Word: antipodean
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...will appreciate just how difficult, for the line between secret exultation and madness is typing-paper thin. Frame knows both sides of the line: as a voluntary mental patient in her native New Zealand and an artist whose originality and stunning gifts have secured a small loyal audience. An antipodean J.D. Salinger, she avoids interviews, and has even been known to flee a face-to-face meeting with her own publisher. In ad dition she has the odd distinction of having written under her real name while living as Janet Clutha, a name taken from New Zealand's Clutha...
Readers of Frame's Scented Gardens for the Blind and Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room will be prepared for the unexpected. Literary aestheticians can ponder the author's ideas on replica and originals. Structural purists may find her infusions of poetry unwiedly and unnecessary. Frame herself simply calls the book an entertainment. It is that and more, for she proves to be not only spinner of bizarre and hunting fantasy but a sharp social observer as well. Her descriptions of New Zealand suburbanization, of California as public confessional booth, of television and religious fakers convey a reality...
...coyote) and something that Hansard recorded as "runt" (which at least rhymed with the actual word). He once became so enraged with one Liberal minister that he dumped a glass of water on him. That minister was Paul Hasluck, who later became Governor General of Australia and, in an antipodean twist of fate, found himself swearing Whitlam into office last December...
...previous novels like Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room and, more recently, Intensive Care, the author examines conventional attitudes toward death with both satire and wistful poetry. Talbot's parents, for example, respond to mortality by rushing an elderly relative into a nursing home with a sigh of relief that Miss Frame compares with "the faint whirr made by the garbage disposal unit when it comes to rest after doing its work." Yet her central symbol for this evasive herdlike response to death is a six-month-old buffalo in the Central Park Zoo that is "already trained...
Writing from the focus of the spiritually down and out, the demented and the dead, New Zealander Janet Frame has developed a tidy literary reputation as a wild necromancer. Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room, her seventh novel, offers a typically hard look at life from the dark side...