Scented Gardens for the Blind

by Janet Frame

Sensory perceptions are the tools with which Janet Frame investigates the failure of human communication in this extraordinary tale of a mind gone mad, a world become insane. With alternating interior monologues, the author conjures up the members of the Glace family: Vera, the mother who has willed herself sightless; Erlene, the daughter, who has stopped speaking; and Edward, the husband who abandons his family to make a genealogical study of a family in a distant land. Beyond this is a mind that has burst the confines of everyday individual consciousness and invented its own tormented reality.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Mental Health, 20th Century, Womens, Adult, Literary Fiction

252 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1963

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

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, it's obvious the publisher didn't know what to do with this one because after some lame attempts to explain the style of 'Miss Frame', the producer of the jacket copy just throws in the towel and gives away part of the novel's ending—an ending which presumably they thought would serve as explanation enough for readers unfamiliar with nonlinear, allusive, deeply poetic prose. There's all kinds of wrongness about this that I won't expound upon so as not to also give away the ending, but suffice to say it involves denigration of mental health issues. (Just don't read the jacket copy.) Though this wasn't one of my favorites of Frame's, I enjoyed it well enough and it definitely fits neatly into her canon. She was one of a kind, though if pressed I'd describe her writing a bit like if Virginia Woolf had ever abandoned her staid Englishness and gone off the rails into the creeping underbrush. (3.5)

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5

When people learned from Edward, as they did sooner or later for he saw no reason to conceal the fact, that he had not seen his family for eleven years but that he considered himself a married man, a responsible father, most were inclined to express some feeling of astonishment, as when an apparently harmless human being (for people will forever consider naïvely that a harmless human being exists) is found out in murder.

I've had many a false start with this rereading business because of how many streaks of disappointments I've had to churn through. For every one I've committed to picking up till I hit a stumbling block (Oyeyemi, Levi, Lispector, etc, and now Frame), there have been a number of truly odious revisitings that have shaken my faith in former favorites. That's adulthood, I suppose, but on the other hand, the expansion of bibliographic experience has made it so I now understand the incentive of people who'll willingly pick up new titles on the basis of nothing more than a familiar and (thus far) beloved name. I don't know how it is with other people, especially with those who are actually willing to spend 20+ bucks on a spanking new hardcover instead of waiting for a few years until the hype dies down and swooping in to grab the three dollar paperback with award stickers all over it, but it helps me extraordinarily when it comes to counteracting the white maleness that plagues even the most expansive of book sales. The future is filled with unknown dead ends, but it is nice to have finally broken through my usual habit of solely picking up the unfamiliar and the new.

People dread silence because it is transparent; like clear water, which reveals every obstacle—the used, the dead, the drowned, silence reveals the cast-off words and thoughts dropped in to obscure its clear stream.

Jane Frame was institutionalized to the point of nearly undergoing the lobotomy, which is why I trust her to the moon and beyond while barely giving neurotypicals the time of day. Contemporary thought says the lack of lobotomy was good cause she didn't actually have schizophrenia, but I call horseshit cause no mental condition ever justifies the sadistic fapping of others. Anyway, this doesn't mean I'm a fan of the Shamalama style twist at the end of this narrative, but that I allow Frame's imagination a broader set of deeper motivations than simply looking for the next fad of a stigmatized demographic to make a narrative buck off of. This is good, because if you strip it down as my brain has a tendency of doing, none of this book is very original: the distant father, the borderline filiciding mother, the repressed child, the Shakespeare quotes, New Zealand retreating to England so often as to border on ridiculous should one ignore the true nature of a settler state. I'll also admit to being completely lost during the first few chapters or so, which made me think I had made yet another mistaken if utilitarian choice of further reading, but fortunately, as the quotes show, it picked up. I could pull it apart in terms of ableism taken to apocalyptic extremes (again, not the most original endeavor when looking at contemporary reality, but it's nice to have it in such excellent prose), it's late and I'm tired and still slightly buzzed, so you're going to have to believe me when I say no one pulls off the poetic abject quite like Frame.

[I]t's terrible isn't it the way things which are serious can get to sound like a joke even if it means you die of them[.]

