Janet Frame (1924–2004)

"Listening to her one experienced a deep uneasiness, as of having avoided an urgent responsibility, like someone who walking at night along the banks of a stream catches a glimpse in the water of a white face or a moving limb turns quickly away refusing to help or to search for help. We all see the faces in the water. We smother our memory of them, even our belief in their reality, and become calm people of the world; or we can neither forget nor help them; sometimes by a trick of a show more circumstance or dream or a hostile neighbourhood of light we see our own face."

Faces in the Water must be one of the most horrifying and heartbreaking books I have ever read. Deemed as a semi-autobiographical work, this is Istina Mavet's account of her time in two, benighted mental facilities. Breakdown, anxiety, and paranoia crawl from the edges of this novel which deliberately and overwhelmingly crowd its pages yet its harrowing content lie not from these but from the manipulation and abuse the mentally ill suffer from the same people—with their families—expected to be sensitive to their needs and provide care for them. In some cases, they're wincingly made as a laughing stock. The crippling social stigma surrounding mental disorders is utterly palpable; the prejudice and discrimination, on Istina and other suffering women, make them start to believe that they are as disgusting and ugly as how they are treated. These horrors stand opposite the beautiful and breathtaking New Zealand landscape.

The breakdown, anxiety, and paranoia eventually worsen. The mind is a prison that hold them without any reprieve.

What do we have then? ECT / shock therapy is administered not as a cure but a punishment to make the patients cower, tame them like rabid animals. Lobotomy, with its mistaken and controversial promise of reconditioning and its serious side effects ignored, is endorsed as the last hope for a patient (** "I will wake and have no control over myself. I have seen others, how they wet the bed, how their faces are vague and loose with a supply of unreal smiles for which there is no real demand. I will be 're-trained'—that is the word used for leucotomy cases. Rehabilitated. Fitted, my mind cut and tailored to the ways of the world." (p189) and a devastating example would be the story of JFK's sister, Rosemary Kennedy).

With all the brutal and limited psychiatric treatments available in this period, although there is much to consider with the available medications at the present with some labeled as "chemical lobotomy", it is a great feat we have eradicated these and continue to seek and improve medical care in the field. But the most agonising of them all is what I think could be misdiagnosis in some of these cases. I watched French actress Sandrine Bonnaire's documentary about her sister with autism (Her Name is Sabine). Her sister was initially misdiagnosed with mental disorders then years later it was discovered she's on the autism spectrum. It took years for Sabine to finally get the care suited for her condition. Sadly, there were irreversible effects from the years she spent, with the incorrect meds, in a mental institution.

"Conversation is the wall we build between ourselves and other people, too often with tired words like used and broken bottles which, catching the sunlight as they lie embedded in the wall, are mistaken for jewels."

Janet Frame's prose lingers and envelops you. You feel like a helpless spectator too. Weaving Istina's story with that of other women, Frame paints a sympathetic environment outside their circumstances through the reader. It is hard not to be swept away by its poignancy and be immensely affected by it. Whilst it's also interspersed with gentle humour, the impact of this book is beyond the haunting ending it has. It's a hard pill to swallow; it is unforgettable. And I believe the social stigma that continues to burden the mentally ill, though not as worse as before, still needs to be addressed and shattered. We should all work together, start with educating ourselves and calling out others on their insensitivity and indifference; mental health should concern us all.

"Living is so much like one of those childhood games where you keep shutting your eyes and on opening them expect to find everything changed—a new city with glass towers, a table laden for a feast, a kindly forest where the trees no longer strike blows or twist themselves into fearful shapes." show less

