everything is favorable for your obliteration. You have been stifled, muffled, silenced. You cannot cry out because you cannot hear the cries of others. On an isolated line he had written: Interesting. As if it were in place of: To be recommended. Or: a good worker. Or: Conscientious. I wrote, - But what can I do? (171)
When this tone arises it can transform Frame’s lyricism into something hallucinatory and ominous:
It was the colour that seen in the sky has the power to fill the heart with foreboding; it was an ‘earthquake of colour’, the colour of an ancient battlefield in the time of huge cannons operated by men diminished in comparison, and it was the colour of a hydrogen bomb, an atom operated by men so tall in comparison that their shadow could take a twilight walk from horizon to horizon across the earth. (178-9)
Frame always seems to hanker, however, for producing a sense of modernist simultaneity, but more often than not this is stated rather than creatively evoked. For example, in Scented Gardens for the Blind Edward is described by Vera as:
A dark-haired man wearing dark-rimmed spectacles. Edward is a balding man wearing mirror-like spectacles. Both are true if one removes the adulteration of time. (39)
And her novel In the Memorial Room concludes with the aging novelist ruminating that he sees through language and metaphor (94) and that ‘tricky words range in two hemispheres of meaning’ (204). It is as if Frame’s vision, her mind, is overburdened by ambiguity about being-in-time: simultaneity may offer a way of eliding troubling doubles or the illogicity of chiasmus arising in language beyond the alphabet. So, for Vera in Scented Gardens for the Blind, Edward can be bald and hairy and she can experience simultaneously blindness and light. These contradictory experiences are rendered to be true and false within the space of a short passage, or even within a sentence as in this from the short story collection Between My Father and the King:
No doubt Fernando will marry a rich woman; no he will not marry her. (‘My Tailor is not Rich’)
In this way Frame embraces non-sequiturs as a way to startle the reader, creating a hiatus in the eye’s progress through her prose. In her very early, breakthrough, novel Owls Do Cry at one point (revealingly, towards the end of the novel) Frame consciously refuses to insert a full stop:
He went to the bedroom and plugged in his electric shaver. The sound of it, the itching whirr-whirr carried to the kitchen where Bob Withers sat, mourning now, over his handful of threepenny bits, and wishing and wishing
The Art Union? There was a theory that if you bought a ticket up north where the population was thickest you were sure to win a prize. (78-9)
In as far as they go such aspects of Frame’s prose indicate a modernist novelist’s consciousness, although modernism itself offers her little by way of a solution let alone resolution to the problems she saw of the limitations of language. Instead she found herself tirelessly restating the issues facing her as a creative writer - that the novel ultimately fails to convey human experience of Death, time, trauma:
Novelists are on the side of life; they understand the need to assume that all people are interesting; otherwise they agree on the death-sentence of the individual; part of their vast hostel of memory is filled with their private furniture and tenants; most of it is let to the history of life – beast, bird, man; they know but do not tell us of the many rooms let to those whose lives contained so little of interest to others that their death passed unnoticed, brought no protest or mourning. (The Adaptable Man: 205)
Bipolar Toby in The Edge of the Alphabet voices Frame’s view that ‘writing (continued at: www.cantab.net/users/john.myles)
There is a something of a divide in Janet Frame’s fiction between the conventionality of her short stories (always excellent ‘slices of life’, sometimes lightly touched by the fantastic or fairy tale) and the, peculiar, modernism dominant in her novels. Her work is occasionally reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s lyrical modernism, sometimes of Beckett’s absurdism, but ultimately Frame’s is a pessimistic, primitivist modernism. Frame’s primitivism is an aspect of her frustration at literary prose to express human experience in the face of modernity – in contrast to this assumption in key modernists like Woolf, Beckett and Joyce. Frame despaired not only at the novel but at language itself as a means to adequately express the ‘dark’ elements of life she experienced. Frame continually knocks at the doors of language but ultimately only to state and repeat a modified Wittgenstein’ position where the limits of language limit not so much our understanding of the world, but of our ability to express feelings beyond the connotations of words.
Frame’s despair of language and her ultimate resort to modernist primitivism derives from her concern with two key and dark aspects of human experience: mental trauma and death. This combination of biographical concerns lying beyond the limits of language derives from Frame’s experience of the death of three siblings at an early age and her own episodes of psychosis and committal to asylums. Nearly all of her major novels address these key themes, but all ultimately despair at the novel as a vehicle to articulate them adequately. We find Frame pointing to how so often we find ourselves floundering at the edge of the alphabet in our everyday lives as words fail us to express what we are feeling or thinking. Frame turns this encounter with inexpressibility back on herself as a novelist dealing in words, and rejects the supposed (presupposed in the case of modernists like Woolf and Joyce) expressive plasticity of literary prose. These two themes appear so regularly they may at first appear as repetitious - but there are significant variations in how they are addressed across the range of Frame’s novels.