I'm glad that books still exist where the absolutely fucking weirdness isn't compromised by the author having lazily founded all of said absolutely fucking weirdness on marginalized demographics and the like. True, I could've used less anti-Romani sentiments, and there was nary an acknowledgement of an indigenous manner that I could catch (if there was, I was probably too busy being proud of myself for picking up on the Lear, which goes to show how solipsism is, ironically, a team effort), but unlike a vast amount of works which I'm expected to simply go along with, this one actually outweighed its weak spots. I haven't seen anything of Frame's other than her autobiography of late (which is here: An Angel at my Table and fully recommended by myself), but I'm holding out hope for the nest one.

It does not seem that in this generation we shall admit that we are murderers; in the future it may be too late.

[Lee Foust · Rating 5 out of 5]

So this was the first Janet Frame novel I ever read, picking it up some years ago after having seen Jane Campion's celebrated biopic, An Angel at my Table. I'm not sure why Frame's genius was less obvious to me then than now, all I can say is that I'm very happy I returned to this for I do believe it is genius and I remembered nothing at all from my first reading (which also alarms me--but, well, it was back in my early teaching days, say 15-20 years ago and I was often very busy, very distracted, with many adjunct positions and also raising a young child).

Anyway, now I've read Frame's first four novels more or less in order. I'm going to have to repeat something I said in a previous review for it holds true for this novel as well: Like Frame's second and third novels, Faces in the Water and Edge of the Alphabet, her first, 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).

Continuing from there, Scented Gardens... also juxtaposes the inner worlds of three characters, also a family, one in the first person entirely but the other two in the indirect third person--although we get very deep into their thoughts so it's sometimes a bit of a moot point. Therefore the polish I spoke of above in terms of Edge of the Alphabet follows here--and I think that this novel is even better than its predecessor, as the characters' observations--manias if you will--are more interesting and, well, quirky--sensory deprivation, light and silence as living forces, muteness and blindness as concepts, genealogy, psychiatry, anthropomorphizing a brown beetle on a windowsill, in general communication and human interaction as an impeded process if not a terrifying impossibility--all sheer poetry from start to finish.

I can't really say more without spoiling the ending. Suffice it to say, the final four pages change everything--for heaven's sake, don't read the blurb on the back of this edition for it spoils it! It's new territory for Frame's writing--but it is only the last four pages, so, in a way, it's a tag rather than a salient plot point. I'm a bit torn as to how I feel about the last chapter. I was surprised, of course, but then kind of happy that Frame had broken from the previous novel's form a bit--with the title Edge of the Alphabet you might have guessed already that it's themes are also communication, isolation, and alienation--but also I'm not sure that the final chapter adds anything to what came before, even as it frames it. I mean, we know it's a novel, we know that all narrative and all characters are the inventions of some single consciousness out there somewhere--dare I say it--on the edge of the alphabet.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

utterly brilliant, Frame is my find of the year (read three this year so far, more to come I expect). I called it poetic ranting somewhere. This novel centres on a woman who assumes blindness and her daughter who has not spoken for many years (although she does speak to an insect, Uncle Blackbeetle who lives in a dictionary - between death and dunghill - but who comes out on to the windowsill to talk to her). The father is absent studying the family tree of a family he has nothing to do with. It's about the senses, mixed up and shouting and soft and deadly. It's about madness and sobriety and obsession and nothing at all. It's weird and beautiful. I will add a quote or two if I get chance later (although have to take the book back to the library today)....

here's Uncle Blackbeetle talking:
I had a cousin once who lived in your dictionary, inside the binding, and there was a tiny hole which he used for a door, and it led out between trichotomy and trick. Now what do you think of that? It was only a few minutes walk to trigger, then over the page to trinity, trinket and trional, and there my cousin used to fall asleep

not Blackbeetle -

there had just been a time when the human race grew up suddenly and panicked at the sight of the empty sky which they had once filled, for comfort, with fat old men wearing beards and smiling blue-eyed smiles and dropping promises that disintegrated when they reached the atmosphere... They were tiny pieces torn from a vast white sheet of blotting paper, and flicked across the face of the earth. They were all silent now. Sound was absorbed into them, staining them, blocking their thoughts and dreams, not able to leave them; the pent up weight of words had fallen; the world was at last muffled by the drifting centuries of its own speech.

The sun is all love and murder, judgement, the perpetual raid of conscience, paratrooping light which opens like a snow-blossom in the downward drift of death. Wherever I turn - the golden cymbals of judgement, the summoning of the torturers of light

there are better quotes but, alas, I now have to return the book..

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It is poetic, surreal (at times very strange), mesmerizing, and beautifully written. It is a book about the senses, a book about madness, emotions, communication; it is a lush fantasy, a garden of words grown for the human condition. I've dog-eared multiple pages, underlined several passages...and had to stop. A very curious book...uncommon.

