Daughter Buffalo by Janet Frame

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.