The title of Frame’s early novel The Edge of the Alphabet signals her position, the definite article and singular ‘edge’ pointing to her view of the fundamental limitations of standard and literary language – it isn’t ‘my’ language, as Wittgenstein has it, that is at fault, but the language. Frame’s alter-ego here is the novelist Thora Pattern who is said to have ‘dreamed-up’ the characters of Toby, Zoe and Pat (pps. 24, 270). However, all these central characters, but particularly the social isolate Toby (a would-be writer but never able to put down words) are described by Thora as her ‘creatures’, fictional beings but ‘living beyond the boundaries of words’ (36-7). At this time Frame still had some confidence in modernism’s ability to create a sense of synchronicity in order to enable the reader to experience something of Toby’s bipolarity, or of the sense of Zoe and Pat’s floundering in the sea of modern life. The young, incipient modernist Frame allows her prose to regularly become somewhat ‘haywire’, disruptive, poeticized, a highly metaphorical language and similes conjugated together in singular passages that spring-up and disrupt the novel’s narrative:
What shall I, Thora Pattern, make from the bottled material of these days? Snip measure charge pay and walk adorned with patches of cloud and frost and words, in a string of beads, around my neck; strong polished beads which do not break at the first tug of anger or confusion; there is no scattering of them in the room and blood-to-the-head search for them beneath furniture…I have one table, three chairs. No one visits me. why should I wear words, like beads, around my neck if no one will visit me? (270-1)
However, in her novel The Memorial Room, published posthumously but written in the early 1970s, we find the narrator starkly stating the limitations of literary fiction:
I told myself I was dreaming the literary dream of a literary blind man, just as those who write or dream fiction have invented a ‘literary’ madness which abstracts from the dreary commonplaces of thinking behavior a poetic essence and sprinkles it where the shadow of ‘the truth’ falls upon the written or printed page. (65)
The novelist’s illusion is accompanied, underlined by frustration at conceptualizing death and time which stems from ‘the illusion of, the obeisance to, time, from birth to death…’ (91). Frame wrote this pessimistic novel despite the early success she had found as a writer with Owls do Cry, focusing instead on the ‘betrayal of the myths conveyed by language’ (94). She now despairs of novelists having to fall back on the ‘stuttering images and cliches of time’ (92). Symbolically, her novelist character Harry Gill becomes increasing deaf as the novel progresses (there are hints he is becoming perhaps dumb as well) in the face of the encaging contradictions facing the writer of fiction:
Poor chap, I thought. He’s already going to seed. Destroyed by his promising future. A man without a past or present. Was he not then a completely unmetaphorical man, deprived of time? […] Now that I was deaf I was becoming more and more used to interior monologues, of the type that always bored me when I tried to read fiction. Within the last few weeks, however, I had been so shocked by the banality of my paper conversations that I almost resolved to give them up… (194-195)
Similarly, in another of Frame’s novels from this period, the intriguing Daughter Buffalo (1972) inexpressibility of death is presented head-on in the encounter between the characters of Turnlung and Talbot Endelman. Turnlung is an aged poet, close to death whereas Endelman is a young scientist and ‘experimenter in death’. Turnlung has hopes that language ‘may give up the secrets of life and death and lead us to the original Word’ (24). But he soon realizes that literary language is inadequate for this task, that his poetic ‘excursion(s) into metaphor’ may be undermined by the nature of language itself:
I try to understand death itself, with inadequate language that is forced to make an excursion into metaphor and returns changed, emaciated, impoverished or enriched, often too powerful for its alphabet. (102)
In contrast, Edelman embraces death, practices cruel and needless surgery on his pet dog, and is shown to be sexually-aroused at the event of its death (127). Edelman expresses capital-D death in scientific and laboratory terms, as something that has developed in human culture as ‘an intractable state of nothingness’ due to long-term evolutionary developments in avoidance:
I began to think of death as a simple darkness and by that I do not mean the comparative ease of killing the embryo for I thought neither of agent nor instrument nor of object; I had in mind a pure personless darkness like the original void of the universe. It’s a romantic notion I had; it was unscientific, as the genes and chromosomes of the embryo had already been given a generous helping of centuries of humankind and it would seem to be too late to rescue or retrieve the simplicity of nothingness – supposing that nothingness is simple, or supposing that there were indeed room for nothingness in the fullness and complexity of the life cycle. (14-15)
In her 1964 novel Scented Gardens for the Blind rather than printed prose and its constituents, word, sentence and alphabet, Frame focuses on spoken language. Vera Glace is, eventually, revealed as someone who has dreamed up the other characters, like a novelist: Edward her husband and their mute daughter Erlene are both equally figures of her imagination. But Vera’s own mutism is very real, and the issue of the lack of communicability at the heart of speech is stated starkly at the start of this novel:
So I placed before me a diagram of the human head neck and chest, drawn to scale, with the tunnels of speech and breath so gay in their scarlet lining; and ignoring the arrows darting from right and left to stab at the listed names of the blue and red and pink territory, I moved my finger, walked it along the corridor, trying to find the door into speech, but the diagram did not show it , somewhere in the brain, the book said, an impulse in the brain letting the words go free, sympathetic movements of larynx lips tongue, the shaping of breath, and even then, the book said, it may not be speech which emerges, it may only be a cry such as a bird makes or a beast lurking in the trees at night, or, loneliest of all, not the crys of a bird or beast but the first uttering of a new language which is understood by no one and nothing, and which cause a smoke screen of fear to cloud the mind, as defense against the strangeness. (10)
For Erlene (but, really - Vera), speech is seen to have become ‘a bad habit’ (152) but nevertheless Frame suggests here and there that there may be a faint hope that words might develop, to become like ‘bombs’ (161). And speech may still deliver, develop, resources that could enable, reveal, truth:
Erlene, and all others who are mute, must learn to speak, not mere animal cries, demands for food, warmth, love, nor human pleas for forgiveness salvation peace of mind, but the speech which arranges the dance and pattern of the most complicated ideas and feelings of man in relation to truth… (153)
Vera’s creature – her historian husband Edward - is seen as dwelling very much in the past, and as such is a vehicle for Frame’s concern with Death and temporality. Edward bemoans the deadening legacy of language (in his case, conventional language but, the implication is clear, also literary language) as ‘the footprints of an extinct education in grammar and written expression’ (117). Foremost, however, Edward is presented as wanting to overcome time, to reevoke history, essentially the history of the, arbitrally chosen, Strang family. But this task of writing history is seen as formidable:
… why, he wondered, did I not use one of the new Death Rays, which are cleanest of the clean, laundering death into invisibility, shrinking the monstrous dead to tiny leftovers with which one can cope put in the palm of the hand, in an envelope, coat pocket, coin purse, walled, paper bag; a handful of ash? What should I do? Edward wondered. (35-6)
In light of all this despair at the limits of language, written and oral, of the limits of imaginative prose, the limitations of the ‘atoms’ (Frame goes well beyond, even, the smallest elements of meaning that Greimas refers to as ‘semes’) of language, the alphabet and the rules of grammar, ‘imposter typescript’ (The Carpathians 79) one might ask why Frame continued to write fiction. Frame relentlessly states the problem of language but offers very little by way of addressing it creatively as Woolf did in the lyricism of The Waves, or as Beckett’s absurd modernism articulated unnameability.
