Poetry while you wait

 

Congratulations to Ruth Arnison on five years of producing Poems in the Waiting Room, a free poetry brochure distributed to medical waiting rooms and rest homes in New Zealand (mostly in the South Island, but the distribution - which relies upon charitable donations - is growing!)

 

Recent brochures have been produced in a Braille edition.

 

The 20th issue (Spring 2013) has a poem by Janet Frame and coincidentally also has a poem by Janet Frame's friend the late Grace Paley, an author and political activist Janet Frame became close to after they met in the USA at a writers colony.

 

The name 'Poems in the Waiting Room' has been kindly sublicensed by the original operation that has been successfully supplying poetry pamphlets in the UK for many years. (More info here.)

 

The Dunedin-based Poems in the Waiting Room is holding a PoArtry Exhibition to celebrate the 20 poetry cards produced in five years.

 

Poets and artists have collaborated for the exhibition which is to be held at Bellamy's Gallery, Macandrew Bay, Otago Peninsula, Dunedin, opening on Sunday September 1st at 5.30 pm and running until the 22nd of September 2013.

 

'Owls Don't Cry': Janet Frame for Dummies

 

Review of Gifted by Holly Shanahan

There's an amusing and instructive howler in the latest of a small flurry of fatuous and sycophantic reviews of the Fortune Theatre's production of Gifted.

Frame's first novel is referred to as 'Owls Don't Cry'. Shanahan had already told us:  'The play paints a rich portrait of a historical character [Sargeson] I know little about', and she also makes her crushing ignorance about Janet Frame very clear too, by her gushing praise of the dramatic portrayal of Frame as basically disconnected and bonkers. Shanahan does not even seem to have the wit to ask herself how she can 'know' that she has viewed an accurate characterisation of the two literary giants, given that she clearly knows nothing of their real history and relationship.

The Janet Frame impersonator Sophie Hambleton also admitted in an interview that she knew nothing about Frame and had not even read anything by her. Such is the lack of biographical and literary expertise at the coal face of this lush and loving production that so utterly takes the public representation of Janet Frame right back to the era of sexism, provincial narrow-mindedness, judgmental conformism and malicious gossip.

What a terrible waste of so much energy and good will. These audiences seem to believe they are getting an 'education' about Janet Frame, when what they are getting, is unadulterated propaganda in a plate of revenge served very cold indeed.

Shanahan suspects that the play might "annoy cultish fans of Frame's" because it is not a "perfect depiction of historical truth". She says "cultish fans" as though she has already been brainwashed by one of Patrick Evans's mantras, the ridiculous claim he often makes that Frame has but a small readership. His own crass exploitation of Frame's vast fame and literary reputation gives the lie to that one.

In defence of the fact that she feels she knows Frank and Janet better now even though she is aware there is some 'fiction' going on (she's obviously not sure what has been changed but surely St Patrick knew what he was doing!), Shanahan declares: "there is not one truth".

Wasn't Pontius Pilate the last to say something like that, when he washed his hands of the persecution of Jesus of Nazareth? "What is truth, anyway?"

Holly Shanahan and Sophie Hambleton would recognise truth in their own lives if it was perverted, and they would squeal too if I were to write up their lives, or someone they admired and cared about, with exactly the same degree of deceit and dishonesty that Patrick Evans has applied to his telling of the story of Janet Frame. 

Janet Frame recognised that Patrick Evans was hell bent on distorting the truth about her, and she complained about it when she was alive.

Does Holly Shanahan even know that Janet Frame and Patrick Evans had a decades-long "literary feud"? How can she seriously believe that Evans would all of a sudden write a "love letter"?

Here is what Shanahan has 'learnt' about Frame from viewing Gifted:

"still in the early stages of finding her literary (and indeed personal) voice"

"Sophie Hambleton embodies the spirit of the troubled artist / genius with beautiful detail and presence"

"Right from her entrance, shrouded in the typical headscarf and glasses, she is a sea of contradiction and curiosity."

"The motif of fragmentation and alternative ways of seeing are evident in the angles of the set"

"the clever choice to have the shed in which Janet writes closed to us completely, but for the light we can see inside. This is another device that leaves us wondering about the mind"

"small fragments of insight into this young mind"

"We meet her mind through the word games she leaves for Frank, and her 'insights' into the relationship of words, art and life"

"I would have liked to see some real garden, some dirt and grass on stage, a literal representation of what Sargeson is attempting to bring Frame back to"

"a reflection of the fragmented world of the woman herself"

Anyone who knows even a little about the real Janet Frame can see that Shanahan has taken away a grossly patronising and pathologising portrait of Janet Frame. She doesn't know that Frame was not fragmented or disconnected either from people or life itself, or, for heavens sakes, from the earth itself!

