Owls Do Cry: A Novel

by Janet Frame

First published in New Zealand in 1957, Owls Do Cry, was Janet Frame’s second book and the first of her thirteen novels. Now approaching its 60th anniversary, it is securely a landmark in Frame’s catalog and indeed a landmark of modernist literature. The novel spans twenty years in the Withers family, tracing Daphne’s coming of age into a post-war New Zealand too narrow to know what to make of her. She is deemed mad, institutionalized, and made to undergo a risky lobotomy. Margaret Drabble calls Owls Do Cry “a song of survival”—it is Daphne’s song of survival but also the author’s: Frame was herself misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and scheduled for brain surgery. She was famously saved only when she won New Zealand’s premier fiction prize.

Frame was among the first major writers of the twentieth century to confront life in mental institutions and Owls Do Cry is important for this perspective. But it is equally valuable for its poetry, its incisive satire, and its acute social observations. A sensitively rendered portrait of childhood and adolescence and a testament to the power of imagination, this early novel is a first-rate example of Frame’s powerful, lyric, and original prose.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Classics, 20th Century, Mental Health, Novels, Audiobook

211 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1957

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

[Mariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

You would think this night that the world sated with blossom and love and death would finish and there would be no memory of it anywhere, save perhaps on a cave wall of new time, where the posturing figures dance unseen their stillness of clay or chalk or stone.
You would think all this on a spring night.
Except the thinking is not real.

The feeling I had a lot when reading Owls Do Cry was of looking out of the corner of your eye. When looking at it full on whatever you expected to see was not there. If there's an astigmatism version for rose coloured glasses then it would be this family the Withers. Family and society mean fuck all for the look are the glasses. I wasn't surprised when the brother Toby reads his little sister's diary during a visit only to be startled into feeling shame when he comes across the pages about himself. I had been thinking about walking across your own grave before then. I don't think it was because he saw in handwriting that he had his mother wait on her own bread bone dry and it's not butter it's margarine (that he bullies her with further poverty with threats of pulling his shares out of the home that he owns with his parents made ME ashamed). Toby had self-awareness of the kind that sees what he expects to see when he slithers into another's eye frames. The kind of weasel you would expect to learn has a dating website profile lamenting that hot girls don't like nice guys and honestly, that's why he goes out of his way to make everyone's life hard in those little ways that add up to blind sided bad days. Greasy-haired, never had a girl, is he going to have one of his "fits" again. He just knows they don't like him, rather than expect better of himself. I SHOULD help my mother , he'd think. His fits are epilepsy, I think. If he had been female he would have ended up under the hot lamp suspect gaze with no phone calls or a glass of water, please. Under the knife and under the stars if all of your ancestors are really judging you. That was his sister Daphne's fate. Toby counts his money like he was the little brother from The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (great book). Coins over the eyelids long before you're dead is one way of living as if you already are. I had the feeling about this family that they were living the "When you get old I'm going to put you in a home!" threat from day one. It's a bitter unwhimpered threat. It is only funny if it is The Golden Girls and you can burn the place down with a hot plate. While Daphne is rotting away in the horror land version of Shady Pines, is that the dying sun reflecting off the you could see your reflection in it is so dirty from a lifetime of sweat and twisted worry dome of Bob Withers over there, you know, where the chicken died crossing the road? I don't know who sprung for the home in this gasping punchline of an ending. The joke isn't funny anymore (this time I'll get it in early that Janet Frame has the comic touch of I don't know if I'm crying or I'm laughing). The "normal" one, please don't call her Chicks anymore her name is TERESA, dead in a murder-suicide. Gotta keep up with the I-married-a-doctor-and-he-broke-both-his-vows-of-marriage-and-the-medical-board couple. She would have been the sort who would make sure you got her husbands title correct so I don't feel bad about my load of hyphens just there. If she could write about it after she died she probably wouldn't have minded that they were trendy. I wonder what Janet Frame would have made of the materialism of today if 1950s New Zealand cocked her brow? I can't see Toby springing for the fees for his father's home. It was probably the lobotomized Daphne in her on the way up factory supervising job. Or the institutional version of the unmarked pothole. Eldest sister Francie died in a freak accident. I am not sure how she burned to death. She rolled out of the pages and into the fires. She was kicking a leg in the mirror. She was whispering secrets that Daphne would always be too young to know, at least not without the so-called benefits of may I have the scalpel, please. She was too old for trips to the local dumpster for treasures. Chicks was running behind with sand in her shoes at the promise of aniseed cakes. Dad wanted to burn Francie's scandalous pants that signified that she was a loose girl. What will people say? After her death he burns those pants in secret. This was a moment that stood out to me as if a girl who was brutally dumped by her boyfriend bonfires every I love you beary much memory in retaliation and promptly regrets it in case they get back together. Was Francie really dead to them? I had the feeling that Toby was always reading Teresa's diary and running away in the night to avoid that exorcist head spin at their family. Remember when we called her Chicks because she looked like a chicken with hair swinging in her face, pointing at the ground as if she could pick up leftover grains of secrets that are only good when you're too young to know them? Teresa is the run away and be too good for your family sister. I don't know if anyone reading this has that kind of family. It was the much vocalized dream in mine. Hearing this has a special way of making you feel as if you had never had a family. If you wonder why YOU aren't also good enough to leave that is another way of losing it. I think that's what Toby probably asked himself every time he thought about Teresa and her house up north. I was interested in how Janet Frame saw that dream. Young Daphne puts her sister on a wicked witch of the west path in the cyclone trail on her bicycle to and fro from a factory job. Once upon a time I looked on a different New Zealand story, the film Heavenly Creatures, for my inner held up image for the horror romance. Teen murderesses scream with delight when their beloved ugly Orson Welles "chases" them in their fantasies. This movie made teenage me very happy because of that scene. Movies don't make me that happy anymore. Sure, there are some stories that spark my mind to go "Oh, this means that" (Claire Danes playing a bipolar character on series Homeland is a recent favorite. I'm not saying I can't get something out of good stories). I don't know if I haven't had the knack of finding the good ones like I used to, or maybe my standards are too high. I feel like the present and stretched out future is for them like that. To feel a shadow of that thrill, it has to come from memories (distorted or no) of the past. Daphne's spinning of "this means that" for a world she doesn't see the way a person who dreams of getting out as soon as they can felt like that reveling in the horror pleasure. I guess how else could you cope if that was your option. Backbreaking work until death. Little did she know what awaited her was much worse. I am horror fascinated by that her method of living with the world made it unlivable for her. Doors shut on the outside as the windows in the mind open like seeing a picture of yourself looking into a mirror. The Withers return to the mind boggling sudden death of Francie as a furnace of their own dreams if it worked as a time stands still trick for Daphne. If they ever read someone else's account of their poverty, or had to ride back to forth to the factory without kaleidoscopic colors of wool. In the fairy tales you could sacrifice your first born child for this. Well, Daphne was locked up for the poetic license she takes with her own life. They take it away from her. I had a feeling of a longing to return to before Francie had died. I couldn't call how Toby and Teresa see the world as poetic anything. It would be like overhearing someone else say the kind of critical things you would say to yourself if you are the sort of person who feels awful about bad hair days. If there was ever going to be a language that made sense of them as a whole it probably wouldn't be that kind. There's a before and after Francie. Funny, she was going to leave them too, as Teresa does. Mom and dad never had any money. They would write about them in their own diaries as figures who yell at them. There would probably be a page about having to do chores. A lot about wanting to live their own lives not as a family. Teresa thinks about where Daphne is shut and means to send her a tin of biscuits. That wasn't that different than Toby's longed for pleasure of finding out what the next flavor was going to be in a type of candy much like Life-savers. It probably wasn't as sweet as when they were kids and got those aniseed cakes (which sounded much like something my birds like to eat). If only Toby hadn't fled in the night when he read a diary never intended for him to read. Teresa's suburban life wasn't seen with the same warm kitchen lights as the one in Frame's Towards Another Summer. I had liked that book better for that, that it wasn't a win or lose life thing to have "it all" of a family versus being alone and not settled in if you were happy with that or not. I don't mind here that it's a loss because I don't think it was really about who saved themselves or not. The loss is in the meaning of it all. Why even have family? The feeling I have had all three times reading Janet Frame is that the only way to save yourself is to try and have as many kinds of looks that you can get. The stolen diary feeling isn't a pleasant feeling to have. I felt like Toby when he is dismissed. I had felt sorry for him when the girl he hardly admits to being in love with him is married to another man. She laughs at him for believing a childhood story about factory girls and a strap. I felt something else for him when another pleasure he gets out of his life is withholding the sports page from the newspaper from his father. These kids wouldn't ever get over that childhood slight, would they? I wonder what the point of moving away from the family you were born into and starting another one is if that is how it is always going to go. It's the home for you! Here, have a biscuit tin. Janet Frame was wonderful with the familial poetical strains carrying over through the kids. Daphne listened willingly. Toby has nightmares that his sisters are Shakespearean witches. Teresa silences herself in her diary. Toby at least pieces together how his mother pulled her view of the world from newspaper headlines read aloud to her from her husband. When Daphne writes something similar (I wonder where she heard it from) her sister only wonders that the nurses allowed her to send such a letter in the first place. What happened to this family?

