The Edge of the Alphabet

by Janet Frame

This is the cautionary tale of Toby Withers and Zoe Bryce, companions at the edge of the alphabet--that strange, incommunicable region of the mind walled by silence, noisy with dreams. Toby and Zoe meet on the ship to England. Irishman Pat Keenan, a London bus driver, passionately ordinary, forms the apex of the triangle.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, 20th Century, Literature, The World

303 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1962

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

[Lee Foust · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few months ago I picked up Faces n the Water, Janet Frame's semi-autobiographical novel of her experiences in (and very briefly out of) a couple of mental institutions. I found it fabulous--gut-wrenching and beautifully written. There was perhaps a slight doubt, however, in the back of my mind that, as Somerset Maugham said of his own singularly great novel Of Human Bondage, perhaps we only really have one novel to write because we only have one life, one unique experience, to veil in a veneer of fiction. Well, fuck you, S.M. some people also have imagination and more than a single life experience to offer literature. As Whitman says, we also contain multitudes, many stories and, most importantly, the words, my friend, the words. Even in a novel, as much as in poetry, the words can take you places, open up human experience, and dazzle and entertain and touch us deeply, even when not a simply thin veil exposing our petty little existences here on planet Earth. Sometimes the whole story is in the words rather than the images, actions, adventures of the characters. Having invented language to express, we forget that they're tied up so close with expression that all we really have to express lies within what we can do with language itself, pushing its limits, re-arranging its grammar, cutting through its excess, and exploiting its sound and rhythms with our song.

The Edge of the Alphabet, like Faces in the Water, is a masterpiece of 20th century fiction and puts Janet Frame, for me, into that handful of novelists who've plumbed the depth of the human heart and come up reaffirming our humanity through mutual suffering and the vague possibility of love and happiness somewhere out there on the other side. I suffer but I feel so much more alive and am filled with the desire to love others after I've read one of these novels. Steinbeck, Hubert Selby Jr., and Jean Rhys are my other favorites in this mode--along with Beckett and his fellow dazzlers in form, such as Joyce, Vollman, Perec, Chris Kraus, et al.--Beckett's probably my favorite novelist because he straddles the two best things a novel can do, formally dazzle and confirm one's humanity in this beautiful way.

The Edge of the Alphabet focuses on human loneliness, on three characters not likely to ever be loved in any kind of avowed way. The narrative masterfully interweaves their experience, the fears and proprieties that keep them imprisoned in their various unique solitudes, and never falls into the cliche of bringing them together in love. Oh, they do interact and effect one another, but in a far more subtle and pathetic way, and it's beautiful, painful, and very touching. I was gripped beginning to end, even though, in retrospect, there's not much in the way of narrative plotting here. Doesn't matter at all. It's riveting in the details, the situations, the words.

At the service of the words is our narrator, not omniscient, but rather a tantalizingly peripheral author (the novel's conceit is that it's a kind of secret text posthumously published when found in it's fictional author's papers after her death). This extra voice, although never intrusive, adds a layer of believability to the overall narrative--for we can only imagine she writes of others' loneliness because of her own--and, without artistic pretension, we accept her linguistic idiosyncrasies and bursts of verse as private, personal quirks rather than authorial attempts at pyrotechnics. The non-sequitur and fragmentary phrases, the beautifully stated truisms and dreamy, symbolic objects--there's a passage in which swans are introduced as a poetic metaphor it seems at the time then, 100 or so pages later, real swans appear which then, in the various characters' imaginations, turn into symbolic figures and dream images again--are all handled well enough not to really demand explanation, but I think the fictional author character gave the novel an especially beautiful frame, which made it impossible to think of Frame's mastery (Frame the author, pun not intended), keeping us always rooted with the fiction's own levels, believing absolutely in its characters' realities, even as they were presented to us as fictional people in the mind of a fictional author.

I've read some pretty great novels these last few months, but this one is really haunting my thoughts and I think will stay with me longer than the others. It's an amazing work of fiction from a masterful author.

[Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Janet Frame writes so beautifully, words just flow in a dream like way, travelling from a real situation to a characters thoughts, and she depicts loneliness and isolation in a sympathetic way. This novel has a narrator, Thora Pattern and she floats in between the story of three characters connected loosely by all travelling from New Zealand to England on the same boat. Toby is 35 and epileptic, he lives with his Dad, his mother recently died. He has dreams of writing a book about The Lost Tribe. He shares a cabin with Irish bus driver Pat. They meet Zoe, a teacher from the midlands and a spinster. All these characters are marginalised from society for all different reasons, health, class, lack of spouse, being a New Zealander, etc. It’s a sad book, even the minor characters seem isolated in their own ways.
The edge of the alphabet where words crumble and all forms of communication between the living are useless. One day we who live at the edge of the alphabet will find our speech.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

One day we who live at the edge of the alphabet will find our speech.

The book is a fictional manuscript written by one Thora Pattern, who inserts herself now and again amid the story she tells of three persons living ‘on the edge of the alphabet’: Toby, Zoe, and Pat, all of them in their mid to late 30s, that vague period of uncertainty before the sudden urgency of middle age descends. Thora herself lives there, too, at the edge of the alphabet:

where words like plants either grow poisonous tall and hollow about the rusted knives and empty drums of meaning, or, like people exposed to a deathly weather, shed their fleshy confusion and show luminous, knitted with force and permanence

The three meet on a ship bound for London from New Zealand, where Toby has grown up and now, intent to rise above his epilepsy and despite being haunted by his dead mother, has chosen to strike out on his own, his head full of passion to write his book about the Lost Tribe (‘he felt so strange, as if he were an entire forest, with the Lost Tribe inhabiting him as if his head were a secret gully somewhere up-country, just below the snow line, before the clumps of tussock and snow grass begin to shine in the wind and sun’). Zoe Bryce, the former schoolteacher from the English Midlands, has just completed a working holiday and during her return voyage will experience an event that alters her course, leading her to conduct her ‘private research’ even as she struggles to find meaningful employment. Finally, there is Pat Keenan, the stolid Irishman, forever holding forth on his moralistic opinions about everything and everyone, but who cannot ever seem to ‘come into his own’.

Frame’s prose, a strange, magical forest of language dangling with the sphagnum moss of odd and humorous similes and metaphors, phrases that surprise yet instantly transform to images in the mind, inches forward at a steady pace, at first in a partial alternating stream-of-consciousness not unlike V. Woolf’s The Waves, and later at part three transitioning to a more straightforward chapter-by-chapter alternation of third-person character focus, still with Thora dropping into the text to comment here and there. Thora telling her story of outsiders, those standing in perpetual stasis outside the circle, alienated, disenfranchised—separate—and each of them on a private voyage of self-discovery, all the while fading in and out of each other’s lives like flashing comets. It’s a sad and beautiful book, not altogether without hope, but resolute in its mission to reveal the clandestine pain that dominates, and sometimes claims, so many people’s lives.

He stood down on the wharf listening to the black people and the white people, side by side and separate yet all warmed by the sun, like stripes in the human shroud hung like an awning over the dead ruined places of understanding.

[Bhaskar Thakuria · Rating 4 out of 5]

With one wall of himself torn away he could feel the wind blowing permanently from the continent of ice. So he needed people – people or stones or woven rushes and flax. Addresses on paper are too flimsy a contact with people. Words are worse, especially if one lives at the edge of the alphabet; yet words may sometimes act like invisible ink, revealing revealing nothing when they are spoken or written, yet days or years afterwards, when they are breathed on or warmed by a flame or the friction of time, they often emerge stark and black with meaning and message, like telegraph wires against a clear sky.
But it is people, their shape, their presence, that are bulwark, bunghole, asbestos wall. For the wind blows from fire, as well as from ice.

A beautiful and poetic book on the inconsistencies of writing with plot and the irrepressible fecundity of a plotless exercise in storytelling- one that constantly questions the very purpose of writing itself. And in doing so the writer, Janet Frame, creates an ambiguous perspective of the characters- or rightly so, the perspective of the three characters from the point of view of a narrator that constantly veers between layers of consciousness and reality.

It is mentioned clearly in the initial pages of the narrative and there we get to know about this seemingly omniscient narrator:
The following manuscript was found among the papers of Thora Pattern after her death, and submitted to the publishers by Peter Heron, Hire-Purchase Salesman.
So the reader is made to believe that the manuscript was published posthumously and as the first chapter begins, Thora announces herself by name and tells us she has ‘made a journey of discovery through the lives of three people – Toby, Zoe, Pat.’
So, in another sense, one can interpret the manuscript as a living testimony that Thora uses as a medium of self-discovery through the twisted and sometimes obscure lives of the three other characters.