[Ann-Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the sort of novel you immediately want to read all over again once you come to the end. Poetic, sad, strange and absolutely wonderful.

[Marieke · Rating 4 out of 5]

A hallucinogenic story about a girl that one day decides to stop talking, except to the blackbeetle on her windowsill that makes coffins and talks in depth to her about death and soldiers and hawks; about the girl's mother who blinds herself to explore a similar sensory deprivation and dreads the day her daughter will speak again; and about the girl's father who is trying to save humanity and is so obsessed with the family tree of an arbitrarily chosen prestigious family that he has abandoned his own.

Explores themes of dark/light, the deprivation of senses, the importance that is bestowed on speech and language by society. It is deeply poetic with phrases that gave me goosebumps. So much to think about it. So much to love.

"At the moment as I gaze out at the leftover summer and the torn circus-hangings of autumn, I am fit only for dreaming. Already the memory of the sheen of crocuses down on the flat near the creek has sunk deep to be replaced by all these damp swirling leaves with their individual flurries and personal panics, caught suddenly in passing currents of death; the hissing rain like an arched gray cat cornered by the enemy and striking out with its poisonous claws; the cream-and-green moss lying soft, bubbled with rain, along the apple branchees; the sodden squelched earth."

"The town is growing more quiet and still. All is in order. Winter will soon be here, not the panic-stricken darkness of the northern hemisphere, that inevitable slow approach of doom where each human being is forced to become a valiant Atlas shouldering his burden of sky, but a more optimistic southern season where a remote light plays about the upper sky, as watch light and guardian of the absent summer."

"[...] she longed for a frost to visit her head and to set, like plaster of paris, upon her broken thought, so that it would stay quiet and still, and then, when the bonds of frost were melted, her thoughts would be healed again, firm and complete, fitting one into the other like wheels, sunflower wheels."

"[...] a frost that was not the graceful white lace drapery revealed in the first timid light of early winter morning but a stark lethal frost originating in human bone and flesh [...]"

"[...] shake shake hazel tree gold and silver over me. I need a fable to fall like a gentle cloak from the sky [...]"

"Light must get in, at all costs. Light will commit murder to get in. [...] One can pour darkness over the house until a thick layer sets, impenetrable as death, a concrete refusal, numbness, isolation; yet inside one meets light in every room, sitting by the fire, at home."

"In spite of his desire to rescue the human race he always became depressed at the reminder that he himself as human."

"[...] I know that he is genuinely trying to rescue the world from destruction, yet the sublimity of his purpose is at times so diffused by his human frailty that his attitude of involvement seems a mere pose of panic, as if he were a weak schoolmaster trying to control a classroom of rowdy children, as if he were not so much interested in his control of them as in the fact that he might be dismissed from his post if the headmaster walks in to confront him with his inefficiency."

"But Change says nothing; he too knows that his power lies in his silence."

"[...] it is a darkness which gives birth to a light that does not suffer the stain of human vision; a pure light resting, like a bandage, close to the deepest wound of the dark."

"[...] like the twinkling of fishes of light caught in the new net of morning."

"And no one knows how much the world is worn out, defaced, by the continual rubbing of human sight upon its edges, corners and open pages."

[josé almeida · Rating 5 out of 5]

uma das novelas mais perturbadoras que li nos últimos tempos. retrato de uma família disfuncional (digamos assim, pois não há adjectivo que a consiga descrever) em que os pensamentos do pai, da mãe e da filha se vão entrecruzando até um final inesperado. lembrei-me muitas vezes de leonora carrington... e quem ler este livro saberá porquê.

[Anthony Ehlers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Janet Frame is probably best known for her memoir, Angel at my Table. In this book, she explores the power of language through the absence of the senses - a mother who has temporary hysterical blindness, a daughter who is mute, a father who starts hearing voices. It is not so much a novel, but something more metafictional. Her dazzling descriptions explore the power of language, the inner lives of her characters show us the weakness and isolation of human existence. Some of the passages will take your breath away, others will make you search your own memory and existence. It's a powerful book - not an easy read, but a great one.

[El · Rating 3 out of 5]

First off my suggestion to anyone interested in reading this book is to not read the description on the back of the book. Talk about spoilers.

