 | Helper and Helper ('Snake and Lizard' #3) by Joy Cowley, illustrated by Gavin Bishop - our BOOK OF THE WEEK! {Reviewed by STELLA}
Another wonderful 'Snake and Lizard' collection from the talented duo Joy Cowley and Gavin Bishop. Helper and Helper is the third collection of tales about the desert dwellers Snake and Lizard. Snake, as charming and deviously clever as ever, and kind, sometimes gullible, Lizard are up to their usual excellent antics. Lizard discovers democracy, not that it helps much to thwart Snake's plans; the Grey Rabbit steals their clients with his special healing abilities until Lizard has a cunning plan; Snake becomes an honorary lizard family member, which entails fifteen aunts making themselves at home in the burrow; and the good friends, our helpers, need to visit Wise Tortoise for a dose of help. These stories, with best friends Snake and Lizard, will delight young and old. Cowley's engaging storytelling allows children to explore big ideas and what really matters with humour and compassion. Gavin Bishop's illustrations are the icing on the cake, or, in the case of Snake, a particularly good quail's egg or, for Lizard, a breakfast of many fat blue flies.
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The Last Wolf b/w Herman: The game warden / Death of a craft by Laszlo Krasznahorkai {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Written in one virtuosic 73-page sentence which exerts enormous pressure on language to make it more closely resemble thought and which makes form the primary content of this novella, The Last Wolf tells of an academic who is commissioned to travel to Extremadura in Spain where he seeks to determine the fate of the last wolves in that barren area. We read his relation to a Hungarian bartender in Berlin of the accounts of Extremadurans made to him via a translator (and usually based in any case on further hearsay), nesting the subject of the story in several layers of reportage, rumour and translation, the performative complexity of which is repeatedly punctured by the offhand comments of the bartender. Krasznahorkai, as usual, succeeds in being both comic and morose, this hopeless tale of human destruction and the frustrating impassivity of nature is one in which meaning is both invoked and withheld much like the presence of the last elusive wolf (or, rather, much like the story of the last wolf, for it is narrative that is the true quarry for the hunter). Herman, the other novella in this beautifully produced little book, was written earlier in Krasznahorkai’s career, yet deals with many of the same themes. The two versions, reminiscent at times of Kafka, tell of a master trapper whose disgust at his calling is turned upon his own species as the compounding of his exterminations creates a momentum from which neither he nor others can be released. What remains but the consequential force of past actions when their rationale has proven spurious? |
 | The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector {Reviewed by THOMAS} “A note exists between two notes of music, between two facts exists a fact, between two grains of sand no matter how close together there exists an interval of space, a sense that exists between senses.” Upon entering the room of her apartment that had been inhabited by her maid, the narrator is frightened by a large cockroach emerging from the wardrobe and shuts the door upon it. This act of violence creates a bond of association between the two, a bond which language-based thought is not able to withstand, and, as the narrator looks into the face of the cockroach and at the white paste that oozes from its fatal wound, she becomes indistinguishable from the cockroach and indeed from all life, she becomes what she terms 'neutral', not individuated by the spurious but 'useful' concepts of identity and time. "Until the moment of seeing the roach I'd always had some name for what I was living, otherwise I wouldn't get away. To escape the neutral, I had long since forsaken the being for the persona." Her mental disintegration is both a symptom of and an escape from life traumas that are barely hinted at (an abortion, a lost lover), and her experience with the cockroach entails a relinquishment of everything she had thought of as herself. The ecstatic and the horrific cannot be distinguished from one another. Only thinking and the use of language can keep this reality at bay. "I was abandoning my human organisation - to enter that monstrous thing that is my living neutrality." But, of course, the relation of her experience is in itself a feat of language: perhaps it is through the failure of language to reach further that the edges of experience that the shape of experience may be conveyed. "Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it - and the way I do not find it. ... The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language." After slowing time down with great austerity in the first two thirds of the novel, Lispector has her narrator progress into a delirium of religious and metaphorical ravings, which, for me, demonstrates how 'profundity' (as so precisely and compellingly delineated in the first part) has no certain point of delineation from madness (though I am not entirely sure that this was the author's intention (and I must say that the novel lost my unreserved admiration at this point)). The novel, and the narrator's identification with the cockroach, culminates in the narrator taking into her mouth, as a kind of communion, some of the crushed insect's innards. |
 | The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus {Reviewed by THOMAS} This book is a sort of fictional encyclopedia of pretty much everything you don't understand about the world but were unable quite to pinpoint and about which you are unable even to find the right sort of words to express your confusion. Familiar things and their meanings have been separated and allowed to settle in new patterns of association, clotted together by the adhesive properties of language, giving rise to new science, new culture, new emotions. Marcus is set against the deadening effect of familiarity; really, his Age of Wire and String is no more savage, tender and surprising than the world we take for granted every day: the problems he describes are the very same ones that already throng the skin dividing our internal world from our external (a concept demonstrably arbitrary and invertible) but to which we have become numbed and unobservant. This book will certainly not help you to understand anything any better, but it will make your confusion immaculate and add to it dimensions of awe and beauty that you had hitherto not suspected. This new edition pairs Marcus's text with Catrin Morgan's equally obtuse and intriguing illustrations. |
A DOZEN INTERESTING NEW RELEASES THAT ARRIVED THIS WEEK
Snake and Lizard are back, negotiating their life together and finding out what the world has to offer. These wry, warm tales, beautifully illustrated by Bishop, are perfect for reading aloud or as an early chapter book.