I was always told that there is a difference between "stupid" and "ignorant". I am not calling Shanahan stupid, but I am calling her ignorant (she said so herself when she admitted to knowing little about the characters of Sargeson and Frame). Stupidity cannot be cured by information, but ignorance can. Ignorance cannot be cured by watching a play that has been designed to make you accept a heavily biased viewpoint. It can't be cured by reading Wikipedia or listening to hearsay.

I hope that Shanahan follows her resolve to learn more about Janet Frame, and that she does that by reading her work rather than reading about her or watching cartoon versions of her in plays and movies. I recommend Frame's autobiography as a good start. It is in every public library, as are good selections of Frank Sargeson's stories.

See also:

 

Fortune Favours the Fake

 

Gifted by Patrick Evans: A Review

 

Fake Janet Frame "quote" promotes bogus "Janet Frame"

 

Misdiagnosing Janet Frame, again

Roger Hall misses the point

Shield Fever

Janet Frame (in 2003, aged 79) wearing her Otago rugby supporters scarf

detail from a photograph by Reg Graham

Otago rugby supporters are in an ecstacy this week after the weekend win by their team of the domestic Ranfurly Shield trophy. It has been a long time since the last time Otago held this shield. In fact, as was pointed out in 'Little rest for the valiant', the Otago Daily Times editorial on Monday 26 August 2013, the last time Otago held the Shield was the same year that Janet Frame published her first novel Owls Do Cry: 1957.

Janet Frame was by 1957 living in Europe but the fact that she used a rugby union metaphor in a letter to a friend (written in May 1957 from London) indicates that she was keeping up with the fortunes of 'her' team. Talking about a writing project she had completed, and her hopes for her future career, she said:

‘I think somehow, in New Zealand language, that it was a curtain raiser, and the Shield match will happen quite soon ...'


 

Janet Frame's Birthday

Janet Frame was born on the 28th of August 1924, and this year to honour the anniversary of her birth our friends at Phantom Billstickers have released another Janet Frame poem poster: 'When the Sun Shines More Years Than Fear' as part of their wonderful Poems on Posters project.

'When the Sun Shines More years Than Fear' is from The Pocket Mirror (1967) and when Janet Frame was planning her funeral service she approved it to be read out by one of her loved ones.

 

Roger Hall misses the point

 

'more revealing about Sargeson than it is about Janet' - Roger Hall talking about Gifted by Patrick Evans

(please note above, the classic identifier of sexism in language usage: the female author is referred to by her first name 'Janet' while the male author is given his surname 'Sargeson')

In a Letter to the Editor of the Christchurch Press, published on Wednesday 24 July 2013, prominent New Zealand playwright Roger Hall claims that I have 'missed the point' in my criticism of the play Gifted.

He points out that we don't actually learn so much about Janet Frame from the play, than we actually learn about how she appeared to Frank Sargeson.

For my part, I think that Roger Hall has 'missed the point' of my objections to the misleading publicity for the play. I did in fact know that in the novel Gifted the misogynist portrait of the fictional Janet Frame is filtered through the perceptions of a fictional Frank Sargeson, and I told the reporter this.

The news report seriously misrepresented my opposition to the play, as so often happens when we have recourse to the media. My emotion as a distressed family member upset by an injustice being done to a loved one, was rendered vividly, but the valid objections I raised were suppressed.

I objected to the fact that Gifted is being promoted as if it were historically accurate, and as if it were a 'tribute' to Frame. There is an actor playing 'Janet Frame' and an advertising poster with a painting based on a real photograph of Frame. This is the basis for my objection: that the public is not being told that major verifiable historical facts have been changed by Patrick Evans.

Hall seems to think that even though we don't learn about the real Janet Frame, that we do learn about the real Frank Sargeson. So his letter, above, adds to the fog of misrepresentation. We learn about neither; we do learn a lot about the playwright Patrick Evans, however.

Evans himself believes his distorted portrait of Frame, with major biographical facts changed and her 'behaviour' distorted through the lens of Sargeson's neuroticism, is more realistic than the Frame revealed by her own autobiography, or the Frame presented by Michael King's biography.

'Evans has rejected the deceits of formal biography', says one of his supporters.

