calamity3jane 's review for:

The Bone People by Keri Hulme

5.0

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This is one of my all time favorites. Set in New Zealand, "The Bone People" examines the limitations of language and the possibility of connection in a linguistic no mans land. The characters are all studies in inscrutability, starkly different depending on the language they use. An experiment in creole fictive possiblity, and a tale of redemption in which each character creates his own hell, this is a novel of the fall from letter to flesh. Astoundingly imaginative, this novel creates whole world within each mind. From a seed of story the novel spirals into a poetic blast of a conch shell.