From Amazon.com
In
The Carpathians, Janet Frame again calls into question the human facility to communicate. Relocated New Yorker Mattina Brecon attempts to get to know her neighbors on Kowhai Street, where she has taken up temporary residence in order to research the Memory Flower for which her new town is famous. One night she awakens to find her neighbors screaming without human language, covered by a midnight rain of glittering specks that are the ashes of language. The townspeople mysteriously disappear, leaving Mattina alone. Her own memories and the frightening novel of a stranger that tells the story of Mattina herself are all that she has to trace the mystery.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
A fearful sense of unnamed and unnamable disaster haunts the pages of the 11th novel by this acclaimed New Zealand writer ( Faces in the Water, Living in the Maniototo ), whose topsy-turvy vision of a world beyond bearing reminds us uneasily of our own. News of the Gravity Star, so-called because the nearer it hovers, the farther it recedes, and of the Memory Flower, Puamahara, which unleashes the land's memories and unites them with the future, so stirs rich New Yorker Mattina Brecon that she flies to New Zealand to visit the town of Puamahara, where the Memory Flower took palpable form. Driven to possess places that capture her fancy and the people therein, she rents a house on Kowhai Street, and sets out to know, possess, her neighbors. But they, like Mattina herself, are strangers, imposters, activated by the memory of another time and place. Increasingly, Puamahara resembles a graveyard, silent, unmoving, except for the great lolling exotic flower heads. As Mattina begins to discover the secrets of Kowhai Street, she senses in her bedroom a shape, quiescent but clearly there, akin to the formless pain inside her body. The grace and power of Frame's prose illumines this inventive, delicately structured narrative.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
