Scented Gardens for the Blind, Paperback 1980

Description: Scented Gardens for the Blind, Paperback 1980 Condition: Mint Sensory perceptions are the tools with which Janet Frame investigates the failure of human communication in this brilliant tale of a mind gone mad, a world become insane. With alternating interior monologues, the author conjures up the three members of the Glace family: Vera, the mother who has willed herself sightless - in jealousy of her daughter’s affliction, in guilt of the gas chambers of the past, and fear of the blinding destruction to come; Erlene, the daughter, who has stopped speaking “Because every time she opened her mouth to say something, her voice, in hiding, reminded her that there was nothing to say and no words to say it”; and Edward, the husband who abandons his family and the living present to make a genealogical study of a perfectly ordinary family in a distant land. These portraits of people in crisis speak eloquently about speech, life, human perceptions, and the imperceptible edges of communication. With a magician’s sleight of hand, Janet Frame violates the reader’s expectations by revealing that all of the characters projected have existed only in the minds of Vera, a fifty-year-old spinster incarcerated in a mental institution for the thirty years since she stopped speaking. Under pressure from the psychiatrists, Vera finally does rupture her silence: “one week after the atomic bomb had been dropped that destroyed Britain,” she begins to growl and mutter, uttering the tortured syllables of the new language of humanity.

Price: 45 USD

Location: Vancouver, Washington

End Time: 2024-12-18T04:08:21.000Z

Shipping Cost: 0 USD