The Bright Side of My Condition by Charlotte Randall
Randall is a very fine writer and this tale of four escaped convicts from the Norfolk Island penal colony in the early nineteenth century is excellent. The convicts escape, only to be caught as stowaways. Given a choice of join the crew (who don’t seem too well watered and fed) or the Island, they choose the latter. Dumped on Snares Island they are left with a bag of potatoes, a tri-pot and an empty promise of passage in a year if they collect enough seal skins. With little in common except a desire to survive, they are thrown together in the midst of the ocean on a small inhospitable island. Nicknamed Slangham, Toper, Gargantua and Bloodworth, they each have their own ways of coping – hard work, faith, sarcasm, and watchfulness. Based on a true story, this is an intriguing and intelligent novel. Randall successfully gets under the skin of these men to give us rich characters with surprisingly formidable abilities and crushing weaknesses. She subtly reflects, through her characters and their conversations, the concerns of men, survival and the thinking of the time.  {Reviewed by STELLA}

>> The Bright Side of My Condition is one of the books featured in the
New Zealand Book Council's Aotearoa Summer Reads promotion.

Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger    {Reviewed by THOMAS} Léger was commissioned to write a short biographical entry on Barbara Loden for a film encyclopaedia but ended up writing a very interesting and quite unusual book. Loden directed one film, Wanda (1970), about a woman who leaves her husband and who, passively and therefore pretty much by chance, attaches herself to a man who is planning a bank robbery for which, following his death in a police shoot-out and despite her lack of initiative and her not even being present at the robbery (she took a wrong turn in what was supposed to be the getaway car), she will be sent to jail for twenty years. The book operates on many levels simultaneously: it is ‘about’ Léger’s attempts to excavate information about Loden, principally beneath the ways in which she has been recorded by others, notably her husband the Hollywood director Elia Kazan, who also wrote a novel in which Loden features, thinly disguised; it is ‘about’ Loden’s making of the film Wanda; it is ‘about’ the character of Wanda in that film, a character Loden played herself and with whom she strongly identified personally; it is ‘about’ the tension between the “passive and inert” Wanda character with whom Loden identifies and Loden as writer and director, and about the relationship between author and character more generally in both an literary/artistic and a quotidian sense; it is ‘about’ Léger’s search for and discovery of the true story that inspired Loden to make the film, a botched 1960 bank robbery after which the passive and inert Alma Malone politely thanked the judge for handing her a twenty-year sentence; it is ‘about’, therefore, the relationship between inspiration and execution, and between actuality and  fiction; it is ‘about’ portrayal and self-portrayal and ‘about’ who gets to define whom (“To sum up. A woman is pretending to be another, in a role she wrote herself, based on another (this, we find out later), playing something other than a straightforward role, playing not herself but a projection of herself onto another, played by her but based on another.”); it is ‘about’, cumulatively, the way in which, as she delved more deeply into the specifics of another whom she sought to understand, Léger come up more and more against the unresolved edges of herself so that the two archaeologies became one (she also ended up learning quite a lot about her mother and the imbalanced mechanics of her parents’ relationship). When Wanda was released in 1970, it was disparaged in many feminist circles for its portrayal of a passive woman. Léger shows the film to be a useful mirror in which to recognise passivity as not only an impulse for self-erasure on a personal level but as part of the wider social mechanisms by which women are erased and colonised by projections, and in which the feminist critique and frontline necessarily become internal and self-reflexive. There is also in this book a strong sense of the inescapability of subjectivity, that in all subject-object relationships the subject perceives only and acts only upon a sort of externalised version of itself (the object being passive and without feature (effectively absent, effectively unassailable)); and also that when attempting to be/conceive of/portray oneself one has no option but to use the template of that with which one identifies but which is not in essence (whatever that means) oneself (except to the extent that one’s ‘self’ perhaps exists only in the mysterious act of identification). Oh, and Léger‘s writing is exquisite.    >> You can read a sample here.