>> You will like the other 'Snake and Lizard' books, too!
>> Not to mention Frog and Toad.
As well as being an admired novelist, Hustvedt's knowledge of neurology, psychology and art make her an incisive feminist critic. In this book she explores the genderisation of visual culture with reference to Bourgeouis, Mapplethorpe, Almodovar, Wenders and Bausch, and also the relationship between brain function and subjective experience.
>> An interview with Hustvedt.
Is this The American Book of the Dead? Abraham Lincoln's 11-year-old son Willie died of typhoid in 1862. This inventive and much-anticipated novel from the author of the Folio Prize-winning Tenth of December has a president, "freshly inclined toward sorrow," driven by grief into communion with the disembodied spirits of the dead in what becomes a meditation on the force of death in personal and collective histories, notably the American Civil War.
>> Read the review in The New York Times.
>> Saunders speaks.
Carroll does a great job of the pretty-near-impossible task of synthesising the various fields of scientific discovery, from the cosmic to the quantum to the neurological scale, into a systematic view of the nature of reality.
"Carroll beautifully articulates the world view suggested by contemporary naturalism. Thorny issues like free will, the direction of time, and the source of morality are clarified with elegance and insight. This is a book that should be read by everybody.' - Carlo Rovelli
We have noticed a renewal of interest in the work of Angela Carter, with pleasing new editions of The Bloody Chamber and her Fairy Tales. And what an outstanding writer she was: unconventional, agile, playful, strident, and a notable stylist. Susannah Clapp was a close friend of Carter's, and is her literary executor. This brief, evocative biography is hung upon a series of postcards sent by Carter to Clapp during their friendship. It is a delight to read and, I think, really captures Carter's personality: "She snarled and she frolicked: the combination made her strong meat."
>>We also have Edmund Gordon's excellent recent biography The Invention of Angela Carter available.
>> Are there wolves in the forest?
Rees' book is remarkable for the amount of new information gathered from 25 years worth of interviews with Holocaust survivors and perpetrators. This research enables not only a reassessment of the social mechanisms that induced and permitted genocide but also of the range of the victims' responses. Also recorded here is the resistance, albeit ultimately futile, of individual stories to the overwhelming story that subsumed them.
>>> Also arrived this week: Denying the Holocaust: The growing assault on truth and memory by Deborah Lipstadt ($30), which asks why Holocaust deniers like David Irwin are on the rise in a post-factual world.
Changes to a community don't need to be large-scale and expensive to have a transformative impact. In fact, one street, park, or a single person can have an outsized effect on life in the surrounding city. Imagine the Church Street Bohemian Quarter closed to traffic and becoming a model for a new way (for Nelson) of thinking about community-focused urban use!
Is this the first talking-dog story in Western literature? All Cervantes' concerns, both with structure and content, here writ small and going about on all fours.
A novel capturing the immense creative freedom unleashed in the aftermath of punk upon youths in a small Scottish town. Memorial Device is the name of the band, and the mechanism of the book.
"Looks set to be the first best thing you read in 2017." - The Skinny
>> "It isn't easy being Iggy Pop in a small town in the west of Scotland."
Socialists, Communists, Bundists, Zionists, Trotskyists, manual workers and intellectuals: before the Holocaust decimated their numbers and laid waste to the land their radicalism addressed, the Jewish communities between Russia and the Baltic brought forth a swathe of new ideas compounded of idealism and doubt. The book examines what was lost, and what might have been.
Imagine Don Quixote set in modern Essex and London, somehow adhered to residues of the Peasants' Revolt and so full of every possible brilliant and stupid thought that it comprises an assault not only upon the realist novel but upon reality itself. Not really much like anything else.
Compiled by the historian at the Royal Horticultural Society, this solander box contains not only an illustrated history of forty rose species and hybrids and a survey of the cultivation and cultural significance of roses, but also an exquisite print of each of the forty roses, which you could frame if you felt so inclined.
