Late nights 1/7. We are open every Thursday until 7:30. Drop in for some relaxed browsing and conversations about books! This Thursday is also the monthly Late Night on Hardy, so there'll be a string of shops on Hardy Street for you to visit, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shaun Tan produces wonderful books, The Arrival and Tales from Outer Suburbia are two of my favourites. Tales from Outer Suburbia has recently been re-published with an accompanying jigsaw puzzle in a slipcase edition. This book is for slightly older reading age than his well-known picture books, The Red Tree and The Lost Thing. Each chapter is a story set in the world of Outer Suburbia: they are intriguing magical tales about what you may notice if you observe your surroundings carefully. A water buffalo that lives at the end of the street, a journey to the edge of the world at the edge of suburbia, a beautiful garden discovered beyond the walls of a mundane suburban home, and the colourful worlds you find beyond the drabness of everyday existence. Tan’s drawings and stories are exquisite, sometimes unsettling, but always a glimmer of something beautiful just around the corner if you’re adventurous enough to step out on a journey of discovery. {Review by STELLA}

From jigsaws to masks! Masks in the Forest by Laurent Moreau is a story told with masks.  The hunter is entering the forest, feeling confident and sure of his ability to ensnare an animal or two. Little known to him, the animals and forest creatures are well aware of his intentions and ready to counter him. The reader of the story can help too! Pop out the face masks and join in with the story. This is a simple story which children can engage with, becoming the characters in the book by donning a mask or two. Plenty of fun and a happy ending too! The illustrations are attractive and the combination of animals - tiger, monkey, deer - and mythical forest creatures - giant, elf - give an added dimension to the story-telling. With nine masks in total this could make a lovely gift for a family, or group of children where new stories can be told as well as the author’s own. {Review by STELLA}

Cloth Lullaby is a beautifully illustrated children’s book about the artist Louise Bourgeois, outlining her early connection with textiles via her family’s work as tapestry restorers for generations in France, her early connection with nature, and her path to becoming an artist. While studying mathematics in Paris, Louise’s mother dies and Louise abandons her studies and begins her work as a painter and sculptor -  a homage to her mother. The giant spiders she produced are the weavers of webs, and constant repairers. Louise marries and moves to New York, continuing her work in the moments between family and scratching out a living, and builds a dossier of work, fairly much in obscurity. It was not until she was in her 70's that a retrospective exhibition acknowledged her importance as an accomplished and influential artist. Another current publication is Intimate Geometries: The life and work of Louise Bourgeios by critic and curator Robert Storr. This is  a comprehensive, insightful and generously illustrated book.  {Review by STELLA}

This is the Place to Be by Lara Pawson {Reviewed by THOMAS} What do you report when you become uncertain of the facts, of the notion of truth and of the purpose of writing? What can you understand of yourself when you are uncertain how or if your memories can be correlated with known 'facts'? Is your idea of yourself anything other than the sum of your memories? Lara Pawson was for some years a journalist for the BBC and other media during the civil wars in Angola, and on the Ivory Coast. In this book, her experiences of societies in trauma, and her idealism for making the 'truth' known, are fragmented (as memory is always fragmented) and mixed with memory fragments of her childhood and of her relationships with the various people she encountered before, during and after the period of heightened awareness provided by war. It is this intermeshing of shared and personal perspectives, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes contradicting each other, always crossing over and back over the rift that separates the individual and her world, that makes this book such a fascinating description of a life. By constantly looking outwards, Pawson has conjured a portrait of the person who looks outwards, and a remarkable depiction of the act of looking outwards. Every word contributes to this pointillist self-portrait, and the reader hangs therefore on every word.

Is That Kafka? 99 Finds by Reiner Stach {Reviewed by THOMAS} Franz Kafka was an exceptional writer, not just in quality but in his qualities. He was also an exception to much of what has been thought of him since, or, rather, both as a writer and a person, he is compounded from exceptions, both to his literary and social milieu and to his own psychology. Not only that, he was an exception to those exceptions. Reiner Stach has written an exhaustive three-volume biography of Kafka, and, while doing so, he has collected these 99 snippets which, published together, display the broader Kafka behind the cliché and are a corrective to conceptions of ‘the Kafkaesque’ which often distort approaches to his works. Kafka never lied but he did cheat in an exam, he liked to drink beer, he followed a fitness regime, he made presents for children, he devised, with his friend Max Brod, a series of on-the-cheap travel guides, he loved slapstick and he liked to be called Frank. Stach also provides a couple of plausible Kafka sightings in contemporary crowd photographs. Is that Kafka? Quite possibly, yes.