In her illuminating introduction to the novel the writer and critic Catherine Lacey mentions about the fiction of Janet Frame:
'The discomfiting magic and absurdity inherent in the fabrication of stories remained one of her central subjects. That battle between the fictive and the real is clearly ongoing in this, her third novel, The Edge of the Alphabet, a kind of companion to her first novel, Owls Do Cry.'

The narrator Thora Pattern, in the initial part of the novel, functions as an intermediary between the writer and the rest of the book. However, in the latter half, Thora recedes into the third person, from which point she will tell the story of her three outcasts.

Perhaps the whole point in the novel is to question the very purpose of writing although I felt as if the latter half was a bit loosely structured and makes it hard for the discerning reader to follow the characters closely enough. The novel's thematic inconsistencies can be best expressed by the critic in her introduction:
....writers who constantly question the purpose of their writing – writers who intend their sentences to rattle like wind-up toys across the page – writers who want to transfer their exhaustive, existential curiosity to the reader – writers of this sort are often accused of writing plotless books. This might not be an unfair accusation, but it’s also more complex than that. Traditionally constructed plots do not serve the goals of such writers, and in fact they frequently get in the way. The energy and forward propulsion of The Edge of the Alphabet, for instance, does not come from the question of how any given plot-knot will loosen itself, but rather from the rapid movement between layers of consciousness and reality. Though, in fact, if plot is what you’re after, someone does die in the end, or, as Frame puts it, a character achieves ‘that most dramatic and convenient change in habits which we call Death’.

This is a book for writers and not just for readers, especially as it deals with the whole game of writing- and writing artistically and beautifully, as the narrative veers between layers of consciousness and reality of the characters that for an occasional reader may appear pointless, but for a more discerning reader is full of pathos and expression that needs delving into considering the endless ambiguities surrounding their lives in the short space of the narrative.

Does this make Thora, the writer and narrator, more or less real than Toby, Zoe and Pat?

Does Thora even count as a character, little about her as we know?

Is she a stand-in for Frame herself?

The edge of the alphabet where words crumble and all forms of communication between the living are useless. One day we who live at the edge of the alphabet will find our speech.
Meanwhile our lives are solitary; we are captives of the captive dead. We are like those yellow birds which are kept apart from their kind – you see their cages hanging in windows, in the sun – because otherwise they would never learn the language of their captors.
But like the yellow birds have we not our pleasures? We look long in mirrors. We have tiny ladders to climb up and down, little wheels to set our feet and our heart racing nowhere; toys to play with.
Should we not be happy?

[Loretta Riach · Rating 5 out of 5]

no one does it like Janet. antipodean loneliness, sour and sheer. full of Waimaru stone and swans and thin walls. kind of excruciating in the way it keeps tunneling, in a good familiar way, like poking a bruise. perfect i think

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m continuing my journey discovering Janet Frame; The Edge of the Alphabet is yet another magical book of prose, experimental and challenging, a timeless narrative about the beauty and ugliness of the human condition. She plunges right in, starting on the first page:

Man is the only species for whom the disposal of waste is a burden, a task often ill judged, costly, criminal — especially when he learns to include himself, living and dead, in the list of waste products.

The creator of the world did not employ a dustman to collect the peelings of his creation.

Now I, Thora Pattern (who live at the edge of the alphabet where words like plants either grow poisonous tall and hollow about the rusted knives and empty drums of meaning, or, like people exposed to a deathly weather, shed their fleshy confusion and show luminous, knitted with force and permanence), now I walk day and night among the leavings of people, places and moments. Here the dead (my goldsmiths) keep cropping up like daisies with their floral blackmail. It is nearly impossible to bribe them or buy their silence. Page 3

…and it is non-stop to the last page:

The edge of the alphabet where words crumble and all forms of communication between the living are useless. One day we who live at the edge of the alphabet will find our speech.

Meanwhile our lives are solitary; we are captives of the captive dead. We are like those yellow birds which are kept apart from their kind — you see their cages hanging in windows, in the sun — because otherwise they would never learn the language of their captors.

But like the yellow birds have we not our pleasures? We look long in mirrors. We have tiny ladders to climb up and down, little wheels to set our feet and our heart racing nowhere; toys to play with.

Should we not be happy? Page 303

It can leave one breathless...