Nicotine by Gregor Hens    {Reviewed by THOMAS} What Thomas de Quincey is to opium, Gregor Hens is to nicotine, the most ordinary of drugs. As what is medically termed a 'never smoker', I was particularly interested in Hens's insights into his own addiction and into the psychosocial fabric of a world deeply penetrated by smoking (one in five New Zealand adults smokes). Hens, no longer a smoker (although, as he points out, “the brain's structure changes once it has become accustomed to the nicotine and these structural changes remain even when the addiction has long been vanquished”), is neither an apologist for smoking nor an activist against it, but rather seeks understanding of the role that addictions of all kinds, but nicotine addiction specifically, play in the lives of addicts and of wider society: “I don't learn through my dealings with the thing, but rather through contemplating my behaviour during my dealings with the thing,” he says. What is the lure of cigarettes, how do they affect the mind of the smoker, and why is it so hard to give them up? “Why are people unable to fulfil a wish when nothing stands between them and the object of their desire?” Whatever your relationship with nicotine, you will find Hens’s rigorous self-examination and ability to recreate the subtleties of his experiences insightful. Here he describes his first smoking experience: “My awareness took on a new, never-before recognised clarity; it was as if a curtain had been pulled back to let in a breeze, a fog bank had been blown away. Before me lay a wide, sharp landscape all the way to the horizon. It was my inner world - my feelings and thoughts - that had taken on distinctive contours that I found beautiful. I felt and saw, perhaps for the first time, a great experiential context. Life was no longer composed of individual moments, of wishes and disappointments, that pass by indiscriminately and in quick succession. I not only saw images, not only heard single words or sentences, but experienced an inner world. I was offered an experience that was narratable for the very first time.” And, of the experience of restarting smoking having given it up: “When I smoke the first cigarette, it is as if I can look inside my own brain, as if I can discover every thought in its formation, every thrill in a neural pathway, every synaptic leap, every seminal feeling developing from my thoughts.” This relationship between chemicals and experience needs to be understood if we are to be truly free not only of indisputably harmful substances such as nicotine but also of the world of social and creative vulnerabilities in which we are immersed and in which substances provide mechanisms of adaption.  >> Watch this interesting discussion between Hens and fellow ex-addict Will Self.

Beatlebone by Kevin Barry “The imagination is a very weak little bird. It flounders, Cornelius, and it flaps about a bit.” This remarkable book deals with the (fictional) 1978 visit of John Lennon to the west of Ireland in an attempt to reach the island he (actually) bought there in 1967. He intends to spend some time alone there, to do some screaming and cast off the weights that are stifling him both personally and creatively. As the epigraph from John McGahern suggests, the island he really seeks is the first person singular. In wonderfully fluid prose that slips in and out of John’s head, that concertinas time and clots and spreads itself over the landscape that is the dominant presence in the book, Barry describes John’s attempts to elude the press and reach his island with the help of his ‘fixer’ Cornelius O’Grady, an autochthonic foil for his mental slippages and ragged edges. The conversations between these two characters are a delight to read, perfectly nuanced and full of ironic resonance. One of the themes of the book is the effect of place upon the personalities, identities and trajectories of the people who live or visit there, and the extent to which memory and experience are properties of the physical, of objects and places, rather than of persons. Not every section of this book is equally successful – John’s visit to the self-actualisers in the Amethyst Hotel tries perhaps a little hard, though it makes convincing the experience that follows, and the section describing the author’s collation of material for the novel has something of the effect of turning the house lights up during a theatre performance (I haven’t decided yet whether this adds to or detracts from the overall effect) – but the novel is constantly playing with the possibilities of writing a novel, which is exciting, and the climaxes when John releases his voice, first at the press who appear in a boat as soon as he reaches his island (spoiler, sorry) and then as transcribed in the ‘Great Lost Beatlebone Tape’, share the liberating, unhinged transcendence of Lucky’s ‘thinking’ monologue in Waiting for Godot.   {Reviewed by THOMAS}

