The Carpathians was published by Century Hutchinson in 1988, Frame’s last novel and in many ways her most ambitious. An American woman, Mattina Brecon, arrives in the small New Zealand town of Puamahara to study its inhabitants. Then the Memory Flower blooms — a mysterious event that causes the townspeople’s private memories to become public property, dissolving the boundaries between individual consciousnesses.
The premise is simultaneously fantastical and rigorously logical: Frame is literalizing the novelist’s claim to access other people’s interiority. If a novelist can enter characters’ minds and render their private thoughts, what would it mean if this access were available to everyone? The result is both utopian (no more loneliness, no more isolation) and dystopian (no more privacy, no more individuality).
Frame’s prose here is more accessible than in her experimental middle period — she has achieved a clarity that accommodates complexity without demanding that the reader work as hard as Scented Gardens for the Blind requires. But the ideas are no less radical: the novel questions whether the self is a real thing or merely a linguistic construction, whether memory belongs to the individual or to the community, and whether fiction is a form of empathy or a form of theft.
The Carpathians won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1989.
Collecting The Carpathians
First edition (Century Hutchinson, Auckland, 1988): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First New Zealand edition: $60–$150
- First UK edition (Bloomsbury, 1989): $25–$60
- First US edition (George Braziller, 1989): $20–$50