Owls Do Cry

Christchurch, New Zealand: Pegasus, 1957. First Edition. Cloth. Fair/Good. cover is in good condition - unfaded with few chips but some of edge on lower rear missing 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. New endpapers Janet Frame's first novel, Owls Do Cry draws on many details of her own life. Her childhood was shadowed by poverty, sickness, and accidental death, and shaped by the power of the spoken and written word. At twenty-one, she was institutionalized in a mental hospital and later saved from a threatened lobotomy only by her achievement as a writer. Owls Do Cry explores the life of the Withers family in a New Zealand town "halfway between the South Pole and the equator." Poverty and a reputation for strangeness exclude the Withers from the hollow conventions and artifacts of suburban life. They do not possess revolving clotheslines, walkie talkie dolls or uncomfortable chairs, yet the children's lives are rich in "wonder currency:" rhymes and rituals, play and dreams. Twenty years later, this currency is subsumed for each of them into vivid, haunted inner lives. Owls Do Cry lyrically evokes "the private and lonely night, with a room of its own but no window" within which the characters are caught. The parents are worn down by worry and love; the children grow into baffled, damaged adults. Each has taken hold of "the wrong magic and the wrong fairy tale." The special quality of this novel lies in its poetic, hallucinatory, perceptive voice, imbued with the surreal vision of childhood and madness.