This Way Madness Lies: The asylum and beyond by Mike Jay As the concept of reason coalesced and gained ascendency in society, so was the concept of unreason increasingly separated from it and those who were viewed as embodying unreason were increasingly separated from the rest of society, confined beyond the ringfence of the 'acceptable', their misfortunes - however kindly or unkindly they were treated – ultimately serving to serve the mechanisms of ascendancy by simultaneously providing reassurance and threat to the populace. Sufficiently separated, there is nothing to prevent the agents of reason acting upon those assigned to unreason, and attempting to modify them through 'treatment' and 'cure'. Throughout this excellently illustrated book, Jay traces the changing attitudes towards 'madness' particularly in relation to the evolution of the Bethlem Royal Hospital ('Bedlam') but also with reference to other European institutions, contrasting these with the parallel evolution of the 'mad colony' of Geel, a Belgian city which has served for many as a model of 'best practice' of noninstitutional care. Also included are a range of artworks by patients, which serve to make the workings of their minds both accessible and reassuringly 'other'. {reviewed by THOMAS}

Would you like to recommend and discuss the books you have enjoyed? We have had requests for a book review forum, and are pleased to launch MY VOLUME, an on-line book group where you can tell others about the books you have enjoyed, and discuss the books you have read in common. This site belongs to our customer community, so the more enthusiasm you contribute to it, the better it will be!  Sign up now (and invite your friends!).  
Be sure to 'follow' the blog to keep up with the latest customer reviews.

Starting in February we will be running two after-school book groups, one for 9-to-12-year-olds, and one for 13+. Let us know now if you are interested!
(Don't worry! We are planning to start book groups for younger children and adults later in the year.)

Wolf by Wolf by Ryan Graudin has a great premise. It’s Germany, 1956, and Hitler has won the war. Yael, an eighteen-year-old woman, is part of the Resistance and she has a mission – a dangerous one – she is charged with assassinating Hitler. As a child, Yael was in a camp and experimented on – the experiment, which was successful, has given her a gift that can be used against her enemies. In 1956 a famous motorcycle race, for the crème de la crème of youths, crosses Hitler’s Europe. After years of training, Yael is ready to join this often-dangerous race, where allegiances are necessary to survive and to win is difficult. But win Yael must so she can get to the Victors’ Ball.  This novel draws you in slowly and then grips you with its teeth and doesn’t let up until the end. While sometimes you have to suspend belief, on the whole this is a fast-paced, suspenseful novel with plenty of grit and a brave, admirable female protagonist. Follow this with the sequel, Blood for Blood.        {Reviewed by Stella}

Last year I read Mislaid by Nell Zink, the story of Peggy who assumes a new identity for herself and her daughter after her very unsuitable marriage breaks apart. Moving to an abandoned hut on the fringe of a small community Peggy, now Meg, plays out her new role in life without a misfire until it all implodes. Mislaid explored what makes a family, what constitutes a relationship and what is real and what is pretentious. Zink’s writing, with its overtones and undertones (plenty of sly digs at cultural norms and hilarious metaphors about relationships), was appealing, fresh and surprising. I’ve just read her latest novel, Nicotine. Again, here, she explores family and relationships in her own surprising way putting her characters through the paces, not letting up on them and playing with society’s concepts of capitalism, pragmatism and ‘spirituality’. Enter Penny, the unemployed business school graduate, daughter of Norm, the Jewish shaman who is famous for his healing clinics and extreme spiritualism, and Amalia, a Kogi, the young second wife rescued from the poverty of South America, who has become a very successful corporate banker. With parents like this, you know from the beginning that Penny carries some baggage. When her aged father dies, Penny is distraught and is left with more questions than answers about her family. Needing distraction, her family decide that she needs something to do and send her to rescue her grandparents’ long-abandoned home in a dodgy suburb of New Jersey. So, we enter Nicotine, the home of squatter activists whose common cause is the right to smoke. Penny is intrigued by the squatters and attracted to Rob, the very good-looking bicycle mechanic. Rather than throw them out of the house, she finds herself part of their group, developing relationships with all the home dwellers that will change not only her life, but theirs too. Penny, despite her seeming uselessness, becomes the catalyst for change for all, with many hilarious machinations and sly digs at social conformity on all sides along the way. Zink is a ‘naughty’ writer – toying with her reader and her characters, constantly making fun of both in a very appealing and clever way. If you like to look at life a bit sideways then you’ll enjoy her style, playfulness and reflections on people – their gullibility, as well as their backbone. {Reviewed by Stella}

