 | The Plains by Gerald Murnane {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Gerald Murnane writes some of the best sentences in English of any living writer, and his fiction is always pushing at the edges of our knowledge about what fiction is capable of, how fiction relates to actuality, and, in Murnane’s conceptual universe, how fiction relates to a reality which lies somewhere beyond the shared horizon upon which fiction may trace some shared features: “Everything in sight is a landmark of something beyond it.” This is the earliest of Murnane’s books that I have read (it was first published in 1982 and has now been reissued as a pleasing hardback), and it contains many of the themes developed in his later fiction (Inland, Barley Patch, A Million Windows, A History of Books (see my reviews for most of these)). The Plains concerns a filmmaker who arrives in the inland plains of western Victoria, a kind of ‘inner Australia’, contrasted in almost every way with the less authentic Outer Australia of those who live facing the coast. “Twenty years ago, when I first arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes open. I looked for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances. My journey to the plains was much less arduous than I afterwards described it. And I cannot even say that at a certain hour I knew I had left Australia. But I recall clearly a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret.” In the first part, which is largely spent waiting for admission to an inner room in a hotel where the wealthy patrons of the plains hear petitioners and occasionally grant patronage to artists and the like, the narrator tells us of the various practices, customs, factions and histories of the plains-dwellers. Because the plains-dwellers are entirely inward-looking, there is no particular that unites them, other than their diametric opposition to the culture and practices of Outer Australia. Their chief characteristics are almost entirely intrinsic (for example, concerning religious sects on the plains: “Men who had watched the sectaries, and even spied on them in their most private moments, had seen nothing that any irreligious plainsman might not have done - and thought ordinary or even trivial.”), with little extrinsic manifestation aside from an obscure system of heraldry. Much of the social anthropology of the plains is ironic and often very funny, although, for Murnane, irony and epiphany are seldom clearly demarcated. Two main parties underlie much of the interactions of the plains-dwellers: the Horizonists, who look towards further plains lying beyond the horizon, and the Haresmen, for whom the world is more deeply revealed in the examination of a contained area of familiar land. This, and indeed pretty much all of the book, can be seen as a commentary of the possibilities and limitations and purposes of the writing of fiction. “Exploration is much more than naming or describing. An explorer’s task is to postulate the existence of a land beyond the known land. Whether or not he finds that land and brings back news of it is unimportant. He may choose to lose himself in it forever and add one more to the sum of unexplored lands.” The narrator eventually gains admission to the patrons, who have been drinking in the inner bar, and, following a wonderful set of discourse between the landowners, the filmmaker pitches his project. Most of the landowners immediately leave the room (it is clear that the proposed film is quite impossible) except for one, who immediately grants the filmmaker tenure for life (probably because of the impossibility of what he proposes to achieve). The second part takes place largely in the library of the great estate ten years later, and describes the practices of that estate and gives further insights into the culture of the plains (which can be seen as a gentle assault upon, or dissolution of, the mores of Outer Australia (those parts of the country that are inauthentic from being too close to other lands)). A lot of the humour (apart from several aphorisms seemingly ready to be displayed on calendars on the walls of the waiting rooms of dentists of the plains: “Our joys and pleasures are only a compromise between our wants and our circumstances.”), as well as many thought-provoking observations on the beliefs and practices of the plains-dwellers, arises from what may be termed Murnane’s philosophy of fiction: “They give all their attention to the possibility itself and esteem it according to its amplitude and to the length of time for which it survives just beyond the reach of the haphazard disposition of sights and sounds which is called, in careless speech, actuality, and which has been considered to represent the extinction of all possibility.” This sounds noble enough, but its immediate logical extension is somehow an assault on sanity as we ordinarily conceive of it: “The woman might have considered the chief advantage of so many years spent among unlooked-for plains, with a man who had still not explained himself, to be that it had once allowed her to postulate the existence of a woman whose future included even the unlikely prospect of half a lifetime spent among unlooked-for plains with a man who would never explain himself.” In the third part, ten years later again, the filmmaker, still researching, is further than ever from making his film, ever more isolated, even within the rooms and galleries of the great estate to which he is attached, posing with his film camera to his eye for a photograph which will provide 'evidence' for people of the future of what could hardly be further from the truth. Although he films nothing it is not incorrect to think of him as a filmmaker as it is specifically filmmaking that he is not doing as opposed to all the many other things he is also not doing.
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 | Pretentiousness: Why it Matters by Dan Fox {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like but how it was made.” - Harry G. Frankfurt. To be pretentious is to seek to be something other than what one is, which seems in some ways a core function (or a core risk) of any model of creativity. According to Fox, the pretentious is that which seeks to break free of suffocating mores in society and in the arts, and is quite correctly seen as an assault on the stability of those mores (which are patrolled by snobs (investors in the status quo)). To pretend is not only a rejection of the authentic but also the means of moving towards a new (or deeper) authenticity. This simultaneity of authenticity and inauthenticity provides for a fluidity of identity which is both the reward and the hazard of creative pursuits. I am not entirely confident that many examples of pretentiousness are in fact not nobly overthrowing the structures of the status quo but rather reinforcing those structures by fluidly attempting to belong in an inauthentic place within them. This book will provoke some good discussions.
