Faces In The Water
SynopsisPlot
Istina Mavet descends through increasingly desolate wards, with the threat of leucotomy ever present. As she observes her fellow patients, long dismissed by hospital staff, with humor and compassion, she reveals her original and questing mind. This riveting novel became an international classic, translated into nine languages, and has also been used as a medical school text.
Story
About this book
Faces in the Water follows Istina Mavet, a patient moving through the increasingly grim wards of a psychiatric hospital. The constant threat of leucotomy, a surgical procedure that severs nerve connections in the brain, hangs over her and the other patients. Istina watches the people around her with sharp attention, noticing what the hospital staff have long stopped seeing. Her observations carry both humor and care, and they reveal a mind that questions everything it encounters.
Janet Frame wrote the novel after her own years spent in New Zealand mental institutions during the 1940s and 1950s. A doctor encouraged her to write about those experiences as a way of working through them. The book is fiction, not memoir, but it draws on firsthand knowledge of institutional life, its routines, its textures, and the ways patients lose standing in the eyes of staff. Frame builds her portrait of the hospital system through accumulated small details rather than dramatic set pieces.
The novel was translated into nine languages after publication and found readers well beyond New Zealand. It has also been used as a teaching text in medical schools, valued for its close, interior perspective on psychiatric care and the people subject to it.