There are, however, certain elements in Frame’s novels that adopt, partially or fleetingly, some modernist tropes that are steps to a kind of imaginative, literary, response to the problems she grappled with. In Towards A (Frame, 1973)nother Summer Frame’s prose is reminiscent of Woolf’s, particularly when conveying a sense of redemption, of personal time captured in moments of being:
I must be careful, she thought. My mind is spread with a quick-growing substance, a kind of compost favourable to discarded moments which blossom so tall and suddenly like fairy trees, and before I can blink my eyes once or twice there’s a forest – birds, animals, people, houses, all sprouted from the carelessly dropped moment, it is quick and slow motion. (165)
Another creative response, briefly referred to earlier in this essay, are the figures of ‘imposter narrators’ that occur regularly in Frame’s novels. Frame’s narrative often ‘leads the reader on’ with what appears to be an omniscient narrator that is only to be revealed later as another character, such as Vera Glace in Scented Gardens for the Blind or Mattina Brecon’s son John the narrator/writer featuring in the late novel The Carpathians (1988). In this novel selections from the work of another novelist – Dinny Wheatstone – are also encountered, thickening the layers of imposter narrators:
I, Dinny Wheatstone, author of this imposter record, divine the activities of Kowhai Street, the street of the Gravity Star among the ordinary extraordinary people, while I study the primer of possible impossibility, the meaning of the meaningless… (57)
Towards the end of many of Frame’s novels one comes across denouements that seem to suggest a throwing in the hand of the writer - surrendering the narrative to a precipitous conclusion. Sometimes this takes the form of deux et machina – found at the end of The Adaptable Man when the Baldry’s chandelier crashes down and kills-off three of the principle characters. Frame had been cajoled by her editor into writing a, light, murder mystery but the final novel became anything but, the whodunnit sub-plot of the murderer of the Italian migrant worker being superficial, at most. Similarly, in The Carpathians, there features the murder of Madge McCurtle but that, again, is incidental. And, after the mysterious disappearance of the residents of Kowhai Street three-quarters of the way in, the voice of the ‘real’ author John Brecon (after the two, other, ‘imposter authors’, of Dinny Wheatstone and Mattina Brecon fade away) becomes dominant. But just soon as John’s authorial voice dominates it coincides, also, with the novel losing momentum and petering out. Frame’s concern with the paradoxes of time and death symbolized in this novel by the images of the Gravity Star and Memory Flower are simply abandoned, supplanted by pedestrian passages relating the biographical background to Mattina’s life prior to her appearing in small-town Puamahara.
At other places Frame’s novels sometimes exhibit elements of modernist absurdity. In Scented Gardens for the Blind we find the following example:
When people moved about me I found that they left their shape in the air, as if they had been wearing the air as clothing which stayed molded even after they struggled out of it, for make no mistake, one struggles out of air because always it fits too tightly, ever since the first tight squeeze of it zipped into the lungs at the first breath… (16-17)
The characters Turnlung and Edelman in Daughter Buffalo are inherently absurd, their conversations have affinities to those of Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Similarly, the following passage from In the Memorial Room has the darker tone of Kafka’s absurd (one is, also, reminded that Kafka lost his voice at the end of his life):
He passed the paper over to me. I read – As I said before, Mr Gill, you are at the point of bisection of circumstances, opportunity, characters, time; everything is favorable for your obliteration. You have been stifled, muffled, silenced. You cannot cry out because you cannot hear the cries of others. On an isolated line he had written: Interesting. As if it were in place of: To be recommended. Or: a good worker. Or: Conscientious. I wrote, - But what can I do? (171)
When this tone arises it can transform Frame’s lyricism into something hallucinatory and ominous:
It was the colour that seen in the sky has the power to fill the heart with foreboding; it was an ‘earthquake of colour’, the colour of an ancient battlefield in the time of huge cannons operated by men diminished in comparison, and it was the colour of a hydrogen bomb, an atom operated by men so tall in comparison that their shadow could take a twilight walk from horizon to horizon across the earth. (178-9)
Frame always seems to hanker, however, for producing a sense of modernist simultaneity, but more often than not this is stated rather than creatively evoked. For example, in Scented Gardens for the Blind Edward is described by Vera as:
A dark-haired man wearing dark-rimmed spectacles. Edward is a balding man wearing mirror-like spectacles. Both are true if one removes the adulteration of time. (39)
And her novel In the Memorial Room concludes with the aging novelist ruminating that he sees through language and metaphor (94) and that ‘tricky words range in two hemispheres of meaning’ (204). It is as if Frame’s vision, her mind, is overburdened by ambiguity about being-in-time: simultaneity may offer a way of eliding troubling doubles or the illogicity of chiasmus arising in language beyond the alphabet. So, for Vera in Scented Gardens for the Blind, Edward can be bald and hairy and she can experience simultaneously blindness and light. These contradictory experiences are rendered to be true and false within the space of a short passage, or even within a sentence as in this from the short story collection Between My Father and the King:
No doubt Fernando will marry a rich woman; no he will not marry her. (‘My Tailor is not Rich’)
In this way Frame embraces non-sequiturs as a way to startle the reader, creating a hiatus in the eye’s progress through her prose. In her very early, breakthrough, novel Owls Do Cry at one point (revealingly, towards the end of the novel) Frame consciously refuses to insert a full stop:
He went to the bedroom and plugged in his electric shaver. The sound of it, the itching whirr-whirr carried to the kitchen where Bob Withers sat, mourning now, over his handful of threepenny bits, and wishing and wishing
The Art Union? There was a theory that if you bought a ticket up north where the population was thickest you were sure to win a prize. (78-9)
In as far as they go such aspects of Frame’s prose indicate a modernist novelist’s consciousness, although modernism itself offers her little by way of a solution let alone resolution to the problems she saw of the limitations of language. Instead she found herself tirelessly restating the issues facing her as a creative writer - that the novel ultimately fails to convey human experience of Death, time, trauma:
Novelists are on the side of life; they understand the need to assume that all people are interesting; otherwise they agree on the death-sentence of the individual; part of their vast hostel of memory is filled with their private furniture and tenants; most of it is let to the history of life – beast, bird, man; they know but do not tell us of the many rooms let to those whose lives contained so little of interest to others that their death passed unnoticed, brought no protest or mourning. (The Adaptable Man: 205)
Bipolar Toby in The Edge of the Alphabet voices Frame’s view that ‘writing (continued at: www.cantab.net/users/john.myles)
June 12, 2014
The book jacket shows a smiling, bespectacled woman who was “[l]iterally rescued from a lobotomy at the age of 29 by the news of her first literary award.” In a note preceding the novel, Frame writes that she was greatly influenced “by [her] mother (recently dead) and by [her] father.” For these reasons, I really, really wanted to like this book.
