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The Severed Land by Maurice Gee {Reviewed by STELLA}
With a striking cover and a map of a divided world, I knew I was hooked. Maurice Gee’s new novel for children is a thoughtful, fast-paced adventure with a wonderful heroine. The novel opens with Fliss observing some soldiers and their cannon. Never able to break through the invisible wall, they have become increasingly frustrated with their inability to colonise the other side. As mayhem breaks loose, a drummer boy runs from the soldiers only to find himself stuck between the wall and the barrel of a gun. Fliss, for reasons unknown to her, is able to pull the drummer boy through the wall. Not that he’s grateful, but the Old One who holds the wall in his mind has been expecting him and he has a mission for Fliss and Kirt: they must rescue the Nightingale - to save the wall, which is in peril, and so keep their land protected from the warring families that wish to take it all. Going back through the wall is dangerous and uncertain: to be caught by the ruling elites would be certain death, and rescuing the Nightingale and bringing her to the Old One has many obstacles.The relationship between Fliss and Kirt has just the right amount of tension, each not quite sure of the other, but their mission relies on trust and courage. The underlying references to colonisation, to the power and passion of a people to resist, and the symbolism of the wall are pitched just right, lending layers of meaning beyond the action. The great story-line and compelling characters, Fliss - daring and passionate and Kirt - brave and stubborn, and their interactions with friends and foes will keep you entranced and leave you wanting more. |
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The Smell of Other People’s Houses by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock (Reviewed by STELLA}
Set in Alaska in the 1970s, The Smell of Other People’s Houses is a excellent debut YA novelabout growing up in small towns, about looking out at the world and comparing your own life with the lives of others, about seeking answers where often there are only questions. The premise that other people’s homes smell certain ways, and what this indicates in terms of lifestyle, social structure and family histories, is a wonderful premise and a successful way in which to hang together the lives of this community. Following the lives of four young people - Ruth, who wants to be remembered; Dora, who doesn’t want to be noticed; Alyce, who wants to please everyone; and Hank, who needs to run away - each story is touching and real. You’ll find yourself rooting for them all, that their lives will be what they wish. This isn’t a sentimental novel though, there are tough issues and hard decisions for all the teens to make. Their lives are often difficult as they deal with absent parents, family secrets, tragedy, teen pregnancy, abuse, first love, and the twists and turns of friendship and family. All the characters have decisions to make as they move from being children to adults, as they realise that life isn’t black and white. But this isn’t melodramatic writing. Hitchcock embraces her characters and tells their honest and sometimes gritty stories with lightness, humour and integrity. Cleverly plotted, the lives of the community intersect as the four main characters become entangled, as secrets are revealed. Ultimately this is a novel about what you leave behind, what holds you together and how lives can be redeemed. |
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Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS}
The narrator, a writer recently returned to Vienna after two decades overseas, attends an ‘artistic dinner’ given by a bourgeois couple he was once close to, in honour of a distinguished actor. In the first half of the book, the narrator sits mostly silently in a wing chair as the company awaits the actor’s arrival, and experiences a vitriolic fugue of invective against his hosts, their behaviour past and present, their associates and everything they think and do and say and represent. That afternoon, the narrator, the hosts and the majority of the guests had attended the funeral of Joana, with whom the narrator had once had a close affinity, who had failed to make any sort of artistic impact in Vienna and had fallen into years of alcoholism and despair that led eventually to her suicide. The narrator’s stream of invective, which is both razor-sharp and frequently very funny, could be seen as a subconscious strategy of avoiding thinking of Joana’s death, as an outlet for his anger at a milieu that allows one of its members to descend to suicide, and, not least, as an indirect expression of his nauseation at everything to do with himself, his past and, in particular, his unacknowledgeable shortcomings in his relationship with Joana. As always in Bernhard, all loathing is primarily self-loathing and only secondarily loathing of the world as it is distilled in the loather. The strongest statements are the most unstable: in the second half of the book, when the loathed actor arrives and the dinner progresses, the narrator’s extreme opinions run up against their objects outside his head and undergo disconcerting reversals leading to a highly unsettling end. Woodcutters is one of Bernhard’s finest and most incisive books, and a good one to start with if you haven’t read him before. |
