| Towards Another Summer |  | Author: Janet Frame
Publisher: Virago Press Ltd
Category: Book
Buy New: £7.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 1031343
Media: Paperback
Pages: 224
ISBN: 1844085090
EAN: 9781844085095
ASIN: 1844085090
Publication Date: July 1, 2009 (In 209 Days)
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Not yet published
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The godwits vanish towards another summer and none knows where he will lie down at night. August 31, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I finished Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame last night and really, it's quite difficult to say how I felt about it because it is too good to capture....
It is brilliantly written and it shows the difficulties which she experienced in conveying by speaking just how she felt.Of course, in writing she was outstanding at explaining her thoughts, but when confronted by people, she could not say much. As the character, Grace Cleave, she describes her childhood memories and the fears she experienced but then when her hosts ask her about New Zealand, she cannot put that into words and she is aware of the inadequacy of her replies but still she can't speak of the memories she has.
' On the map, the last building is marked heavily in black: Industrial School.
'Industrial school...a place filled with whirling black skeletons...of which dust was the flesh, and that being sent to the In dust rial School you were caged inside a skeleton and forced to revolve with it in a fury of black dust until eventually your body became indistinguishable from the skeleton....'
' Hello! Had a good walk?
Yes, thank you...'
Grace Cleave, a writer leaves London to visit Philip and Anne and their little children - for a break away, and she occupies the room of Anne's father who is from New Zealand.
At night, she reads 'The Book of New Zealand Verse' and she remembers.
She is a migratory bird, so she reminds herself constantly and she has not settled in one place.
Her thoughts return to the old home and the old ways and we are able to see the brilliance of Janet Frame's writing shining through the obfuscations of her childhood life and the many misunderstandings and the grinding poverty of the family.
Yet she cannot convey those thoughts to her host family, so she quietly goes for walks and remembers.
Until eventually after a couple of days, she realises that she is much happier alone in London, and she decides to return.
"It was taking so long to get used to the ways of the world : Grace did not think she would ever learn.'
Many of us are very grateful that Janet Frame left this book, which she considered too personal to be published in her lifetime, to be published after her death because of the beauty of her writing, the brilliance of her style and the glimpses into her troubled and tortured writer's mind.
I would like to pay tribute to one of the greatest writers whom I have ever read.
'....Let the world have wonder enough to care
when poets live
and to grieve when they die.'
Val De Beer.
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