As in her three previous novels, in Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963), Janet Frame is again writing about damaged and deluded people living diminished lives. The focus of the novel is the Glace family of New Zealand. Vera Glace lives with her mute adult daughter Erlene in the family home in the town where she grew up. But Erlene’s muteness is the least of their problems. The Glace family is fractured, barely functional, stymied by fear. “I deprived myself of each of my senses,” Vera show more declares. “It was I who was blind.” Vera’s blindness is apparently a choice: the condition seems to come and go. And there’s this: years earlier, Edward Glace left his family and moved to London to conduct genealogical research into the Strang family. In London Edward has access to a rich assortment of libraries, archives and government records, but he lives alone in a rooming house and seemingly has no friends. Edward’s life is empty, but for the Strangs and his collection of toy soldiers. When people inquire of Edward where his interest in an ordinary family comes from, he doesn’t answer, and in fact doesn’t seem sure of the answer. But Edward has reached a turning point, and this is a source of severe anxiety: he has found out all he can about the historical (dead) Strangs and, to move his project forward, must now approach those who are alive. Back in New Zealand Vera is exceedingly worried about Erlene, who refuses to speak and spends her days in her room staring out the window. Vera pleads daily with her daughter to say something and lectures her on the importance of speech for the survival of the human race, but to no avail. Midway through the novel Vera makes an appointment for Erlene with Dr. Clapper, whom she hopes will get to the bottom of Erlene’s muteness, which has no apparent physical cause, and get her talking again. The thrust of Frame’s tumultuous, pulsating narrative seems to be the role sensory perception plays in human experience, and the imbalance that results when means of social exchange are withdrawn. The novel is composed of parallel internal monologues from the perspectives of the three main characters, in which each faces their greatest fears. Vera’s fear is of being abandoned, a condition that her daughter’s silence exacerbates. Erlene, whose life of the imagination is vibrant and graphic, fears that meddlesome interventions will force her to speak up and rejoin humanity, resulting in exposure to human pressures and the loss of her imaginary companions. And Edward fears the human contact that the next stage of his research demands of him. But all of this is turned on its head in the book’s final chapter, where the source of the churning angst that fills the preceding pages is revealed. By 1963 Janet Frame’s confidence in her art and development as a novelist freed her to take imaginative leaps for which critics and readers would have been woefully unprepared. In Scented Gardens for the Blind her eccentric prose structures and the power of her imagery produce astonishing flights of fancy (“When Uncle Black-Beetle took off his apron and set aside his cutting, cleaning and polishing tools, she noticed that his skin was brown and shining, his eyes were large and black, overhanging his face like street-lamps, and there were dark tracks up and down his face which, lit by his eyes, became caverns, ravines flowing with underground rivers.”). By turns disturbing and playful, and often delightfully, unapologetically weird, Scented Gardens for the Blind continues Janet Frame’s exploration through fiction of the human mind in crisis and the destructive power of isolation and loneliness. show less

I hadn’t heard of Janet Frame until I found two of her short story collections in an Oxfam last year. The blurb and write-ups were very intriguing, non more so than the fact her work in this book, upon winning a literary award, saved her from a leukotomy whilst in a mental asylum diagnosed with schizophrenia.

With this in mind, there is a haunting air of instability that permeates the twenty-four stories written in the late 1940s. They are delicate slivers of life in New Zealand as young, show more innocent girls or fragile young women. A lot of the stories seem to draw on Frame’s own life; either taking place in mental hospitals or recounts of life on the homestead as a little girl experiencing new best friends, strict parents or dubious tales of a supposedly murderous grandmother. They are very short fragments and thoughts, meditative but incredibly powerful. She writes with such pathos and poignancy that you become absorbed in an inherent sadness within the words; her prose and its tone are truly beautiful and resolutely struck a chord ever more strongly as the book went on.

Unsurprisingly, the book is reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s writing so if you like her or just want to appreciate some beautiful, melancholic short stories, I strongly urge you to give this a go. show less

Floating somewhere between free verse and stream of consciousness, Janet Frame's beautifully evocative, semi-autobiographical novel traces the various fortunes of the dirt poor Withers family...most notably siblings Francie, Daphne, Toby, and Teresa (nicknamed "Chicks")...as they grow up and strive to establish lives for themselves in the modern world of 1950's New Zealand. Frame uses words the way a painter uses oils (or a sculptor a chisel) giving her readers not so much a linear story but show more rather a carefully curated collage of memories, impressions, and emotional impacts. One marries well and turns to consumerism in order to fill an inner void; another tries to make their own way despite a severe handicap only to find Poverty traveling alongside them; and yet another struggles to understand the world through a mind crippled by madness. Humorous and heartbreaking in turn, "Owls Do Cry" is the closest I've come to an immersive reading experience in quite some time. show less