Janet Frame’s books never cease to fascinate me — I have dog-eared several pages of this one (like others) marking where I want to return someday to explore a word-scape of unique beauty. The entire book is loaded with the most exquisite language — precious, priceless. She created geographical territory in which the borders of social inclusion and exclusion are investigated with an emphasis on language (communication or the lack of communication). The ghosts of the past are haunting, memories of lost relatives or events linger with a zealous desire to be remembered. There are surreal essences of despair, fear, failure — fragile dreams and disquieting realities—the human condition of those existing on the margins, marginalized — to be blunt, reality sucks. Sadly, this is a generous portion of our world’s population — life is not glamor, romance, and drama—to look away and deny it is negligent. Life is gritty with filth — our manmade rubbish, self-made madness, and life-long sickness. Some people are incapable of coping with life — some just do not have the tools to cope as they are flawed by disabilities (Toby’s epilepsy) or disabled by life (Zoe’s ignorance.) They are people easily discarded and ignored — yet Janet Frame writes in a way that makes the ugliness of life beautiful — and in all the trauma, there are comic pleasures that wink with a sweet wit that isn’t frivolous, if anything, the absurdity is very grounding.

A first kiss leading to the private research of identity, which leads to the creation of a sculpture from the silver paper of a cigarette pack, and then a life ended. A novel, The Lost Tribe, left unwritten because the writer is illiterate. Paintings destroyed, talent unrealized by an artist overcome by despair. And a life spent just getting by, going through the motions of life’s expectations to the point of not truly living.

“Just how much blank paper do you need, sir, to match your blank life?” Page 278
~
“He’s getting above himself, going overseas.”…there is an affliction of dream called ‘overseas’, a suffering of sleep endured by the prophetic, the bored, the retired, and the living who will not admit that it is easier and cheaper to die, die once and forever and travel as dust. But being dust how can you return and have your name in the paper and yourself pointed out in the street as having been “overseas” and your conversation filled with the names of places you have visited, your words received with wonder, as prophecies… How, if you are not Marco Polo or Herodotus? Page 49-50
~
Shall I write a book? Everybody is going to write a book. Memoirs on writing paper, toilet paper, café wall, pavement, or stone column in a city cemetery where borders of trees provide a trip-wire into silence. Shall I write? Shall I engage in private research of identity? Page 99
~
And then she laughed out loud to think that she had never known, that she had always believed that people were separate with boundaries and fences and scrolled iron gates, Private Road, Trespassers Will be Prosecuted; that people lived and died in shapes and identities with labels easily recognizable, with names which they clutched, like empty suitcases, on a journey to nowhere. Page 106
~
The day is patched with long silences between the communication of people, give rise to dread; as if the time itself held a reserve of opinion too terrible to express. In the cracks of the silence the people’s voices grow like bright feverish weeds whose stalks are hollow and whose shallow roots are separated from the earth (or water) with one tug of a hand or breeze; now and again people’s voices disappear in the gaps that open with the continual shock of Time. Page 215
~
“Did you make it?” he asked Zoe. “How did you think of it?”

Everyone admired the shape once again. Zoe was not used to being the center of attention; not for something she had made — when in her life had she ever made anything? It’s only a bit of paper, she said to herself, but she throbbed with warmth. How strange that it had so affected the others, had evoked in them feelings which they could only consider and explore by sitting there, as all three were doing now, silent, staring at the silver sculpture… How extraordinary, Zoe thought, that such feeling should be roused by seeing a conventional paper shape twisted at random, in idleness, among strangers whom I shall never meet again. Page 272

Janet Frame writes with this special vision about social identity, a textual borderland — a wonderland— an Is-land — the post-colonial experience, New Zealand and England — being an alien within one’s homeland and within one’s own skin, living in the margins — at the edge of the alphabet…

And sometimes it seemed too much like being excluded from the mystical long-division sum, like being the odd number at the bottom or at the side of the column, the mental afterthought, the carrying number put there for mere convenience and erased when the answer to the sum is worked out. Page 297

Honestly, who hasn’t spent time living on the edge of the alphabet…

[Margo Montes de Oca · Rating 5 out of 5]

leakages and soggy leaves and thin peeling walls and vast dark seas. sweaty and painful but also feels like essential reading. this description of wellington is one I think I will always come back to:

"The houses nearly toppling from the cliffs, the damp switchback streets where my aunt kept a tiered boarding-house like a grandstand overlooking the win-and-place involvements of the city; streets of moss and fern, and the sun poured like fresh barley-sugar twisting in and out of the native trees, setting golden upon the roofs and walls."

