Profound Experience For A Reader

The diary kept by a teenage girl forms the basis of an account of life on Tahiti in the early years of the second World War. Amusing anecdotes of delightful and some times frustrating Polynesian friends, lyrical descriptions of the tropical beauty of French Polynesia and in timate glimpses of a young Ameri can girl’s innermost thoughts in such a setting are all to be found in the pages of Sound of the Stars.

Nothing unusual in this, perhaps?

But bear in mind that the writer of this book has been deaf from birth.

Deafness is an isolating and res trictive handicap, which spells seclusion from normal social inter course because a deaf person does not speak and acquire language nor mally. The hearing person builds up a vast vocabulary during the forma tive years, without giving conscious thought to the matter, but, to a deaf person, every word learnt is a new and hard-won achievement.

To read this book is a profound experience to anyone aware of and sympathetic to the problems of the deaf.

Frances Parsons and her twin sister were discovered to be deaf at the age of five and not until the age of

10 did they learn to speak intelli gibly. They attended the State School for the Deaf in California, but after five years of boarding school life, their mother determined to re-unite the family, rather dramatically, by moving lock, stock and barrel right across the Pacific to French Poly nesia. They settled on Tahiti in the outlying district of Vairao, which was tenuously linked to the bright lights of Papeete by a quite hilarious and unpredictable means of trans port, known as the “midnight truck”.

The vagaries and marital disputes of the Parsons’ Chinese neighbour and his Tahitian wife are described with great verve and racy detail and such local characters as Papa Poria and Mother Angel spring to lusty life for the reader. Through her literary-minded parents this young deaf girl also had the good fortune to meet such well-known characters as Charles Nordhoff, James Hall and Zane Grey.

Outer island travel on small schooners provided Frances and her twin with many adventures. Two adolescent girls are soon aware of life’s finer and more intimate points and these are recounted with re freshing and unsparing candour.

The reader will discover some rather quaint English in this book.

This is due to Frances’ handicap as the deaf inevitably miss out on some structural language. But, far from detracting from the narrative, these small lapses add a charm and origin

ality.

Today, Frances Parsons, holder of a Master of Arts degree and hav ing passed her first half century, is a faculty member of Gallaudet College in Washington, DC—the only tertiary institution for the deaf in the world. She lectures in Art History and her idea of a good holi day is to bustle off to some far-flung corner of the world to help some project concerned with educating the deaf.

She is a remarkable woman who can make herself at home anywhere, undaunted by any language barrier.

Those four adventure-filled years in Tahiti served to whet her appetite for travel and for understanding the world. Her very readable Sound of the Stars is surely worthy of a place on the book shelves of all who enjoy reading about the Pacific. —Merle H. Coppell (SOUND OF THE STARS by Frances M.

Parsons. Published by Vantage Press Inc, 516 West 34th St, New York, NY 10001.

U 555.95).