 | Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Fear (as opposed to anxiety, terror, horror, angst and its other cousins) clarifies perception and heightens the significance of details, much as does good writing, building an electrostatic charge which almost craves, yet ultimately resists, the release offered by the revelation of the feared. Schweblin’s short novel is like a Van de Graaff generator, building a textual charge that can be felt up the spine long after the book is finished. The book sustains three narrative levels most of the way through: Amanda, a woman apparently on her deathbed in a clinic, is urged with increasing intensity by David, someone ostensibly a child, to narrate a seemingly recent series of events when Amanda, who was on holiday with her young daughter Nina in the environs of a small Argentinian town, spent some time with Clara, the mother of her interrogator. The third narrative level is provided by Amanda reporting the stories told to her by Clara, largely concerning David’s contact with the environmental poison that contaminates the whole novel and is the cause of the deaths of animals and humans in the area and the cause of deformities, illnesses and eldritch personalities among the children who survive. A fourth narrative layer is occasionally provided by Amanda reporting Clara’s reports of things told to her by her husband. In the surface layer, David’s demeanor, demands and speech are very unchildlike, bringing into question his status as a child, and also the length of time since the events narrated by Amanda occurred. He seems very like the part of an author that drives the narrating part to narrate and we cannot be sure how much of the story has a ‘factual’ basis. In addition, the narrator is apparently suffering a high fever, and the heightened but narrowed perceptions destabilised by hallucination, or by the uncertainty about whether what is perceived is a hallucination or not (which is the most frightening thing about hallucinations), combined with the compelling fear is both typical of fever and a further destabilisation of the narrative. Towards the end of the book, the David character ceases to question Amanda, and Amanda goes on, unguided, to narrate her husband’s visit to Clara’s husband some time after, presumably, both Amanda’s and Clara’s deaths, a visit that she cannot know about, further undermining the veracity of the narrative and deepening doubts about Amanda’s relationship to it. Amanda’s story demonstrates that being within ‘rescue distance’ is not enough to save those we love when the world is saturated in literal and metaphorical poisons, and we lose those we love by letting them slip from their places in our narratives and losing the specificity of their identities.
Fever Dream has just been short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize.
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 | Home-Made Europe: Contemporary folk artifacts by Vladimir Arkhipov {Reviewed by STELLA} If you like poking around at auctions or in second-hand shops and at the recycling centre at the dump (lovingly referred to as 'Mitre 11' by some) for odd contraptions, or if you are even a maker of DIY solutions, you will enjoy Home-Made Europe. In this illustrated book, the author Vladimir Arkhipov from Ryazan has travelled across Europe seeking examples of idiosyncratic objects. On each page of this book, an object is presented with an accompanying photograph of the maker and text explaining the purpose of the object. The objects themselves as a photo essay are compelling, but it is in the text that the passion for making, for creating from scratch or for cannibalising other objects, and the pleasure and pride in creating a successful and useful object is revealed. Some things will be familiar - examples of Go-Karts made from old prams, bits of wood and odds and ends - others will be bizarrely ingenious. A fire-fuelled heater made from old pipes and an engine from an old wall-mounted air-conditioning unit that looks like something you might find in a scrap pile but can, in fact, heat water. A Ski-Bob made from a bicycle frame, some chunks of wood and parts of a ski. An oddly leaning ladder of welded together pieces of scrap metal initially for cutting back vines - the ladder looks as though it would hardly stand let alone take a person’s weight. A grill made from a cluster of tea candles huddled beneath a tangle of wire which is a work in progress for cooking a corn cob (adjustments are required): “ It doesn’t taste so good, it tastes like it’s not completely cooked.” Delightfully made, the aesthetic of these objects is clumsy, quirky and oddly appealing, reminding us that there is a place for the home-made, for folk art in a time of slick, mass production. |
 | 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages,” states Manguso in one of the 300 aphorisms and ‘arguments’ (as in ‘the argument of the story’ rather than a disputation) that comprise this enjoyable little book. Indeed the whole does feel as if it bears some relation to another considerably longer but nonexistent text, either as a reader’s quotings or marginalia, or as a writer’s folder of sentences-to-use-sometime or jottings towards a novel she has not yet written (“To call a piece of writing a fragment, or to say that it’s composed of fragments, is to say that it or its components were once whole but are no longer”). Many of the aphorisms are pithy and self-contained, often dealing with awkwardness and degrees of experiential dysphoria (so to call it), and other passages, none of which are more than a few sentences long, are distillates or subsubsections of stories that are not further recorded but which can be felt to pivot on these few sentences. Some of the ‘arguments’ reveal unexpected aspects of universal experiences (“When the worst comes to pass, the first feeling is relief” or “Hating is an act of respect” or “Vocation and ambition are different but ambition doesn’t know the difference”) and others are lighter, more particular (and, I'm afraid, a few do belong on calendars on the walls of dentists’ waiting rooms). Some of the arguments are just singular observations: “The boy realises that if he can feed a toy dog a cracker, he can just as easily feed a toy train a cracker” or “Many bird names are onomatopoeic - they name themselves. Fish, on the other hand, have to float there and take what they get.” To read the whole book is to feel the spaces and stories that form the invisible backdrop for these scattered points of light, and the reader is left with a residue similar to that with which you are left having read a whole novel.
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 | Swallowing Mercury by Wioletta Greg {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Cleanly written and quickly read, this novella conjures a series of presumably autobiographical vignettes from Wiola’s childhood in a village in rural southern Poland in the 1980s, when tradition, superstition, Catholicism, poverty and Communism had roughly equal pulls upon village life. To say the book is without residue is not to say it is not memorable; the moments caught in Greg’s deceptively simple prismatic prose are clear and vivid and the development of her individual character from childhood into adolescence against the adult world and its limitations is subtly and convincingly portrayed.
