A posthumous conversation with the reader (The Australian)

There's a major review of Janet Frame's new novel today in The Australian newspaper (4th May 2013):

"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." Read more

" a deeply funny book, containing elements of satire: of the literary world, of society and rituals, including much about ageing and the myth of a life as a journey"

"Frame's character descriptions are wonderfully perceptive"

"Frame's books and stories always have moments of lightness, a fact people sometimes forget due to her life being overshadowed by tragedy and, ironically, misunderstanding."

 The reviewer (writer and critic Angela Meyer of the Literary Minded blog) concludes:

"All Frame's books are hearty, hardy trees. They should be visited often. It's a delight to have this one revealed, standing strong and tall, palpably alive, alongside the others."

"A deliciously mischievous piece of fun" (Booktopia)

"[In the Memorial Room] shows a very different and much lighter personality"

Caroline Baum has reviewed In the Memorial Room for Booktopia Buzz (May 2013):

 

"Well, who'd have thought! Forget the thin skinned sensitivity of the Janet Frame you associate with An Angel at My Table. This gem ... [In the Memorial Room] ... shows a very different and much lighter personality."

"A deliciously mischievous piece of fun, this is sharp social satire, ruthless in its mockery of literary pretension."

  Booktopia (Australia)

 

Another speech from the launch of Gorse is Not People

Launch of Gorse is Not People by Janet Frame

15 August 2012, University Book Shop Dunedin

'Thank you' speech by Pamela Gordon: 

As Janet Frame’s literary executor, this is a fulfilling moment. There are fine stories in this book that have been silent for too long a time. "Silence has found its voice" – and it has been a huge privilege to be a part of that.

I have a lot of people to thank.

First, to Denis Harold, my co-executor, co-editor, and life partner – who else would have the wisdom, strength, imagination and knowledge to persist on this challenging path? I don’t know. I salute his faithfulness to who Janet Frame was as a person, as an artist and as his friend.

I acknowledge the Frame estate’s literary agent Andrew Wylie in New York (and his colleagues especially Tracy Bohan, Jin Auh and Jackie Ko) for recognising ‘Gorse is Not People’ as a masterpiece and for offering it to the New Yorker. And credit to all the editors of the journals who have enthused about Frame’s unpublished stories (including the New Yorker, Granta, A Public Space, Zoetrope).

Thanks go to Geoff Walker who wanted this collection for Penguin NZ. And to Debra Millar who took the project over from Geoff. Thanks to Catherine O’Loughlin, Gillian Tewsley and Claire Gummer who all worked closely with us on the publisher’s copy edit.

Anna Egan-Reid designed the book and isn’t it an exquisite object? Her work on Janet Frame in Her  Own Words (the text as well as the cover) was rightfully acclaimed when that book won ‘Best Non-Illustrated Book’ in the 2012 PANZ Book Design Awards.

We’re grateful to the Woollaston Estate for kind permission to reproduce Toss Woollaston’s wonderful painting ‘Upper Moutere’ on the dust jacket.

Thanks go to the Hocken Library archivists and other staff who look after Janet Frame’s manuscripts. Thanks also to the Janet Frame Literary Trust, our current and former trustees and other supporters and advisors.

I also want to acknowledge the three authors present here tonight whose names are on the growing list of the writers who have received grants from Janet Frame’s legacy – Peter Olds, Rhian Gallagher and Emma Neale. May there be many more opportunities over the years to add to this list. Congratulations to Rhian for her win this year at the NZ Post Book Awards for the best book of poetry published in New Zealand in 2011. I had the honour of speaking at the launch of Shift here in this bookshop last year and it has been a real pleasure to see that volume getting the accolades it so richly deserves.

And Emma Neale – esteemed Robert Burns fellow this year! (following in the footsteps of Janet Frame and so many others) - thank you so much for your beautifully expressed launch speech tonight. It’s a joy to hear such a sensitive and erudite response to these stories. [Click this link to read Emma Neale's launch speech.]