Mattina Brecon, our protagonist, is a New Yorker with enough money to buy real estate around the world, never work, to patronize indigenous New Zealanders because they possess a “warmth . . . a wisdom that could not be ignored,” and to fret that reality is entirely contingent on our ability to name its component parts. That is, Mattina is able to rent a home in New Zealand to worry that the discovery of a star known as the Gravity Star will ruin the lives of the people she observes. Will they “find the new words when they may not realize they had lost the old? No doubt the government would soon speed the change by passing laws against the use of the old language and the old ways of thinking, using the old ways to describe the prohibitions!”
The Gravity Star, it seems, has led Mattina to New Zealand because its discovery might re-order existence, now that (in 1988) humanity knows that something can be simultaneously near and far.
WTF?
How does this discovery upset Mattina (or Frame) more than the idea of an infinitely expanding universe? Is it really that much more mind-bending to think that distance might be approximate and relative than to contemplate anything else terrifying about a universe expanding into nothingness, that sometimes sucks portions of itself into a vacuum? Perhaps my scientific mind is too poorly developed to understand the greater significance of the Gravity Star, but if that’s the case, the Gravity Star was an ill-chosen leitmotif for a work of fiction, especially since it is tied up with a legendary flower.
Yes, Mattina goes to New Zealand not just because she feels unmoored by the discovery of the Gravity Star but to find out about a legendary flower and its connection to the Gravity Star. She selects a home in a town that is the home of the so-called Memory Flower—because, you see, memory and language are all tied up with the contingent nature of reality, and, like, gravity and relative distance and shit.
Upon her arrival in New Zealand, a new neighbor, Dinny, on her new street gives Mattina a novel that is —gasp!—ABOUT MATTINA. Dinny knows all about her. It’s eerie! Dinny knows all about Mattina’s husband, her son, and a mysterious illness that Mattina has tried to avoid.
Because, you know, it wouldn’t be enough to just tie a legendary flower to the Gravity Star, there has to be a gimmick.
I don’t think that fiction needs to be analytically rigorous but it’s absurd to half-pose questions about reality and language, especially if the book fails to acknowledge that it’s at least possible that astronomical phenomena can exist before our discovery of them and that our discovery, alone, does not change the nature of reality. I do think that Frame points at this possibility, that existence may have an objective component that doesn’t require a “point of view,” her favorite phrase, but she doesn’t really deal with it, and the story itself is dull at best. But, wait? Who is the omniscient narrator? Is it the neighbor OR IS IT SOMEONE ELSE ENTIRELY who appears in the closing pages?
The book would have been a success if I had cared who was narrating, at all, by the end.
By layering narrative within narrative, Frame does not make the reader consider what is reality—that feat is accomplished by the constant question posed expressly in the book, what is real? Does language make things real? It is a feat accomplished by a child’s nursery rhyme, too (“Row, row, row your boat / Gently down the stream / Merrily, merrily, merrily / Life is but a dream.”) Layering narrative within narrative here allows the book to skirt itself. When the whole narrative is a trick, we can’t fault the author for the banality of the observation that, yes, language structures the way we think about the world. The lack of analytical rigor is then attributable to the fictional authors embedded in the story, and the author can conveniently disown the confused philosophies of her characters. But I think that if a book’s analytical parameters are going to be loose, it should offer a compelling story for readers to follow.
Why is it called The Carpathians? Because near is far, and imagination is a reality unto itself, or some shit. Maybe because the reference to the Carpathians was the occasion to throw in a WWII POW. So that the reader can rest assured that this is a serious work of fiction.
An infuriating book.
Mattina Brecon, our protagonist, is a New Yorker with enough money to buy real estate around the world, never work, to patronize indigenous New Zealanders because they possess a “warmth . . . a wisdom that could not be ignored,” and to fret that reality is entirely contingent on our ability to name its component parts. That is, Mattina is able to rent a home in New Zealand to worry that the discovery of a star known as the Gravity Star will ruin the lives of the people she observes. Will they “find the new words when they may not realize they had lost the old? No doubt the government would soon speed the change by passing laws against the use of the old language and the old ways of thinking, using the old ways to describe the prohibitions!”
The Gravity Star, it seems, has led Mattina to New Zealand because its discovery might re-order existence, now that (in 1988) humanity knows that something can be simultaneously near and far.
WTF?
How does this discovery upset Mattina (or Frame) more than the idea of an infinitely expanding universe? Is it really that much more mind-bending to think that distance might be approximate and relative than to contemplate anything else terrifying about a universe expanding into nothingness, that sometimes sucks portions of itself into a vacuum? Perhaps my scientific mind is too poorly developed to understand the greater significance of the Gravity Star, but if that’s the case, the Gravity Star was an ill-chosen leitmotif for a work of fiction, especially since it is tied up with a legendary flower.