The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee {Reviewed by THOMAS} A man arrives, with a new name, Simón, and with no memories of his previous life, in a country whose residents have all, like him, arrived there at some time, shedding their histories and learning a new language, a flat ‘Spanish’, which they use without irony or ambiguity. Existence in Novilla, like Coetzee’s writing, is spare, and abraded of connotation; things have no significance beyond their purpose. The society is founded on good will, respect and the meeting of everyone’s needs; there is enough but no more: no excess, no passion, no longing, no dissatisfaction. Is this the best of all possible worlds? Perhaps Simón has not been washed sufficiently ‘clean’ in his passage to the new life: he feels that human nature requires more intensity than Novilla provides. He brings with him a young boy, ‘David’, who has lost his papers, and who Simon has promised to reunite with his mother. Simon ‘recognises’ David’s mother as the implausible Inès, and hands both the boy and his apartment over to her. Inès infantilises David, and, when he is to be sent to an institution because he cannot/will not accept the basic assumptions of commonality, such as the symbolic assumptions of language and numbers, Simón and Ines flee with him into the hinterland, where reality is even ‘thinner’ than in Novilla and David exhibits disturbingly messianic qualities as they head towards a ‘new life’. Philosophical and ethical questions are raised throughout the book, which turns its back on the possibility of answers, making the whole thing a sort of opaque allegory without any stable referent. In its refusal to satisfy the reader or to be ‘about’ anything (other than itself), whilst engaging our faculties of thinking and feeling, the book, with all its unsettlingly arbitrary developments, inconsistencies and uncertainties, its ambivalences of clutching and relinquishment, resembles ‘real life’ more than most fiction (which is predicated upon the largely unexamined abstractions we construct to ‘pre-package’ and mediate our experiences). At it core, though, this book explores the problematics of fiction-making: characters are suddenly brought into existence by an author in a world which contains only that which the author has created by naming. The characters are entirely subject to the author's will yet struggle, through exerting themselves upon the author, to effect some sort of autonomy. Coetzee is a writer of great weight and precision, and here he continues to push at the edges of his territory. This book has just been followed by The Schooldays of Jesus, which continues the themes explored in this book.

The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
[Long review:] “Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules repeated without end,” said the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. This very enjoyable comic novel reveals that, when irreverently applied to science and metaphysics, this observation could just as easily read “bottomless absurdities” or “bottomless horrors” (mind you, Mandelbrot’s fractal theory ‘proves’ that the coastline of any island is infinitely long, which is at once absurd, horrible and true). Falling somewhere in the triangle between Alice in Wonderland, Waiting for Godot and The Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll, ‘Pataphysician, The Third Policeman tells of a chain of events triggered by a murder committed by the narrator (a scholar of the eccentric philosopher de Selby), his visit to a rural police station in a strangely altered bucolic Ireland, and his encounter with two singular policemen who introduce him to such wonders as a spear so sharp it draws blood some distance beyond its visible point, the base substance omnium that is manifest in any form, and an atomic theory that explains the slow transformation of humans into bicycles (and vice-versa) due to rough roads insufficiently maintained by the County Council. All of this (not to mention the crazed inventiveness of Sergeant Pluck’s diction) is a lot of fun if having the rug whipped out from under your feet only to discover that there is no floor beneath is your idea of fun. I have been haunted for years by the scene in which Policeman MacCruiskeen pulls out smaller and smaller boxes from inside each other far into the infravisible, and works on crafting a yet smaller box only to lose it on the floor and have it found by chance by a character named Gilhaney who was only pretending to find it.

[Short review:] It's about a bicycle.

{THOMAS}

SOME RECENT BOOKS ON RUSSIAN HISTORY

Second-Hand Time: The last of the Soviets, An oral history by Svetlana Alexievich
A quite remarkable collection of voices by the Nobel Prize-winner in literature, charting the disintegration of the USSR through the experiences of ordinary people, and intimating the kind of riven social terrain upon which any new society must be built. 

Where the Jews Aren't: The sad and absurd story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish autonomous region by Masha Gessen
In 1929, with the support of Jewish Communist intellectuals and Yiddishists, preparations were made to establish a Jewish homeland in Russia's Far East (no, this book was not written by Michael Chabon!), and tens of thousands of Soviet and international Jews moved there. With Stalin's purges, the idea fell from favour and the settlers were unsupported. Another influx following World War 2 increased their numbers, but, being easily identified, the Birobidzhanians were increasingly subjected to persecution. An interesting sidelight on Soviet history.

