“I think I must be frozen inside with no heart to speak of. I think I’ve got the wrong way of looking at Life.” (“My Last Story,” in THE LAGOON, 183)
Janet Frame is mesmerizing. How stupid of me not having read her earlier! I can fully imagine myself writing a serious piece of criticism on her, book-length perhaps.
What about the ending of “The Day of the Sheep” (THE LAGOON, 75):
Oh if only the whole of being were blued and washed and hung out in the far away sun. Nora has traveled, she knows about things, it would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we’re always in other places, lost, like sheep, and I cannot understand the leafless cloudy secret and the sun of any day.
There is a recurrent pattern of some kind in “Dossy,” “Child,” and “Jan Godfrey.” What can it be? A thread worth pursuing.