Their mother sang a song to her children that went like this:
Come in you naughty bird
the rain is pouring down
what would your mother say
if you stay there and drown?
You are a very naughty bird
you do not think of me,
I'm sure I do not care,
said the sparrow on the tree

Frame wrote that she "half-wailing it so that it seemed tragic and terrible". Damn. Guilt trip for her kids, sure. But for a family that epitomizes "You don't call, you don't write"... I thought that was great. I read a review online that the character marginalized to the detriment of the story was the mother. I don't agree. I think she takes her place in that family and then doesn't take it, same as everyone else.

People could say that Janet Frame wrote similar books because of the autobiographical content. Like Daphne, she was locked away in an institution and scheduled for a lobotomy herself. Her family was poor. I read a goodreads review from a friend on here about another author not too long ago that she wrote the same book every time and I didn't agree with that either. Jean Rhys books read to me like interlocking pieces of the same puzzle. Janet Frame is something else. If you have ever struggled with a crushing weight on your own shoulders that was sometimes shifted to your heart, or maybe your brain, and you could trick yourself into thinking it was gone with stories you tell yourself? You would catch your own reflection and what you expected to see there wasn't what you saw anymore. Her books read like that to me (I've only read three so far. Maybe I'm talking out of my ass). Society is fucked up. Maybe it isn't that bad because there is a light coming out of these bridges that I can cross with some help. Is the ending of Owls Do Cry the subverted image of what you expect to see, what with the mentalist Daphne making the dough? Those who got out dug themselves in the pot holes (society loves parking lots). I feel it's sad and angry. Faces in the Water was kinder towards the lashers than I had inside of me because I was too angry that society doesn't ask of itself to be better than that. So the mom was going to die anyway. That was going to be her end no matter what. But why did she have children to live like that? Tell yourself I don't care, why is my son so cruel, that's how it goes. So their neighbors read about this stuff happening to all of these people. Anyone we know? I guess they didn't expect to see these people in the paper. They all had their places. Toby's sorta love who married that social security clerk who had been embezzling all the time. I missed the old Daphne who saw their ominous faces peeking out of the sides of Mt. Rushmore. Oh wait, that's me. I'm trying to reconcile historical expectations with it never happened so let's just give up. Oh wait, that's what they did. I'm stuck on Daphne getting locked up because her mind played tricks on her that it wasn't all the town dump and dad yelling at mom about money. Owls Do Cry is the it is freaking hard book. Poetry isn't going to save you this time.

Damn, but I do feel bad about that save yourself drive. I would think Frame would see it from both sides of the lonely socket. Somehow that isn't as consoling to me this time. I've seen where Daphne goes...

And the mill girls going on bicycles, chased by the south wind to their rooms of blindness; but not here, Daphne, here at the hour of the hooter, the door outside the mountain hovel is unlocked, some other door of a brick house holding the idiots and maimed and the dwarves with their crepe faces and parchment eyes, and these people move into the yard; they jabber, jibber and are quiet; they know what you say to them; they know, they are understanding, so they must work; and off they skip and limp and crawl, with bundles of soiled clothes under their arm to the laundry; all day with the hiss of steam like snakes in their ears; ironing, folding, hanging out the clothes; feeding and being crushed, their heads and the bones in their heads, under the mangle that is time, taking the sheets of earth they lie between and the pillow-cases of dream they rest their hearts on.

[Chrissie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did I enjoy reading this? No, but that is because of the subject matter. This is a book about the mentally ill, the physically ill, aging and death. It records the darker side of human behavior; how humans behave toward the impoverished, the ill and the aging. The portrayal is uncomfortably accurate.

This was Janet Frame's first novel and it has strong autobiographical elements. She was incorrectly institutionalized as a schizophrenic. She was institutionalized for a decade but avoided a lobotomy. Her writing had begun to be published and a doctor saw that maybe rather than being ill she was simply expressing a creative sensibility. Her life story is moving. But should one judge a book by the author's difficult life or the value of the book? I don't even judge a book by its value, but rather by my own personal reaction to it! I would give it five stars if I were to rate the book by the author's difficulties or as proof that what is defined as mentally ill is debatable.

How is the writing? Is it special? Yes, absolutely. Think free verse poetry. I personally have difficulty with poetry, but this is easy to read. Much of the book is written employing a semi-stream-of-consciousness narrative. You perceive how the character thinks. The author's decade in an institution and her own troubled thoughts (two of her sisters drowned) are used to good effect. The dialogs are perfect. You hear what people DO say.

