I hadn’t heard of Janet Frame until I found two of her short story collections in an Oxfam last year. The blurb and write-ups were very intriguing, non more so than the fact her work in this book, upon winning a literary award, saved her from a leukotomy whilst in a mental asylum diagnosed with schizophrenia.

With this in mind, there is a haunting air of instability that permeates the twenty-four stories written in the late 1940s. They are delicate slivers of life in New Zealand as young, innocent girls or fragile young women. A lot of the stories seem to draw on Frame’s own life; either taking place in mental hospitals or recounts of life on the homestead as a little girl experiencing new best friends, strict parents or dubious tales of a supposedly murderous grandmother. They are very short fragments and thoughts, meditative but incredibly powerful. She writes with such pathos and poignancy that you become absorbed in an inherent sadness within the words; her prose and its tone are truly beautiful and resolutely struck a chord ever more strongly as the book went on.

Unsurprisingly, the book is reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s writing so if you like her or just want to appreciate some beautiful, melancholic short stories, I strongly urge you to give this a go. ( )

Janet Frame’s debut collection of stories, The Lagoon, collects together pieces she wrote during the late 1940s and early 1950s, a time when she was repeatedly hospitalized in psychiatric institutions. The collection was initially published in 1951 by The Caxton Press (there have been numerous subsequent editions) and in 1952 won the Hubert Church Memorial Award, a New Zealand literary prize established in 1945 and given annually to the best first book of prose published during the previous year. The book established Frame’s reputation as a daring prose stylist and fearless storyteller who focused her art primarily on childhood perceptions of the adult world. The stories are loosely structured, rarely dramatic and occasionally come across as surreal or dreamlike. Several of the stories are built around a family event of some sort, such as an outing or a holiday, in which children interact with the natural world while forming alliances and making observations about their siblings, their parents or other adults. Some situate the narrator in a grown-up environment reminiscing about or recalling an earlier time in his or her life. The trusting and ingenuous perspective prevalent in the stories concerning children is often threatened or endangered by the more serious and weighty concerns of those around them, creating a kind of push-pull effect as the children are thrust into the adult world and compelled to acknowledge it. But we discover too that the adults in Frame’s stories are not always reliable, the men sometimes drunk, the women often distracted, confused or depressed. Read in sequence, the twenty-four stories collected in this volume create the impression of an author of prose fiction who, while trying to establish her voice through experimentation, is actively seeking ways to stretch the limits of the genre. Though the fragmentary nature of some of the stories in The Lagoon mark it as a youthful work, it remains a significant document that heralds the arrival of an extraordinary writer who over the next fifty years would produce one masterpiece after another. ( )

Debuutbundel. Dit boek voorkwam dat de schrijfster, ten onrechte verpleegd in een psychiatrische inrichting, een ingrijpende hersenoperatie moest ondergaan.