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Edge
| Biography |
Mixing and revolving words with the skill of a warrior handling a Taiaha, novelist Janet Frame made an pre-eminent edge contribution to international literature, coming as she did from the peripheries of art and society. Yet her fictional explorations have always been forays into the interior. For Frame her art and imagining were the closest she could come to conjuring experience, madness, dreams, identity and memory, into a coiled reality. The agenda for her prose, wrestling with the dual/jewel (to borrow a typical Frame word-play) nature of 'truth' entangled in the medium of its expression, is laid out the famous opening lines of To the Is-land:
"From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth."
She was short-listed for the Nobel Prize twice and was compared to Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf. "One of the great writers of our time" (San Francisco Chronicle). "Ms. Frame writes with a beauty that confers a morbid grandeur, that makes poetry of the particular, the private, the enclosed." The New York Times on Reservoir: Stories and Sketches. "Few novelists since Joyce," writes William Peden in the Saturday Review, "have so successfully portrayed the world of dreams and illusions."
Her international reputation rests on an original, "edge of the alphabet" use of language. Australian Nobel Laureate Patrick White on Frame's "new minded" way with words wrote in a letter to her publisher that "Frame's writing makes me feel I have always been a couple of steps out from where I want to get in my own writing." Her prose is torrential, electric, soaring on a thermal from an Oamaru north westerly or tossed about in the stormy roaring forties: allusive, looking for symbols, currents, myth, metaphor:
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