The Edge of the Alphabet

Reviews / Votes

'Her writing is engaging and idiosyncratic - full of a character that proves that the best way to strike deep with the reader is not to do what everyone else is doing, but to grasp your distinctive vision of the world and hammer it hard.... [T]hat is the joy of books like this, out of print for 60 years, but now roaring into view, stronger and brighter than ever. It's good to have it back.'

- John Self, The Times 'Janet Frame's prose is a highly volatile material. Words, sentences, paragraphs behave like mercury on the page, running this way and that, forming new shapes and smears from one silvery, trembling blob.... Frame's fiction ... made not of some stale conception of verisimilitude but of the shifting stuff of sentences, can take us to a borderless, boundless anywhere.'

- Kirsty Gunn, Times Literary Supplement 'It is the most Woolfian of Frame's work: with intense, often dissociated separate monologues and repeated imagery of light, sounds and shapes evoking The Waves, and the long, turbulent journey by sea of Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out.'

- Catherine Taylor, Guardian 'Intensely personal, her writing is always spiralling in on itself, towards the condition of myth, and yet it nails the moment, pins down experiences so fleeting that others would never grasp them. What eludes ordinary language, she can capture in the extraordinary argot of her imagination.'

- Hilary Mantel 'She is a singular writer. No one is quite like her.'

- Eleanor Catton, author of The Luminaries 'It is a revelatory portrait of the sometimes unbearable unease of being a human, wrapped up in a consummately playful metafiction.'

- Ellen Peirson-Hagger, New Statesman 'Frame's writing ... frequently returns to the strange, self-doubling rituals of normalcy, required of us to find so-called connection. Frame is invested in those who fail such performances, and who sometimes reach a type of multiplicity far past them. Her sentences, always at the shore of some great nothingness, have the intricacies and echoes of a conch shell.... Frame points us away from the sturdy book in our hands, toward the flimsy, the abandoned, the scrapped and scraped, the reflective, the ribboned. Toward stories that are nothing but a title, and masterpieces that can fit in the interior pocket of a handbag. There, she says, look. You almost missed it. Look what she has made.'

- Audrey Woolen, New Yorker 'Frame's writing is often compared to Faulkner's, and her family history reads like a Southern Gothic novel. Yet Frame can be an extraordinarily cheerful, funny writer. Language was a source of continual revelation... The Edge of the Alphabet is about trash, debris, dreams, the incommunicable and the excluded.... The proposition Frame seems to be making is that marginality means semantic exile too; vivid, broken images are her characters' alternative vehicles for communication.'

- Lucie Elven, London Review of Books 'Frame achieved that supremely difficult task of finding a voice so natural it feels almost as if it were not written.'

- Jane Campion, Guardian '[Frame] is endowed with a poet's imagination, and her prose has beauty, precision, a surging momentum, and the quality of constant surprise.'

- The Atlantic '[Frame] meditates upon the disrelation between inner and outer landscapes, mental and physical colors, cruelty and the withdrawal from cruelty, the experience of chaos, of inexplicable evils, of broken perceptions.'

- New York Times 'She has shown, so quietly, a mastery of the English language which dazzles one beyond ordinary praise.'

- Naomi Mitchison 'Everything she presents is illuminated and thrown into sharp focus by the limpid clarity of a highly individual vision; she can be detached and passionate at the same time.'

- Fleur Adcock 'One of the great autobiographies of the twentieth century ... A journey from luminous childhood, through the dark experiences of supposed madness, to the renewal of her life through writing fiction. It is a heroic story, and told with such engaging tone, humorous perspective and imaginative power.'

- Michael Holroyd, Sunday Times (praise for An Angel at My Table)