 | My Documents by Alejandro Zambra {Reviewed by THOMAS} “My father was a computer, my mother a typewriter. I was a blank page and now I am a book.” Zambra's enjoyable (occasionally disconcerting) book is a collection purportedly from the 'My Documents' folder on his desktop. In the first three sections, Zambra, or a narrator very similar to Zambra, relates, in clean, direct (though sometimes ironic) and energetic prose, events or thematic developments from a life growing up and progressing through adulthood in a Chile over which hangs the shadow of the Pinochet regime and under which the earth occasionally unexpectedly shifts. The true subject of these pellucid pieces is always memory, and the tension that always exists between memory and personal or collective history: how does the past shape who we are, and what is the relationship between living an experience and living as someone who has had an experience? What is the difference between a memory and a story? In the fourth section the stories are told in the third person and have a different texture: why should this be, considering that there is no real reason (only a tendency) to think of these characters and events as any more fictional than those told in the first person? |
 | Things to Make and Break by May-Lan Tan {Reviewed by THOMAS} The eleven stories in this book seem (quite reasonably and refreshingly) preoccupied with what may (to the mind at least) be termed ‘the body problem’, which is (of course) not a problem but a number of interrelating problems (or potentials) clustered around the disjunction between the kinds of relationships had by bodies and the kinds of relationships had by their correlated minds. Minds and bodies are subject here to differing momentums, and one bears the other away before the two can coalesce. Tan is concerned also with the interchangeability of persons, and with the contortion of persons, Physically or psychologically, that enables this interchangeability. Whether it is twins who both fall in love with the same amnesiac, or the narrator of ‘Legendary’ who discovers photographs of her boyfriend’s previous partners in his drawer and becomes obsessed with one, an ex-aerialist once badly injured in a fall, stalking her and attempting to enter her experience using a playground swing, the stories have a raw elegance and precision and are full of intense and sometimes surprising images which give them a very realistic texture, he best of them mostly keeping their engines off-screen and only occasionally falling to the temptation to wheel these engines into view at pivotal moments (such as endings). |
There are some excellent books contending for this year's WELLCOME PRIZE (for books that engage with some aspect of medicine, health or illness).
They are all available from our website (or over the counter).
The Doll's Alphabet
"Imagine a world in which the Brothers Grimm were two exquisite, black-eyed twin sisters in torn stockings and handstitched velvet dresses. Knowing, baroque, perfect, daring, clever, fastidious, Camilla Grudova is Angela Carter’s natural inheritor. Her style is effortlessly spare and wonderfully seductive. Read her! Love her! She is sincerely strange – a glittering literary gem in a landscape awash with paste and glue and artificial settings." — Nicola Barker
Featured publisher: MAUNGATUA PRESS
We are fortunate to have available the following hard-to-get poetry editions from the peripatetic Maungatua Press:
At West Arm, Lake Manapouri by David Karena-Holmes*
A Brief History of Treason by Michael Steven
Giraffe by Rose Sneyd
The Dream by David Karena-Holmes*
Black by Kat Maxwell
* The latest issue of Broadsheet (#18) also features the poetry of David Karena-Holmes.
The 27 sections of this novel are not bound together but come in a box so that, apart from the first and last sections, they can be arranged and read in any order. With unselfsparing autobiographical rigour, Johnson (who, ever a provocateur, stated that “telling stories is telling lies”) tells of a journalist who travels to [Nottingham] to report a football match and is constantly put in mind of previous trips to the city to visit a friend who died young of cancer. Memories of Tony and his decline are intruded upon by unbidden memories of a former lover who once accompanied him on a visit. Johnson gives scrupulous attention to how the concrete mundane either ignites emotional significance or provides a respite from (or impediment to) emotional significance when touched by the seemingly haphazard movements of the mind (hence the unbound sections) as it attempts to face but cannot bring itself to face the inevitability of death. “I fail to remember, the mind has fuses.” The Unfortunates is an impressively alert and careful portrayal of memory’s capacities and shortcomings, and an exacting yet moving portrayal of loss.