Lenin on the Train by Catherine Merridale
In an attempt to provoke a political crisis in Russia that would take them out of World War 1, the German command 'enabled' Lenin's return by train from exile in Switzerland. Merridale's very readable book traces the journey, the personalities on the sealed train (in which the Germans and the Russians were divided by a chalk line across the middle of the carriage), the struggle between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks for supremacy in Russia, and the new path taken by Russian and world politics as a result of that journey.

The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard by Ivan Chistyakov
Astonishing and compelling, this book reproduces a first-hand account of the miseries and rigours of life in a Soviet prison camp, as observed by a senior guard at the Baikal Amur Corrective Labour Camp (Bamlag) in 1935-36.

The Soviet Century by Moshe Lewin

“Probably no other Western historian of the USSR combines Moshe Lewin’s personal experience of living with Russians from Stalin’s day—as a young wartime soldier—to the post-communist era, with so profound a familiarity with the archives and the literature of the Soviet era. His reflections on the “Soviet Century” are an important contribution to emancipating Soviet history from the ideological heritage of the last century and should be essential reading for all who wish to understand it.” – Eric Hobsbawm

 

Stalin and the Scientists: A history of triumph and tragedy, 1905-1953 by Simon Ings 

How did a group of professors, idealists and entrepreneurs create an intellectual pressure-cooker that made them the envy of the scientific world? And how did Stalin's megalomania and insecurity derail the great experiment in 'rational' government? "A dazzling, often astonishing prism through which to view the Soviet experiment." — Peter Pomeranzev

Give the gift of reading! (or keep it for yourself). Why not let us choose you (or the person of your choice) a book a month on our VOLUME SUBSCRIPTION scheme? Each month we will select a book we think you'll love and have it ready to collect (or send it anywhere to you or to that person of your choice). Click through to our website to see the various options for customising subscriptions!

SHIFTS OF TONGUE. Come and hear Harry Ricketts, Ruth Allison, Cliff Fell and Lindsay Pope reading a selection of poems by Rachel Bush (1941-2016), and some of their own work, too. VOLUME, 15 Church Street, Nelson. Sunday 5 February, 4 PM. Rachel's book Thought Horses was recently long-listed for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

The Power by Naomi Alderman     {Reviewed by STELLA} It’s hard to resist a book that has a thumbs-up from Margaret Atwood. The Power imagines a world where men live in fear of female power, where faiths arise following the wisdoms of Mother Mary, and wayward young women gain cult status. There are definite nods here to Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and the Gardeners of Eve in her 'MaddAddam' series. Alderman has created a piece of speculative fiction that pushes to the brink the idea of a physical ability which enables the disenfranchised to regain equilibrium in previously male-dominated society, but it also enables the more ruthless to secure the social status and political clout they desire. The Power, an electrical current which resides in a skein near the collarbone and is administered through the hands, develops initially in girls of 15, but within very little time can be triggered from one to the other and to older women. The charge, depending on how controlled it is, can cause pain, severe injury and death. The most interesting characters in The Power are: Allie, an American runaway foster child, who has reinvented herself as Eve, becoming a messiah figure with the help of the social media and YouTube; Roxy, the savvy child of a criminal father who heads a powerful drug syndicate operating from working-class Britain, whose Power is triggered when she witnesses the murder of her mother in a retribution killing; and Tunde, a young Nigerian from a wealthy family, whose personal experience as a teen leads him to become fascinated by these powerful women and to a very successful career as the reporter who is trusted to capture the stories of the increasing popular and powerful women, as well as their opponents, male-dominated counter-terror groups. All their stories are fascinating, and, as time progresses and we find ourselves in a countdown to a climactic happening, their lives become more intertwined and life becomes increasingly dangerous. This is a thought-provoking exploration of gender, the nature of cults and conformity, power and abuse.

Picture books are not only for the very young. They can be appreciated on many levels for their language, playfulness and images. Wordless picture books are a wonderful way to delve into a story and many are sophisticated interpretations of story-lines we know well. Artist Thomas Aquinas Maguire’s version of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Wild Swans is a stunningly designed wordless concertina-style book which also doubles as a very long frieze. The frieze can be looked at completely if you have a very long floor space, or the pages can be turned just like a standard book. Presented in a box, the detailed illustrations in black and white are fittingly dreamlike and atmospheric. The fairy-tale is told in an accompanying booklet. It is the story of a young princess driven out of her home by the new Queen, a witch who has cast a spell on her brothers. The brothers turned to swans can only be returned to human form if the young princess knits seven shirts from nettles and keeps an oath of seven years’ silence. As our world becomes increasingly screen-based, it's exciting to encounter beautiful tactile objects. {Reviewed by STELLA}

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}

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