Scented Gardens for the Blind and The Adaptable Man

Description

Title: Scented Gardens for the Blind and The Adaptable Man
Author: Janet Frame
Publisher: Vintage (The Janet Frame Collection), New Zealand, 2007
Format: Hardback
Condition: Excellent — as new
Price: $28.00

Two complete novels in one volume. Out of print.

Description:

Two novels. One voice. One of the most uncompromising literary imaginations New Zealand has ever produced.

Scented Gardens for the Blind (first published 1963) takes the fractured Glace family as its subject — a daughter who does not speak, a mother who cannot see, a father absorbed in genealogy and toy soldiers while the shadow of nuclear apocalypse hangs over the present. Each member lives in a vivid world entirely of their own making, cut off from the others by different forms of sensory and emotional deprivation. Frame uses alternating interior monologues to map the failure of human communication, and the novel moves toward an ending that forces the reader to reinterpret every page that came before it. Kirkus called it “a brilliant outburst of a book”; Spare Rib noted it “defies stereotyping and tidy categorisation” — which was, of course, the point.

The Adaptable Man (first published 1965) takes Frame to the small English village of Little Burgelstatham, where the arrival of electricity and the London Overspill forces a large cast of characters to choose their relationship to the modern world. Some resist; others, like Muriel Baldry — now free to hang her Venini chandelier and throw dinner parties — throw themselves into it. But Frame’s comedy of manners has teeth, and the central question — what do we sacrifice to adapt? — turns darker as the novel progresses. CK Stead observed that “Frame, that most authentic, firm and unadaptable lady, planted landmines everywhere in those bogus English fields.”

Both novels were written during Frame’s most prolific period, when she was living in London after the formal rejection of her schizophrenia diagnosis at the Maudsley Clinic. The discipline and structural confidence of this writing represent, as a Landfall reviewer observed, “the most disciplined, structured, and completely professional accomplishment” of that era of her career. They are less widely read than Owls Do Cry or Faces in the Water — which makes this omnibus a genuine find for any serious Frame reader.

This edition is part of the 2007 Vintage “Janet Frame Collection” series, produced posthumously to bring Frame’s full body of work into print under a unified edition. It is now out of print.

Why We Stock It:

Frame is the cornerstone of the NZ literary tradition — and these two novels represent her art at its most formally assured and satirically sharp. For a bookshop whose mission is to preserve what New Zealand culture has produced and too easily let slip, stocking Frame is not optional. This particular omnibus pairs two underread novels in a beautiful edition that is no longer available new. It belongs on every serious NZ literature shelf.