Humor? Yes, even given the dark tone of the book, there is humor. Even on her deathbed the author has retained her sense of humor. When she was diagnosed with incurable leukemia she was told that they would do all they could to make the few weeks that remained comfortable. She jokingly responded, "No one has ever cared about my quality of life before!" Here are some lines that made me smile. Daphne, who is the central character in the book, is speaking of her father's hygiene routines and talks of, "....the powder that he sprinkled on his feet to stop them from becoming athletic." Or a depiction of a nurse "with her greet the visitor smile". Or the comment, "It must be in the family. Some of these visitors are queerer than the patients." There may be humor, but there is a lack of kind people. Maybe Daphne's mother....but she dies?!

Doctors. Should one trust doctors? This book is upsetting if you, as I do, immediately get psyched out in a medical institution. The author certainly shares my skepticism. When you enter a hospital you better be healthy if you want to exit.

And then there is the ending, the epilogue. It is very clever, and that left me loving the book. A message is left. Should I judge a book solely by the ending? Parts of the book do in fact drag.

Do you see how hard it is for me to decide on my rating?! In summary:
Good writing, poetic in tone.
A touch of humor.
Health issues, again hard for me....
Mental illness is portrayed with stunning insight.
People accurately drawn, but with an emphasis on the evil rather than the good.

The narration by Heather Bolton is outstanding. The dialect was genuine and not hard to follow. She beautifully sings the songs and recites the poetry. When Daphne sings and then her sister, you actually hear the difference. Daphne's father and mother and each sibling, each has their own voice. EXCELLENT narration which cannot be improved upon, but I insist on rating a written book and the narration of the audiobook separately.

I don't think I ever really came to feel for Daphne......so three rather than four stars. Definitely a book worth reading.

Oh yes, at the end of the audiobook there are two additional pieces, a "Biographical Sketch" by Pamela Gordon and a long, very long, "Introduction to the Author" by Lawrence Jones. I enjoyed the first but was put off by the second. I don't want to be told why I should like a book, so I stopped listening. I want to form my own opinion. I will now, having completed my review, go back and listen. This introduction, placed at the end, is more than an hour long. It has the character of a literary review. It felt promotional.

[Lanea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Janet Frame is another one of those authors whose books I ration. I discovered Frame's work after I fell for Jane Campion's work. The Piano led to An Angel at My Table, which was based on Frame's autobiography of the same name and some of her other work. Frame died a few years ago after a life of tragedy, astounding accomplishments, and gorgeous writing. Some writers wish they would write like Dickinson or Faulkner or Shakespeare . . . I wish I could write like Frame.

Owls Do Cry was Frame's first semi-autobiographical novel. It follows a New Zealand family through the death of a daughter, the mental illness and subsequent institutionalization of another, and the general tragedies of deeply injured children. But the plot isn't what normally matters in Frame's books. her language is intense, and beautiful, and poetic. And right--always right. I'm sure I'll read it again.

[Dagio_maya · Rating 5 out of 5]

”Il mondo dell’infanzia si ingrandisce a ogni ricordo e ce lo poniamo come un mantello fatato sulle spalle.
Ma io ora tornerò a Waimaru e scoprirò che il mio mantello, come la pelle di zigrino, si rimpicciolisce a ogni desiderio, e mi ritroverò fra le mani solo un brandello frusto e grinzoso.”


Ecco. L’ho finito.
Sono in quello momento di vuoto; ferita come fossi vittima di un recente abbandono.
Mi accingo a scrivere qualcosa di questo libro.

Si dice “fare un commento a caldo”.
Che strano: io sento i brividi…
Eh, sì le parole sono veramente oggetti bizzarri che possono assumere forme differenti a seconda di chi le manipola.
Questa è la prima sensazione che mi sento di fare a fine lettura di “Gridano i gufi” primo romanzo della neozelandese Janet Frame.

Una storia bifronte già nella geografia dell’isola in cui un Nord e un sud si contrappongono nelle differenti caratteristiche di clima e di ambiente cittadino e rurale.


”Buffo, il cielo qui a nord è diverso dal cielo del sud, e anche la luce. Giù a sud non dimentichi mai l’Antartide, una specie di temibile retroterra, un blocco di ombra grigia, il continente di ghiaccio. Il buio giù al sud è più pauroso e meno amichevole di qui, ti ci senti intrappolato come in una tomba, e temi che la lastra tombale di ghiaccio non verrà mai via. Qui al nord di notte in alto nel cielo resta una specie di luce solare, come se le tenebre aderissero alla terra sotto la sferza del sole.”


Al centro la dolorosa miseria dell’indigenza e le due facce che può assumere la realtà:
follia e cosiddetta normalità.

Non vorrei dire nulla di più di quello che si può leggere in sinossi perché basta ed avanza per addentrarsi tra queste pagine fitte di umana sofferenza.
Sento, tuttavia, di dover avvertire che bisogna muoversi cautamente per non essere sopraffatti dalla potenza di questa scrittura che come una magica acrobazia riesce a stare in bilico tra prosa e poesia con spettacolare naturalezza.

La prosa segue il filo della storia che ci viene raccontata con evidenti tracce biografiche: la miseria, la follia, l’internamento (”giorni senza luce e notti senza tenebre), l’elettroshock (pare che la Franet ne subì più di duecento!!!).


” Il lungo corridoio fuori luccica come il cuoio di una scarpa nuova che cammina cammina su se stessa con passo spettrale calpesta il proprio luccichio finché non giunge alla camera dove la donna aspetta, in vestaglia, l’orrore delle ore nove del mattino chiamato trattamento di elettroshock. Indossano vestaglie di flanella rossa, come se Dio o il diavolo, comprato un continente di stoffa, lo avessero percorso a piedi, usando le forbici anziché il bastone da passeggio, da costa a costa, ritagliando un inerte e vasto disegno di pazzi e di pazze i quali all’improvviso, vedendo il loro mondo e la bandiera di stoffa a forma di sole penzolante nel loro unico cielo, diventeranno ciechi.
Oh, ma alle nove, si dice, tutto andrà a posto. La vista sarà oscurata, l’ombra risistemata sugli occhi, e il campo visivo verrà ristretto al piatto, alla tazza di tè, alle sigarette; tutto qui il loro mondo; fermi come una casa a guardare sempre il proprio cortile posteriore.
Hanno tolto loro le forcine che sono state disposte in fila lungo la mensola del camino. Le dentiere sono immerse in acqua tiepida dentro tazze senza manici, disposte in cerchio, perché si facciano compagnia, sul tavolo dalle gambe d’osso.
«Via le dentiere» hanno ordinato le donne vestite di rosa. «Via le dentiere».
E tra un attimo lo stesso Dio o lo stesso diavolo che ha passeggiato sul continente di stoffa girerà l’interruttore che decreta: Guardare. Dimenticare. Diventare ciechi. “

La poesia, intanto, tratteggia immagini e fa delle parole strumenti che evocano altri mondi, altre dimensioni.

«E la follia, non forse è questo?», mi chiedo.
Vedere oltre.
Vedere altro.
E dirlo ad alta voce con l’innocenza di chi ignora che parlare alfabeti sconosciuti è rischioso.
Chi è dichiarato folle non è forse un incompreso che parla linguaggi cifrati?