Yes, Mattina goes to New Zealand not just because she feels unmoored by the discovery of the Gravity Star but to find out about a legendary flower and its connection to the Gravity Star. She selects a home in a town that is the home of the so-called Memory Flower—because, you see, memory and language are all tied up with the contingent nature of reality, and, like, gravity and relative distance and shit.
Upon her arrival in New Zealand, a new neighbor, Dinny, on her new street gives Mattina a novel that is —gasp!—ABOUT MATTINA. Dinny knows all about her. It’s eerie! Dinny knows all about Mattina’s husband, her son, and a mysterious illness that Mattina has tried to avoid.
Because, you know, it wouldn’t be enough to just tie a legendary flower to the Gravity Star, there has to be a gimmick.
I don’t think that fiction needs to be analytically rigorous but it’s absurd to half-pose questions about reality and language, especially if the book fails to acknowledge that it’s at least possible that astronomical phenomena can exist before our discovery of them and that our discovery, alone, does not change the nature of reality. I do think that Frame points at this possibility, that existence may have an objective component that doesn’t require a “point of view,” her favorite phrase, but she doesn’t really deal with it, and the story itself is dull at best. But, wait? Who is the omniscient narrator? Is it the neighbor OR IS IT SOMEONE ELSE ENTIRELY who appears in the closing pages?
The book would have been a success if I had cared who was narrating, at all, by the end.
By layering narrative within narrative, Frame does not make the reader consider what is reality—that feat is accomplished by the constant question posed expressly in the book, what is real? Does language make things real? It is a feat accomplished by a child’s nursery rhyme, too (“Row, row, row your boat / Gently down the stream / Merrily, merrily, merrily / Life is but a dream.”) Layering narrative within narrative here allows the book to skirt itself. When the whole narrative is a trick, we can’t fault the author for the banality of the observation that, yes, language structures the way we think about the world. The lack of analytical rigor is then attributable to the fictional authors embedded in the story, and the author can conveniently disown the confused philosophies of her characters. But I think that if a book’s analytical parameters are going to be loose, it should offer a compelling story for readers to follow.
Why is it called The Carpathians? Because near is far, and imagination is a reality unto itself, or some shit. Maybe because the reference to the Carpathians was the occasion to throw in a WWII POW. So that the reader can rest assured that this is a serious work of fiction.
An infuriating book.
March 9, 2015
a whole street of bourgeois in nice homes, in an idyllic neighborhood surrounded by peace and possibly the secret of humans in the universe, suddenly are all terrorized and eventually murdered and disappeared.
nothing to see here folks, move along, and hey! big auction and homes for sale, homes for sale!
ahh. either you are a janet frame fan or not, for the fans. a classic.
too bad, my little synop is not even close to what all is going on with this novel. just the murder, none of the love.
nothing to see here folks, move along, and hey! big auction and homes for sale, homes for sale!
ahh. either you are a janet frame fan or not, for the fans. a classic.
too bad, my little synop is not even close to what all is going on with this novel. just the murder, none of the love.
February 9, 2008
Just started..but have heard good things said of her writing.
Ok. Have since given up on this novel. I find her style overly verbose and cryptic, and not in a way that really piqued my interest. She bored me. I must be missing something here as I hear only good things about her writing.
Ok. Have since given up on this novel. I find her style overly verbose and cryptic, and not in a way that really piqued my interest. She bored me. I must be missing something here as I hear only good things about her writing.
July 2, 2010
A surprising good book by Janet Frame. Even if is a work of fiction some autobiographical aspects of the writer's can be noticed along the plot.
September 6, 2023
Mattina Brecon, a middle aged New Yorker, reads about the mythical Memory Flower which supposedly grew in Puamahara, New Zealand and decides she needs to spend a couple of months in that town to get to know the people who live there. Independently wealthy, Mattina has travelled the world spending weeks or months here and there trying to understand the lives of others as a way to find purpose in her own rather aimless existence. She pretends to be researching for a novel and people do seem to open up to her.
Mattina is married to Jake, a writer whose first novel was an acclaimed bestseller. For years now Jake has been struggling to write a follow-up. Mattina uses her wealth to support the couple and their son John Henry and also provides Jake with his own studio to work in, a place he seldom visits. John Henry’s most constant caregiver is his nanny, Mrs. Parker, who keeps the household functioning while her employers each pursue their own lives.
People have given up asking about Jake’s second book but as Mattina sets off on her journeys she does hope each time that her absence will spur him on to complete the novel he says he is working on. When she returns from each sojourn abroad they rekindle their relationship but the promised novel never appears.
Puamahara is a small town of about thirteen thousand people. The street she moves into, Kowhai Street, is pretty much like any other but the inhabitants “cherish their street” because “they depend for their being on their certainty of place.” The inhabitants themselves are rather nondescript. Each has landed in Puamahara almost by chance rather than choice and each lives their own contained life. It is a measure of the brilliance of Janet Frame’s writing, her wonderful, expressive language, that she brings each character three-dimensionally to life. As simple as some of their lives are, each becomes fascinating because of Frame’s vivid but nuanced descriptions of them. The only unifying element in the street, according to Mattina is their language. She wondered:
“When she would be used to the real estate language constantly spoken by the people of Kowhai Street. Internal entry. The car as part of the household. Like the chickens and cattle in other lands; but with deadlier breath.”
Mattina says she is doing this research for a novel she is writing, which is not true, and her husband is supposedly trying to write a follow-up to his successful first novel but actually isn’t. The only person who is actually writing is Kowhai street resident, Dinny Wheatstone, self-styled “imposter novelist’, who intrudes into this book completely taking over Chapter Seventeen with his own view of Mattina who is at that time reading his manuscript.
“Her need, however, has been to see and know the human condition in the flesh and spirit, to traverse distance, accepting in jet travel the alarming distortion of distance.
“And Mattine Brecon, no novelist, has been only able to stand and stare at the passing of time, and then, gathering her wits, to visit residents of Kowhai Street and take notes about them as if they were animals in a zoo; and certainly to feel moments
of interest, sympathy, compassion but never, during her weeks in Puamahara, to sense or capture the human force that feeds the Memory Flower.”