We gain insight into the 'real' Frame by telling deliberate untruths about her? I don't think so.

Even though I disagree with him, I do appreciate Roger Hall's letter, because out of all the stringent criticisms I received for opposing the use of a fake Janet Frame quote, his was the only one that did not attack me ad hominem, but that at least tried to engage with the critique he had thought that I had made. Many others instead ignored the issues and tried to discredit me as a person by repeating malicious gossip and making slanderous accusations about my professional role, and questioning my right to speak up at all, while at the same time, ironically, accusing me of being the 'totalitarian'.

Roger Hall is right that one hardly learns anything about Janet Frame from this play. But it seems that many in the audiences have indeed 'missed the point' that he so aptly makes. It is clear from their tweets and their reviews that they have walked away from the play feeling that they have viewed an accurate portrait of Janet Frame.

Some of the reviewers admit to having started from a point of almost complete ignorance about either of the prominent NZ authors lampooned by the play. Despite their unfamiliarity with the biographies of Sargeson and Frame, they can still apparently recognise a 'brilliant' or 'moving' portrayal of them, which is intriguing.

'Beth' said: 'As the show began, I was embarrassed to admit that I knew very little of the two writers portrayed, Janet Frame and Frank Sargeson.' But her eyes were soon opened to their real nature: 'Frank seemed so real, so charismatic, so profoundly kiwi, which contrasted perfectly with the mysterious and sometimes completely absurd character of Janet.'" Youth Ambassador Review

Chalk one up for Patrick Evans, who has managed to sway one more person to his own point of view that Frame was evasive, out of touch with reality, and generally bonkers. The historical facts do not support this opinion, which is why Evans has had to distort them.

Elizabeth O'Connor reports that 'Frank Sargeson, the “father of New Zealand fiction”, finds his house, garden and shed semi-invaded by a Janet Frame who is only just beginning to find articulation as a person, never mind a writer.' Another reviewer obviously ignorant of the fact that Frame was already an accomplished and prize-winning author long before she even met Sargeson, and if this play had done her any justice it would certainly have represented the dazzling communicative wit and wisdom she is on record as being capable of, rather than attributing to her only what Patrick Evans referred to in a recent interview as "schizophrenic word salad".

Another reviewer, Alan Scott (Christchurch Press) in a report that can only be described as effusive, found that the play 'captured so acutely and so accurately a certain period in New Zealand literary history'. I hope that Roger Hall will write to the Editor immediately to slap Mr Scott on the wrist for 'missing the point'. There was certainly no 'accuracy' concerning the historical details of this moment in literary history - these were all rendered a-jumble by Patrick Evans. And anyway, it was Frank we were learning about, not Janet, wasn't it, Roger?


See also:

 

Fortune Favours the Fake

 

Gifted by Patrick Evans: A Review

 

Fake Janet Frame "quote" promotes bogus "Janet Frame"

 

Misdiagnosing Janet Frame, again

 

"it's just a job" ~ Janet Frame

Janet Frame (far left) snapshot with extended family members, Whanganui

 

Janet Frame was queried in a 1983 interview in Whanganui about the fact that she was widely believed to be a 'recluse'. She answered that the term was really too strong for her because she liked to socialise, but that the misperception was also useful because it allowed her to get on with her work:

There’s much misunderstanding of writers. If you say you’re a boot maker, nobody asks, ‘What are you doing?’ They can see. But people are afraid of imagination. They can’t see what is going on, and it frightens them. It’s mainly only writers themselves who know what it’s like – it’s just a job, but you’re working with the invisible.

 I have to build a fortress around myself – it’s the only way I can get anything done.

I know if I had a family I’d never get anything done. I feel I’m much like my mother for she denied herself, actively effaced herself for the ones she loved. I thought that would happen to me, and so my writing has always come first.

From 'Secret' Life in Suburbs (1983) quoted in Janet Frame In Her Own Words (Penguin NZ, 2011)
 

"a canny commentary on literary fame" - Publishers Weekly (USA)

 

"In her signature eclectic style, Frame has crafted both a canny commentary on literary fame and hero worship and a heartfelt meditation on what it means to be a writer."

The first US review: Publishers Weekly (USA) 5 August 2013

In the Memorial Room will be published in the USA in December 2013
by Counterpoint Press
ISBN: 9781619021754

In the Memorial Room was published in Australia and NZ in May 2013
by Text Publishing

ISBN: 9781922147134

 

Misdiagnosing Janet Frame, again

Patrick Evans this week admitted that he believes Janet Frame to have been 'autistic', and that 'autistic' is just another name for 'schizophrenic'.

