kdraw333 's review for:

Faces in the Water by Janet Frame

3.0

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This novel feels like a memoir, the fictional narrator at a slight remove. Perhaps fiction is a method we rely on to examine ourselves at a distance, safely and honestly. It feels right for this story, regardless how much it might draw from Janet Frame's own experience in mental health asylums. The narrator struggles for something to hold onto, a sense of self-belief in a purgatory of lost souls. The book spins in circles like an anxious mind, the plot tangled in reveries and careful observations of patients and staff, seeming to promise answers but their ultimate meaning remaining elusive. At times I wanted more dramatic movement to propel me through. Having lost the plot felt uncomfortable and lethargic. But then an image would cut through the fog with such clarity. This is what I love about Janet Frame's writing. The way she observes things is often enough for me. Her descriptions of her encounter with a cow on her 'escape' from the asylum, with the mobile library van that comes to visit, of her own tender thoughts on suffering... I felt a little more raw and empathetic reading it.