Dinny also says that her activities have made her the focus of the Gravity Star which disrupts time and space and is evidently drawing close to Puamahara. (The Gravity Star is Frame’s name for the effect large stars do have on gravity, appearing to bend time and space in their vicinity.)
At this point surreal events take over the action and completely upend the existence of Kowhai Street and its residents. Quite what this all means is still a puzzle to me, but Mattina does make it back to New York excited by receiving a message from her husband and son that the “Novel is finished.” The final twist of this novel perhaps is Frame’s way of saying that words in themselves have power to inform, but also may delude you. I am still thinking about this.
In a note before the novel begins Frame says:
“Writing this, my second novel, I became absorbed not in my power of choice but in the urgency with which each character equated survival with maintaining a point of view, indeed with being as a point of view.”
There is much to think about in this novel, and it keeps me thinking about it still.
Mattina is married to Jake, a writer whose first novel was an acclaimed bestseller. For years now Jake has been struggling to write a follow-up. Mattina uses her wealth to support the couple and their son John Henry and also provides Jake with his own studio to work in, a place he seldom visits. John Henry’s most constant caregiver is his nanny, Mrs. Parker, who keeps the household functioning while her employers each pursue their own lives.
People have given up asking about Jake’s second book but as Mattina sets off on her journeys she does hope each time that her absence will spur him on to complete the novel he says he is working on. When she returns from each sojourn abroad they rekindle their relationship but the promised novel never appears.
Puamahara is a small town of about thirteen thousand people. The street she moves into, Kowhai Street, is pretty much like any other but the inhabitants “cherish their street” because “they depend for their being on their certainty of place.” The inhabitants themselves are rather nondescript. Each has landed in Puamahara almost by chance rather than choice and each lives their own contained life. It is a measure of the brilliance of Janet Frame’s writing, her wonderful, expressive language, that she brings each character three-dimensionally to life. As simple as some of their lives are, each becomes fascinating because of Frame’s vivid but nuanced descriptions of them. The only unifying element in the street, according to Mattina is their language. She wondered:
“When she would be used to the real estate language constantly spoken by the people of Kowhai Street. Internal entry. The car as part of the household. Like the chickens and cattle in other lands; but with deadlier breath.”
Mattina says she is doing this research for a novel she is writing, which is not true, and her husband is supposedly trying to write a follow-up to his successful first novel but actually isn’t. The only person who is actually writing is Kowhai street resident, Dinny Wheatstone, self-styled “imposter novelist’, who intrudes into this book completely taking over Chapter Seventeen with his own view of Mattina who is at that time reading his manuscript.
“Her need, however, has been to see and know the human condition in the flesh and spirit, to traverse distance, accepting in jet travel the alarming distortion of distance.
“And Mattine Brecon, no novelist, has been only able to stand and stare at the passing of time, and then, gathering her wits, to visit residents of Kowhai Street and take notes about them as if they were animals in a zoo; and certainly to feel moments
of interest, sympathy, compassion but never, during her weeks in Puamahara, to sense or capture the human force that feeds the Memory Flower.”
Dinny also says that her activities have made her the focus of the Gravity Star which disrupts time and space and is evidently drawing close to Puamahara. (The Gravity Star is Frame’s name for the effect large stars do have on gravity, appearing to bend time and space in their vicinity.)
At this point surreal events take over the action and completely upend the existence of Kowhai Street and its residents. Quite what this all means is still a puzzle to me, but Mattina does make it back to New York excited by receiving a message from her husband and son that the “Novel is finished.” The final twist of this novel perhaps is Frame’s way of saying that words in themselves have power to inform, but also may delude you. I am still thinking about this.
In a note before the novel begins Frame says:
“Writing this, my second novel, I became absorbed not in my power of choice but in the urgency with which each character equated survival with maintaining a point of view, indeed with being as a point of view.”
There is much to think about in this novel, and it keeps me thinking about it still.
November 7, 2022
I walk regularly around my local area, where new apartment blocks appear, as if overnight. Then I think to myself, “what was there before?’ I almost never remember the house or business that stood there.
Memory is the subject of Janet Frame’s thrilling book, The Carpathians. That, and language.
At the start of the book, the Penultimate Madge, dying, reflects on just that intersection: her very name is dying with her and will soon be forgotten. When Madge asks her visiting great-niece whether she is a highland dancer like Madge was, the answer is a firm No. “Madge felt herself being disposed of because she belonged to another time of highland dancing, of Saturday night socials…” When she drops into the present tense to describe her late husband, Madge reflects “she was aware of the lapse, but what did that matter… she had no obligation now to remain within her ‘correct’ time’”.
This scene sets the tone, in a book where not a scene is wasted.
Although the plot is simple, there are many clashes in this book. A rich New Yorker moves temporarily to a small New Zealand town, drawn by the legend of the Memory Flower. Frame pits urban vis rural sensibilities, generational and Maori vs Pakeha perspectives. The action consists of the New Yorker, Mattina, familiarising herself with the people of one street. Perhaps my favourite scene is where one of the resident’s, Hercus Millow, re-enacts his wartime experience in his garden. “Yesterday and tomorrow breathing down our bloody necks, not to mention the Ancient Greeks and Romans.” Or the Carpathian mountains in his garden.
As she goes about her visits, Mattina’s thoughts are about her place in the world, her anxieties about her family and her endless search for understanding of ‘others’. Language is found wanting as a way of communicating feeling, memory – or simply what’s in your head – to another human being.
Mattina meets a self-confessed imposter, Dinny, who gives her a draft of a novel to read. Rather than being a ‘real’ character, Dinny is a harbinger – highlighting Mattina herself as an imposter, inhabiting “all worlds except the world of oneself.”