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Inside the Head of Bruno Schultz by Maxim Biller, with two stories by Bruno Schulz {Reviewed by THOMAS}
During World War 2, the writer and painter Bruno Schulz was kept from the gas chamber by a Gestapo officer who wanted him to complete a mural for his children’s nursery. One day he was shot in the street by another Gestapo officer while returning to the ghetto with a loaf of bread. In this little book, Maxim Biller imagines a time just before the German invasion of Poland, with Schulz hidden from fear in his cellar and writing a letter to Thomas Mann, imploring his help and warning him that Mann’s sinister double, or at least someone claiming to be Mann, is present in Schulz’s town of Drohobycz, presaging in many ways the coming German invasion. Biller’s Schulz is having trouble concentrating and in making his message to Mann clear, and has to restart many times, each attempt being less successful than the last. The letters are invaded by fears and memories, or the doubles or stand-ins for fears and memories, and it soon becomes unclear which elements belong to the description of Schulz writing, which to the letter he is writing and which exist only in the head of Schulz and not in what he is writing or in the world in which he sits and writes. Even if it all only exists in Schulz’s head, and of course it does (he is alone), this three-fold distinction, or rather the inability (of Schulz and of the reader) to make this three-fold distinction remains. Biller’s text is followed by two of the actual Schulz’s most representative stories, ‘Birds’ (about a melancholic father’s increasing over-identification with birds) and ‘Cinnamon Shops’ (concerning the dissolution of the actual city into one built of dreams and memories as a boy is sent home from the theatre to fetch his father’s wallet). There is certainly something of Kafka in Schultz’s narratorial relinquishment of initiative to a less-than-conscious weight that presses against the text from below (or within (or wherever)), but Schulz has a wistfulness that gives his writing a flavour all of its own. |
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City of Lions by Josef Wittlin and Philippe Sands {Reviewed by THOMAS}
The city known variously in history as Lviv, Lwow, Lemberg, לעמבערג and Leopolis in eastern central Europe was once a city where cultures and ethnicities (Jewish, Polish, Ukranian, Austrian) met and enriched each other, but, in the twentieth century, it became a city in which cultures and ethnicities obliterated each other. In the first half of this book, 'My Lwow', Josef Wittlin, looking back from exile in the 1940s, celebrates the rich texture of the city in which he grew up. Lying on the crossroads between East and West, North and South, Lwow was a melting-pot of buoyant and diverse traditions. Reading Wittlin's descriptions of the streets and life of the city reminds me of nothing so much as of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz (who lived and was killed in Drohobycz, about an hour from Lwow). Although the shadows of the events of WW2 lie across Wittlin's text, his memories of the cosmopolitan city are all the more poignant for his saying little of them. “All memories lead to the graveyard,” he says, though. The second half of the book, 'My Lviv', is written by human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, who travelled to Lviv, now in the Ukraine, in the last several years, partly to learn more about his grandfather, who had lived there in the early twentieth century, but spoke little of that phase of his life, and partly to research his remarkable book, East West Street: On the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity – terms coined by Lvovians Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht – which won the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction. His is a mission to connect history to its locations, but he finds that everywhere, although the old Lwow physically persists, the stories that should give those places meaning are forgotten or suppressed. “Wittlin believes that memory 'falsifies everything', but surely imagination of the unknown is an even greater falsifier,” Sands writes. History must be multivocal to avoid authoritarianism. Sands finds and visits the site of the mass grave which holds the remains of the majority of the Lvovian Jewish population, killed when the city came under Nazi control in WW2. The city now being almost entirely monocultural, Sands reports the unchallenged ease with which some Ukranian nationalists assume the trappings and ideologies once stamped on the city by Nazism. But what should be preserved, the rights of the individual or the identity of the group? |
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The Babysitter at Rest by Jen George
The self-obsession bordering on narcissism which passes for purpose among thirty-something arty types who have not yet succumbed to despair or parenthood or both is here forensically explored in five longish stories with protagonists for whom the aspirations towards “self-fulfillment” (admit you also have these tendencies) are proving insufficiently resilient to masquerade as anything other than the self-indulgence tempered only by ennui that they always were (admit you also suffer from this). Maturing may be a liminal process but every doorstep is also a place to trip, and George's stories, although they suffer on occasion from the self-indulgence one would expect from their subject matter, exhibit the sort of stunned lyricism that results when your head hits the floor in mid-sentence (test this yourself). “Your life may fall apart may fall apart around you while you're putting on the act of radiating positivity, but you will not realise it for some time,” says The Guide in the story 'Guidance/The Party'.
