Janet Frame's The Carpathians: The Magic Reality of Memory

This essay analyses Janet Frame's The Carpathians (1989) through the lenses of what has been defined as 'magical realism', mainly focusing on language and power, that is on the power of language, and the power language loses when it confronts the natural laws of that ordered chaos we call Nature. Or when it confronts the magic rules and events of that parallel, disordered world we do not name, because the act of naming it would make it come into existence, but which exists, as we are so often ready to swear. This dialectic of dual realities is the unifying thread on which Frame's narrative is artfully constructed.