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Tell us what books you like and why.
Contribute to MY VOLUME: the space for you to recommend and discuss the books you have enjoyed.
THE OCKHAMETER
The winners of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize will be announced on May 16.
Vote for your favourites now on the VOLUME OCKHAMETER and go in the draw to win a copy of each of the winners.
Share the Ockhameter so your friends can enter too.
>> Read Stella's review.
>> We will have signed copies available.
>> The Homegrown Kitchen's on-line recipe journal.
>> The joys of growing and making your own food from scratch.
>> Yoghurt and Honey Panna Cotta with Roasted Strawberry.
>> Nicola's lovely Instagram gallery.
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Two children's fantasy series reviewed by STELLA.
This week at our children’s book group for 9-12-year-olds our topic was fantasy (anything magical: dragons, wizards, witches, ghosts). Why do we love imaginary worlds and what do they tell us about our own world? I chose two books with a similar theme - Inkheart by Cornelia Funke and The Forbidden Library by Django Wexler. I read both of these some time ago, but they still stick with me. In both, the characters literally fall into books and into danger - wild rides where truth is uncovered and obstacles are overcome. Each have interesting girl protagonists, Meggie in the 'Inkheart' series and Alice in 'The Forbidden Library' series; both have a least one missing parent; both explore the need to trust, yet be wary of, strangers; and both have an incredible power - one that will help the characters overcome great obstacles to free the ones they love.
Cornelia Funke’s series is a complex, multilayered tale of mythical and magical proportions. When a stranger knocks on Meggie’s door one night, her life is turned upside down. Dustfinger, a fire-eater and performer, has come to find Mortimer (Meggie’s father), a bookbinder with a strange power: he is a Silvertongue with the ability to talk characters out of books. But for every character that comes out, something must go in. Dustfinger comes with news of Meggie’s mother and dangerous times, and Mortimer is pulled back into a world which he has tried to keep hidden from Meggie, who soon learns she has some incredible powers herself. When you see a by-line that says "Books open new worlds. Especially for Alice", you can’t help but be tempted, and this was my introduction to The Forbidden Library by Django Wexler. When Alice's father disappears, presumed drowned, Alice is sent away to live with the strange Mr. Geryon at his dark and unfriendly home, which includes a mysterious forbidden library. Banned from entering, of course Alice is curious, and so begins a tale of talking cats, books that you fall into, moving shelves, unusual and sometimes frightening creatures, foes and friends, and Alice's discovery of her quite remarkable talents. The Mad Apprentice is the second book in the series, where Alice meets other children like her and learns more about the sorcerers that they are apprenticed to, and the third book, just arrived at Volume, is The Palace of Glass. |
 | Homegrown Kitchen by Nicola Galloway {Reviewed by STELLA} Nicola Galloway’s much-awaited cookbook Homegrown Kitchen is definitely worth the wait. A gorgeously presented book, the cover is enticing with its simple elegance, the photography conveys a feeling of comfort and pleasure in food. Thoughtfully ordered, the book opens with an introduction to Galloway’s philosophy of food and cooking and some preliminary notes about the recipes and your pantry, including information about gluten-free ingredients, sugars and their alternatives, and alternatives to dairy (nuts, seeds, coconut) - approachable and sound nutritional advice that doesn’t get bogged down in particular diet fads. For those that like to have all the essentials at their fingertips, this is a wonderful cookbook - almost half the book is dedicated to processes and recipes that will fill your household with all the nutritional goodness you and your family will need for eating well. There is a weekly kitchen planner to keep everything on track with your making of yoghurts, broths and stocks, sour-doughs, preparations for grains, seed and nut milk, and on preserving and fermenting. The recipes for preserving fruit, making sauces and chutneys look particularly tempting at this time of year when you want to fill the cupboards with bottles of beautifully coloured fruits, giving warmth and nutrition in the coming cooler months. Galloway’s instructions for fermenting are straightforwardly reassuring, and recipes include sauerkraut, lacto-fermented beetroot pickle and kombucha. And then the recipes, headed up under the categories of Morning, Day, Evening and Sweet, are predominately everyday, interlaced with treats for special occasions. From porridge to poached eggs with a lime hollandaise on a roastie hash, there’s a breakfast that will appeal, the dips all look delicious and there are quick and healthy snack and lunch choices, and the evening dinners are tasty treats made from seasonal ingredients and combining nutritional value alongside the pleasure of food. And Galloway’s book is a pleasure which reflects her interest in nutrition, wellness and the goodness of eating and enjoying food. |
 | The Body Where I Was Born by Guadalupe Nettel {Reviewed by THOMAS} This novel describes the childhood and adolescence of the author (evidently), who was born with a birthmark covering her right cornea into a Mexican family of uncompromising personalities. Evoked (remembered or ‘remembered’) with great precision, both boldly and delicately, this is an incisive portrait of a girl striving to feel at home in her own self, to overcome her feelings of being a social and familial misfit (she describes herself as a “cockroach” or a “trilobite”) without compromising her individuality. The device of having the story related to a psychiatrist (who makes no contribution (good practice for a psychiatrist)) introduces an interesting tension upon the narrative, a pressure retrospectively applied to childhood by later (here unrelated) experiences. |
SOME NEW RELEASES
Books either anticipated or surprising - just out of the carton. Follow the links for more information, to purchase these books or to have them put aside for you.
