THE CARPATHIANS [First UK edition]

Janet Frame

ISBN 10: 0747502463 / ISBN 13: 9780747502463

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 1988

About this Item

First impression of the first UK edition. ***Near fine in dark blue cloth-covered boards with gilt titles and border to the spine and gilt initials and star design to the front board. The boards are clean and unmarked. No significant bumps or creases, just a slight crease to the bottom corner of the back board. Internally also near fine with no inscriptions. Dark blue endpapers and an integral satin blue reading ribbon. Pages clean - good quality thick paper used. Spine tight. ***In a near fine colour-illustrated dustwrapper, that has not been price-clipped, retaining the original publisher's printed price of £12.95. No chips or tears and hardly any creasing. No fading. Dustwrapper bright. ***242mm x 162mm. 196 pages. ***'Janet Paterson Frame ONZ CBE (28 August 1924 - 29 January 2004) was a New Zealand author. She was internationally renowned for her work, which included novels, short stories, poetry, juvenile fiction, and an autobiography, and received numerous awards including being appointed to the Order of New Zealand, New Zealand's highest civil honour. Frame's celebrity derived from her dramatic personal history as well as her literary career. Following years of psychiatric hospitalisation, Frame was scheduled for a lobotomy that was cancelled when, just days before the procedure, her debut publication of short stories was unexpectedly awarded a national literary prize. Many of her novels and short stories explore her childhood and psychiatric hospitalisation from a fictional perspective, and her award-winning three-volume autobiography was adapted into the film "An Angel at My Table" (1990), directed by Jane Campion.' [Wiki] ***'At the time of the strange happenings in Kowhai Street, Puamahara, people were living their quiet lives, taking pride in the maintenance of "suburban comfortable" homes, little realizing that inexplicable chaos was at hand. ***As the events of Kowhai Street unfold, the Tararua mountains, their foothills and orchards become as near and as far as the distant Carpathians. Janet Frame transports us to the realm of shifting dimensions - where unquestioned beliefs inexorably fall into doubt and ordinary lives come to blossom in the Ancient Springtime.' [Quote taken from the front flap of the dustwrapper] ***First impression of the first UK edition, complete in its original dustwrapper, in beautiful near fine condition. This last published novel by Janet Frame is now quite elusive, especially in such nice condition. ***For all our books, postage is charged at cost, allowing for packaging: any shipping rates indicated on ABE are an average only: we will reduce the P & P charge where appropriate - please contact us for postal rates for heavier books and sets etc.

Seller Inventory # 4212x

Bibliographic Details

• Title: THE CARPATHIANS [First UK edition]
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, London
• Publication Date: 1988
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0747502463
• ISBN 13: 9780747502463
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First UK Edition
• Printing: First Impression
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature
  • First Editions

About this title

Synopsis

Frame, Janet. The Carpathians. London, Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd, 1988. 16.5 cm x 24 cm. 196 pages. Dustjacket designed by AB3 Design with an illustration by Dulce Tobin. Original Hardcover with dustjacket. Excellent condition with only minor signs of external wear. The Carpathians is the last novel [published in her lifetime] by New Zealand writer Janet Frame, published in 1988 and awarded that year's Commonwealth Writers' Prize. In The Carpathians we are presented with a topsy-turvy world. The protagonist, Mattina Brecon, is a wealthy New Yorker whose husband, Jake, is a novelist struggling to follow up the success of his smash-hit debut. Mattina, upon hearing the legend of the Memory Flower, decides to fly to New Zealand to visit a rural town, Puamahara, where the magical flower, said to release the memories of the land, linking them with the future, is rumoured to grow. Once there, Mattina rents a house on Kowhai Street, where, posing as a novelist, she sets out to record the lives of her new antipodean neighbours. As she discovers, however, the locals are also ‘impostors’, brought into existence by the memory of another time and place. Eventually, the town slowly begins to resemble a cemetery, silent and dead still. As Mattina begins to unravel the secrets of Kowhai Street she discovers, in her own bedroom a mysterious presence. The novel is hijacked by one of Mattina's new neighbours who describes herself as an imposter novelist, as the New Yorker gradually loses her grip on time and place. A dense, complex novel, The Carpathians combines elements of Magical Realism, postmodernism and metafiction.

Review

In The Carpathians, Janet Frame again calls into question the human facility to communicate. Relocated New Yorker Mattina Brecon attempts to get to know her neighbors on Kowhai Street, where she has taken up temporary residence in order to research the Memory Flower for which her new town is famous. One night she awakens to find her neighbors screaming without human language, covered by a midnight rain of glittering specks that are the ashes of language. The townspeople mysteriously disappear, leaving Mattina alone. Her own memories and the frightening novel of a stranger that tells the story of Mattina herself are all that she has to trace the mystery.