Despite this, however, the book is still pretty darn good. It tells the story of the Glace family: Vera, her estranged husband, Edward, and their daughter, Erlene. Erlene is mute, and Vera - out of jealousy - wills herself blind. Edward becomes obsessed with the genealogy of another family. Everyone's hopes and wishes rest of Erlene, when/if she begins to speak again.

It's a messed up little story about a messed up little family, but fascinating nonetheless. The focus is on communication, the difficulties and the importance of it, the different facets, the different motives and the elusive nature of it and how, in the end, it's the only thing that really matters.

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of my favorite writers ever.

another nod for new zealand.

she questions everything. she did have a breakdown. was she schitzophrenic? she was something of a prophet with Intensive Care which basically describes the world we live in today: nuclear world run by technocrats with facist authority.

no wonder jane campion devoted so much of her own artistic questioning and investigation to janet frame.

would also like to read the goose bath and others.

[Anamaria Serrano · Rating 4 out of 5]

Holy Moly! This is the maddest book about madness I've ever read. And possibly the best.

It has elements of the Mad Hatter's absurdity, that other side of life that questions the conventionally "normal", with its delightful upending of norms and language. And it has the bookish innocence of Don Quixote, attempting to grapple with societal attitudes, the nature of reality and "normality", how these overlap with the richness of the imagination, and our place within the whole morass.

It took me quite a while to get into it, but once I did, it got better and better. As I read, I often wondered if I had missed something. Is Uncle Blackbeetle a person or actually a beetle who talks to one of the main characters, Erlene. It is a beetle - I think! - that makes coffins for black-eyed beans, and lives in the pages of a dictionary. It's the only character Erlene talks to since she stopped talking to humans, much to her mother's distress. In fact, her mother was so distressed she decided to go blind and speaks of herself as blind even though it's obvious she is not, and can go about her business in a fully sighted way. While she wants Erlene to recover her speech, she's also afraid that the first words from her will be a negative judgement of her mother. Over what, we do not know. This is left as a tantalizing question throughout the book. What we do know is that Erlene believes that if she speaks up and blames her mother for her sudden refusal to speak, her mother will kill her.

The effect of a character who refuses speech, and one who refuses sight, draws attention to the sensory world and, my goodness, Janet Frame is good at that. Her associations are like fireworks in colours you've never seen, exploding like you've never heard. The wealth of images and poetic observations is orgiastic, tripping into the absurd, but always intensely beautiful, exquisitely mad. Moreover, a lot of the novel seems to present language for its own sake, for the beauty of language, but also for the beauty of silence (non-speech), for the absurdity of relying so much on all the noise of platitudes, chatter, unecessary language. The purpose and meaning of words is chopped up for the reader and delivered in startling ways when, just to give one example, we are told that the dungbeetle's literary cousin "has lived between celandine and charnel house, between caul and cherry red...". Who speaks, who we listen to, and why, are also at the core of this novel. The father, Edward, who gets top prize for crazy, counterbalances his unusual obsessions with one of the most important lucid thoughts in the novel:

"We have asked so many things and people to speak for us--like the waves, we knock our foreheads against the shore, pleading for the word; we listen to the syllables of nonsense uttered by streams and birds and trees and by the objects we ourselves have built and made tenants of our lives, all in the hope of discerning the message placed between the layers of babble. Is it possible that Erlene, my daughter, can deliver the language we long for?"

It's hard not to make a connection between Frame's exuberant and sensory world and her experience of mental health problems. I read that she spent periods in institutions with suspected schizophrenia. Erlene's father, who abandoned the family years ago but still considers himself a pater familias, hears voices about 2 meters from his ear. He exists in his own parallel worlds, it seems, deeply invested in researching the history of a random family, the Strangs, for no apparent reason. Equally obsessively, he enacts battles with little toy soldiers and at one point wants to become a chair, a throne which, he thinks, has its own dignity. In Edward's logic, it has the potential to be a seat that he will at least fit into, of his own making, unlike everything else that we are born into.

Some of the behaviours in the novel could be Frame poking fun at fiction itself, and how we readers become so invested in the lives of others who we know nothing about, and in events that have never actually happened. It could be considered quite daft if you didn't explore the lessons that reading about human nature can impart. It is something Erlene is in touch with when she pleads with the dungbeetle to tell her more stories. She is after deeper truths than those offered by a superficial society, perhaps, than the empty chatter of the doctor who is trying to get her to talk. If we focus more on this, then the book can also be seen as a defence of writers, and of Frame herself in particular. It certainly is a defence of thought patterns that many might see as skewed, but I think that the subject of schizophrenia is probably foremost in the author's mind, confirmed at the end with the twist I should have seen coming, but didn't.