Language and thought wrestle and play as characters try and fail or succeed or fail/succeed to communicate.
"Fiddling with words, as if playing with them were all that mattered, her characters draw time to a standstill – then they stop, suddenly, blinking and thrilled. It’s beautiful, the way they get lost." - Guardian
Is this the Russian equivalent of Finnegans Wake? Language itself is the default protagonist in a novel in which plot, character, time and death all lack stability. The only thing that never changes is the frozen Russian landscape.
>> "I thought it would never happen."
Beautifully presented and full of accessible delicious recipes and the best advice for those who want to eat delicious, healthy, natural, nourishing food every day, this eagerly anticipated book starts with a section on kitchen essentials, sourdough, fermentation and preserving, the book, as the day, moves on through breakfast, lunch and dinner, and finishes off with an array of delectable sweet treats.
The remarkable intelligence of the cephalopds evolved quite separately from that of homonids and cetaceans. What does this tell us about the nature and evolution of consciousness, and what would it be like to have the mind of an octopus?
"Brilliant." - The Guardian
Parallel biographies of three New Zealanders who stood up for what they believed in and paid the price: Dr John Saxby, Brigadier Reginald Miles and Judge Peter Mahon. McNeish's work highlights the difficulties of living with integrity against the grain of society.
A history of dental intervention as evidenced in objects and illustrations, from the Bronze Age to the present. Concurrently attractive and repellent and consistently fascinating.
A wide gathering of voices and concerns. Poetry arises from an urgent wrangling between freedom and constraint and between the personal and the societal. It is never far away from being political.
Excellent examples of bold yet sensitive hybridisings of existing structures with modern architecture.
A young boy describes his life in a small seaside town, all the while remembering that as he is swimming or playing his father is at that moment in the dark under the sea digging for coal.
In ten years time, will antibiotics still work? Have we let bacteria get the upper hand in the evolutionary arms race?
An impassioned and informed defence of tertiary education in the face of the business model that has been forced upon it, both in Britain and New Zealand, and a reassertion of the role of the university as a a public good, first and foremost.
Capitalism is by definition an unsustainable model, but, since the 1970s, governments have acted widely to defer the consequences of capitalism's inherent pressures. This has caused the pressures to build. How will they be released? Which will ultimately survive, capitalism or democracy?
"When political passion connects with critical exposition of the facts and incisive argument, Streeck's sweeping and empirically founded inquiry reminds one of Karl Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte." - Jurgen Habermas
Despite their new prominence in world affairs, Moscow and Beijing have shown no capacity to cooperate on grand strategy or establish new international norms. Theirs is a partnership of strategic convenience: pragmatic, calculating and limited.
What is life really like for ordinary and not-so-ordinary people in North Korea? These stories by the anonymous 'Solzhenitsyn of Pyongyang' depict a country operating over the edge from sanity and under the sway of a demagogue.
"Very rare fiction to emerge from the secretive dictatorship. On its way to becoming a literary sensation." - Guardian
Full of surprising information, Spence's book is an examination of the multisensory experience of eating and the roles it plays in our multifaceted lives.
The search for answers to deep questions, motivated solely by curiosity and without concern for applications, often leads not only to the greatest scientific discoveries but also to the most revolutionary technological breakthroughs. This essay is a challenge to current application-based funding models.
The e-Tangata website is a focus of discussion for Maori and Pasifika issues in New Zealand. This selection brings together sharp commentary on political and social issues, history and popular culture.
A playful, modernised parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with aplomb. Oreo, our young hero, navigates the labyrinth of sound studios and brothels and subway tunnels in Manhattan, seeking to claim her birthright while unwittingly experiencing and triggering a mythic journey of self-discovery. First published in 1974.
"A brilliant and biting satire, a feminist picaresque, absurd, unsettling, and hilarious, Ross' novel, with its Joycean language games and keen social critique, is as playful as it is profound. Criminally overlooked. A knockout." —Kirkus
A pleasing new hardback edition of Murnane's 1982 novel, exploring, with his signature perfect sentences and idiosyncratic genius, a sort of "inner Australia", a place under the surface of but also separate from the "outer Australia"; a dimension of existence that reveals its subtleties best against the emptiness of the inland plains. The narrator is an filmmaker attempting to film the plains in a way that will reconcile the opposing worldviews of two cliques of plainsmen who use their wealth to support an elaborate system of patronage whereby artists are employed to interpret or represent the meaning of their jealously guarded and endlessly elusive landscape.
>> Introduction by Ben Lerner.
>> Meet Gerald Murnane.
>> Thomas recommends books by Gerald Murnane.
