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The Carpathians / Janet Frame.

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: Frame, Janet. Janet Frame collection ; Frame, JanetPublication details: Auckland, N.Z. : Vintage, 2005.Description: 278 pages ; 20 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 1869411544 (pbk.)
  • 1869417372 (2005 : pbk.)
Subject(s): Genre/Form: Awards:
  • Commonwealth Writer's Prize, 1989, winner.
  • New Zealand Book Awards, 1989: Fiction.
Fiction notes: Click to open in new window
Holdings
Item type Current library Collection Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Fiction Alexander Library | Te Rerenga Mai o Te Kauru Stack Room Stack Room FRA 1 Available T00196642
Fiction Alexander Library | Te Rerenga Mai o Te Kauru Stack Room Stack Room FRA 2 Available T00196641
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

What happens when the town of Puamahara begins to profit from its legend and the astronomers discovering the Gravity Star predict an unthinkable future? Mattina Brecon, a New Yorker, arrives in Kowhai Street, Puamahara, where her painstaking study of her neighbours is interrupted by a new kind of cataclysmic event. Mattina finds herself in possession of a Kowhai Street that is without people, language or memory.This novel won the 1989 Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Ansett New Zealand Book Award. It is Janet Frame's eleventh novel.

Novel.

First published: Auckland, N.Z. : CenturyHutchinson, 1988.

"The Janet Frame collection"--Cover.

Commonwealth Writer's Prize, 1989, winner.

New Zealand Book Awards, 1989: Fiction.

2 7 8 11 18 20 22 27 37 44 60 68 74 79 81 83 89 96 98 147 149 151 159 161 164 168 172 175 189

GY_NZFIC

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This novel within a novel within a novel raises questions about the nature of identity, narrative, and language itself. Protagonist Mattina Brecon temporarily moves from the hub of New York City to a small town in New Zealand, edge of the civilized world. As she does so, the conventional dichotomies between center and periphery, self and other, crumble. Focusing our attention on the life of suburban Kowhai Street, the novel is a thought-provoking exploration of the connections among language, memory, and identity. Yet it also entertains with its whimsical descriptions of suburban life and its gradual unfolding of supernatural events in an apparently ordinary town. A book that will be enjoyed by a wide range of readers. Julia Duffy, CUNY Graduate Sch. Lib. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

A fearful sense of unnamed and unnamable disaster haunts the pages of the 11th novel by this acclaimed New Zealand writer ( Faces in the Water, Living in the Maniototo ), whose topsy-turvy vision of a world beyond bearing reminds us uneasily of our own. News of the Gravity Star, so-called because the nearer it hovers, the farther it recedes, and of the Memory Flower, Puamahara, which unleashes the land's memories and unites them with the future, so stirs rich New Yorker Mattina Brecon that she flies to New Zealand to visit the town of Puamahara, where the Memory Flower took palpable form. Driven to possess places that capture her fancy and the people therein, she rents a house on Kowhai Street, and sets out to know, possess, her neighbors. But they, like Mattina herself, are strangers, imposters, activated by the memory of another time and place. Increasingly, Puamahara resembles a graveyard, silent, unmoving, except for the great lolling exotic flower heads. As Mattina begins to discover the secrets of Kowhai Street, she senses in her bedroom a shape, quiescent but clearly there, akin to the formless pain inside her body. The grace and power of Frame's prose illumines this inventive, delicately structured narrative. (October) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

This forceful and original novel tells the story of Mattina Brecon, a wealthy New Yorker who spends a few months in the small New Zealand city of Puamahara. Mattina rents a house on Kowhai Street and spends her time trying to get to know her neighbors. All of them, she discovers, consider themselves strangers despite their close proximity. In fact, one of the novel's several themes has to do with the relativity of distance: what is close is also far away, while what seems distant is at the same time next door. The novel mixes the mundane, expressed in the details of the lives of the residents of Kowhai Street, with the surreal. At the time that Mattina is scheduled to return to New York, all of her neighbors suddenly disappear. This incident is never explained. Also unanswered is the question of who actually controls the narrative point of view. It may be Mattina; it may be Dinny Wheatstrone, known as the ``impostor novelist'' of Kowhai Street; it may be Mattina's son. Despite its thematic and symbolic complexity, the novel is made accessible by the author's beautiful prose. MEQ.

Kirkus Book Review

A deceptively low-key tale from New Zealand writer Frame, author of ten other novels and a well-received three-volume autobiography. With time and money on her hands, Manhattan patrician Mattina Brecon leaves Park Avenue for New Zealand to invest in real estate and local culture. Choosing the town of Puamahara, Mattina settles in among the residents of Kowhai Street for an extended field study and undertakes a polite door-to-door inspection of the neighborhood. Puamahara's one attraction, the legend of the Memory Flower, and the fact that many of its residents are retired, present to Mattina a community defined by memories. While the murder of a local excites Kowhai Street to speculation, the lives of its residents remain predictably routine: gardening, work, endless conversation. Just when Frame's project threatens to fade into pale domesto-drama, though, the author attempts to give Kowhai Street a bizarre spin. Filtering her narrative through a number of characters, point of view initially splays--and then entirely blurs--one evening when a supernatural event blends time, space, and memory on Kowhai Street. While far from convincing, Frame's narrative twists are nevertheless eerily dislocating, and redeem an otherwise humdrum venture. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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