Mansfield and Me is a beautifully produced book from New Zealand novelist, graphic designer and zine-maker Sarah Laing. This is a story of Katherine Mansfield, a journey about becoming a writer, a tale of growing up in New Zealand in the 80s, and the balancing act of family and creativity. A memoir, a history lesson and an honest account of being a woman who wants to write and be taken seriously, whether that is Mansfield or Laing. The stories are wonderfully interlinked, with Katherine often scoffing off to the side of Sarah’s endeavours (but mostly not). Mansfield’s story is delightfully drawn in images and text. If you haven’t ventured into the world of the graphic novels this is a great place to start: the text is great – Laing writes well with a strong sense of voice, and the drawings are charming – full of playfulness, wit and sensitivity. I’ve read Laing’s previous novels and seen some of her art work before, but in Mansfield and Me she has hit the mark, bringing all her talents together with this satisfying, inspiring and thoughtful graphic memoir.                                                                   {Review by Stella}

by the same author by Jack Robinson   {Reviewed by Thomas} A book exists. It has a reader. It has several readers, or many readers, some of whom at some point may well meet each other, perhaps in a circumstance in some way related to the book. People give the book to other people. Some people might steal the book (and other books). People interact with other people because of the book. The book has an author, whose relationship to the book is different from the readers’ relationship to the book, and whose relationship with the reader is different from the readers’ relationships with each other. The book has a publisher (or several publishers), a designer (ditto), a critic (several critics); the author has, perhaps, a biographer (and the biographer some readers of their own (though probably, in the main, readers shared with the author of the book (a subset of the readers of that book))). Things happen in the world because of the book that would not have happened if the book did not exist, or which would have happened differently if the book did not exist or had been a different book. This particular book, by the same author, by Jack Robinson (not his real name), is a book about what books are, how they touch upon our lives and how our lives touch upon them and upon each other because of them. The book is charming without being cloying, joyful whilst remaining critical, brief yet universal, profound yet light, pellucid whilst wary of the devotion we direct towards these portable vectors of something made by a stranger yet somehow integral to ourselves.    >> You can read a sample here.

Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter   {Reviewed by Thomas} An immensely poignant portrayal of the impact of a woman’s sudden death on her sons and husband (a Ted Hughes scholar), and of their visit by Crow, all beak, flint eye and feathers, who stays with them through their mourning (grief being its own cure). An eloquent exploration of the liminal zones opened up by loss, awkward where awkwardness subverts cliché, poetic, dark, playful (the passages narrated by Crow are infused with the personality of this corvid psychopomp), unflinching and, ultimately, hopeful.     >> You can hear the author reading the book here.

Vertigo by Joanna Walsh {Reviewed by Thomas} I first read Joanna Walsh in Hotel, in which she recounts her experiences as a hotel reviewer at a time when her marriage was falling apart. The movement in that book is from the particular to the personal to the theoretical, and Walsh succeeded in picking large enough holes in what at first seems like continuous thought to fall through, and to leave us on the brink with a feeling of vertigo. In Vertigo, a collection of short short stories, vignettes almost, Walsh reverses the current. Here the theoretical forces itself through the grille of the personal to induce the particular. The resulting text is perhaps flatter, less nuanced, than Hotel, but the stories are immediate, often pointed, and filled with sharply selected details which puncture, and thus reveal the emptiness of, the characters and situations her protagonist(s) encounters. When all that is left are the ordinary particulars of everyday life, and, as these particulars shrug off any ‘meaning’ draped over them, what is there to suppress the panic that arises when we question our relationship to those particulars? >> Joanna Walsh introduces us to Elena Ferrante. Vertigo by W.G. Sebald {Reviewed by Thomas} Addressing (however indirectly or even ironically) loss, exile and insufficiency in a world composed entirely of residues (lingering or fading, or unstable and even strangely malleable), Sebald’s patient and melancholy prose, not fiction nor autobiography nor travelogue nor essay (but perhaps something more than all of these), is unlike much else: it is as if he is edging his way around ripples still moving outwards from past events that are unregraspable and unapproachable, often too awful to be more than circumambulated, charting for us the patterns of interference that occur when these ripples meet the ripples from other events or are disturbed by wholly submerged cultural or personal traumas. >> We've got new editions of Sebald, with covers by Peter Mendelsund