Eva Radich interviewed Patrick Evans on Monday 19th August 2013 for 'Upbeat' on Radio New Zealand Concert. They were discussing Patrick Evans's play Gifted which is a fictional reinvention of Janet Frame.

Radich: I wondered how you interpreted her [Janet]?
Evans: Well, ahh, we have in our family a much loved autistic person who I've helped care for, for quite a while now, who lives with us and who's deeply creative in the artistic sense and I guess you have to say that there's a lot of one in the other. If you have ever been close to somebody who is gifted in that way...
Radich: But Janet of course wasn't autistic - it was an entirely different situation - she was shy, she was incredibly vulnerable and shy, but autistic?
Evans: Ahh, everybody I know who is autistic is autistic and not autistic. You deal with the person who is in front of you.
Radich: Of course we didn't have labels like that in the 1950s... Janet was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia: that was certainly never an issue.
Evans: No. But no, that was the label that we had then.
Radich: And the label we have now is autism?
Evans: It is, yes. And you take the person in front of you and you can see the vulnerability, the difference, the extraordinary insights that people have who are different in that way.

(Listen to the rest of this most enlightening interview here, in which Patrick Evans is unable to explain why, for the purposes of his fictional portrayal, he has felt it necessary to make such drastic changes to the historical record of the actual relationship between Janet Frame and Frank Sargeson.)



Some background:
English literature lecturer Patrick Evans of Christchurch New Zealand never accepted the fact that when doctors in Dunedin labelled Janet Frame with 'schizophrenia' that they had made a mistake. The label 'schizophrenic' was given at Dunedin hospital without a proper examination, simply on the advice of Frame's university tutor, psychology student John Money, with whom she was engaged in an emotional affaire complicated by the transference from his botched amateurish attempt at a Freudian analysis of her dreams. Money had at that stage not even embarked on his doctoral studies in psychology and he was never a medical doctor let alone a psychiatrist [see Michael King's Frame biography Wrestling with the Angel, Penguin 2000].

A panel of eminent psychiatrists in the UK in the 1950s, after extensive examination and observation, proclaimed that Frame had never suffered from schizophrenia, should never have been hospitalised, and in fact had clearly never suffered from any formal mental illness at all [see King, 2000].

Despite this historically verifiable medical decision, Evans has coined the term 'the myth of the misdiagnosis' to deride Frame's contention that she had been misdiagnosed in New Zealand.

Some middle class New Zealanders such as Evans seem to be so bewildered by the behaviours, bearings and even dress, of those who are 'lower class' and 'non-conformist', that they interpret these social differences as symptoms of disorder. It's all the same to them if it's 'odd' - and to be thought peculiar amongst these narrow-minded people it is sufficient to be uninterested in clothing labels, or to want to go to your room and write your novel when everyone else is sitting up late drinking, or to cry when your mother dies, as Frame's mother did when she was boarding with Sargeson (one of the many biographical facts suppressed by Evans in order to construct his projected fantasy 'Janet'). However it was Janet Frame's wild red hair that was her most obvious symptom of pathological 'difference' in the eyes of the smugly 'typical' people. That hair was obviously not normal and is the first of the list of things that made those around her think she was so 'strange'.

 "I was a certified lunatic in New Zealand.  Go back?  I was advised to sell hats for my salvation."

~ Janet Frame (from Towards Another Summer 1963/2007)

 

 

 



See also:

Play Misrepresents Janet Frame

 

Fortune Favours the Fake

 

Gifted by Patrick Evans: A Review

 

Fake Janet Frame "quote" promotes bogus "Janet Frame"

Owls Don't Cry: Janet Frame for Dummies

Roger Hall Misses the Point

 

 

 

 



Stars shining in the literary firmament

When the authors on the 2013 Man Booker Prize long list were recently asked to reveal their favourite first line, one of them, Eleanor Catton, chose the first sentence of Faces in the Water by Janet Frame:

"They have said that we owe allegiance to Safety, that he is our Red Cross who will provide us with ointment and bandages for our wounds and remove the foreign ideas the glass beads of fantasy the bent hairpins of unreason embedded in our minds."

Eleanor Catton is longlisted for her second novel The Luminaries. Born in Canada and raised in New Zealand, she attended the IIML (Bill Manhire's writing school) at Victoria University, winning a fellowship to study in the United States.