”E camminiamo come Teseo o come uno spazzino nel labirinto, le nostre memorie srotolate come fili di seta o di fuoco; e dopo aver ammazzato i minotauri del nostro ieri continuiamo a tornare incessantemente alla scaturigine del filo, al Dove. Ma quale Teseo o spazzino porterà mai fra i capelli un papavero di carta, o si legherà i calzoni come un pacco, con lo spago, legando le gambe in fondo con un filo dorato come un ciondolo di Natale?
E il cielo ora è una maschera blu che copre la memoria, le lapidi, le meraviglie nelle bacheche di vetro,
Raperonzola, Raperonzola, butta i tuoi capelli.
Lascia il tuo piffero, il tuo allegro piffero.”


Framet ci racconta la storia di questa famiglia generando emozioni e annunciando la tragedia già dal titolo.

I gufi che gridano sono presi in prestito dalla Tempesta shakespeariana e più precisamente dalle strofe cantate dallo spiritello Ariel (”Dove l'ape succhia succhio io: / giaccio nella corolla d'una primula e lì dormo./ Quando gridano i gufi. volo sul dorso del pipistrello/ in cerca dell'estate, allegramente./ E allegro, allegro ora vivrò / Sotto il fiore che pende dal ramo!) che da note spensierate si tramutano con la Framet in presagio di disgrazia tra le labbra della sorella Francie:

”Ma Francie Withers è Giovanna d’Arco, e alla festa in giardino cantò:
Là dove succhia l’ape succhio anch’io
dentro una primula è il letto mio
il mio rifugio quando gridano i gufi.
Quando gridano i gufi, quando gridano i gufi.
Ma non è più lì il mio rifugio quando gridano i gufi. I gufi sono fra gli alberi e gridano quiiuiii, quiiuiii, e a volte di notte per via degli alberi pensi che la pioggia durerà per sempre e che il sole non spunterà mai più, solo quiiiuiii, quiiiuiii e tenebre.”

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I probably shouldn't have read this straight after the 3 volume autobiography and 'Faces in the Water' - 5 books with similar material is a little wearying. But, having recommended 'Owls Do Cry' to a fellow Goodreader; I felt the need to make sure I knew what I was talking about. And in the process of reading I have now realized that my last visit must have been several life-times ago.

'Owls Do Cry' deserves the 5 stars. Frame's first novel, published in 1961, is remarkable. It's a beautifully structured story about the Withers family of the fictional town, Waimaru, in South Island, New Zealand. It's also a very good example of how fiction can express a truth more clearly than the facts.

Toby has travelled from his home in the South Island, to visit his sister, Chicks in the far North. He reads Chick's diary and understands that his presence is an embarrassment to her. So he leaves the same night; he takes a train to the nearest big city and recalls as he travels, a journey from when he was a young boy being sent up North to Wellington to stay with his well to-do Aunty and Uncle and their children.

And they took him for the day to the Gardens first, through the hothouse, treading over the hoses and touching giant pink flowers that were labelled in foreign language on a piece of wood, tied up, so they could not escape; and every flower in the hothouse and fern in the fernery was there to be looked at, and what a crowd of people walking up and down and looking, turning their heads and saying,
- That's a lovely colour,
or
- I like that shade, it's like Mag's dress, only deeper,
or
- You can get that colour now, in that stuff you have don't have to iron,
or
- What lovely flowers! They just make you realise, don't they?
All the people turning their heads backwards and forwards like dolls.
So Toby spent the day looking, next at the Sound Shell, where bands played, and then at the Zoo were the polar bear wore an old yellow fur coat, and his eyes were runny and red as if he had a cold.

Here is an extract from Chick's diary:

A letter from my mother today, the same old story of everything well and faith prevailing. Oh I hate her and wish she would put an end to all suspense and die. She seems to have been ill for long enough. She tells me Dad has been to the hospital to see the doctor about Daphne. He could not see Daphne herself, as apparently she seemed not well enough for visitors. He says the grounds are full of flowers with wide lawns and neatly kept paths, so that the place seems a paradise for the poor deranged folk. No doubt they are happier there than in the outside world. But how shall I face people if they find out I have a sister in an asylum? I am amazed that my father dared to visit there, he is usually so reluctant to make definite journeys or transactions. His trying to give up smoking. He is afraid of cancer.

And here is Daphne: the nurse, Flora Norris, is insisting that she answer the doctor's enquiries.

Daphne sat in the corner upon her straw mattress, her legs covered with a piece of torn blanket, her nightie, striped and oblong on her like a faded peppermint stick. ...
Daphne said nothing. Inside herself she thought,
They are mad. They are frauds. They are thieves who sneak through the night and day of their lives, exchanging their counterfeit whys and hows and wheres, like fake diamonds and gold, to zip them inside their leather human brain till the next raid and violence of exchanging, when they jingle their clay and glass baubles, untouched by sun, in their hands, and cry out.

And she means the doctors and nurses - not the 'mad' people.

This book draws me, because I feel that it contains an important message about our humanity. If we want people to be the same and not express their differences then there is an untold loss to what is possible in this world.

Each member of the Withers family is presented as a unique individual; there is no pressing and pushing into an ideal shape or a pre-determined way of how they should be.

Allow me to close with this final passage; it seems to me a famous description, one that I either remembered or perhaps it recurs as a key in other places in Frame's novels and writings.

I remember when we were children we used to lie for hours looking up at the sky in autumn when the thistledown sailed above the cloud, sailed or scurried on an urgent voyaging. Where? And then a cloud would cross the sun and we would shiver for the blocked warmth, and it would seem as if there had never been any sun, as if we had lived always in the cold; until the cloud passed and we shivered for the warmth of new sun upon our backs, between the shoulder-blades where cold and hot strike. It's funny, the sky up in the north here is different from the sky in the south, and the light too. Down in the south you feel all the time a kind of formidable background, like a block of grey shadow, of a continent of ice, Antarctica in the wings.

It seems to be a good summing up of the novel - the divides in life - the hard times and the good, but also that you have no control over where and when you are born. Often the place where you were born and where you grow up has a profound effect on your life, and the person you become.

[Ensiform · Rating 3 out of 5]

The children of a poor family in New Zealand, the Withers, spend their days searching through rubbish heaps for childish treasures, fearing and suspicious of much (their hard-working, simple father, the nurse at school, the day when they must go face the factories and mills of the adult world). After the eldest girl dies horrifically, the book jumps twenty years ahead: we now see that the youngest is married and trying, poorly, to get on in higher society; Daphne is mute and in a grim mental institution staffed by pushy attendants and smiling, clueless doctors, getting ECT; and Toby is a slightly mentally off (“a shingle short,” as the book has it, in Australian slang) epileptic who works as some sort of scrap dealer. He lives at home, is unnoticed by women, and cannot empathize with his long-sacrificing parents.

