A Frame Story

Page 9 September–October 2009 it or not, Tulli seems to say, we must work with the flawed materials we have been given, we must build with them, or on them. We may complain about these materials and mutter at their exorbitant price, but first we must see them for what they are. This intricately wrought, highly original novel provides a working model for doing just that. Jaimy Gordon writes fiction in English (Bogeywoman , She Drove Without Stopping) and translates from German (Hermine, by Maria Beig). She teaches in the Prague Summer Program and has written about Bruno Schulz. Gordon continued from previous page from the baroque poeticism of Dreams and Stones (2004, also translated by Bill Johnston), a fantasia on the construction and deconstruction of a great city. Brilliant, prolific, and fearless, Bill Johnston has taken on even the legendarily difficult Witold Gombrowicz, along with more than a dozen other Polish poets and writers, and seems to be working his way through the novels of Magdalena Tulli for Archipelago Books, whose beautiful editions remind one of great small presses of yore. Although nothing inside the novel specifies her gender, I read the narrator of Flaw as a woman, and not only because its author is a woman. Let us say that the narrator owns a sort of womanhood by default, because the menacing, conspiratorial, arrogantly negligent workers of her parable, those “master craftsmen and apprentices” who have built this world for her and who will “stop at nothing” to ward off the blame for it, are all men. Moreover, the narrator explains, they are men whose “perpetually smoldering anger” came of “being condemned to a life without women.” Even if the narrator claims neither one gender nor the other, we all know that that old life, the life without women, is over. Nevertheless , the world we start with, the one in which we are what the tailor makes us, particularly in wartime or other times of crisis, is a world made by men, and so is the world of forms that the novelist inherits. Like A Frame Story Julia Elliott The novel Towards Another Summer, written in 1963 but published posthumously because Janet Frame found it “embarrassingly personal,” contains no shocking revelations about the writer’s private life, especially to readers familiar with the tragically baroque details of her New Zealand youth: an impoverished childhood, an epileptic brother, two sisters dead by separate drowning incidents, an attempted suicide, nearly a decade of involuntary and voluntary incarceration in psychiatric hospitals, hundreds of electroshock therapy “treatments” (after a mistaken schizophrenia diagnosis), and a finally, a hair’s-breadth escape from a scheduled lobotomy after her first book won a prestigious prize. Frame explored such grim autobiographical details in her fictional works (especially her first three novels) and then, after emerging as a writer of international prominence, revisited her life more explicitly in a three-volume memoir that was eventually adapted into a film by Jane Campion (An Angel at My Table [1990]). Frame left New Zealand in 1956, lived in London, published prolifically, and then returned to New Zealand in 1963, where her two remaining family members had been hospitalized (her brother after falling from a horse, her sister after suffering a stroke). At this point, Frame abandoned the novel she’d been working on to write TowardsAnother Summer, a fictionalized account of a weekend spent with English journalist Geoffrey Moorhouse, his wife Janet (who was also from New Zealand), and their two small children. On the first page of the novel, the narrator Grace Cleave describes the mystifying weekend: “and it was between the second and third parts of her novel ‘in progress’that the weekend intruded itself; it stuck in the gullet of her novel; nothing could move out or in, her book was in danger of becoming a ‘fosterchild of silence.’”When reduced to summary, the plot reveals little in the way of “embarrassingly personal” material: New Zealand novelist Grace Cleave leaves her London flat during the dreary winter to spend a weekend in Stockport, England with the Thirkettle family. Anticipating the visit, Grace envisions herself as a charismatic guest whose “witty and sparkling” repartee leaves her hosts...