A dialogue between history and science, re-evaluating the factors that have tipped the planet into a new geologic age, one in which human actions are the major determining factor for environmental conditions.
"Trees cannot change their place in the world so they are patient and learn to live where they are."
What place is there for love in a world torn by crisis? From the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
"Exit West is a novel about migration and mutation, full of wormholes and rips in reality. It is animated by a constant motion between genre, between psychological and political space, and between a recent past, an intensified present and a near future." - The Guardian
A multifaceted examination of post-partum depression, drawing on critical theory, popular culture, and personal experience.
The New Zealand Project by Max Harris $40
New Zealand faces some urgent issues: climate change, wealth inequality, political populism, the degradation of health and education, housing affordability, racial tension. How are we going to grapple with them when our media and political discussion is so frustratingly superficial?
Are wars avoidable? Grayling examines, tests, and challenges the concept of war and proposes that a deeper, more accurate understanding of war may enable us to reduce its frequency, mitigate its horrors, and lessen the burden of its consequences.
What happens when Elizabeth and her unusual friend Zenobia enter the forbidden wing of the great house and find a room in which the wallpaper seems to be alive and they find a strange book that contains a different story every night?
A fascinating collection of objects made because the maker lacked the correct tool, the relevant source, sufficient money, or the requisite common sense to solve their problem or fill their needs in any other way. Endlessly inventive, often hilarious or sad, always interesting, each object is accompanied by a photograph of its maker and a description of its necessity and making in their own words.
50 stunning designs from books published by New Directions between 1941 and 1952.
>> Excellent Alvin Lustig website.
UNDERSTANDING AMERICA
If rationality is not to be the motor of politics (a disconcerting realisation for thinkers across the political spectrum), what forces drive change and whose end does that change serve? We have laid out a few books that might help us get our heads around the current plight of the United States of America.
Vance's account of growing up in a Rust Belt town reveals the slow -and then fast- growth of disaffection in the poor white communities which formed the core Trump's support.
"You will not read a more important book about America this year." - Economist
Roy and Cusack discuss the nature of the state, empire, and surveillance in an era of perpetual war, the meaning of flags and patriotism, the role of foundations and NGOs in limiting dissent, and the ways in which capital but not people can freely cross borders.
A devastating portrait of urban poverty in the US, both of the mechanisms of inequality and its effects.
"Essential. A compelling and damning exploration of the abuse of one of our basic human rights: shelter." - Owen Jones
Written in a "fury of disbelief", Jacobson's cathartic satire is the tale of the unlikely Prince Fracassus. Idle, boastful, thin-skinned and egotistic, he has no manners, no curiosity, no knowledge, no idea and no words in which to express them. Could he, in that case, be the very leader to make the country great again?
>> "The consolation of savage satire".
The culmination of nearly 30 years of reporting on Donald Trump, Pulitzer Prize- winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston takes a revealingly close look at the mogul's rise to power and prominence. Covering the long arc of Trump's career, Johnston tells the full story of how a boy from a quiet section of Queens, NY would become an entirely new, and complex, kind of public figure.
A wide survey of disruptive protest in the US in the last forty years, drawing parallels between the efforts of environmentalists, black and indigenous activist, feminists and radical queers. What effect has protest had on shaping society, and what are the potentials for protest now?
A vain, outlandish, anti-immigrant, fearmongering demagogue runs for President of the United States - and wins. Sinclair Lewis's chilling 1935 bestseller is the story of Buzz Windrip, 'Professional Common Man', who promises poor, angry voters that he will make America proud and prosperous once more, but takes the country down a far darker path.
"A devastating front-line account of the police killings and the young activism that sparked one of the most significant racial justice movements since the 1960s: Black Lives Matter. Lowery more or less pulls the sheet off America. Essential reading." - Junot Diaz, The New York Times
How can we explain, let alone remedy, the wave of paranoia, racism, nationalism and misogyny that is sweeping the world and manifesting as reactionary government, violence and demagoguery? Mishra shows how disaffection has wide roots in our economic and social structures.
"Urgent, profound and extraordinarily timely. Throws light on our contemporary predicament, when the neglected and dispossessed of the world have suddenly risen up to transform the world we thought we knew." - John Banville
Doublethink: "The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."
As America and its allies use their military might in the misguided attempt to export a desiccated version democracy, and reactionary strands in mainstream political opinion abandon civil liberties, Ranciere argues that true democracy - government by all - is held in profound contempt by the new ruling class.
"In our time of the disorientation of the left, Ranciere's writings offer one the few consistent conceptualizations of how are to continue to resist." - Slavoj Zizek
This set of furiously affecting prose poems exposes racial prejudice and violence in various situations and contexts, from the everyday to the critical.
"Wonderfully capacious and innovative. In her riffs on the demotic, in her layering of incident, Rankine finds a new way of writing about race in America." - Nick Laird, New York Review of Books
Other paths could have been taken.