I'm reminded that in 2005 the Janet Frame Literary Trust donated $10,000 towards the IIML scholarship fund, and so I'm heartened to see that the resulting scholarships from that fund have fostered writers of such high calibre (and fine discernment).

It's also worth noting that Eleanor Catton is not the only admirer of Janet Frame's writing who has a Booker connection: Hilary Mantel, twice Booker Prize winner, wrote a magnificent introduction to Faces in the Water for the Virago Modern Classic edition published in 2009 and reprinted half a dozen times since then:

"The book is a record of humiliation and fear, shot through with chilling insights. The experience of its central characters is realised on the page with such lightness that it is never a punitive experience for the reader. It is an account of suffering that is exhilarating as well as harrowing, because its very existence – the fact that Istina survives to tell the tale – shows that suffering has been kept in its place. Its darkest pages are lit up by the perception of human life as precious, and each life as unique. It is also a shrewd and clever book, revealing without fuss (or sociologists’ jargon) how oppressive institutions work. If you can’t live in a mental hospital, the more resistant patients are asked, how do you expect to live in the world? Istina compares the hospital to a factory, a prison, a slaughterhouse; the images are developed, extended, pressed home. The novel allow us to understand, intimately as well as intellectually, the abusive practices of the psychiatry of the time, and the self-reinforcing beliefs that drove them." (from Hilary Mantel's Introduction to Faces in the Water, 2009)

Cooking with William Saroyan

Arche Küchen Kalender 2014

 

A stylish German language literary kitchen calendar for 2014, includes excerpts from Janet Frame, Philip Roth, Penelope Lively, Richard Ford, Nancy Mitford,

Gabriel García Márquez

and many others

 

 

 

One of the distinguished authors featured in this calendar alongside Janet Frame is William Saroyan, who was an important model and inspiration for Janet Frame in her early writing career.

After reading William Saroyan's short stories while she was still a student, she said to herself "I can do this!"

 

 

Fortune Favours the Fake

The first image above is of the cover of the American edition of Janet Frame's selected short story volume Prizes published by Counterpoint Press in 2009.

The second image above is the poster for the play Gifted by Patrick Evans being toured around New Zealand in 2013 by Dunedin's Fortune Theatre Company.

The first represents the real thing, the literary product of a highly acclaimed international author, a respected and loved cultural icon in her native New Zealand for her courage and perseverance in overcoming early abuses and setbacks to become a successful world writer.

The second image is derivative and exploitative, and the play it advertises constitutes a further abuse - this time of Janet Frame's legacy and her memory - because of its deliberate distortions of verifiable historical facts.

The play, which is being promoted by the use of a fake Janet Frame quote, is allegedly 'about' Janet Frame and yet it deliberately changes and suppresses major known facts about her life and career.

The actors and the playwright apparently revel in their act of 'mythologising' of Janet Frame's story as you can hear for yourself in this radio interview with them:

"People need to remember it's fiction not fact."

People also need to ask themselves, why would the academic Professor Evans, who has been engaged in a forty year feud with Janet Frame, who in her lifetime resented his stalkerish speculations about her history and rejected them vigorously, want to deliberately muddy the biographical waters with false "facts" and "quotes" and invented episodes?

Where is the humanity? Where is the respect for a great New Zealander? Who would want their own mother or sister or aunt to be treated like this, famous or not?

It is even controversial to mess fictionally with the known details of historical figures from the Victorian era. But Janet Frame still has family and friends who are alive, and who are bewildered and hurt by the nastiness of this attack on her integrity.

Janet Frame lived very recently, she is not a far flung cipher from the past.

I speak for many people, and not just those who knew and loved Janet. Many of her fans also hate to see her misrepresented and mocked so soon after her death by one of her most notorious enemies during her lifetime.

In the radio interview aired yesterday, Professor Evans was careful to stress that his play is "fiction". But this contradicts his video interview on the Christchurch Arts Festival website in which Evans claims that everything he has written is "plausible", and that nobody knows the truth anymore.

He cannot seem to make up his own mind; is it fiction or not?

Major supporters of Gifted, such as the Christchurch Arts Festival Director Philip Tremewan, seem to be quite deceived concerning the nature of the play. Tremewan has said: "We are mindful of the Janet Frame heritage. We want to do nothing more than honour our greatest writer." Does that sound like he knows that Gifted is fiction?

In what way is a derogatory remake of the meeting between Janet and Frank, changing so many of the known facts, a "tribute" to either of them, when this event was already probably one of the most highly and carefully documented ones in the history of New Zealand literature, having letters, films, two autobiographies and two biographies plus eyewitness reports and documentary films based on it already?