Books that hover successfully over the thin line between what might be considered madness and everything else are few and far between, but when good ones come along I love them and am reminded of Emily Dickinson's poem, "Much madness is divinest sense", or as the dungbeetle says after a truly wacky story, "Such is dungbeetle logic, Erlene". And that is much of the point: the fabulous perspectives on life that different, gifted and alternative minds give us, how they introduce us to imaginative realities if we are willing to be open-minded about them and up for the g-force effect they can have on us. Despite that, too, how hopelessly difficult it is to reach such a mind when it has tipped over completely to its own wanderings. All of which, one way or another, requires a new language, new ways of communicating, with which to adequately express ourselves and understand others.

[Robert Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is one of the most interesting I have read. It is mainly the ending, the last 5 pages that makes this book truly unique. The story evolves around the Glacé family. Edward, who is doing gemologist work, Vera his wife, and Erline, who does not speak. The Strang family plays an important role throughout especially for the end. There is not much more I can say without giving anything away. It’s dark but poetic. Recommended.

I think I figured out what to pay attention to that I didn’t think about the made the ending such a surprise. Great touch by Janet Frame there.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 i
continued at: www.cantab.net/users/john.myles

[Louis · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this evocative story, Erlene, the daughter of Vera and Edward, has stopped speaking to people, though she holds conversations with Uncle Blackbeetle, an actual beetle. Erlene lives in New Zealand with Vera, who has willed herself to sightlessness. Vera writes to Edward, who is in England researching the genealogy of a family, to tell him that Erlene no longer speaks. Edward replies that he is coming home because it's extremely imperative that Erlene begins talking again. Yet, instead of coming straight home, he detours and visits a member of the family he's studying, one who lives in New Zealand, regardless of how imperative it is that he get home right away to help Erlene.

These three characters, who comprise the main point-of-view characters in the book, each misunderstand the world and each other in different ways. It felt like the author was dipping our toes in the minds of three different people who've become unmoored from reality and have drifted into the DMZ just beyond the border of sanity.

The story's beautiful, visual and lyrical language, and not the events our characters endure, kept me reading. And yet, when the last few pages smash into the story, like one car T-boning another, my interest in the story mostly evaporated. If I had to describe the book, I'd call it, ethereally interesting. In the end, I'm not sure I can, in good conscious, recommend it.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

As in her three previous novels, in Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963), Janet Frame is writing about damaged and deluded people living diminished lives. The focus of the novel is the Glace family of New Zealand. Vera Glace lives with her mute adult daughter Erlene in the family home in the town where she grew up. But Erlene’s muteness is the least of their problems. The Glace family is fractured, barely functional, stymied by fear. “I deprived myself of each of my senses,” Vera declares. “It was I who was blind.” Vera’s blindness is apparently a choice: the condition seems to come and go. And there’s this: years earlier, Edward Glace left his family and moved to London to conduct genealogical research into the Strang family. In London Edward has access to a rich assortment of libraries, archives and government records, but he lives alone in a rooming house and seemingly has no friends. Edward’s life is empty, but for the Strangs and his collection of toy soldiers. When people inquire of Edward where his interest in the Strangs, an ordinary family, comes from, he doesn’t answer, and in fact doesn’t seem sure of the answer. But Edward has reached a turning point, and this is a source of severe anxiety: he has found out all he can about the historical (dead) Strangs and, to move his project forward, must now approach those who are alive. Back in New Zealand Vera is exceedingly worried about Erlene, who refuses to speak and spends her days in her room staring out the window. Vera pleads daily with her daughter to say something and lectures her on the importance of speech for the survival of the human race, but to no avail. Midway through the novel Vera makes an appointment for Erlene with Dr. Clapper, whom she hopes will get to the bottom of Erlene’s muteness, which has no apparent physical cause, and get her talking again. The thrust of Frame’s tumultuous, pulsating narrative seems to be the role sensory perception plays in human experience, and the imbalance that results when means of social exchange are withdrawn. The novel is composed of parallel internal monologues from the perspectives of the three main characters, in which each faces their greatest fears. Vera’s fear is of being abandoned, a condition that her daughter’s silence exacerbates. Erlene, whose life of the imagination is vibrant and graphic, fears that meddlesome interventions will force her to speak up and rejoin humanity, resulting in exposure to human pressures and the loss of her imaginary companions. And Edward fears the human contact that the next stage of his research demands of him. But all of this is turned on its head in the book’s final chapter, where the source of the churning angst that fills the preceding pages is revealed. By 1963 Janet Frame’s confidence in her art and development as a novelist freed her to take imaginative leaps for which critics and readers would have been woefully unprepared. In Scented Gardens for the Blind her eccentric prose structures and the power of her imagery produce astonishing flights of fancy (“When Uncle Black-Beetle took off his apron and set aside his cutting, cleaning and polishing tools, she noticed that his skin was brown and shining, his eyes were large and black, overhanging his face like street-lamps, and there were dark tracks up and down his face which, lit by his eyes, became caverns, ravines flowing with underground rivers.”). By turns disturbing and playful, and often delightfully, unapologetically weird, Scented Gardens for the Blind continues Janet Frame’s exploration through fiction of the human mind in crisis and the destructive power of isolation and loneliness.