In the twentieth century, European democracies collapsed into fascism, Nazism and Stalinism. These were movements in which a leader or a party claimed to give voice to the people, promised to protect them from global existential threats, and established rule by an elite with a monopoly on truth. European history shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary people can find themselves in unimaginable circumstances. Today, we are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to totalitarianism in the twentieth century. Only a thorough knowledge of their failings can protect us from repeating them.
A paean to optimism in the face of an increasingly desperate world. Change is made by the hopeful.
The US has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The prison population has increased from 300,000 in the early 1970s to more than two million now. One in every 15 people is expected to go to prison. For black men, the most incarcerated group in America, this figure rises to one out of every three. Bryan Stevenson grew up a member of a poor black community in the racially segregated South. He was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of the US's criminal justice system.
As it says.
"The thing is, when you actually think about it, it's not funny. Given what's at stake, it's more like the opposite, like the first sign of the collapse of the United States as a global superpower. Twenty years from now, when we're all living like prehistory hominids and hunting rats with sticks, we'll probably look back at this moment as the beginning of the end." Incisive articles, many of which first appeared in Rolling Stone.
"Matt Taibbi is one of the few journalists in America who speaks truth to power." - Bernie Sanders
On Saturday 23 November 2013 ten children were shot dead. The youngest was nine; the oldest was nineteen. They fell in suburbs, hamlets and ghettos. None made the national news. It was just another day in the death of America, where on average seven children and teens are killed by guns daily.
On January 21st, 2017, five million people in 82 countries and on all seven continents stood up with one voice. The Women's March began with one cause, women's rights, but quickly became a movement around the many issues that were hotly debated during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign: immigration, health care, environmental protections, LGBTQ rights, racial justice, freedom of religion, and workers rights, among others.
>> Hope.
>> Read Stella's review.
>> "A small miracle of imaginative sympathy."
>> "Prickly, shy, arrogant, imaginative, contradictory, curious, confused, melancholic, ambitious, restless."
>> A Description of the New World, Called the Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish (which inspired The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt).
>> The philosophy of Margaret Cavendish.
>> And now in PowerPoint.
>> A sampler of Margaret Cavendish's works.
>> Danielle Dutton: "One of the most original and wonderfully weird prose stylists of our time".
>> Dutton is also a publisher at the very excellent The Dorothy Project.
We have 'adopted' a show at the forthcoming Nelson Fringe Festival (29 April - 7 May). We would love you join us to see Mr Beckenbauer's Unfortunate Encounter with Enlightenment by Nelson youth 'existentialist theatre' group Ironic Theatre of the Absurd (Indigo Levett, Rohan O’Neil-Stevens and Daniel Merry). Click through to find out more and to book your tickets.  |
Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton {Reviewed by STELLA}
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of New Castle, was a poet, philosopher, essayist and playwright in the 17th century. Eccentric, erratically shy but desiring of fame, she was both shunned and celebrated by the aristocracy and the thinkers of the time. I kept picking up this slim volume with its attractive cover and its attractive turn of phrase, and insights into a woman’s lot in the 17th century. “One morning I woke to find I’d stained my sheets and thought I’d split in two. There followed a quiet clamor: new linens, removal from the nursery, and no one explaining why. Until a maid, in secret, provided useful counsel: Inscribe veronica in ink on the ball of your left thumb, to decrease the irksome flow. Stunned I fled to my room, only to find that my mother awaited me inside. 'You must wear chicken-skin gloves on your hands each night.'” And with those chicken-skin gloves, I was hooked. This is a fascinating fictional view of Margaret Cavendish, who courted fame and won it. Taken seriously by some, ridiculed by others, she was both shy and flamboyant (her fabulous outfits had London gossiping). The book opens with her childhood in the country estate of a royalist family. As trouble brews – Cromwell and the Civil War- Margaret goes into exile as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Henrietta Maria. In Paris she is courted by William Cavendish, and in their early married life they mix with European thinkers and other exiled intellectuals. Margaret is not content to be a wife and bystander and, encouraged by William, begins on a series of plays and novellas. Some are treatises on being female, philosophical treatises, discussions about science, while others are fantastical stories – the most famous of these being The Blazing World, which is seen by some academics as the forerunner to science fiction. Danielle Dutton captures Margaret and all her complexities and inconsistencies perfectly. The first part of the book often reads like diary entries giving us an intimate portrayal of her state of mind, her frustrations and fascinations. In the later parts, which take us back to England (the royal family back in the seat of power), Dutton changes her writing style and we look upon Margaret with all her foibles - her egocentric nature, knack of offending with her arrogance, bouts of doubt and sense of isolation - as well as allowing us a glance at how she was viewed by others. Known as ‘Mad Madge’, she courted attention - at times London society couldn’t get enough of her – whether for her ideas or just titillation. And while she was viewed as a peculiarity, she was also the first woman to attend the Royal Society, and in her 49 years published 21 volumes of work, some of which garnered serious attention. Dutton’s fictional account of this fascinating character is lively and absorbing. |