[Frazer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm struggling to know how to talk about this book. (Someone who's read this, please back me up.) A singular book. Combining elements of Bulgakov-esque surrealism, with British modernism's bleak interiority, oh and there's little old New Zealand!

I thought Frame did a remarkable job balancing the surrealism with the narrative thrust, so that neither gets dwarfed by the other. The story feels refreshed by the dream-like passages, and vice versa.

The narrative perspective was one of the most interesting that I've come across in a while. I'm not surprised she's been picked up by Fitzcarraldo. She was writing literary fiction before it was a thing.

A remarkably bleak book, but Frame's sense of humour and fun (especially at the expense of her characters) shines through at all points.

I'd love to discuss this with someone. Has anyone else read this, or any other Frame?

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Janet Frame constantly amazes me. Much like VW she can achieve astounding poetic insight into the psyche. This is a pictorial theater of madness: a waking dreamstate where all is a kind of quiet and graceful torturous despair and nothing is quite as we would have it be.

[Tina Hein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading anything from Janet Frame is a gift to yourself. An exeptionally rare gift with language, her books are exquisite. She will leave you speachless.

[Ruby · Rating 3 out of 5]

(I can’t believe this took me a month to finish) User error because I didn’t follow what was happening very well. Although Janet still manages to word things so wonderfully!!!

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Now I, Thora Pattern (who lives at the edge of the alphabet where words like plants either grow poisonous tall and hollow about the rusted knives and empty drums of meaning, or, like people exposed to a deathly weather, shed their fleshy confusion and show luminous, knitted with force and permanence), now I walk day and night among the leavings of people, places and moments."

Perhaps because she came from New Zealand, Janet Frame (1924-2004) never became the Famous Novelist she should have been north of the equator. Her sense of language was that of a malleable medium, pliant, given to twisting, with high tensile strength. She had acute insights into human behavior and was empathetic to even the most tiresome of people, but ready with a vial of acidic wit as burning as Margaret Atwood’s. If Frame is famous for anything north of the equator, it is for Jane Campion’s film of Frame’s autobiography, An Angel at My Table, in which Frame—institutionalized for years after a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia—is only just spared a lobotomy when her doctor, listening to the morning radio on the day of her scheduled surgery, hears that she has won a prestigious national writing award, presumably along the lines of a Pulitzer Prize. The surgery was cancelled, her diagnosis retracted, her freedom granted, and her ability to write At the Edge of the Alphabet, her third book, made possible.

Edge is narrated by an author named Thora Pattern, who shepherds her trio of protagonists through their misbegotten lives, aged late 30s to early 40s when we first meet them aboard a ship headed from New Zealand to England. Toby Withers—an epileptic, unemployed, and poorly educated New Zealander with dreams of grandeur for the responses he imagines will come upon publication of his book, The Lost Tribe, which he has been thinking of writing, once the conditions are right, since his elementary school days; Pat Keenan—an Irishman from “the real Ireland” returning to England after a tour of New Zealand (probably looking for suitable employment), friendly in his controlling way, frequently offering tips to others that verge on coercive demands on improving their lives; and Zoe Bryce, former school teacher from the British midlands, also returning to England, future uncertain apart from an undefined program of “personal research” she intends to take up. None have been partnered at any time in their lives and none seem to know how to sustain a conversation.

While Pat is the more outgoing of the three, naming his many acquaintances—all quite respectable with honorable professions or trades—our narrator, Pattern, notes that “Pat could never keep the triumph from his voice when he talked of people who were ‘friends of his.’ He was like a big-game hunter, proud of the carcasses, but doomed to have no relationship with the living animal.” Toby and Zoe, too, seem doomed to remain alone, without romantic relationships, whatever their wishes to the contrary might be. Zoe, however, is kissed one night by a crewman who creeps into her cabin while she is not quite asleep. (Fairly chaste as far as sexual assaults go, but still. . .)

It is a momentous occasion for Zoe, who, until that moment in her late 30s had never been kissed before. The kiss itself—not its impropriety—haunts her the rest of her days (“After all, I am a woman who has been kissed!”), and her thoughts obsess for the remainder of the trip on giving birth to a child with a yellow crust across its eyes, born blind from syphilis. Zoe, Toby, and Pat are essentially members of Toby’s Lost Tribe. The inscrutability of their lives to others and themselves may not become apparent until much later, like the fate of a sheep Pattern describes that gets stuck in a bog and drowns:

'Perhaps in five or ten years’ time, when with the whim and privilege peculiar to water, the underground creek has changed its course and the area is dry with couch or tussock, the bleached bones of the sheep will be found lying like broken script arranged in cunning disarray by the penstrokes of Time and the furtive corrections, blots, and underlinings of the weather. (Are our words thus, falling fleshed and heavily fleeced from our mouths, and only after a length of time can their true meaning, their gaunt uncluttered bones lie exposed upon the slopes of thought?)"