I read this book as part of a project in which strangers dictated online what books I should read. This is a good example of the kind of book that I would probably not, left to my own devices, decide to read. The literary world is strewn with examples of the child, child-like, or free-association narrator (Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, Room, Riddley Walker, Thy Servant a Dog), and while I've enjoyed some of these, I often find the style more laborious than it is worth the literary payoff. Frame occasionally expresses Daphne’s disjointed observations through blank verse, a bit too abstruse for my tastes — perhaps a bit too close to an actual schizophrenic look at the world. It’s a fully autobiographical novel: Frame was one of five children, two of whom died, one of whom was epileptic, and she spent time in a mental institution, even being scheduled for a lobotomy at one point. Given its utterly, thoroughly bleak tone, this makes for uncomfortable reading — and criticizing; what can one say, really, about the madness of this grim life? Frame is a good prose stylist with some clever imagery at her disposal and is capable of writing very much from the point of view of a child. She also has that power of the novelist, to put herself in the lives of minor characters (but again, it’s unrelentingly grim, as we see the nurse push away her loneliness and poor self-image, to blossom only through the petty power she has in the asylum). And I’m exceedingly glad Frame's literary talents saved her from the madhouse. But I’m not sure I’m better for having read this novel of poverty, isolation, murderers, lack of understanding, and the crushing indifference of everyone.

[Ratko · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ово је први роман Џенет Фрејм у коме има много аутобиографског.
Сиромашна породица из малог, фиктивног града на Новом Зеланду центар је збивања. Много је ту несреће, породица је обележена, како сиромаштвом, тако и епилепсијом сина/млађег брата и шизофренијом ћерке (која је, заправо, алтер его саме ауторке).
Било је овде материјала за једну изузетно занимљиву причу, али ипак ми се није свидео стил, посебно поетски пасажи у којима је наратор Дафне, заточеница у психијатријској установи.
У сваком случају, занимљива ми је "права" ауторкина аутобиографија која је преведена и код нас ("Анђео за мојим столом"), па очекујем да ће ми се више и свидети тај реалистичнији приказ живота у малој средини на Новом Зеланду средином ХХ века.

[Debbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first Janet Frame book I have ever read so her writing took some getting used to at first - she has her own style which is kind of semi-stream-of-consciousness. She uses punctuation in a very interesting way and some sentences call for a re-read. Once you get the hang of it you realise how rich, deep and beautifully poetic her writing is.

The book is based in 1950s New Zealand and follows the story of one family from Dunedin in the South Island, and goes in-depth into the characters of three siblings in particular. You get a real feel for the culture of the society of those times, and this is particularly interesting for me being based in NZ at the moment as it gives me an insight and a reference point (though I recognise it as an intimate and subjective one) of a particular period in New Zealand's history. The story is both witty and sad in equal parts.

I am left feeling quite well acquainted with the characters in this book, and that to me is a real success. This was her first novel, and if it's anything to go by I am sure Frame will become one of my favourite authors.

[Kiran Bhat · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a dreadfully under-rated book! In this short yet terse novel, Frame takes a small town called Waimaru and brings it to life. The novel is made up of short and powerful vignettes that take the form of chapters. Frame delves into simple village life, filial aggressions, and finally, the after-effects of time spent in an asylum. Frame writes some extremely evocative and compelling sentences, resulting in some chapters having the brevity and immediacy of poetry. No matter where I was in the book, I felt completely absorbed in it. And this has nothing to do with the madness at the core of the novel! It just has to do with Frame's command of language!

Highly recommended for anyone who wants to read something quick and yet emotionally potent. Frame is like Virginia Woolf but from the other side of the world.

[Olive Fellows (abookolive) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Odd and deeply depressing. I liked the first part better than the later sections.

I read this as part of a silly reading challenge that ended up being a ton of fun.

Click here to hear more of my thoughts on this book over on my Booktube channel, abookolive.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

And the grey crater of the long-dead mad lies empty enough to be filled with many truths together.

In her first novel Janet Frame explores the life of the Withers family living in poverty in the small but growing town of Waimaru, southern New Zealand. The book opens when the four children (three girls and one boy) are young and it follows them for a while as they do their childhood things: going to school, searching for treasure in the rubbish heap, experiencing the first pangs of growing up. Then tragedy strikes the eldest daughter Francie dies in a tragic accident and it fractures the family the second oldest daughter Daphne ends up institutionalized while the youngest marries and moves north away from the family. After that the narrative jumps 20 years into the future and loosely splits into three parts, following the three remaining children in a close third-person account veering at times into stream-of-consciousness, especially with Toby, who is also a major character in Frame's novel The Edge of the Alphabet. Other perspectives arise from Daphne's songs and when Toby discovers and reads the adult diary of the youngest daughter, his sister Teresa (aka Chicks), which is transcribed in the text.

Frame's style is messily poetic in the best way, sometimes utilizing more formal poetry at times (in the songs of daughter Daphne). Her characters are outsiders, and the only family member to even attempt societal conformity is Chicks, who largely fails. Through Daphne's experience Frame condemns the draconian conditions in psychiatric asylums. At one point near the end of the book Bob Withers fears leaving his son Toby alone for a moment in the asylum waiting room after he's had an epileptic seizure:

Bob Withers was afraid. He had heard of people disappearing inside these hospitals, and then, when they said they were visitors, no one would let them out, and no one believed them. Why, anything could happen in a hospital like this, after all, it was still the dark ages.

In Toby, Frame creates what I find to be her most compelling character (further evidenced in The Edge of the Alphabet, in which Toby goes abroad). As a boy with epilepsy, Toby is perpetually left behind by all except his mother, and then as a young man who never learned to write, he struggles to earn a living, eventually becoming a secondhand junk dealer, thus returning to his roots in the rubbish heap. Toby has a dreamy and erratically perceptive outlook on life. At times his insights into human nature are profound, while at other times he is dangerously naive.

The novel ends with a revealing epilogue that I must admit I was not expecting. But that is one of the best features of Frame's writing: every page is likely to hold at least one surprise, even if it's just a peculiar turn of phrase. She is anything but predictable.

[Domenico Fina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Molto bello, molto triste. Gridano i gufi (1957) primo romanzo di Janet Frame. Pubblicato quando la scrittrice neozelandese aveva 33 anni. Il titolo è bellissimo, nel verso originale Shakespeariano i gufi piangono (Owls do cry). In italiano è più bello con l'allitterazione della g e col grido, nel libro, più appropriato del pianto. La storia di una famiglia trafelata dalla vita in una cittadina neozelandese. Tre bambine e un bambino nella prima parte e poi la loro vita vent'anni dopo. Un bambino Toby che viene avvolto dal mantello buio delle convulsioni e sua madre deve mettergli uno stecchetto tra i denti. La più piccola Teresa si sposerà e farà vita agiata, nel suo diario da sposata si chiederà:

"A proposito quando ho cominciato questo diario dissi che avrei registrato la mia vita interiore. Invece temo di non aver mai scritto nulla al riguardo. E se non avessi una vita interiore?".