 | Wa: The essence of Japanese design by Rossella Menegazzo and Stefania Piotti {Reviewed by STELLA} Wa is not only filled with gorgeous examples of wood, metal and textile objects, it's a design object in itself. Beautifully bound with striking stitching, the pages are made from folded fine paper so from the moment you pick it up it feels special. Within the covers of the book, the pages carry the essence of Japanese aesthetic with typographic design and placement of images on the page which are pleasing and thoughtfully arranged. Split into different media (textile, wood, metal etc), each chapter has an essay discussing the area and the contemporary approach to each. Altogether a stunning book. |
 | The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Once in bed, the blankets pulled up to my chest, I reach with my right hand under the pillow and draw out the book – the way a cowboy would draw a pistol from under his pillow, but a bit more slowly.” From his job as a security guard at a juice factory, Gustavo Sanchez Sanchez, augured by Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars, aspires to improve his lot by studying to become an auctioneer (learning the differing styles of auctioneering: hyperbolics, parabolics, circulars, allegorics and elliptics). After some success in the US, he returns to Mexico, having replaced his teeth with a set that once belonged to Marilyn Munro. After a charity auction in which he sells his old teeth as having been those of various famous writers, he falls into the hands of his estranged son and then meets a young writer who he commissions to write his story (and who later tells Sanchez’ story from the outside too). Of course, what is ostensibly about auctioneering is in fact about the writing, and the various sections of the book are in turn hyperbolic, parabolic, circular, allegoric and elliptic (a further section, chronologic, is added by the translator Christina McSweeney). Furthermore, the book had its origin in a commission Luiselli undertook to build connection between a contemporary art gallery and the workers in the juice factory that owned it, and much of the book arose out of collaborations between Luiselli (posing as Gustavo Sanchez Sanchez) and the workers, spliced with content from artworks and actual locations and people of the city of Ecatepec, as well cameo appearances by other (mainly Latin American) writers (or at least by characters with their names). Luiselli in various ways bridges, or dissolves the distinction between, writer and reader, art and labour, meaning and farce, and the book falls in texture somewhere between Borges and Kharms (probably a little closer to Kharms). Where Duchamp assailed the status of art by placing a urinal in a gallery, Luiselli undertakes a kind of reverse Duchampism by taking art from the gallery and literature from the pantheon and using them as the grist for quotidian lives. What results when large things are placed in small vessels? Sanchez is a wonderfully limited narrator, and Luiselli, with the lightest of touches, demonstrates the creative mileage to be made from limitation and constraint. Often very funny, there is philosophy behind the farce, and, as the reader will learn, “real writers never show their teeth”. |
 | Correction by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS} Finding himself the literary executor of his friend Roithamer after Roithamer’s suicide, the narrator returns to Austria, to the room in the garret of the house their mutual school-friend the taxidermist Hoeller built above the Aurach Gorge, the room in which Roithamer sought refuge from the world to think and plan and perfect the cone-shaped house he built for his sister in the exact centre of the Kobernausser Forest, which was so ‘perfect’ and so ‘suited to her particular character’, or so Roithamer intended, that she died, or was relieved of the burden of having to keep herself alive (Austrians’ ‘national folk art’ being “to think constantly about killing themselves without actually killing themselves”), immediately upon entering it, the room in which Roithamer wrote, rewrote and re-rewrote the manuscript ‘About Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, with special attention to the Cone’, which the narrator considers Roithamer’s masterwork, despite its differing and conflicting versions, along with ‘hundreds of thousands’ of passages on slips of paper and preparatory drawings for the nihilistic structure of the Cone, which the narrator prepares himself to ‘sift and sort’. In the second of the two relentless paragraphs that comprise the book, the narrator reads Roithamer’s manuscript, the ‘corrected’ and shorter second version and the ‘re-corrected’ and even shorter third version, and the slips of paper, and is progressively and ultimately completely subsumed by Roithamer’s voice, its absolutism, its monstrous ambivalences, tectonic self-contradictions and tiresome petulance, as Roithamer obsesses over his miserable childhood and youth at his immensely wealthy family’s home at Altensam, his attempts to oppose himself to his family, in particular to his step-mother, ‘that Eferding woman’, his sale of the family estate at Altensam after it was perniciously left to him by his father, who surely knew that Roithamer hated Altensam and would bring about its destruction, all building to a maniacal crescendo of invective and self-abnegation. Even within the claustrophobic subjectivity of Roithamer’s mind, each assertion, as soon as it is stated, begins to move towards its negation: “We’re constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously, because we recognise at every moment that we did it all wrong (wrote it, thought it, made it all wrong), acted all wrong, how we acted all wrong, that everything to this point of time is a falsification, so we correct this falsification, and then we again correct the correction of this falsification, and we correct the result of the correction of a correction and so forth, so Roithamer. But the ultimate correction is one we keep delaying.” As with the narrator, so ultimately with Roithamer: persons and facts do not endure; the mechanisms of thought and language, when permitted to run their course, are destructive to all equally: entities, identities, personalities, actualities are all mere contingencies to an ineluctable process of devastation. |
NEW BOOKS FOR A NEW MONTH
Choose from this array of new releases
Language dances as death presses at it from behind, agency flees into objects, images draw themselves together on the brink of their own dissolution, small things become final containers for the large. Manhire's first collection for seven years takes its title, and many of its themes, from the elegy he wrote for his friend Ralph Hotere.
