Wrestling With The Angel: A Life Of Janet Frame - Hardcover

King, Michael

4.24

117 ratings by Goodreads

9780670893713: Wrestling With The Angel: A Life Of Janet Frame

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670893714 ISBN 13: 9780670893713

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2000

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Book by King, Michael

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About the Author:

Michael King has published more than twenty books and received seventeen awards. His international bestseller, Death of the Rainbow Warrior, was published in 1986 and has become the standard work on the French Secret Service's attempt to cripple Greenpeace.

From Publishers Weekly:

Remarkable and resilient, Janet Frame is New Zealand's most accomplished writer. She's the author of 11 novels, dozens of poems and stories and three volumes of autobiography (including the work that inspired Jane Campion's film An Angel at My Table). Now in her 70s and having suffered a stroke, she is largely silent. In this rigorously researched authorized biography, fellow New Zealander King (Death of a Rainbow Warrior) looks back over Frame's anguished life. At her request, the bookAwhich draws from previously unavailable personal documentsAlacks critical literary analysis (although King does note that her writing conveys the "sense that reality itself is a fiction, and one's grasp on it no more than preposterous pretense and pretension"). But the focus here is not on Frame's works; instead, King describes her life as wordsmith and survivor. In effect two books, the first half of Wrestling with the Angel is a dramatic account of Frame's struggle to survive a painful and emotionally troubled life (two of her sisters drowned, and she attempted suicide) and to write. King details Frame's early lifeAher travels into and out of psychiatric hospitals (where her anxiety neuroses were dangerously misdiagnosed as schizophreniaAshe narrowly escaped a lobotomy)Aas well as the writing career she began in her mid-30s. In the anticlimactic second half of the book, he describes Frame's succ?s d'estime: the literary prizes she won, the money troubles that followed and her compulsive moving from place to place (five times in one two-year period), in New Zealand and abroad, which testified to the persistence of her unexorcised anxieties. King's biography is a competent account of an unusual lifeAthough no replacement for Frame's autobiography. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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