Spurious by Lars Iyer {Reviewed by Thomas} “What can we, who are incapable of thought, understand of what the inability to think means for a thinker?” If Waiting for Godot’s Estragon and Vladimir were young philosophy lecturers instead of aging tramps, one of them might have written this book about their friendship and about their failures to gain existential traction (either because of personal insufficiency or philosophical impossibility (mostly personal insufficiency (or at least the cultivation of the excuse of personal insufficiency)). Lars and his friend W. consign themselves to the lower rungs of intellectual achievement by seemingly expending their efforts verbally greasing those rungs. They have been born too late for great thought, even if they had been capable of great thought. Damp and then mould spreads through Lars’s flat but, consistent with the stagnation they claim for themselves, nothing happens or develops in the novel (if it is a novel). The book is very funny, and retains its buoyancy by the fact that the narrator, Lars, only appears as described by W. “’Your problem is that you fear empty time’, says W. as we head back to the city. ‘That’s why you don’t think’. And then: ‘Thought must come as a surprise, when you least expect it’. Thought, when it comes, always surprises him, says W. But he’s ready with his notebook, he says, which he keeps in his man bag. ‘That’s why I need a man bag’, he says, ‘in case thought surprises me’. But I fear the empty time which makes thought possible, says W., so I don’t need a man bag.”

Wonderful children's books (for wonderful children) by Marianne Dubuc.
Click through to find out more:

BEST WISHES FROM VOLUME

 

We wish you all the best for the new year. May 2017 bring you lots of interesting books and the time to read them (we might be able to help with the books, at least).

VOLUME will be closed on New Year's day, but otherwise open every day in the coming week for relaxed browsing (we understand that a pile of good books is essential to a good holiday).

- Stella & Thomas

 

 

 

New in the Hogarth series of re-imagined Shakespearean plays comes Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed. This is an extremely wry, clever re-telling of The Tempest, complete with revenge, bitterness and possibly a little redemption. Our modern day Prospero is Felix, a theatre director and actor fired by his backstabbing right-hand man, Tony. Dumped from the theatre, grieving the death of his daughter Miranda, Felix takes to the backroads ,where he settles on the edge of a scrubby farm in a semi-abandoned shack - his own island world. A decade or so passes. In this time he re-invents himself as Mr Duke, a genial retired drama teacher, and watches ‘Miranda’, now a fully fledged fantasy, grow from a child into a young woman, all the while keeping tabs on the treacherous Tony and his cohorts who have risen up the ranks of cultural politics to positions of power and advantage. When he spies a job as a drama teacher at a local prison, he knows this is his path to revenge himself on his enemies and redeem himself. {Stella}

Bicycling to the Moon by Timo Parvela is a series of delightful stories with two main characters at its centre; Purdy and Barker are a cat and a dog who live in the blue house on the hill. Purdy is a showoff inclined to boasting, but also has wonderful dreams and ambitions. Barker is kind and gentle and, while it seems Purdy often has the upper hand, it is Barker who quietly goes about life enjoying the best of every day. Both have a zest for life, whether adventuring or relaxing; they are great friends and the stories are endearing. Wonderfully told, lovingly illustrated, great to read aloud and filled with character, this book of playful fables will become a favourite.  {Stella}

Antigone by Ali Smith This beautiful book, with its gorgeous illustrations by Laura Paoletti, is part of the ‘Save the Story’ series produced by Pushkin Press. Their aim is to “save great stories from oblivion by retelling them for a new, younger generation.” The stories are rewritten by well-known contemporary authors. Ali Smith tells this tale beautifully. This Greek myth has all the classic attributes – death, love, tragedy and loyalty – as well as a misguided ruler, a shape-shifter and a wise crow. Antigone is distraught because her brothers have died, stabbing each other simultaneously on the battlefield, dramatically warring with each other over the kingdom. While one is allowed a hero’s death, while the other is decreed a traitor. Antigone, loyal to both, goes against the rule of her uncle and gives her outcast brother a proper burial. Her punishment is to be killed. Her uncle, under pressure from his people, reneges a little, toning down his punishment to captivity in a sealed cave. Well, the end, to say the least, is tragic, and no one will be happy, but Antigone is our brave and loyal heroine to the end. {Stella}