For Janet Frame, the “five or ten years’ time” has become a century (this year marks the centennial of her birth). I hope Fitzcarraldo’s reprint of The Edge of the Alphabet initiates a revival of her vital voice.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[Lucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very interesting novel, which I struggled to finish due to its drifting style and lack of strong narrative arcs, but also kind of loved? It is full of paradoxes and tensions. On the one hand, this novel is about loneliness, mortality existential crisis, and the ways in which those deemed "abnormal" or mentally ill are sidelined and excluded from society, relegated to the "edge of the alphabet" as they struggle not to fall off. On the other, it is a story that somehow connects the otherwise fragmented lives of its main characters Zoe, Toby and Pat, under the omniscient eye of the overarching narrator Thora Pattern (who curiously appears in the first person intermittently as the narrator, then disappears for 100 pages). It is a very funny book, full of dry observations about human behaviour and the gap between the mundanity of much of life and the grand ideals and questions the characters grapple with. It’s also quite bleak in its overall view of humanity, full of characters who are self-absorbed and lonely. I felt particularly attacked (or affectionately seen) by the character of Toby, who has an idea for a novel - and/or enjoys the idea of himself as someone with an idea for a novel - but never quite seems to be able to start writing. Same, Toby.. Overall, it's a novel that I found myself reluctantly enjoying even as the characters are infuriating and often unlikeable, which I think is quite a feat of writing.

[Bente]

I don't know how to rate this book. It's a one of a kind type of novel due to its narrative structure. The novel follows three characters' journey to and arrival in London from New Zealand through the eyes of a narrator Thora Pattern, but it's so not about them either. This novel is about its narrative structure and its prose, as it were. Thora sometimes pops in all of a sudden, when you have just about forgotten that there was a narrator at all. There are many things I underlined because I loved the way Frame described feelings and situations as both realistic yet feverdream-ish, awful yet poetic, completely new yet recognizable. The feel of the novel cannot be described better than the Dutch word 'beklemmend'. As to how the sentences are, I will borrow Catherine Lacey's words - who wrote the introduction - and say that Frame is an author "[...] who intend their sentences to rattle like wind-up toys across the page".
I wouldn't know how to advertise or recommend this novel to as I think this is just something only you can experience (singular). It will leave you both extremely confused and highly intrigued but it is a novel that demands your full attention and energy.

[Zoe Hannay · Rating 4 out of 5]

janet frame be like ‘life’s a bitch and then you die’

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

[An]

next a translator for the edge of the alphabet, some framework (sounds or letters or symbols to describe sounds or letters) to eelooomeeneeiigghhtt the reason why we drool over ripe raspberries that look like splayed insides, or rest our head on blades of grass stuffed like a caged chicken with pesticides

[Sam Ryckaert · Rating 3 out of 5]

strange, lonely book run through with post-colonial out-of-placeness. maybe too prickly to love but beautifully written and comforting in its own way, in how it renders Aotearoa in all the half-remembered, ill-placed dreams of home Europeans have built atop it

[emma broderick · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was breathtakingly sad which i wasn’t expecting, but in a way i’ve never read before? such painfully direct descriptions of loneliness.

if you’re going to read this (which you should do!) i recommend reading this guardian article as well - https://www.theguardian.com/books/art...

[Robert Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where to begin with this one? The book states it is a manuscript of Thora Pattern and is being submitted to a publisher by a minor character in the story. The story follows 3 people and their lives of loneliness.

Toby Withers (who originally appears in Frame’s first novel Owls Do Cry) is one of the main characters. He leaves New Zealand to go to England. He meets Zoe Bryce and Pat Keenan. All the characters are fighting their own battles with loneliness, trying to make it in the world, and staring the fact of aging and ultimately death in the face.

This is a dark book and reminds me a lot of a Sartre novel minus the philosophy. If you are looking for an upbeat feel good book, this is not for you. But if you want to delve into the heart of the human being then give it a try.