La più grande Francie lascerà la scuola per andare a lavorare in un cotonificio. A scuola recita fiera Giovanna d'Arco. C'è poi Daphne, una bambina schiva che vive di poesia. La lingua di Janet Frame è ciò che s'intende quando si parla di naturalezza. Giocare, ironizzare, essere straziante, folleggiante, pratica, aspra, leggiadra. Tutto con misura, anche i capitoli sono brevi e non c'è frase inutile.

Ecco come Toby da grande si esprime davanti al mare (ha perso l'occasione di sposarsi per via della sua malattia e vive solo di lavoro forsennato):
"Se il mare fosse stato fermo un secondo o un minuto o cinque minuti, tanto insomma da dare a un uomo il tempo di intromettersi con una parola, un grido, una canzone, o una maledizione..."

Ecco Daphne chiusa in ospedale:
"Infilava gli aghi nella tela, ricamando una rosa, perché oramai sembrava che di norma le rose non crescessero più nei giardini bensì sulle tovaglie, sui cuscini, sui paraventi".

Ecco sua madre che ripete nei momenti più bui, «Abbiate fede»:
"Non potevi vederla la fede, ma era da qualche parte per aiutarti, come l'aria che doveva togliere le grinze alle divise di scuola; così era ora col disegno spiegazzato e scomposto".

Ecco suo padre davanti ai bambini:
"Non avevano mai visto piangere il padre. Sapevano che i padri si arrabbiano e gridano per i conti da pagare e perché le figlie portano i pantaloni, e che ridono con le commesse, e alle volte con le madri; ma mai avevano pensato che i padri potessero piangere".

[Joshie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A countryside drama about a dysfunctional family and their unending encounter with misfortune, Frame's Owls Do Cry touches on several interweaving societal issues which afflict the human condition. Each chapter pivots on one member of the family where individuality intersects their relationships with each other. The novel's narrative greatly delves with how poverty, mental illness, sex, and disabilities limit the opportunities and ultimately decide the life of a person.

Here, a family is desperate to make ends meet. The husband goes to the same job day by day with a wife defined by her husband and household chores. One of their children suffers from epilepsy. Another has a mental illness and eventually locked in an asylum with a promise of a new life through a lobotomy. But this doesn't end there; it seemingly gets worse. The youth of their eldest child is snatched away far too young. The older girls in town who work at mills and die with diseases due to poor working conditions dictate her future. And the youngest one seems to fairly live a decent life only to be caught blind by her desire for status and the ultimate brutality of marriage and domesticity.

Tragic beginnings meet tragic ends in Owls Do Cry through Frame's sensitively heartwrenching prose set in the splendour and distant beauty of New Zealand. The passing of time aches in each slap of horrifying circumstance—the characters are submerged in the flood of mishaps without any vest of hope. Although refreshingly raw without giving the impression of its characters used for plot devices alone but as realities of people across the world I find it all too depressing amidst the reality I am already in.

[Lee Foust · Rating 5 out of 5]

Owls Do Cry is Janet Frame's first novel, the third of her novels that I've read since joining Goodreads, and my fourth overall. While I seem to recall I was a bit more puzzled than blown away by the first novel of hers that I read, Scented Gardens for the Blind, now that I've read and so loved her first three, I must return to that one, her fourth. (Sadly, I just left it behind in Florence and I'm now in San Francisco for the summer. --insert unhappy face emoticon here.)

Like Frame's second and third novels, Faces in the Water and Edge of the Alphabet, Owls Do Cry is, to me, a beautiful and lyric composition plumbing the depths of the inner lives of more-or-less ordinary characters with a competency few authors accomplish. Being her first written novel, Owls Do Cry is perhaps a bit more raw than her third, Edge of the Alphabet, which uses a very similar technique--juxtaposing or presenting in a parallel fashion the inner lives of several characters. Owls... depicts a family, mainly through the narratives of its four children in various forms, but the parents are primary characters as well--Edge... consists of the inner monologues of three people who meet on a steamer crossing from new Zealand to England (if I recall correctly).

Further forcing the comparison, I felt Owls... was more generally emotionally effecting than Edge...--since families are more important to us all, I suppose, than strangers among whom we are tossed by circumstance (although I suppose that's what families also are really)--and I found Edge... more patiently written, better crafted overall, the work of a writer more seasoned and comfortable with the technique that she had created and by that time mastered--mistressed? (Small observation: the epileptic male protagonist of each--based, I guess, on the author's own brother--seemed more or less identical, I don't recall if he had the same name.)

Odd that I just finished reading Virginia Woolf's The Waves, another novel that takes a similar technique, linking associative and fragmentary (poetic?) prose with the rich inner life, but also needing somehow to parallel such inner monologues with others. (Or maybe not--perhaps it was The Waves subliminally reminded me to return to Janet Frame's work.) Maybe that's the formal, narrative lesson in life these authors teach us--that life itself is the weave of our private interior lives (emotions, thoughts, impressions, instincts, nonsense even) into a family, or society, or any form of human interaction, for we are super interior social animals after all. The only other writer that comes to mind in this context is Jean Rhys. Although she opts for a third person indirect look at her semi-autobiographical protagonists, Rhys still manages to tread this ineffable ground between the interior life of the emotions and mind and the tenuous threads of social interaction and how little we understand one another even--perhaps especially--when we are interacting on the most intimate levels. A beautiful and melancholy truth of how we fall short of really knowing one another in this world.

So, typical review: If you like Woolf's The Waves or Jean Rhys's novels, read Janet Frame, for more of the same--also: the lyricism of her prose is second to no other writer I can think of, Woolf included!, it often takes my breath away with its showy beauty.

[Will Ansbacher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Impossible not to be deeply affected, not just by the story but by the impressionistic stream-of-consciousness way that Janet Frame writes. How did I not finish this in the 70s when I first picked it up? Though I’m glad now that I had read her three-part autobiography An Angel at my Table in the mean time, that set so much of this work in context.

It’s a portrait of the poor Withers family in the small NZ town of Waimaru, beginning in the thirties then shifting forward twenty years, to around the time Frame wrote it. Not exactly autobiographical but it is certainly based very much on her own experiences, family and home town of Oamaru, and it’s told through the voices and memories of the four children:

Francie the oldest, pulled out of school at 12 because the family can’t afford to send her to high school, but dies in a terrible accident only a few months later while playing with the other children in the town rubbish dump which is their main source of “treasures”.
Toby, “a few shingles short” is also epileptic and though his fits become more manageable as he grows up, he remains an immature, shambling and lonely man.
Daphne whose voice is heard most often, suffers from mental illness possibly stemming from Francie’s death (though that’s never explicitly mentioned). A significant part of the novel is recounted from the “dead room”, the asylum modelled on the Seacliff mental hospital where Frame was committed for years. The passages about shock therapy and at the end, lobotomy, (a fate which Frame herself escaped fortunately) are particularly wrenching.
Chicks the youngest by some years, just tags along until she gets her own voice through her diary entries as the adult Teresa, and which reveal her to be a vacuous and angsty middle-class striver.
And the parents Bob and Amy - though they call each other Dad and Mum - he’s taciturn and a bit of a tyrant in the traditional mould, she’s the peacemaker and somewhat fearful of her husband.