I’m not going to talk about the stories themselves now, because Emma has introduced them so well.
I just want to say, that if Janet Frame herself were here tonight, she would, I’m sure, be at pains to point out that she wouldn’t want Charles Brasch or Frank Sargeson to be seen as the villains of this piece. Her message for writers who receive seemingly devastating setbacks is this (from her autobiography): “A writer must stand on the rock of her self and her judgment or be swept away by the tide or sink in the quaking earth: there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer’s own.”

Many thanks to the UBS for hosting this launch. Congratulations on your 50 years in this very building that is so connected to the literary history of Dunedin. May you have many more!

Thanks to Bronwyn Wylie-Gibb and the legendary Bill Noble of the UBS for organising and hosting this launch, and to the folks at Pearson NZ for their generous assistance, and thanks to everyone who has helped out (including picking the glorious bunch of gorse!).

Finally thanks to all of you who are here to celebrate with us, friends, family, Frame fans, teachers, academics, librarians, book sellers, fellow writers, thanks for your company and continuing support.

It is so good to have this launch right here, surrounded by the gorse covered hills of Dunedin.

 

 

 

"amusing fish-out-of-water story" (Readings)

The excellent independent booksellers Readings of Australia have put up a review of Janet Frame's novel In the Memorial Room. Nicole Mansour, Assistant Manager of the St Kilda store, says:

"Without question, In the Memorial Room captures Frame’s own particular awareness of the universe around her. As a reflective journal, it gives the reader a beautiful window into the author at work. And while the end may leave some without a real feeling of resolution, Frame’s amusing fish-out-of-water story doesn’t actually need any explanation, for it explores not only the writer’s condition, but also the human one."

What they were saying (NY Mag 1991)

 New York Magazine 29 July 1991

Review of Jane Campion's AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE

 "Jane Campion has made a dry and plain movie from the rapturously lyrical autobiography of the New Zealand writer Janet Frame. The astringency of Campion's visual palette is nevertheless pleasing, and Kerry Fox, a large actress with a thatch of unmanageable red hair, plays the morbidly shy Janet with a streak of vagrant sensuality. Campion revels in the joke that this awkward, unprepossessing woman, diagnosed as a schizophrenic and subjected to electroshock therapy, could emerge as a major writer, but she emphasizes the shyness so much that we never see the aggressive intelligence, the sensibility, the taste - whatever it was that made Frame a writer. Campion appears to love victimization more than art."

More than twenty years later, largely due to the influence of the Campion movie, which has become a much-loved enduring classic, a few new fallacies have been added to the misconceptions that Frame originally attempted to challenge by writing her autobiography in the first place.

(1) The subsequent success of the movie - and its director - has led to the farcical claim one hears these days that Janet Frame was not in fact a major literary figure UNTIL Campion's 'biopic' elevated her out of obscurity.

(2) The casting of 'large' actors to play Frame has also led to a belief that Frame herself - who was thin as a young woman - was overweight.

(3) Campion's exaggeration of Frame's shyness - noted in the above review - has also enabled autism extremists to claim Frame had severe social and communicative disabilities.

It's just a movie guys - a beautiful, haunting one - it's not documentary evidence.
 

Life after death

 

Let this be a lesson to all authors. Being dead shouldn't put a crimp in your publishing life. Janet Frame's new... fb.me/EaMhgcOX
— Page & Blackmore (@PageBlackmore) April 29, 2013

In the late Janet Frame's new novel In the Memorial Room, she even seems to satirise herself:

"There is such intense interest in Rose Hurndell’s works, more so, naturally, now that she is dead and her last poems have been compared in their purity and otherworldliness, their vision of death, to the Requiem music which Mozart left unfinished, and although they were written before her death they have the effect of being posthumous, of actually being written after death."

(from the prologue to In The Memorial Room by Janet Frame, Text, 2013)

 

A Korean Angel at My Table

From Sigongsa a two-volume Korean edition of Janet Frame's complete autobiography. (2013)