photo: Janet Frame and her curly hair, which attracted many unkind remarks.

I have read several books in recent months: light and serious ones, which I did not particularly feel like reviewing here. The book I have just finished, however : Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame, a New Zealand author I discovered shortly after my arrival with Owls Do Cry, thrilled me. The hard copy*, which I found second-hand (allowing me to return it once I have finished), was published posthumously in 2009 but was written in 1963. Janet Frame fascinates as much because of her personal history as her talent as a writer. Indeed, she spent some time in psychiatric hospitals in her youth, among other things, and attempted suicide. She narrowly escaped a lobotomy after a collection of her short stories won a literary prize in New Zealand. She later published her autobiography to set the record straight about her mental health, which did not stop anyone from speculating about it: schizophrenia, autism, or other conditions, but that does not interest me much. What the book I have just read mainly reveals is a mind as unique as it is fascinating. In this novel, where she somewhat naively gives herself the name Grace, we follow the heroine as she is in a kind of exile in Great Britain, after being declared insane in New Zealand and advised, for her own salvation, to sell hats. Grace is going to spend a weekend with a critic’s family in the north of Great Britain. She decides to spend a few days with them, while struggling to continue her writing project. The reader thus has the opportunity to enter the thoughts of a woman whom I find exceptional, detailing her discomfort in social circles: she never knows what to say or when to say it, she wants to flee to her room rather than spend time with her hosts. She is afraid of the couple’s children because they speak the truth. She has nothing to say to the BBC about her books. There is also her way of speaking about New Zealand, her childhood memories, her deep relationship with words, and her mind always attentive to everything around her, in short, someone who sees life in a particularly original way. During this weekend, which causes her pain and which she ultimately shortens, she reveals the nature of her mind, her inner and intimate life**, demonstrating great mastery of style and narrative, which moves back and forth between the weekend’s events and what is happening in Grace’s head. I liked the migratory bird metaphor less, that said, the cover of the book in French is absolutely beautiful.

*I may find difficult to bring this one back. The quality of the paper is outstanding. I should use my e-reader, but sometimes I miss the feeling of holding a book in my hands and turn the pages.

**Perhaps that is why she wanted this book to be published after her death.