Profoundly moving, but despite their grim lives it isn’t gloomy, maybe because of the hypnotic, dreamlike way everything unfolds, particularly the meanderings of Daphne’s mind; and there are frequent flashes of humour where Frame is brilliant at skewering small-town hypocrisy and small-minded society.

There were just two things that didn’t quite jell for me:
Teresa is present only via her diary that Toby reads surreptitiously when he goes to visit: in doing so discovers nothing good about Teresa’s opinion of him or of Daphne. It’s a neat artifice but I felt it was a rather over-long and adolescent way of showing up Teresa for who she really is.
And the epilogue – “Anyone we know?” – is a novel but disconcerting shift: a couple read in the local newspaper of a murder, a suicide, an arrest, a celebration for a promotion, and a photo of an old man in the Old Men’s Home. The old man is Bob, but the others? may be Teresa, Toby and Daphne (“though the paper said another name”) – it’s an enigmatic way to draw everything together.

The introduction by Margaret Drabble is excellent too and says far better than I can why Owls Do Cry is such a brilliant and moving book.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Starting on page one... "The Day is early with birds beginning and the wren in a cloud piping like the child in the poem, drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe..." this book knocked the wind out of me, and did so on more than one occasion...I couldn't put it down, but forced myself to so I could absorb it in small bites...most definitely a "read it again someday" book. My copy is dog-eared with favorite bits, in some cases, if the bits spilled over to the next page, I dog-eared the bottom corner to indicate this to be the case. I'm savoring her books, one at a time, just like I had rationed Virginia Woolf until they were done, as there are so few...Janet Frame, like Woolf, is a writer's writer. I have learned so much about myself as a writer reading books that are so fearless in their prose, I feel inspired... encouraged... grateful. This is one of those books I love to call a "human document" because they have that glimpse into life, the dreams and realities, harrowing grief that also knows and understands the beauty of joy...the painful and sometimes terrifying truths gently covered by the lies we tell ourselves and each other to make things bearable during the darkest times...the daughter seeing her father as a gray man, a stranger, his face crumbling as he struggles with the shock of seeing her shaved head, prepared for surgery "to fix her". The father telling his daughter that everything is going to be all right.

"All sun. The ripening fruit of sky bleeding, bandaged with snow-skin of autumn cloud; the noon light dripping from the trees in gold flakes called leaves..." (page 46)

Linger through it, savor it, don't let it flow away too quickly...

"If I travel a hundred miles to find treasure, I will find treasure. If I travel a hundred miles to find nothing, even if I bring money with me, to lay it down in exchange, I will find nothing." (Page 176.)

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was debating on whether to listen to the audio or read the book, so I asked the friend that I heard about it from what I should do. His (rather wise) reply was that he actually did both simultaneously. Somehow this felt to me like I was wasting some time but I decided to try anyway. I struggled at first but it really did end up being the best way to experience this book. It gave it a much more three dimensional character. Throughout the book there were these cockeyed, slightly surreal scenes where I honestly couldn't tell what was really happening. This is where the effect of reading and listening together was most deeply felt. And did I mention there were a lot of those scenes?

This book had an interesting emotional impact on me because I swung wildly between sympathy, choking frustration, and absolute shock. I was most interested in Daphne's story, and unfortunately she didn't get to speak until the end, but each character was very skillfully rendered in a complex and human way. These were people with layers and layers to their personalities and psyches.

This was a completely brilliant novel and it only made it more interesting to me to learn that it was based in part on the author's life experiences. I can't wait to read more by the author.

[George P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars rounded up to 4.
I have previously read Frame's Faces in the Water, which I really liked. As people say, "I wanted to like this book more", and much of it I did like a great deal. The parts I didn't like so much were the pages written from the stream-of consciousness of the characters, mostly the mentally ill sister Daphne, which were very fantastical.
Frame was definitely a talented writer and I don't want to discourage anyone from reading her. She was in a psych hospital herself for quite a while when she was young and she drew a lot from that experience in her writing.

[Thais Warren · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was moving, painful, horror-inducing but so, so powerful. i've never read such descriptions in my lil life and so many made me stop, reread them and go wowzaaa

[Sandy Hogarth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started to read Owls Do Cry as research for my second novel as I cannot decide whether my protagonist is sent to prison or a Closed Psychiatric Unit. Well, it has helped me decide. It will be prison.

Despite the painfulness of the subject matter what a delight the language is, especially when it is Daphne’s story. It is the story of the Withers family: Francie, Toby, who is epileptic, Chicks the baby of the family and Daphne with her wonderful and damaging imagination. And what an extraordinary creature that imagination is. The novel covers 20 years and as Margaret Drabble says in the Introduction, one of the first works of fiction to deal with life in a mental institution. And Frame’s first full length work, originally published in 1957. Margaret Drabble quotes from Janet Frame’s superb autobiography, Wrestling with Angels. ‘I have got to learn that I am alone forever…Looking at living for me is like looking mentally through the wrong end of opera glasses.’ There is much of Daphne in this, her fragility, her aloneness.

Daphne is a ‘special’ to her father, Bob Withers, for whom a special was some line of fresh food or clothing put cheap in the shops or on Friday.’ To her visiting father she says, “‘I hate you’, she said. ‘Go away. The snow is too heavy in falling and it falls criss-cross like a tapestry, so go away.’”

I’d love to quote the breathtaking last lines, which concern her father but I must resist. Read it and find out.

A novel, to quote Margaret Drabble again, who puts it so much better than I can, ‘Owls Do Cry is ‘a mingled cry of joy and pain’. And survival.

Frame wrote many books after this and I am working my way through them. A brilliant, brave and imaginative writer.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've never read anything like this. It breaks all kind of "rules" - the verb tense shifts, unconventional punctuation and sentence structure, etc. There isn't really a main character. There's a main family, but I couldn't pick any one of its members as a protagonist. But it works. It works REALLY well.

The story chronicles the lives of a poor family in a small town called Waimaru in New Zealand. There's plenty of dialog and action. The characters are clear and well-developed. But the sentences often spin out into strings of detailed description and vivid sensory images. Sometimes it's kind of stream of consciousness and sometimes it's something else...a non-traditional third-person narrative, maybe? It's a strange book, but I didn't have any trouble following what was going on. All of its weirdness added to the powerful effect of the writing.

I'm surprised this book doesn't have more reviews. It's a sad tale, but its telling is excellent. I'd recommend it to anyone who's willing to try a story told in completely different way than a typical novel.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is genius writing. And, beautiful. And, brave.
It's a bit squeamish-making, which is why I'm not putting this on my "favorites" shelf, but I vehemently recommend it, nevertheless.

