"In the Memorial Room is not just a brilliant novel but a considered and poignant posthumous literary act, a curtain call by one of the world’s greatest authors, New Zealander Janet Frame, who died in 2004."
Angela Meyer, 'Writer's Cell Block', a review of In the Memorial Room by Janet Frame, The Australian 4 May 2013
Australian author, critic and book blogger Angela Meyer (of Literary Minded fame) really gets Janet Frame. It's a delight to reread her insights about Memorial - I blogged this review at the time, but have just come across it again while looking for something else, and had to marvel yet again at how perceptive it is.
"It is mentioned in the preface that Frame did not want to offend anyone involved with the Mansfield Fellowship, or in Menton, but it's also probable that she enjoyed the idea of a posthumous conversation with the reader, about language, expression, "truth" and endings: retirement, personal or professional obliteration, and (always there behind it all) death. And here, too, lies Frame's sharp, knowing wit, her attention to the absurd, and also - as some may think of it - her darkness."
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