The novel burns like embers. The language theme is sparked by the narrator drawing our attention to the role of turns of phrase, and every time you read one of them – ‘always so kind’, ‘more real than real’, ‘waste not want not’ – you are reminded of the invisible heat of language, radiating more than the “words that propped up speech”. Ironically, this means they are not wasted on us, because they force us to examine them: What sits behind the use? In this context?
There is much more – novels within the novel set at the end of the world (in both senses of the phrase!) – but there is no reckoning. Frame wants you to think. Beautiful, thought-laden writing like this, will do that to you.
Memory is the subject of Janet Frame’s thrilling book, The Carpathians. That, and language.
At the start of the book, the Penultimate Madge, dying, reflects on just that intersection: her very name is dying with her and will soon be forgotten. When Madge asks her visiting great-niece whether she is a highland dancer like Madge was, the answer is a firm No. “Madge felt herself being disposed of because she belonged to another time of highland dancing, of Saturday night socials…” When she drops into the present tense to describe her late husband, Madge reflects “she was aware of the lapse, but what did that matter… she had no obligation now to remain within her ‘correct’ time’”.
This scene sets the tone, in a book where not a scene is wasted.
Although the plot is simple, there are many clashes in this book. A rich New Yorker moves temporarily to a small New Zealand town, drawn by the legend of the Memory Flower. Frame pits urban vis rural sensibilities, generational and Maori vs Pakeha perspectives. The action consists of the New Yorker, Mattina, familiarising herself with the people of one street. Perhaps my favourite scene is where one of the resident’s, Hercus Millow, re-enacts his wartime experience in his garden. “Yesterday and tomorrow breathing down our bloody necks, not to mention the Ancient Greeks and Romans.” Or the Carpathian mountains in his garden.
As she goes about her visits, Mattina’s thoughts are about her place in the world, her anxieties about her family and her endless search for understanding of ‘others’. Language is found wanting as a way of communicating feeling, memory – or simply what’s in your head – to another human being.
Mattina meets a self-confessed imposter, Dinny, who gives her a draft of a novel to read. Rather than being a ‘real’ character, Dinny is a harbinger – highlighting Mattina herself as an imposter, inhabiting “all worlds except the world of oneself.”
The novel burns like embers. The language theme is sparked by the narrator drawing our attention to the role of turns of phrase, and every time you read one of them – ‘always so kind’, ‘more real than real’, ‘waste not want not’ – you are reminded of the invisible heat of language, radiating more than the “words that propped up speech”. Ironically, this means they are not wasted on us, because they force us to examine them: What sits behind the use? In this context?
There is much more – novels within the novel set at the end of the world (in both senses of the phrase!) – but there is no reckoning. Frame wants you to think. Beautiful, thought-laden writing like this, will do that to you.
July 11, 2024
I read this as part of My Year of Rereading project (Insta: @myyearofrereading). Subscribe here: carolinebarronauthor.com/subscribe.
Fav quotes
She suspects that her desired acquisition of so many lives in a short time may be influenced by her growing certainty that her own life may soon end. Perhaps, she wonders, I am fighting a war against death, with lives for ammunition. – p 70
She realised now that her travels to foreign lands had not been simply to acquire real estate, nor simply to know about people of other lands: her aim had been to make a collection of people whose lives and ‘truth’ she had discovered and knew. - p 75
There's no clear anchorage, no roots, the street is full of strangers with empty baskets of love, or so it seems to me; but only because I have not struck the most valuable of treasures: acceptance. I know they have not accepted me. – p 93
‘I have been in parenthesis,’ Martina said. ‘And emerging from this typescript, I leave in a few days for New York and my home.’ – p 115
She was a stranger, however, something that all in Kowhai Street had claimed to be and perhaps were: trespassers. – p151
‘…The time has been like a war. People, like countries, move in to try to change, explain, describe what they see, to take control and credit. People are born interferers, intruders, changers. People infect people like a disease. And people love. The people of Puamahara could have been living at the end of the earth; and they were.’ – p 156
Mattina died in February, surrendering at last her point of view. – p170
…a writer’s forgetting is not ordinary forgetting, nor is a writer's remembering: a writer's remembering is never quite merged with usual life, as part of the day and night, but is set as on a stage with curtains drawn, prepared to be floodlit instantly to reveal every detail of sight, sound, colour, and once those are noted the lights are changed to bathe the scene in the remembered feelings and thoughts; the memory is then set in its own drama with the writer the sole audience until that memory is chosen to be described in words. – p 180 (Jake thinking about Puamahara)
Someday, perhaps, New York City may suffer the fate of Kowhai Street; there may be a new world, a new language for all; new people turned out of their old minds and hearts. – p 195
Fav quotes
She suspects that her desired acquisition of so many lives in a short time may be influenced by her growing certainty that her own life may soon end. Perhaps, she wonders, I am fighting a war against death, with lives for ammunition. – p 70
She realised now that her travels to foreign lands had not been simply to acquire real estate, nor simply to know about people of other lands: her aim had been to make a collection of people whose lives and ‘truth’ she had discovered and knew. - p 75
There's no clear anchorage, no roots, the street is full of strangers with empty baskets of love, or so it seems to me; but only because I have not struck the most valuable of treasures: acceptance. I know they have not accepted me. – p 93
‘I have been in parenthesis,’ Martina said. ‘And emerging from this typescript, I leave in a few days for New York and my home.’ – p 115
She was a stranger, however, something that all in Kowhai Street had claimed to be and perhaps were: trespassers. – p151
‘…The time has been like a war. People, like countries, move in to try to change, explain, describe what they see, to take control and credit. People are born interferers, intruders, changers. People infect people like a disease. And people love. The people of Puamahara could have been living at the end of the earth; and they were.’ – p 156
Mattina died in February, surrendering at last her point of view. – p170
…a writer’s forgetting is not ordinary forgetting, nor is a writer's remembering: a writer's remembering is never quite merged with usual life, as part of the day and night, but is set as on a stage with curtains drawn, prepared to be floodlit instantly to reveal every detail of sight, sound, colour, and once those are noted the lights are changed to bathe the scene in the remembered feelings and thoughts; the memory is then set in its own drama with the writer the sole audience until that memory is chosen to be described in words. – p 180 (Jake thinking about Puamahara)
Someday, perhaps, New York City may suffer the fate of Kowhai Street; there may be a new world, a new language for all; new people turned out of their old minds and hearts. – p 195
January 28, 2018
A really peculiar book, with some metafictional and magical realist touches, but that ultimately shows a singular take on the world. Frame is a writer that I definitely need to explore more of. I was rather taken with the setting in Puamahara, a fictional location that may have been modelled on Levin, the small town I lived in for a while. Frame brings an outside perspective to New Zealand provincialism but her main focus is the concept of memory and distance, which she explores through the legend of the 'Memory Flower' and the strange concept of the 'Gravity Star', both of which are constantly alluded to without ever being fully explained.
