The Sub Rosa reading group will meet Saturday August 29th at 6:30 to discuss Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame.
A landmark of modernist fiction, Owls Do Cry traces one family’s unraveling in post-war New Zealand after their daughter is institutionalized.
First published in New Zealand in 1957, Owls Do Cry, was Janet Frame’s second book and the first of her thirteen novels. Now approaching its 60th anniversary, it is securely a landmark in Frame’s catalog and indeed a landmark of modernist literature. The novel spans twenty years in the Withers family, tracing Daphne’s coming of age into a post–war New Zealand too narrow to know what to make of her. She is deemed mad, institutionalized, and made to undergo a risky lobotomy. Margaret Drabble calls Owls Do Cry “a song of survival”—it is Daphne’s song of survival but also the author’s: Frame was herself misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and scheduled for brain surgery. She was famously saved only when she won New Zealand’s premier fiction prize.
Janet Frame was among the first major writers of the twentieth century to confront life in mental institutions and Owls Do Cry is important for this perspective. But it is equally valuable for its poetry, its incisive satire, and its acute social observations. A sensitively rendered portrait of childhood and adolescence and a testament to the power of imagination, this early novel is a first–rate example of Frame’s powerful, lyric, and original prose.
“Owls Do Cry is a devastating reflection on the character of conventional society and the dangers that await those who reject its narrowness… It is a heartbreaking evocation of childhood and a child’s vision of the world; and not least, it is a work of considerable lyrical beauty.”-IRISH TIMES
“A modernist masterpiece about siblings struggling with money, health, and grief still has the power to unnerve and astonish nearly 60 years after it was first published. Owls Do Cry remains innovative and relevant.” – THE GUARDIAN
“A mixture of the bleak and the humorous, the everyday and the magical.”-INDEPENDENT
Janet Frame (1924 – 2004) was one of New Zealand’s most distinguished writers. She is best known for An Angel at My Table, which the Sunday Times of London called “one of the great autobiographies written in the twentieth century,” and inspired Jane Campion’s internationally acclaimed film. Throughout her long career, Frame received a wide range of awards, including every literary prize for which she was eligible in New Zealand, honorary membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Literature.