[Glen U · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Scented Gardens for the Blind" is the fourth novel/short story collection I have read, authored by Janet Frame. I do not know why I enjoy her books so much. They are written in a multitude of styles (all within the same volume), at times lyrical, utilizing a combination of poetry and poetic prose, at times a stream of consciousness style with run on descriptions, a compendium of metaphors and similes, and at times straight forward with a firm grasp of narrative style. Usually, I would dislike this mish mash of styles, but Frame makes it work. As in her previous books, her characters deal with madness and no one does madness better than Janet Frame. (Sorry you Sylvia Plath fans) Frame has a rare ability to make the reader feel her character's madness and perhaps that is why her disparate styles seem to work. Frames novels are not light reading as the reader will have to pay attention as they read, but it is worth the effort, an enjoyable trek through some literary madness. An aside: if reading the George Braziller, Inc. published edition, do not read the story notes on the back cover. For some reason, they chose to reveal the conclusion. Slightly irksome!

[Shea · Rating 4 out of 5]

“He was afflicted with an enormous appetite for human news especially when it was provided in the intimacies of letters from stranger to stranger; news of births, deaths gathered in that way gave him a feeling of belonging and sharing which news gathered in the ordinary way, told from friend to friend, did not give him; the beckoning of a friend, whispered confidences, heart-to-heart talks at midnight, letters written to him "because it's news and I must tell you, you must know," only increased his feeling of
isolation.”

Janet Frame saw the world as it was and tried to love it anyway.

3.5 because the ending was silly..

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dear Mr. Publisher, please don't give away the twist ending in the synopsis! I mean, honestly.

As always, Frame's prose is luminous and I do like the idea. As (almost) always with Frame, the book doesn't quite live ups to its potential. While I often found myself pausing to appreciate an insight or particularly lovely description, I can't say the book flows very well. I wanted to love it more than I did.

[Mariana Mahood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good but you need a little patience

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

A unique piece of writing that takes the reader on an unexpected journey.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book deserves to be more widely known as for me this is in a league of its own. Janet Frame at her best.

[Aditi]

like being forced to live inside a fairytale in reality; slow, dreamy, almost nightmarish, never realising what's wrong but it's all beautiful.

[bia ˚✧₊]

que raio de final é este?
it seemed mega rushed

[Ricardo Baptista · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ensaios sobre a loucura? Cada personagem tem o que acho ser uma forma de loucura. O fim desaponta um pouco, essas diferentes formas, afinal, são a mesma.

[K M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strange and beautiful, poetic and surreal. A tad difficult to get into at first, but then difficult to put down.

[Simone · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incredible novel bogged down by a sudden ending that undoes all of the narrative tension established throughout the majority of the text.

[The Book Garden · Rating 4 out of 5]

I happened upon a movie called "An Angel at my Table", an emotionally moving biography about author Janet Frame, growing up in New Zealand. Following is a clip of the movie (I highly recommend):
http://10starmovies.com/Watch-Movies-...

After watching the film, I became curious about the actual writings of Ms. Frame and began an online search for her poems and books, followed by a visit to the library, where I found a few of her writings.
"Scented Gardens for the Blind" is a delightful read. Ms. Frame writes dramatic metaphors, ribboned in dazzling prose. Definitely worth putting on one's reading list.

[Lorraine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This would've been 5 stars if I hadn't predicted the ending even before I finished it....

[Ellen]

Book club meeting, July 30!