[Martin Henson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine the world as a (faulty) clockwork mechanism. Our three protagonists in this book are like three spinning cogs, unable to properly engage with the world or with one another. Variously out-of-step, they find different ways of partial survival (or, in one case, not) in a world that is unreliable and unrelenting. Toby is hampered by his epilepsy and moderate autism. Zoe’s problem has been a sheltered timidity and a permanent sense of not fitting. Pat is particularly interesting in his ability to create an ersatz escape from his terrors through conformity and fake understanding - conformities and understandings that he is only to happy to use to advise his acquaintances. We read:

“In Pat’s view, painters were the type of people who threatened the foundations of society, and although he sometimes realised vaguely that the foundations of society needed threatening (and in those moments his fear made him more determined to drive in the rivets of conformity) he looked upon those whom he called ‘painters in general’ and ‘idlers’ who ‘ought to be forced to do a day’s hard work on the buses.” (p. 256 - Pat was for a good deal of his life a bus driver).

The story of these three is told through a narrator, Thora Pattern, who occasionally breaks through the curtain of her third-person account to become embodied and reflective in discussing her three “goldfish”. In this way, Janet Frame has dramatised her own relationship with her characters within the novel itself. A clever and successful trick that has been used by others, of course, like Philip Roth.

A great deal of the drama, the multi-dimensional misfiring of individuals negotiating their world, emerges with beautiful implicity - at the edge of the alphabet.

“Are our words thus, falling fleshed and heavily fleeced from our mouths, and only after a length of time can their true meaning, their gaunt uncluttered bones live exposed on the slope of thought” (p. 162)

Pat, in particular, conjures the poor philosopher’s solution to their difficulties by summarising inadequately. Frame captures this in a brilliant aside:

“... The definitions return to their lairs, like their wounds got in human combat, and sleep.” (p. 282)

Note - they sleep; they do not die.

With novels that deal with great human ideas with such psychological depth, there is often no strong sense of ‘plot’. This is discussed in the foreword by Catherine Lacey.

“Writers … who constantly question the purpose of their writing … writers who want to transfer their exhaustive, existential curiosity to the reader … are often accused of writing plotless books … Traditionally constructed plots do not serve the goals of such writers, and in fact they frequently get in the way.” (p. 11)

A consequence is often a difficulty in finding a satisfactory narrative arc within which to bring things to an close (if not a conclusion). In this novel, Janet Frame finds a beautiful solution with a final soliloquy that begins, “How strange human beings are …” (p. 282) and ends, “Should we not be happy?” (p. 289).

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1962, Janet Frame’s extraordinary third novel chronicles the adventures of three people living “on the edge of the alphabet”: a desolate outpost of the soul where feelings of worthlessness and crushing loneliness cannot be expressed. New Zealander Toby Withers, an epileptic, suffers as well from an acute form of social awkwardness that leaves him isolated and fretful. Zoe Bryce, a depressed middle-aged spinster from England, has left her position as a schoolteacher in humiliation after developing amorous feelings for a colleague that were not reciprocated. And boastful know-it-all Pat Keenan, an Irishman, lives an exceedingly prosaic life in London, where he drives a bus. The three cross paths on a passenger ship traveling from New Zealand to London. After the death of his supportive mother, and in defiance of his pragmatic father, Toby has decided to exert his independence, strike out on his own and see the world. He is also smarting after being rejected by a young woman whom he was convinced loved him because she tolerated his company and was on occasion nice to him. Zoe’s “working vacation” in NZ is over, and she is returning to England to face an uncertain future. And Pat is returning home as well after time off from his job. On board the ship, each traveling alone, Toby, Zoe and Pat form a loosely compatible trio, and in London their connection endures even as their quiet desperation intensifies. Pat returns to his squalid rooming house, where he has convinced Zoe that she should live as well, while Toby finds cramped, disagreeable quarters elsewhere. To support themselves, Zoe and Toby take menial, unfulfilling employment. For a time, Toby, Zoe and Pat are able to sustain themselves on their delusions. Toby, though largely unschooled and barely literate, has convinced himself that he will someday write a novel about “The Lost Tribe,” a notion, encouraged by his mother but dismissed as ridiculous by his father, that he guards closely and that has occupied him for years. Zoe, having been kissed on board the ship by a drunken sailor (the first kiss of her life), clings to the hope that love is not completely out of reach. And Pat makes his unexceptional life tolerable by puffing himself up with self-important claims, habitually exaggerating his accomplishments, offering unsolicited advice, and pushing people around, especially those, such as Zoe, who lack confidence and will be overwhelmed by his persistence. Eventually, however, each is compelled to give up on their dreams, with consequences that range from unfortunate to disastrous. The novel’s loose structure and Frame’s reliance on distorted interior monologue contribute a hazy, dreamlike quality to the action, which drifts from one event or encounter to the next. Throughout, Frame’s magical, often disorienting language leaps from the page: “But it is people, their shape, their presence, that are bulwark, bung-hole, asbestos wall. For the wind blows from fire, as well as from ice.” Impressionistic, sometimes bizarre, but bracingly original, The Edge of the Alphabet is also a compassionate and moving novel, one that confronts an age-old and tragic human enigma: that loneliness and its devastating effects can persist in a world filled with people searching for connection.