February 26, 2024
As well as serving as a nice reminder why Frame is one of my favourite writers, especially in the prose department this may be the deepest Frame went as a novelist and serving as her final novel it feels like her ultimate statement around her pre occupation of language. This is also her most densely packed book when it comes to the symbolic interpretations. Frame left the writing world with flying colours in this book.
May 5, 2018
Intrigued by the summary, but found the writing really opaque and difficult to decipher. I think that's intentional, but I didn't really enjoy it. Put off reading it until I had to rush through the last hundred pages before the library closed on the sixth week I had it checked out.
October 14, 2017
Brilliant and her last novel.
April 19, 2020
Frame is by far one of the 20th century's best writers.
July 21, 2020
Marvelous. What a great writer.
August 19, 2022
I’m not sure I understand this book fully and would have to read it again to catch up with the missing links and message, but I did enjoy it. Janet Frame’s fine pen and use of surrealism pleased me.
April 7, 2025
Maybe it's just me, but I had no idea what the point was of all this. I think it's partly because of the long, convoluted sentences.
December 7, 2015
I really, really enjoyed this book. For its tiny size it packs a lot of punch. It brings together a small town's discovery of the Maori legend of the Memory Flower and a physics discovery of the Gravity Star, which appears to be near and far at once (and introduces other paradoxes), and adds the character of Mattina, a wealthy New York publisher who has made a habit of settling somewhere 'at the end of the word' and getting to know the locals (sometimes practically purchase the locals). This time she has chosen to stay in Kowhai Street in Puamahara, the town whose recent discovery of the Memory Flower legend is tipped to boost the tourism income. Mattina aims to stay and get to know the locals, to belong with them, and to learn more about the Memory Flower. The residents of Kowhai Street turn out to be not quite what she'd thought.
But it's really a novel about memory and point of view (and novel-writing) and what happens to both if you mess with them. It's also about words and what we say and don't say, and how we use language, words, to present ourselves in a certain light. If you're looking for a big three-act drama, this may not be for you: it's a book that concerns itself with characters' interior worlds and their interpretations of the life/lives in front of them; it's particularly focused on Mattina's interior world and interpretations and her writer husband Jake's. Their son John Henry (at this point an adult) also features in interesting ways.
Frame published the novel in the 1980s and it has her hallmark: accessible, economical, intimate prose underpinned by astute observation and big ideas that invite us to question who we are and how we work as people. It is not out-of-date but perhaps even more relevant in these times of Craig's List and Airbnb and shifting ground around what makes a 'real' writer.
But it's really a novel about memory and point of view (and novel-writing) and what happens to both if you mess with them. It's also about words and what we say and don't say, and how we use language, words, to present ourselves in a certain light. If you're looking for a big three-act drama, this may not be for you: it's a book that concerns itself with characters' interior worlds and their interpretations of the life/lives in front of them; it's particularly focused on Mattina's interior world and interpretations and her writer husband Jake's. Their son John Henry (at this point an adult) also features in interesting ways.
Frame published the novel in the 1980s and it has her hallmark: accessible, economical, intimate prose underpinned by astute observation and big ideas that invite us to question who we are and how we work as people. It is not out-of-date but perhaps even more relevant in these times of Craig's List and Airbnb and shifting ground around what makes a 'real' writer.
August 14, 2014
I had read two Janet Frame novels prior to this one, Owls do cry and Scented Gardens For The Blind, but I have to admit The Carpathians was slightly less to my liking than the other two. Although 'weird' in a good sense, the story didn't manage to grab me the way the two other novels did.
But at least now I've read both her first (Owls do cry) and her last (The Carpatians) novels, as well as one in between (Scented Gardens for the Blind), which gives me a better idea of her style of writing.
For a review in Dutch, see message 22 of the Netherlands & Flanders group Spring Challenge 2014.
But at least now I've read both her first (Owls do cry) and her last (The Carpatians) novels, as well as one in between (Scented Gardens for the Blind), which gives me a better idea of her style of writing.
For a review in Dutch, see message 22 of the Netherlands & Flanders group Spring Challenge 2014.
November 21, 2012
I wanted to read this book simply because I was fascinated by the unknown Carpathian Mountains and entranced by New Zealand. I put it on some buy list with Amazon and after more than a year a used copy appeared to me. Reading the book was similarly a slowly revealed mystery of ordinary life. It's now been some years since I read it, so I can only say that I enjoyed the experience and the writing style. I am a fan of surreal art and I think this book is also surreal.
August 8, 2015
Read for my NZ lit class. This novel annoyed me in every way, and reminded me too much of David Foster Wallace, minus the obnoxiously long sentences. The characters were uninteresting, as was the plot. The structure is built around layers and layers of "imposter" writers, which normally I would like, but here just seemed excessive and pretentious. Even the novel's meditation on distance/nearness/time fell flat for me.
May 10, 2015
very thought provoking. frame clearly knows how to get into the heads of her characters. the magical realism was a bit hard to integrate and made for slow going at times. it's definitely the kind of book that you want to discuss with your book loving friends. it might be one of those books that I leave on my shelf and read again in a few years.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews