For fans of Janet Frame’s work, Towards Another Summer will be another encounter with a much-loved friend. Those unfamiliar with this brilliant and eccentric New Zealander, as famous for her traumatic life story as for her crystalline prose, might start here.
Towards Another Summer (Janet Frame, Vintage, $23.95, 9781741667240, October) ****
For fans of Janet Frame’s work, Towards Another Summer will be another encounter with a much-loved friend. Those unfamiliar with this brilliant and eccentric New Zealander, as famous for her traumatic life story as for her crystalline prose, might start here. Janet Frame wrote this slender novel in 1963, during her seven-year sojourn in London. It’s a highly personal work that she did not want published until after her death. Frame’s London output was prolific, and she was developing a more international view of the world, but her life-long obsession with privacy is evident. Grace Cleave, living in her soot-streaked flat, struggles with the demands of social convention and fulfilling others’ expectations. Becoming known as a writer, she feels she should be able to converse in person as wittily as she does in her work, but is defeated by mundane interactions such as a country weekend with acquaintances. Grace is also feeling the pull of her native New Zealand—she is transforming into a migratory bird. Reminiscences of her poverty-ridden childhood contrast the intensity and lyricism of childhood perceptions with the stultifying conformity of the adult world. Frame’s treasure-house of personal metaphor transforms a meditation on exile and return into something singular, knowing and wickedly funny.
Kathy Hope is a former trade editor who now works in medical publishing
This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2007, Thorpe-Bowker