Faces in the Water by Janet Frame – #1961Club

I made a lot of notes on Faces in the Water while I was reading it, but I find that I don’t really know what to write now! It’s a novel about a woman who is in and out of psychiatric institutions – mostly in – and the treatment she receives from the staff there. Frame was famously going to have a lobotomy before she was awarded a literary prize, and her characters face and fear the same fate – as well as other brutal forms of treatment that were meted out to those deemed ‘mad’. It is clearly a heavily autobiographical book, despite what the note at the beginning protests. I’m not going to write a full review, but will share some quotes and a couple of reasons why I didn’t love this book as much as I was hoping. The strongest part of it is Frame’s ability to write moments of madness – getting into the curiously lucid incoherence of somebody in the throes of delusion. I will write about the season of peril. I was put in hospital because a great gap opened in the ice floe between myself…