I have listed some of the biographical distortions Evans employs in an earlier blog post, which also lists three main points I made that were censored by the Christchurch Press news report about my opposition to the publicity around the play Gifted.

I am quite pleased, on hearing the radio interview, that at least Patrick Evans has been forced to admit publicly that he made his play up, and that the character is not the real Janet Frame.

However it was bizarre to hear Evans justify naming his bogus Janet after the real Janet Frame by claiming that she had put real people in her fiction. So it was OK for him to do it to her.

What infantile "logic" (delivered in the tone: "she did it first! Nyah nyah nyah!").

And flawed logic also, because Janet Frame did not name fictional characters after real people. She used aspects of the lives of real people to incorporate into fictional characters, which is an entirely different thing. And I challenge anyone to find another fiction author who does not do the same thing. Frame was not unusual in drawing from her observations and experiences to create fictional characters.

What Evans has done is unusual.

The identity theft by Evans of a real person (Frame) who died less than ten years ago, and the deliberate corruption of the facts about her life and work, is a pretty much unique act of exploitation, especially when you learn the background of Patrick Evans having written an unauthorised 'biography' that Frame was appalled by, and that was full of mistakes.

The Fortune may well next be unearthing a play script written by a neo-Nazi about the life of Anne Frank. Hahaha, what a comedy that will be.

 

Michael King's biography of Janet Frame contained a reputable and verifiable chronology of Janet Frame's life and career including the short time she spent boarding at Frank Sargeson's place during the weekdays (and staying with her sister's family during the weekends).

 

The real Janet Frame

 

 

This image is a rip-off of the above photograph, and fittingly is taken from an advertisement for the Fake Fortune Frame.

 

See also:

 

Gifted by Patrick Evans: A Review

 

Fake Janet Frame "quote" promotes bogus "Janet Frame"

 

Misdiagnosing Janet Frame, again

"Her work is a joy to read" ~ Otago Daily Times

 

The Australia/New Zealand notices for In the Memorial Room are still coming in! There's another perceptive and thoughtful review, written by Helen Speirs for the Otago Daily Times (27 July 2013):

 

"downright hilarious"

 

"brilliant, but cutting"

 

"Frame is shrewd as ever in her observations"

 

"Her work is a joy to read"

 

"The late Janet Frame's works are rewarding to read because they work on so many levels. On the most ''basic'' one, she simply writes a great story. Delving deeper, there is much more.    

The layers of meaning and reference, autobiographical elements, vivid and poetic language, characterisation and satire in Frame's second posthumously published novel In the Memorial Room show again why she is one of New Zealand's literary greats."

Read the review here: 'Fitting Memorial to Literary Great'

 

A poem for Poetry Day

Today is POETRY DAY in New Zealand, and there is a feast of poetry to be had up and down the country.

Every day was poetry day for Janet Frame. Here is one of her poems:

The Place

The place where the floured hens
sat laying their breakfast eggs,
frying their bacon-coloured combs in the sun
is gone.

You know the place -
in the hawthorn hedge
by the wattle tree
by the railway line.

I do not remember these things
- they remember me,
not as child or woman but as their last excuse
to stay, not wholly to die.

(From The Pocket Mirror, 1967)

"astute at revealing hypocrisy and brutality" ~ Boston Globe

Jane Ciabattari reviewed Janet Frame's story collection Between My Father and the King (Counterpoint 2013) for the Boston Globe (25 May 2013):

 

"The late New Zealand literary master Janet Frame’s inimitable voice — poetic, acerbic, piercing — is as fresh now as a half-century ago, when her stories and novels were drawing international attention. The 28 stories in her new posthumous collection are a reminder of her legendary storytelling gift and of the miraculous ways in which her life as a writer evolved." 

"Frame went on to become a groundbreaking author, original in language and subject matter, astute at revealing hypocrisy and brutality, particularly as it arose in lives of women and marginalized people like the patients she encountered during her stays in psychiatric wards."

"Frame’s is an acute vision, attuned to the full spectrum of human experience. The kingdom of her spacious imagination is fully displayed in this collection."

Auf dem Maniototo

A new German edition of Janet Frame's novel Living in the Maniototo will be released by CH Beck next month.

Auf dem Maniototo
C.H.BECK
ISBN 978-3-406-65385-8
13 September 2013
Translation by Lilian Faschinger