skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Janet Frame is one of my favourite authors of all time. It seems she was a modern-day Virginia Woolf. Her way with words is absolutely magical. This was her only book to be set in the United States. The main topic of this book is death. Dr Talbot Edelman, our narrator, is a post-graduate medical student working in New York and researching death. We learn early on that he does this because death has always been repressed in his family; people have died or been dying and have suddenly disappeared and been pushed out of the imagination. Talbot discovers, as we do by reading this book, that death has become a taboo and dying has become the most lonely place of all. He experiments on his dog, Sally, his most faithful companion who he breaks and puts back together, because he loves her and because he couldn't bare to harm anyone else.
Talbot comes to meet Turnlung, an old man who seems to resemble his dead grandfather. Talbot comes to befriend and research Turnlung, an author and a man who has moved to New York, not to live but to die. The existence of Turnlung's existence is quite questionable from his entrance into the story. We wonder if he exists or if he only exists for Talbot.
Above all this book is a critique of the way that Western civilisation deals with death - we brush it under the carpet, we don't talk about it for fear of being viewed as morbid, we ignore it and we brush past it in day-to-day life, it is inevitable but it is completely silent. Talbot's experience with death in his family sets him up for a life of wondering and researching the taboo of death and in his own way his world becomes mythical as he obtains custody of a buffalo in the zoo.
This is an amazing book and I take something new from it every time I read it.
This amazing memoir documents the author's life after a hectic period of time. In December, 2003 her adult daughter contracted a near-fatal toxaemia and while she was in hospital in a coma, Didion's husband had a massive coronary and was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. In the following days and months, Didion went through a process that many people will go through at some stage in their lives, but that no one likes to think about.
The credible thing about this book is that it explores emotions immediately following her husband's death as well as during her daughter's first and subsequent admissions to hospital over the time. Didion was obviously imminently capable of keeping track of immediate emotions as she was a writer already; used to scribbling things down for more exploration at a later date.
This book for me was characterised firstly by Didion's bluntness and dedication to her subject of shock, grief and recovery. This often seems to appear as a lack of feeling or sensitivity but it does demonstrate a coping strategy that many use in times of grief. The feelings in this book are also expressed in a useful way which corresponds well with the natural process of grief. Tragically, just as Didion began to rebuild her life and look to the future, her daughter collapsed and was taken to hospital presumed brain dead - she recovered amazingly, but Didion found herself unable to grieve in the months while she sat by her daughter's bedside trying to accept that there was more to lose.
This is an amazing book both about the experience of death and the processes of grief involved with it. I would highly recommend it to anyone who has lost someone close or anyone interested in how the mind copes with such a loss.
