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Living in the Maniototo / by Janet Frame.

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: Frame, Janet. Janet Frame collection ; The Janet Frame collectionPublication details: Auckland, N.Z. : Vintage, 2006.Description: 262 pages ; 21 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9781869417710 (pbk.)
  • 1869417712 (pbk.)
Subject(s): Genre/Form:
Holdings
Item type Current library Collection Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Fiction Davis (Central) Library Fiction Collection Fiction Collection FRA 2 Available T00484375
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

'Quirky, rich, eccentric, ' is how Margaret Atwood responded in the New York Times when this dazzling novel was first published in 1979. Through the eyes of a woman of myriad personalities - ventriloquist, gossip and writer - Janet Frame playfully explores the process of writing fiction: the avoidances, interruptions and irrelevancies, as well as a teasing blurring between fact and fiction. The landscape of the Maniototo becomes the 'bloody plain' of the imagination, as the narrator tells us about her marriages and children, her friends (real and imagined), her travels (between New Zealand and the United States) and her stay in the house left in her care by friends travelling in Italy. She must face the reality of death as well as probe the authenticity of the modern world. 'Probably as near a masterpiece as we are likely to see this year ...it is a novel full of riches' - Daily Telegraph 'Puts everything else that has come my way this year in the shade' - Guardian 'The most original and resourceful novel I have read for a long time' - New Statesman 'Frame's novel is remarkable - full of word plays, cameo portraits and deliberate mystery' - Publishers Weekl

Originally published: New York : Braziller, c1979.

Novel by a New Zealander.

2 5 6 8 11 18 19 68 69 85 86 100 151 155 156 159 161 164 168 175

GY_NZFIC

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

New Zealand's Frame is a crafty, if occasionally murky, writer. Here, though, her multiple surfaces lock up to produce something thoughtful and very fissionable: a ""replica or a replica dreaming of a replica of dreams,"" i.e., fiction-writing. Mavis Halleton, a widowed New Zealand writer (who thinks of herself too as Violet Pansy Proudlock, a ventriloquist, and as Alice Thumb, eavesdropper and gossip), visits a doctor friend in Baltimore. While there she hears from an older, childless Berkeley couple, the Garretts, who are great admirers of Mavis' work; they invite her to take over their house while they're away in Italy for six weeks: she can write there in peace. Mavis accepts and moves in. But then she hears that the Garretts have been killed in an earthquake in Italy, and their will leaves the house to her. As though this were not enough, the couple before their death had invited two other couples as houseguests--and these four in turn arrive, driving Mavis into the basement to be out of their way. This comedy of coincidence and implausibility is sheer puppetry, of course: the Garretts' house is the house of fiction which Mavis, with the ""generosity and forgiveness of words,"" has totally invented. Frame's satire on California personalities is a bit tired, but her gaily played-out metaphor of invention, living in the ""manifold,"" retains a lively snap. She treats the book like one of those miniature glass balls which snows when you shake it. Playful, deft work, then, by a writer of eccentric strengths. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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