[Mina Widding · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jag tycker om den här boken för att den är så annorlunda. Den har en bakomliggande författare, med ett eget namn (Thora Pattern) som berättar om Toby, Zoe och Pat, mest om Toby - en epileptiker från Nya Zealand som reser till London för att - ja, varför? För att komma utomlands, göra något på egen hand, för att skriva en bok som han aldrig kommer till skott med. Han möter Zoe och Pat på båten, de har varit på Nya Zealand för att i sin tur söka detta "andra", sig själva kanske, fast de inte riktigt förstår det. De är alla udda fåglar, och jag tänker att det är det som är att vara "vid alfabetets gräns". Bitvis snårig att hänga med i, passagerna i Thoras egen röst är tex rätt surrealistiska, och det är även åtminstone Tobys och Zoes inre tankar. Pat är den som klarar av att "passera" som vanlig, att behålla ett jobb etc. Innehåller också många dikter, presumably Thoras, som jag ju tänker mig som författarens alter ego. Det ges ingen riktig förklaring till varför hon skriver deras berättelser, kanske är de påhittade av henne, kanske är det människor hon mött, man vet inte. Och vad skönt det är att inte alltid veta, att det inte är en berättelse som följer en mall, att den har sin egen inre logik.

Läsprojekt: slumpat från "want to read" här på Goodreads + kartan (Nya Zealand)

[Fiona Erskine · Rating 4 out of 5]

WARNING - This book won't appeal to everyone - don't expect the story follow any conventional path. The writing, on the other hand is extraordinary.

A reluctant writer - Thora Pattern - lives at the edge of the alphabet 'where words like plants...grow poisonous tall and hollow about the rusted knives and empty drums of meaning'. She collects three outcasts: Toby Withers, Pat Keenan and Zoe Bryce, and sends them on a long, uncomfortable sea voyage from New Zealand to England while musing on her control as omniscient (and often irritated) narrator.

I won't say any more. If you love Fitzcarraldo Editions as much as I do you may be intrigued by this book in their Classics series. If you don't like experimental or metafiction, then steer clear. I was captivated. Many thanks to Vanda Symon for introducing me to to the extraordinary Janet Frame.

[Rose McLish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ok. Wow. Unlike anything I’ve ever read tbh and I loved every second of it. It was definitely an intense and difficult read but I think that’s what made it awesome. I’ve genuinely never seen someone write with so many descriptions that somehow didn’t get annoying (because usually they get annoying for me). It felt like one long poem and I’m surprised I liked that because I hate poetry. I think a lot of us are at the edge of the alphabet these days

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Did we need the meta-fictional trickiness? No. But we did need the language, the characters, the thoughtfulness. A bit like if Patrick White had ever worked out how to trim his books down into a reasonable size. I wish I had a non-antipodean comparison, but this gave me very strong P White memories.

[Jack Bowman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this, often sitting with certain sections for a few days at a time. Frame’s writing is disjointed and dissonant, both reflecting and framing an almost ethereal and otherworldly character. Tragic, haunting, and beautiful.

[Carolyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is beautifully written. Lots of unique metaphors that I’ve never seen before. Not much going on plot wise, which is why I think I struggled with it. It’s a very introspective book, focusing a lot on loneliness. It’s bleak, somber. Very slow paced.

[Britt-marie Ingdén-Ringselle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Janet Frame skriver underbart bra, men berättelsen är rätt knepig och ibland lite för långdragen, tyvärr

[Nadine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not an easy read but worth it. Took me longer to read than it normally would. Great ending.