{THOMAS}
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 | The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge {Reviewed by STELLA} Faith and her family have shipped out from England to a remote island to escape scandal. On arriving at the island, Faith discovers that her beloved father, a respected minister with an interest in the sciences (evolution, creation and anthropology), has laid himself bare for ridicule. Not long after Faith takes a mysterious trip with her distracted father to hide a strange plant, he is found dead. Faith believes he has been murdered and that somehow this is tied to the plant. As she delves into his papers and journals she discovers the plant is a ‘lie tree’ that supposedly flourishes and bears a fruit when fed a lie. The fruits when eaten will give the recipient the truth. Faith sets out to discover who is behind her father's death and to understand the obsessive behaviour of her father by using the strange properties of this malign plant to seek the truth. Intriguing.The Lie Tree won the Costa Book of the Year in 2015, and recently this special edition was produced with illustrations by Chris Riddell. |
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This coming week's book is Solar Bones by Mike McCormack, the winner of the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize for "extending the possibilities of the novel form".
>> Read Thomas's review
>> Watch this interview
>> Read this review at The Guardian
>> Find our how a single-sentence novel won a major prize
>> Visit Tramp Press, the tiny but wonderful Irish independent publisher who published the book
>> Hear McCormack reading from the novel
>> His 2005 novel Notes from a Coma was described as "the greatest Irish novel of the decade" by The Irish Times
Just in! Mimicry journal #2 aims "to make New Zealand art and poetry cool again!" Including work by Chris Tse and Claudia Jardine, this lively journal is an organ of New Zealand's literary new wave.
Come and pick up a copy, or click through to our website to read the full list of contributors.
Featured publisher: FITZCARRALDO EDITIONS
Fitzcarraldo Editions is an exciting independent publisher of contemporary fiction (blue covers) and long-form essays (cream). We have the following titles currently in stock (click through for more information and reviews, and to purchase from our website):
Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett
Always hinting at experience just beyond the reach of language, Bennett's remarkable book is impelled by the rigours of noticing. Her unsparingly acute observations of the usually unacknowledged or unacknowledgeable motivations, urges and responses that underlie human interaction intimate the anxiety which all human activity is designed to conceal.
Always hinting at experience just beyond the reach of language, Bennett's remarkable book is impelled by the rigours of noticing. Her unsparingly acute observations of the usually unacknowledged or unacknowledgeable motivations, urges and responses that underlie human interaction intimate the anxiety which all human activity is designed to conceal.
Nicotine by Gregor Hens
What Thomas de Quincey is to opium, Gregor Hens is to nicotine, the most ordinary of drugs. Whatever your relationship with nicotine, you will find Hens’s rigorous self-examination and ability to recreate the subtleties of his experiences insightful.
What Thomas de Quincey is to opium, Gregor Hens is to nicotine, the most ordinary of drugs. Whatever your relationship with nicotine, you will find Hens’s rigorous self-examination and ability to recreate the subtleties of his experiences insightful.
Counternarratives by John Keene
"A kind of literary counterarchaeology, a series of fictions that challenge our notion of what constitutes 'real' or 'accurate' history. His writing is at turns playful and erudite, lyric and coldly diagnostic, but always completely absorbing. Counternarratives could easily be compared to Borges or Bolano, Calvino or Kis." - Jess Row
"A kind of literary counterarchaeology, a series of fictions that challenge our notion of what constitutes 'real' or 'accurate' history. His writing is at turns playful and erudite, lyric and coldly diagnostic, but always completely absorbing. Counternarratives could easily be compared to Borges or Bolano, Calvino or Kis." - Jess Row
Pretentiousness, Why it matters by Dan Fox
"A lucid and impassioned defence of thinking, creating and, ultimately, living in a world increasingly dominated by the massed forces of social and intellectual conservatism." - Tom McCarthy
>> Meet Dan Fox.
"A lucid and impassioned defence of thinking, creating and, ultimately, living in a world increasingly dominated by the massed forces of social and intellectual conservatism." - Tom McCarthy
>> Meet Dan Fox.
