Categories: uncategorized
Date: 29 January 2007 01:34:06
Janet Frame is a New Zealand writer that we studied briefly at high school. I don't remember reading any of her books, but instead I do remember watching Angel at my Table, her biography. It's pretty shocking, she grew up in a dodgy family and was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and endured shock treatment.
Anyway, this book was an interesting one to read, I was intrigued but also regularly confused. I'm still not sure, even a few weeks after finishing it, whether the author is brilliant or just a bit strange. It flows all over the place, reality within the book bends as the main character (who is an author) starts writing part of the novel you are reading and imagining her own life narrative different to what it is. It has a sort of country grittiness too, lent by the rugged New Zealand setting, which sets it apart from others in the post-modern magical realism (slash confusing) genre.
This monologue takes place when guests are chatting at the main character's newly-inherited house (it's a bit complicated), delivered by another character who has moved from New Zealand to the US.
I tell you I grew cunning beneath my rosy milk maid mask. The change from farm to city was worse than any I have since known. The change of colour, too, from green and drought-brown and grass-brown to drab grey, and the dark green of the Wellington hill-bush, a resentment, a mourning green. Nevertheless, there were distractions for us children - the wind blew often in Wellington, frolicking everyone about in the streets, and the clothes on the clothes lines and and the smoke from the chimneys, tearing apart shapes and shadows, placing and misplacing every unanchored thing, while only great stones and mountains stayed unmoved. The wind blew through people and came out the other side with shreds of them and their thoughts flowing like ribbons in its path; and seeds alighted in their hair - one o'clocks, dockseed, sycamore windmills; while the wind coming around the street corner had a special fury, whipping flowerheads and dust. The Wellington wind was a kind that seemed to have escaped from supervision of weather whereas our Canerbury Nor'Wester was part of the weather and kept its place, before rain.