Daughter Buffalo

by Janet Frame

Recipient of the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1989, Janet Frame has long been admired for her startlingly original prose and formidable imagination. A native of New Zealand, she is the author of eleven novels, four collections of stories, a volume of poetry, a children's book, and her heartfelt and courageous autobiography -- all published by George Braziller. This fall, we celebrate our thirty-ninth year of publishing Frame's extraordinary writing.

Genres: Fiction, 20th Century, Literary Fiction

212 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

The 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.

Reviews

[Paul Grimsley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know how well known Janet Frame is but it seems to me that it is not enough. Her work is evocative and poetic in a way that not much prose is. There is such a deftness of touch and free-roaming engagement with ideas present in her work that it amazes me not more people have fallen in love with her as a writer.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Page 7— For years without success I searched for Death in my own home. I gradually learned that just as people refuse to accept the knowledge of the anatomy of their own bodies…, so they are reluctant to include the experience of death in their lives, regarding it until the end as their last guaranteed immunity. They start early. With each death among their friends and family they do not more readily accept the idea of their own death; they merely dose themselves with a vaccine obtained from each death, renewing their own immunity year after year with the help of the dead until, although they may have reached an age when few of their own generation have survived, they still assure themselves of their own invulnerability. Finally, over-immunized, they catch the infection and give up the ghost, and their death is harder for them if they have been taught to fight every natural process as they fought, at first, against breathing. They must learn to work toward a constant treason of their will.

I can always rely on Janet Frame to leave me with more food for thought and puzzles to work through. She studies the morbid thoughts about death with poetic dexterity that I admire— Janet Frame’s word play is a complex, multilayered literary feast. She takes the morbid and grotesque themes of death and creates beauty—an uncomfortable beauty. In the darkness of the valley of death, she makes light so you can see it for it is. It’s only Death, that specter that we discuss in low voices and metaphors. Reality is as twisting and turning as a maze full of the dead ends with one true path to the way out. Death.

This book puts Death under a microscope to look at that “thing” we do when we die, and the many ways we die, young, old, by accident, by illness, by one’s own hand. What happens when we die—everyone has their personal idea about the matter, but we tend to keep it to ourselves.

As fascinating as it is, it’s a bit grim, probably not the ideal book to read at this time of COVID 19. I was mildly alarmed when I first dipped into it, but Janet Frame has this way about her writing, that can bring you back from the brink of despair. Her prose is magical, and at times its surreal nature allows the reader to go with the flow; there’s a comforting sentiment…Have no fear, it’s only a Janet Frame novel, where what is real is questionable, and what is preposterous is likely the truth.

Daughter Buffalo is another gem that I’ve dog-eared and underlined, starred, and have backtracked to rediscover. Here are a few…


Page 27— I said that to survive, from the moment we are born, we must be capable of turning against. Before birth we are against air, against breathing, yet we survive to breathe and love the air, we become turncoats—turnskins, turneyes, turnmouths, turnhearts, turnlungs. And having known life we are against death even when all messages from the country of death convince us that our final role must again be that of turncoat—turnheart, turnlung.


Page 29—A traitorous agent “crosses to the other side.” Entrance is gained by a “password.” The dying “pass on,” their password uttered.

Page 62—During the weeks following the death the word “loss” was used in letters of sympathy and in speech and I learned the heart-distinguishing difference between this loss, and those reported in the advertisement columns of the newspaper under Lost and Found, which presupposed an eventual finding if one searched far and wide enough.

Page 119—Words are a risk, too. The first risk. And they’ve been tampered with before they get into the language, before birth; their very birth is a tampering.

[Kirsty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Daughter Buffalo is markedly strange, and often quite disturbing, but this makes it no less compelling. The voices which Frame creates for both of her protagonists are rich and evocative, and the characters are horribly believable. Undoubtedly one of the weirdest books which I have ever read, Daughter Buffalo is interesting in its prose style, and would offer an awful lot to discuss if it were selected for a book club - provided all members have strong stomachs, of course!

[Monica Copeland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth the read, although its depth requires you read in little chunks. Poetic and weird and visceral...captures death in all its beauty and confusion.

[Starfish · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a good book to read on a plane, when mildly depressed, or when returning to Japan.

Alternatively, the best book to read on a plane, somewhat depressed and returning to Japan.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, that was horrifying.

An interesting idea, though.

[Tamsin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every book I’ve read of hers is one of the best books I have ever read

[Sara DuBois · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book after asking an Auckland bookstore worker who her favorite New Zealand authors were - she cited Frame ("a sort of kiwi Sylvia Plath"). What a beautiful, lyrical -yet dark- literary journey. It is a fast read about relationships and reflections of two men. Moreover, though, Frame is captivating in her examination of, play with and artful deployment of words, philosophy, love, empathy, apathy and existence/death. It's part Milan Kundera, part poetry, part magical realism, part pure original.

There were, too, some particular NZ idiosyncrasies that I appreciated - a duality/conversation of differing perspectives even on shared experiences that reminded me of my time at the museum at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, a casual acceptance of the presence and harshness of nature, and the general small observations of a traveller to the US. And for some reason, I also appreciated that there were little typos throughout the book - somehow it added to the rugged and straightforward 'life is what life is, and what we make of it' feel. Grateful for having stopped by this little bookstore on a rainy travel day!

[Luce · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was surprisingly evocative of so many questions I've asked myself at some time or other. Reading this book felt deeply personal and introspective, so I won't try to articulate those questions here. Janet Frame's writing is so tender and melancholy, she truly has a unique voice.

