The Carpathians

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.