Faces in the Water Book

4.5/5

The author of this book was saved from a lobotomy by her first book winning a prestigious literary prize.

Now, tell me, what do you say to that? What do you focus on first? The 'lobotomy', perhaps, one of the most popularly conceived intersections between the unknown and the brutal, a 'how could we' combined with a 'the best medicine has to offer' during a certain period of time. The 'author', the oh, I know what this will be about now, I have her numbered down for my interval of reading depending on my mood and flavor of curiosity. Or perhaps the 'prestigious literary prize' in conjunction with both, for what does that say about the prize, the judges, fiction entire when writing literally saved a person's existence from systematic excision?

Those who say space is the last frontier haven't considered the contours of their skull in a biosociocultural context for nearly long enough.

What are your verbs? What are your definitions? What is your metaphorical ideology that powers you through this world and all its clusterfucks of health and sanity, out here in the open where you are considered human enough for freedom of movement and adequate clothing? Tell me, what has saved you from the walls, the clockwork, the nurses jittering about their wards and bear baiting the more entertaining specimens of insanity for a momentary break from boredom? Tell me, what is your reality, and how blessed are you that it happens to conform to the all too easily deconstructed into the void word, normality?

Fiction? Fiction. The author won a prestigious literary prize in the midst of her incarceration. The prefixes of 'voluntary' and 'involuntary' to that are additional, optional, irrelevant. In this fiction, the character is saved at the moment of bypassing all authority, disobeying the rigidly brutal structure of mental 'health care', sacrificing all that had been taught her in the years of nurse and schedule and 'What she needs is...' for a single question of 'What is your opinion'?, asked of a passing doctor/deity normally hedged off for the good of both. "For your own good" is a persuasive argument that will eventually make man agree to his own destruction. What dark and sibilant passages of plashed neuron streaks, thrown forth from mind to matter on the force of the desire to mirror the psychological context with a construct of black and white, appealed to those judges of that 'prestigious literary prize'? What did it say about them, to have so strongly believed in the ravings of a madwoman? What political machinations of 'civilized' society favored the release of the author, rather than the shutting up of the approving audience? The rumors? The scandal? The entertainment value outweighing the threat posed by a person functioning along their own lines of metaphor? Where was the point that prose found its anchor and grew up and out into the 'real' world, changing fact based on the fiction, a list of sentences now to be found on a short biography heading an entry of literary works?

Janet Frame didn't get part of her brain cut out because her book became too famous.

Words. Just words. He sees the land of meaning, and one path to it, and the so-called "normal" people traveling swiftly and in comfort to the land; he does not include the shipwrecked people who arrive by devious lonely routes, and the many who dwell in the land in the beginning. Tell me, what are your fundamental clear cut and contemporary expoundings on the theme of objectivity? Tell me, what is your hardcore blunt and straightforward rhapsodizing on the motif of truth? How do you use them, and how well? How do you mix and match into the forms of 'sanity'? And how much will you suffer for it?