DAUGHTER BUFFALO

by Janet Frame ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1972

This New Zealand author and poet metaphorically explores the American way of death; she exhumes those rock crystal realities which modern man, in his estrangement from others and himself, has been in the habit of burying. Medical student Edelman and the dying elderly writer Turnlung, together with their ""adopted daughter"" (a zoo buffalo--pristine innocence) assume, Cerberus-fashion, a fixed station before the fact of death. Edelman pursues his investigations -- he removes organs from a beloved dog, excises a false unity with his fiancee, remembers and analyzes the demise of family and strangers. Turnlung chases a phantom language to root out deception: ""I have grown used to the tendency of human beings to ransack each other's reality and to the way they go about it like jewel thieves."" And in a society where the elderly are packed away for neat extinction, a kind of Instant Trash Disposal, and TV provides a cornucopia of deaths -- the limited supply of human grief and understanding is easily exhausted. At the close Turnlung (a name equating survival with turning away from death) and Edelman meld -- as an old man in a cell of a home for the aged. Ms. Frame writes elliptically, with caustic impulses which densely course over the same symbolic circuits. It's disturbing and claustrophobic.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1972

ISBN: 0807612847

Page Count: -

Publisher: Braziller

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1972

Categories: FICTION