A young woman lies dying in hospital. The boy at her bedside asks some questions which unleash the most terrifying of stories.
Long-listed for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
"Terrifying but brilliant, this dangerously addictive novel in which a woman’s life speeds towards doom is haunted by the bleak landscape of rural Argentina. Schweblin remorselessly cranks up the tension until every sentence seems to tremble with threat. Fever Dream’s ambiguities, and the intricate psychologies with which Schweblin invests her characters, mean that rereading proves rewarding even when the suspense is removed. Wherever you decide the truth lies, aspects of Amanda’s story will continue to puzzle and haunt you long after she stops being able to tell it." - Guardian
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patty Yumi Cottrell $38
32-year-old Helen is in her Manhattan apartment when she receives a call that her adoptive brother has killed himself. Helen, who like her brother is Korean and was adopted by the same white Milwaukee couple, is shaken by the news and books a one-way ticket to Milwaukee. But what starts as a detective’s hunt for clues soon becomes Helen’s confrontation of her own place in the world and her estrangement from her past.
“Patty Yumi Cottrell’s adoption of the rambling and specific absurd will and must delight. This is a graceful claim not just about writing but about a way of being in the world, an always new and necessary way to contend with this garbage that surrounds us, these false portraits of our hearts and minds. This book is not a diversion—it’s a lifeline.” —Jesse Ball
In her memoir of leaving settled life in search of a way of existing not based solely on either struggle or surrender, Crispin (author of Why I Am Not a Feminist) finds solidarity with Nora Barnacle, William James, Maude Gonne and Igor Stravinsky, fellow refusers of the stable caught always in the borderlands between dependence and independence.
Steeped in the author's own experiences, this novel protrays the life of a girl growing up in rural Southern Poland in the 1970s where the edges of reality are always assailed by Catholicism, Communism and folklore.
"Enchantingly elliptical. Greg moves back and forth across time with a poet’s panache. It is refreshing to find a fiction writer so free of stylistic pomp, so and finely attuned to the truth of her material, a novel so sensually saturated." - Kapka Kassabova, Guardian
This book has just been long-listed for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
The Abundance by Annie Dillard $25
A selection of essays from the Pulitzer Prize-winner's various collections of essays.
"Annie Dillard's books are like comets, like celestial events that remind us that the reality we inhabit is itself a celestial event." - Marilynne Robinson
"Spirited and gale-force. She raps out her opinions; lyrical, gleeful, cymbal-clashing, peppery. The best thing is her glee, a pied-piperish glee at being in the world, which she evokes better than anyone else." - Robert MAcfarlane
"Annie Dillard is among the greatest nature writers who have ever lived. Like Thoreau, like Gilbert White, she combines a naturalist's sharp eye with a philosopher's curiosity and a poet's magical gift for language. Keen, urgent and impassioned, her subject is life itself, in all its teeming and marvellous forms." - Olivia Laing
A deeply poetic and dark novel set in the 13th century BC and telling of Medea's journey with Jason across the Mediterranean on board the Argo bringing the Golden Fleece from Colchis. Vann has an almost uncanny ability to probe the furthest corners of his characters' motivations, weaknesses and strengths, and this is a nuanced treatment of an often maligned character.
"David Vann is surely one of the most powerful writers working today." - New Zealand Herald
>> Euripides attempted something similar.
>> As did Lars Trier.
>> Beware of centaurs.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it seemed possible that a new age of openness and co-operation with the West was possible. But the vacuum of the 1990s proved the ideal conditions for the growth of a worrying new nationalism with international repercussions led by Vladimir Putin.
"Nuanced yet fast-paced, this is the essential guide to our rocky relationship with a country we ignore at our peril." - Peter Pomerantsev
When a woman is found dead with a signed copy of Rudian Stefa's latest book in her possession, the author finds himself summoned for an interview by the Party Committee. He has never met the woman in question but he remembers signing the book. As the influence of a paranoid regime steals up on him, Rudian finds himself swept along on a surreal quest to discover what really happened to the mysterious woman to whom he wrote the dedication.
"A compelling amalgam of realism, dreaminess and elegiac, white-hot fury. Kadare communicates with awful immediacy the nature of tyranny and the accommodations that those subject to it must make - as Kadare himself had to do." - John Banville
A much-anticipated new translation of some of Kafka's most interesting (but sometimes lesser-known) stories by the luminous Michael Hofman. Includes 'Building the Great Wall of China' and 'Investigations of a Dog'.
>> Hofman stands, speaks and reads.
>> Meet Franz K.
>> What makes something Kafkaesque?
>> Will Self finds K's dust.
How did we arrive at the current favoured model of physical reality? Why is the Standard Model of Particle Physics the best tool we have at the moment to understand the unseen forces that shape our everyday realities?
