Faces in the Water

At twenty, Maud's Truth felt an unbridgeable chasm between herself and others, and, losing connection with reality, she finds herself several times in psychiatric hospitals, which she perceives as nothing less than torture chambers. She is both a victim and a witness. A series of images of the unfortunate – each in her own way – patients pass before us. The dismal daily routine. Punishments. The nightmare and pain of shock therapy. Fear. Helplessness. Loneliness. In her unmatched and, despite the grimness of the topic, remarkably poetic style, Janet Frame describes life in psychiatric institutions in the second half of the 1940s, although she softens the truth, fearing that she will not be believed.