A Primer for Cadavers by Ed Atkins
"Atkins’ writing spores from the body, scraping through life matter’s nervous stuff, leaving us agitated and eager. What’s appealed to us is an odd mix of mimetic futures. Cancer exists, tattoos, squids, and kissing exist – all felt in the mouth as pulsing questions." — Holly Pester
"Discomfited by being a seer as much as an elective mute, Ed Atkins, with his mind on our crotch, careens between plainsong and unrequited romantic muttering. Alert to galactic signals from some unfathomable pre-human history, vexed by a potentially inhuman future, all the while tracking our desperate right now, he do masculinity in different voices – and everything in the vicinity shimmers, ominously." — Bruce Hainley
"Atkins’ writing spores from the body, scraping through life matter’s nervous stuff, leaving us agitated and eager. What’s appealed to us is an odd mix of mimetic futures. Cancer exists, tattoos, squids, and kissing exist – all felt in the mouth as pulsing questions." — Holly Pester
"Discomfited by being a seer as much as an elective mute, Ed Atkins, with his mind on our crotch, careens between plainsong and unrequited romantic muttering. Alert to galactic signals from some unfathomable pre-human history, vexed by a potentially inhuman future, all the while tracking our desperate right now, he do masculinity in different voices – and everything in the vicinity shimmers, ominously." — Bruce Hainley
Notes on Suicide by Simon Critchley
Whether life is worth living or not is not something that can be philosophically contested, but, if it is not worth living, whether suicide is justifiable and well as understandable is perhaps open to examination. Critchley interrogates the standard arguments against suicide and finds them unsupportable. If there is an argument against suicide it is not that life is worth living, but a general one against the possessive individualism upon which our culture, and indeed modern consciousness, depends.
Whether life is worth living or not is not something that can be philosophically contested, but, if it is not worth living, whether suicide is justifiable and well as understandable is perhaps open to examination. Critchley interrogates the standard arguments against suicide and finds them unsupportable. If there is an argument against suicide it is not that life is worth living, but a general one against the possessive individualism upon which our culture, and indeed modern consciousness, depends.
Zone by Mathias Enard
"An ambitious study of twentieth century conflict and disaster. Enard does for the comma in Zone what Eimear McBride did for the full stop in A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, and just as McBride brought her writing a raw intensity and immediacy, Enard brings to his a similarly fierce political engagements and moral authority. Enard’s novel is to be seen within a tradition of French avant-garde writing. The result is a modern masterpiece." — David Collard, Times Literary Supplement
"An ambitious study of twentieth century conflict and disaster. Enard does for the comma in Zone what Eimear McBride did for the full stop in A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, and just as McBride brought her writing a raw intensity and immediacy, Enard brings to his a similarly fierce political engagements and moral authority. Enard’s novel is to be seen within a tradition of French avant-garde writing. The result is a modern masterpiece." — David Collard, Times Literary Supplement
On Immunity by Eula Biss
Weaving her personal experiences with an exploration of classical and contemporary literature, Biss considers what vaccines, and the debate around them, mean for her own child, her immediate community and the wider world. On Immunity is an inoculation against our fear and a moving account of how we are all interconnected;our bodies and our fates.
Weaving her personal experiences with an exploration of classical and contemporary literature, Biss considers what vaccines, and the debate around them, mean for her own child, her immediate community and the wider world. On Immunity is an inoculation against our fear and a moving account of how we are all interconnected;our bodies and our fates.
My Documents by Alejandro Zambra
Whether chronicling the attempts of a migraine-afflicted writer to quit smoking or the loneliness of the call-centre worker, the life of a personal computer or the return of a mercurial godson, this collection of stories evokes the disenchantments of youth and the disillusions of maturity in a Chilean society still troubled by its recent past. "Alejandro Zambra’s My Documents is also his best: an eclectic, disconcerting, at times harrowing read. His voice is unique, honest and raw, and there is poetry on every page. Zambra’s fiction doubles as a kind of personal history, full of anguish, humour and verve. A truly beautiful book." — Daniel Alarcón
Whether chronicling the attempts of a migraine-afflicted writer to quit smoking or the loneliness of the call-centre worker, the life of a personal computer or the return of a mercurial godson, this collection of stories evokes the disenchantments of youth and the disillusions of maturity in a Chilean society still troubled by its recent past. "Alejandro Zambra’s My Documents is also his best: an eclectic, disconcerting, at times harrowing read. His voice is unique, honest and raw, and there is poetry on every page. Zambra’s fiction doubles as a kind of personal history, full of anguish, humour and verve. A truly beautiful book." — Daniel Alarcón