"A Homeric tale of science, history and philosophy revealing how we learned so much about the universe and its tiniest parts." - Sheldon Glashow (Nobel laureate in physics)
When Reuben discovers an old pocket watch, he soon realizes it holds an incredible power: it can turn you invisible for fifteen minutes. He can't resist the lure of disappearance: for a time, he can vanish from the despotic regime of New Umbra. But the watch's power is even more extraordinary than he imagines. Soon, he's on the run from New Umbra's ruler, The Smoke, who's determined to possess it for himself...
From the author of the rather wonderful 'Mysterious Benedict Society' series.
At the end of the 80s a young literature student travels to the Baltic Island of Hiddensee, a notorious destination for hippies, idealists, and those at odds with the East German state. Although he tries to remain on the edges he feels himself drawn to charismatic Kruso, unofficial leader of the seasonal workers. What is Kruso's mission? What will happen as the wave of change in Germany hits the island?
"The first worthy successor to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain to appear in contemporary German literature.” - Der Spiegel
>> Read an extract here.
Between 1830 and 1945, Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, Italy and the United States impressed their languages, laws, culture, religions, scientific and technical knowledge and economic systems upon Africa. What was the result?
Teffi writes with superimposed sympathy, wit and clarity of her 1918-1920 journey by cart, freight train and steamer into exile during the Russian Civil War and of the ordinary and 'unheroic' people she encountered, many of them refugees.
"Like Nabokov, Platonov, and many other great Russian prose writers, Teffi was a poet who turned to prose but continued to write with a poet's sensitivity to tone and rhythm. Like Chekhov, she fuses wit, tragedy, and a remarkable capacity for observation; there are few human weaknesses she did not relate to with compassion and understanding." - Robert Chandler, New Yorker
"I never imagined such a memoir could be possible, especially about the Russian Civil War. Teffi wears her wisdom lightly, observing farce and foible amid the looming tragedy, in this enthralling book." - Antony Beevor
Accessible, enjoyable, authentic.
The Folded Clock: A diary by Heidi Julavits $35
"Exquisite. This diary is a diary in the way that Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater is a confession, or that Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year is a journal, or that Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book is a pillow book. Witty, sly, critical, inventive and adventurous, a work so artful that it appears to be without artifice. This diary is a record of the interior weather of an adept thinker. In it, the mundane is rendered extraordinary through the alchemy of effortless prose. It is a work in which a self is both lost and found, but above all made." - New York Times
A lovely hardback edition.
A deeply poetic and thoughtful consideration of the British landscape and the effect of place on the people who live there.
"Rangy, deeply felt and sometimes luminous. Like the raking light that exposes ancient lynchets at sunset, such knowledge brings out new detail in the one particular view over a gate which Pavord has loved in all seasons, and which she now evokes for us as it changes through a full year. From the vantage point of this ending, I look back and find that the mixed landscape of the whole book is cast in a very beautiful light." - Alexandra Harris, Guardian
Now in paperback.
>> They've got a blog.
>> They've got a YouTube channel.
1775 of them.
[But did Dickinson consider any of her poems "complete"?]
>> Try this (Herman Melville-inflected) Emily Dickinson poetry generator.
>> Also in stock: the very lovely Envelope Poems.
Baram navigates the conflict-ridden regions and hostile terrain to speak with a wide range of people, among them Palestinian-Israeli citizens trapped behind the separation wall in Jerusalem, Jewish settlers determined to forge new lives on the West Bank, children on Kibbutz Nirim who lived through the war in Gaza, and ex-prisoners from Fatah who, after spending years detained in Israeli jails, are now promoting a peace initiative.
"Written with great talent, momentum and ingenuity. It expands the borders of literature to reveal new landscapes." - Amos Oz
"A book that is a fascinating and charged document about the meaning of home, security and freedom, on both sides of the divide." - NRG
An interrogation of relationships, idolisation, and how the author's past intertwines with cultural history. Though the book explores bonds that Febos has with others—lovers, friends, lost and found family members—the relationship it ultimately depicts is the one that she builds with herself. It is also an origin story about creating the life of an activist, artist, teacher, and cultural theorist.
>> Read an interview with Febos here.
A collection of his witty and iconoclastic columns for the Independent on everything from racism to darts.
"Jacobson is one of the great sentence-builders of our time. I feel I have to raise my game, even just to praise. He is one of the great guardians of language and culture - all of it. Long may he flourish." - Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
Hopeful.
"Brennan is part of a new generation of thinks who are suggesting exciting alternatives to the orthodoxies of the last forty years. In this surprising, accessible and often counterintuitive book Bregman explores some simple but brilliant ideas for making a better world." - Brian Eno
Who controls the exchange between artists and their collectors? A tale of brilliance, cunning and greed spanning centuries.
Brennan considers forty years of work by this revered and admired author. Garner often writes herself into her non-fiction, but just who is this 'I' of which she speaks? Insightful.
An old man with a red beard and red slippers is eating an endless bowl of junket. He says he will give something nice to whoever can guess what he is thinking about. The wildest guesses are wrong, but a small boy knows and the junket comes to an end. First published in 1932, this is a very silly book indeed.
>>> ("If you don't know what junket is, ask your nana about it.")