The word 'book' and the word 'gift' might be synonymous anyway, but did you know that there is a day especially nominated for giving books as gifts? (it happens to be Valentine's Day too).
Come and choose a book for someone you love. We will gift-wrap, include a special bookmark, and even deliver anonymously for Valentine's Day (if that's what you'd like).
You might also consider giving someone a VOLUME book subscription. If you're out of town, choose from our website or e-mail us to arrange your gift or VOLUME voucher.
If you'd like to give books to people who might not otherwise have them, you might consider Book Aid International or Room to Read: World Change Starts with Educated Children (Official) or Duffy Books in Homes.
Tell a different story each time you play with the Story Box. The interlocking pieces are a huge amount of creative fun.
(Hint: this would make an ideal gift on International Book-Giving Day!)
>>Visit our website for more information.
LIONS HAVE ALL THE BEST BOOKS!
A very beautiful large-format book telling the story of a lion who seeks the excitement of the city but is disappointed that he is not noticed when he gets there. For lion-lovers and Paris-lovers old and young.
Lafcadio, The lion who shot back by Shel Silverstein
Lions have always run away from the hunters who come in search of lion-skin rugs, but one day a young lion questions this tradition, eats a hunter and takes his gun. After a bit of practice, the lion becomes such a good shot that soon all the lions have hunter-skin rugs. A man comes to take the lion to be a sharp-shooting star in a circus, and so begins a new life for Lafcadio: fame, clothes, travel, marshmallows. He becomes more and more human-like and begins to forget that he is a lion. What happens when his friends persuade him to go to Africa on a lion hunt, and, when he is standing there in his lion-hunting outfit, an old lion recognises him? Is he a human or is he a lion? Deep issues of identity are treated with a light touch in this funny book with great illustrations.
The Lion and the Bird by Marianne Dubuc
A gentle lion finds a wounded bird who cannot fly off with its flock and makes it a bed in a slipper, nursing it back to health as they become close friends through the winter. Spring comes and the flock returns. Will the bird leave the lion to rejoin them? The story is full of subtle observations about attachment and freedom, about seasons in the year and also in relationships, about being true to your nature and about the strength of friendship, but these are not shouted and the reader is entirely involved in the characters’ immediate feelings. This might well become your favourite picture book.
A Hungry Lion (or: A dwindling assortment of animals) by Lucy Ruth Cummins
The hungry lion's friends are all disappearing. Where could they have got to?
BOOK OF THE WEEK! : 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster
Come and get yourself a copy and become immediately enmeshed in the four possible strands of the life of its protagonist. Only fiction can provide this ability to live alternative lives.
>> Read Stella's review.
>> 4-3-2-1-0! Auster reads an extract.
>> and another extract.
>> "A sprinting elephant."
>> "Auster has always been interested in those chance events that send a person whose life was running smoothly on one track careening off in some unexpected direction."
>> An interesting interview with Auster.
>> He may not own a computer but he does have an interesting FaceBook page.
>> "America does not resemble the country I grew up in."
>> Auster is "very frightened and very angry."
>> But what keeps Auster awake at night?
 | 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster - our BOOK OF THE WEEK! {Reviewed by STELLA} From page one, I knew this was going to be splendid. When a writer tells a subtle joke and makes you laugh within the first few moments of reading, you know that you're onto a winner. Paul Auster’s first book in seven years, 4 3 2 1, follows the life of Archibald Isaac Ferguson born March 3, 1947. It’s not one life though: this Jewish boy born in Newark has 4 lives. Auster tells the story in parts - four strands - in sliding door style. In each part a fateful event at Archibald's father’s business (a burglary, a fire, a tragic accident and a buy-out) leads to a change in circumstances for the family, and Archie’s life is determined by how his immediate family respond. The minutiae of each of Ferguson’s lives are delightfully told and, despite the variations in his circumstances, his characteristics, along with those of his immediate family, keep the four strands linked together. Auster keeps many things the same, the characteristics, likes and dislikes, interests and talents of the main characters are constant. Circumstance dictates the roles they take and the choices they make.The extended family play their roles like bit actors, adding substance and colour to the novel and giving Auster room to articulate the social strata and political opinions of the time, and to bring in (or, conversely, to leave out) players that add to the sweeping saga of Ferguson’s life. This is excellent writing, taking you into the mind of one life in all its fragmented realities, and capturing a time and place - the American mid-twentieth-century - in all its tumultuous glory. If you enjoy Donna Tartt,Jonathan Franzen or Jonathan Safran Foer you will enjoy this. |
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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.