If you haven't seen An Angel at My Table, the film about Janet Frame's life, I recommend that as well.

Thank you, again, Jo!

[Richard Derus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rating: The Full Five

Absolutely my favorite Kiwi novel. I learned so much about the national character of the country I feel I should have been born in.

[Erica]

instant favorite. ranks above both leonora carrington and marianne fritz in its portrayal of abjection and madness. wittgenstein's mistress meets the bell jar meets trumpets of jericho. this is my favorite type of book

[Tamsin · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books I have ever read

I cannot wait to read all her other stuff

[Abc · Rating 4 out of 5]

La povertà è il primo problema che questa famiglia, composta da padre, madre e 4 figli, si trova a dover affrontare. Ma siccome le sfortune sembrano sempre attirarne altre, ci si mettono anche il peso della malattia di Toby e la morte della figlia maggiore.
Il racconto inizia quando i figli sono ancora piccoli e poi ci fa ritrovare questa famiglia a distanza di vent'anni, svelandoci poco a poco ciò che è accaduto nelle vite di ognuno di loro.
Sono tutte vite che non sono riuscite a realizzarsi. La stessa Teresa, la figlia più piccola e quella che sembra aver raggiunto la serenità, di fatto non è più libera della sorella ricoverata in un istituto psichiatrico e deve costantemente ricordare a se stessa di essere fortunata ad avere ciò che ha per convincersi della "bellezza" della sua vita.
L'unico personaggio che non sono assolutamente riuscita a digerire è la mamma, soprattutto per quanto è riuscita a soffocare Toby con la sua ingombrante presenza.

[Helen Varley · Rating 5 out of 5]

it's decades since i read this, janet frame's first novel, & it's a delight to revisit her world & be once more immersed in her rich language and imagination. she creates entire alternative universes out of minute observations. i realise that i've only read a couple of her other novels (11 in total) so i'm looking forward to some further immersions.

[Özge · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Çocukluğun dünyası bir çocuğun her bir dileğiyle daha da genişler ki büyülü bir pelerin gibi omza atılabilsin.” Bayıldım bu romana, şimdiye kadar okuduğum hiçbir şeye benzemeyen çok özel bir metin okudum ve etkisinden tam olarak ne zaman çıkabilirim bilmiyorum.

‘Baykuşlar Öterken’ Yeni Zelandalı yazar Janet Frame’in ilk romanı ve fazlaca otobiyografik unsur barındırıyor. Yazarın hayatı çok ilginç ve bu hayatın özellikle çocukluk dönemi büyük ölçüde romana yansımış. Çocuk yaştayken iki ablasını kaybeden yazarın erkek kardeşi ise epilepsi ile mücadele ediyor ve roman buradan çokça besleniyor. Ayrıca yazarın öğretmenlik yaptığı yıllarda bir intih*r girişimi var, sonraları bir müfettişin ders denetimi sırasında sınıfı terk ediyor ve neticede psikoloğa yönlendiriliyor, daha sonrası ise uzun yıllar psikiyatri kliniklerinde tedavi sürecini getiriyor yazara. Bu sırada yazdığı öykülerle prestijli bir ödülün sahibi olunca doktorlar lobotomiden vazgeçiyor. İnanılmaz bir yaşam öyküsü gerçekten. Neyse hayretimi bir kenara bırakıp biraz da kitaptan ve onu sevme sebeplerimden bahsetmek istiyorum.

Romana Yeni Zelanda kırsalında yaşayan dört çocuklu yoksul bir işçi ailesinin hayatı çerçevesinden bakıyoruz. Kitapta klasik anlamda bir olay örgüsü ve ana kahraman diyebileceğimiz belirgin bir roman kişisi yok. Aslında ‘çocukluk’ bu romanın başkişisi diyebiliriz. Kahramanların her biri çok iyi işlenmiş, çok canlı, aramızda ve çocukluğumuzda geziniyorlar, her bir kahramanın ele alındığı ya da konuşturulduğu cümlelerde üslup değişimleri müthiş. Yazar bu canlı karakterleri yaratırken çocuksulukla yetişkinlik, delilikle aklıselimlik arasında hızlı zihinsel gel gitler yapıyor; düşler, sayıklamalar, tekerlemeli cümleler ve günlük paragrafları ile farklı türler arasında yolculuk ediyor ve biz de o tüm bunları yaparken kullandığı şiirsel dil ile cümlelerinin dansını izliyoruz. Yani günün birinde roman yazma perileri ziyaretime gelseydi bana da böyle bir şey yazdırsınlar isterdim açıkçası:)

Ben romanda çocukluğun şeffaf ve kırılgan dünyasının kurguya böyle hiç zarar görmeden korunarak taşınmasını çok sevdim. Bütün bunların yanı sıra yazarın hiç beklenmeyen anlarda sistem eleştirisi yaptığı ve taşra sosyal yapılanmasını iğnelemelerle ortaya koyduğu pasajlar da bu romanı özel kılan bir diğer unsur bence. Keşke daha çok okunsa Janet Frame ve ‘Baykuşlar Öterken’ zira ilk baskısı 2010’da yapılan kitabın şu an hala 2. baskısı satılıyor. Ayrıca şimdi bu yazdığım dışında Goodreads’te henüz hiç Türkçe inceleme-eleştiri yazısı yok kitap hakkında.

Bu roman gizli kalmış bir hazine, bulalım bulduralım.

[Krishan Mistry · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW INSANITY ! I AM BLOWN AWAY. like I don't even really know how to describe this book, but I have never really experienced language like this in fiction (in a work that does still have like a fairly coherent plot and story). I wanna say something like "wow just reading the language was such a pleasure" but usually what that connotes is that the language was so descriptive or evocative in it's way of representing that even outside the movement of the plot or action it was just quite beautiful to read. The idea here is that this author could describe something very monotonous or boring, but because their language is so "beautiful," you enjoy reading about something that maybe isn't that exciting or doesn't share that much commentary. Moms might even say that the writing is "like poetry." But this was something different, there was such an energy to the language that seemed divorced from representation or even high level forms of meaning. There was just like a power and energy emanating from the words that was so electric...you can see I can't really describe it...I felt so compelled to follow each word with the next and see where they went and what they were doing...like perhaps this is just a description of more contemporary types of poetry (or an explanation of the pleasure behind certain older poems), but again, it was crazy because there also was story and plot and this was like a full length book! so dope !

[zunggg · Rating 2 out of 5]

Impressionistic, itinerant narration tells the story of four siblings in midcentury New Zealand. Sort of reminded me of Faulkner and Woolf, but the voices of involuntarily confined Daphne, epileptic Toby and suburban neurotic Chicks, and even those of their parents, share one or two annoying tics — “oh” and “ah” and sentence-starting “and” — that betray the presence of the author. Daphne’s sections are convincing in their insanity but not much fun to read. The whole book is ambitious but unfortunately a bit of a slog.

Disappointed not to have enjoyed this more, since I’m generally a big fan of frame stories…