[Gabriella · Rating 4 out of 5]

A poet’s novel, befuddled and beautiful, befuddling and comforting. Staring death in the eye and making nothing but imagination of any of it.

[Ryan Sayegh · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was given this book by a friend after we had a discussion on the representation of death and grief. For the most part I would just describe this piece as poetic introspection of two characters in different life stages on their concepts of death and how their interests in death connects them.

There a few core things that happen, but to be honest for the most part it felt like a poetic deconstruction of death and I wasn’t the biggest fan. I was definitely drawn to the book quite intensely at first, but in reality the brilliance of the prose was just a distraction and not much actually happened.

I don’t necessarily mind works that aren’t plot driven, but this one just felt like I was stuck in a circle. Where everytime a character embraced a sense of life they were drawn back down because of their obsession with death.

[Aidan Durant · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is just a wonderful book. Perfect with a little abstraction at the end that left me wondering a bit too hard and made me want to go back. Frame’s writing is always the highest quality I’ve ever encountered. Truly literary work. Left me with this: “you have what you give”

Story of two men, one old and dying, and one young and obsessed with dying, coming to terms with their experiences and trying to find the pure truth of their lives from only their experiences.

4.5

[Georgia Maranville · Rating 5 out of 5]

i randomly picked up this book in a charity shop and decided to give it a chance. i loved it so much i made a goodreads account just to review it. i love the way janet frame writes and builds her world. it’s so easy to get trapped into it even though it’s so weird and a little disturbing. i loved this book.

[VinitaF · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve enjoyed Frames autobiographical trilogy but this book not nearly as much. Maybe it’s the morbid sentiment, not that an analysis of death is not warranted and Frame conducts this poetically. Her ingenuity is evident in this book.

[G · Rating 3 out of 5]

so strange

[David Layton · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Daughter Buffalo" comes from Janet Frame's second phase when she breaks away from writing mostly autobiographical novels. The novels in this period came out more sporadically, as if she had trouble writing from a perspective not her own. It is tempting to think she recognized this struggle and made these second phase novels about that struggle of trying to find an authentic means of telling a story about imaginary people. "Daughter Buffalo" is probably the most enigmatic novel of all the novels by a writer of already highly enigmatic novels. On the surface, the novel is about two men. The older man comes from an unnamed country that the descriptions give away as New Zealand. The younger man is from New York. The older man gives his name only as Turnlung, a pseudonym he uses based on the fact that his lungs are turning against him and killing him. He is a gay writer now living alone in an apartment near the mortuaries. Talbot Edelman, the younger man, is a doctor who specializes in Death Studies. He comes from a Jewish family. His father collects landscape art by unknown artists. Talbot lives with his fiancée and a dog that he performs experiments upon in his study of death. The two men connect because of a mutual fascination with death. The novel is made of reminiscences by each man, not in strict alternation. Needless to say, not much "happens" in the book, which is mostly reflections on each narrator's experiences and feelings. Much of the chapters narrated by Turnlung are samples from a long, modernist-symbolist poem he is working on based on his encounters with Edelman. It seems that in a way, each man is using the other as material for his chosen profession. The figure of "Daughter Buffalo" features prominently in this poem, and appears about halfway into the book. This is a buffalo calf that both men observe on a visit to the Bronx Zoo. Turnlung later claims to have adopted this buffalo as the daughter of both him and Edelman. Daughter Buffalo seems to be the central symbol of this symbolist novel, standing for bewilderment and bedazzlement, in a way the position of the reader who must be bewildered by what the novel is "about" and bedazzled by the metaphorical style. Even with all this, Frame seems unable to escape the autobiographical, inserting a story about the deaths of two of her sisters as "related by" Turnlung, who says he is repeating what a "friend" told him.

In essence, the novel is pure Janet Frame in style and subject. Frame returns to the matter of writing as a subject and portrays her inability to get out of writing autobiographically as a more or less universal problem. The idea is that all writing of any art or value is in some way autobiographical. Thus, she hides this autobiographical component while not hiding it. Another common theme is the deception of the first-person narrator. This novel has two, strikingly self-identified, whose names and personalities are highly suspect and who gradually merge into mirror images of each other. Another theme is death, ever-present in any Janet Frame novel. The concern is over the appropriate way to come to grips with this fact, both personally and publicly. Finally, we have the theme of the novel as an artifice, basically a construction that hides as much of what the author wants to say as it reveals.

To summarize, Janet Frame's writing is always going to be "marmite," to use an English reference, a love it or hate it proposition. Probably more than any other Frame novel, "Daughter Buffalo" has caused and will continue to cause problems of reception. To those who do not favor Frame's writing, it is the epitome of everything wrong with what Frame does. Even those who appreciate Frame's writing often find this novel as going too far, perhaps seeing this as Frame's equivalent of Henry James's "The Sacred Font," much to-do about very little. Others often find this a novel a stimulus for contemplation, an occasion to contemplate what the reader him or her self believes about death, fiction, and aging.

[Gillian Kevern · Rating 3 out of 5]

My grandmother gifted me this book several years back when I visited New Zealand. I started reading it on the flight back to Japan. At first I was charmed by its coyness about death, was amused by it. Later as sleep deprivation kicked in, my mind wandered to a really weird, really morbid place.

This time around I was careful to read it with enough sleep and escaped the morbid thoughts. I liked the way death was dissected from many angles without any particular knowledge being gleamed, and I admired how a story Turnlung explained in its entirety, jewels, could be misread by Talbot, lacking the complete knowledge of the readers. A few chapters later, in true Frame style, it is Talbot whose definition of jewel is rich with meaning.