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Tickets are selling fast for the 2017 Nelson F
ringe Festival (29 April - 7 May). We have 'adopted' Mr Beckenbauer's Unfortunate Encounter with Enlightenment by local youth theatre company Ironic Theatre of the Absurd, but there are lots of other excellent shows and workshops, too. We are also supporting the Nelson Fringe Visual Arts Project. 
>> A quick survey of our shelves revealed them to be loaded with books that have feisty, adventurous girl protagonists who take their destinies into their own hands. Here's a small selection - recommended reading for children and young adults of all genders.
>> We found to our delight that the gender-bias assessment undertaken in this video did not apply to the books on our shelves (if anything, the reverse!). We would also contend that it is not only girls who need books with girl protagonists - boys can enjoy them too.
Our featured Rebel Girls this week:
Monday: Policarpa Salavarrieta
Tuesday: Wang Zhenyi
Wednesday: Grace O'Malley
Thursday: Zaha Hadid
Friday: Lakshmi Bai
Our featured Rebel Girls this week:
Monday: Policarpa Salavarrieta
Tuesday: Wang Zhenyi
Wednesday: Grace O'Malley
Thursday: Zaha Hadid
Friday: Lakshmi Bai
PROGRESS REPORT ON THE VOLUME OCKHAMETER
We are asking everyone to have their say on which books should win at the Ockham New Zealand Books Awards on May 16.
Click here to see which horses are currently in the lead.
Click here to back your favourite and have a chance at winning the sweepstakes.
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.
Undergoing a breakdown, an artist moves to her grandmother's cottage in rural Ireland, where she confronts her memories and nature's ineluctable cycles of life and death, pattern and disintegration. An excellent new novel from the author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither.
"Immensely sensitive, carefully calibrated, original and affecting." - Guardian
>> Hear Baume on A Line Made by Walking.
"I'm not Turkish, I don't have a Serbian best friend, I'm not in love with a Hungarian, I don't go to Harvard. Or do I? For one wonderful week, I got to be this worldly and brilliant, this young and clumsy and in love. The Idiot is a hilariously mundane immersion into a world that has never before received the 19th Century Novel treatment. An addictive, sprawling epic; I wolfed it down." - Miranda July
Cortázar's novels and short stories ignited a whole generation of Latin American writers, and had an enthusiastic following through the Americas and Europe. In this series of masterclasses he discusses his approach to the problems and mechanisms of fiction writing: the short story form, fantasy and realism, musicality, the ludic, time and the problem of literary "fate".
"Anyone who doesn't read Cortázar is doomed." —Pablo Neruda
Wilkins' writing is both light and deft as he brings us inside the head and world of Amy, a store detective at Cutty's (for which read Kirkaldie and Stains) in the weeks leading up to the department store's closure. Why is Amy being interviewed by the police? What will change in her unremarkable life?
In this book, Solnit continues the sharp important work she began in Men Explain Things to Me with this collection of commentary essays on feminism, misogyny, gendered binaries, masculine literary insecurity and related topics.
"No writer has weighed the complexities of sustaining hope in our times of readily available despair more thoughtfully and beautifully, nor with greater nuance." - Maria Popova
>> Which other Solnit books have you read?
Adichie received a request from a childhood friend for advice on how to raise her baby girl as a feminist, and has responded with this considered approach to both the broad issues and the minutiae of raising a child free from sexist conditioning. Much of the advice is pertinent to adults as well, with warnings against Feminism Lite, the dangers of likeability and the conflation of appearances with morality. A follow-up to We Should All Be Feminists.
>> Adichie discusses this book.
Kingsnorth's novels have been intimately concerned with the relationship of a person, and of peoples, to the land. In this very individual book, the former green activist argues that the concept of 'sustainability' is a sop that enables humanity to continue living and consuming without guilt rather than decivilise themselves in a way that would make a difference for the planet. By turns provocative, frustrating, inspiring and visionary; always urgent.
>> Read a sample.
>> The Four Degrees.
An English governess in Moscow gets caught up in various ways in the Revolution of 1917 and the tangle of idealism and ideology that surrounds it.
A novel exploring the psychological and humanitarian crises that face the "guest workers" who enable Dubai to grow and function but who have no citizenship or welfare rights in the UAE.
Painter and author Leonora Carrington's fascinating account of being taken "over the border" into Spain, into insanity and being held in an abusive lunatic asylum in Spain after her partner Max Ernst was imprisoned by the Germans.
>> "The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope."
Drawing inspiration from fairy tales and folklore, Little Nothing is the story of a peasant couple who long for a child, who, when he comes, turns out to be no ordinary child.
"Marisa Silver delivers a tale as mysterious as anything the Grimm Brothers might have collected. Little Nothing celebrates not only the unruly and lost parts of all our lives but also the possibility of their reordering and comprehension." - Los Angeles Times
"'Little Nothing is the key to its own box, which opens and opens, transcending the limits of the very tale one thought one was reading. This book is a beautifully realised riddle." - Rachel Kushner
Eric Ravilious's wood engravings and watercolours captured the spirit of mid-century England. The group of artists that gathered about him formed an artistic node between their influences and those they inspired. Beautifully produced and profusely illustrated.
Two extended excerpts from her never-before-seen notebooks, one tracing a 1970 road trip through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama; the other a contemplation of California following the 1976 Patty Hearst trial.
Poets disimprove with age and should die young./Should resemble shooting stars./Should trace short arcs of fizz and fire/and then disappear.
"The richness of life and time as they happen to us in tiny explosions all the time are grasped and held up for us to view in her magnificent work." — John Ashbery
"The experience of reading Works and Days is exhilarating; it’s like encountering a new, never-before-seen contemporary artwork you know will stand the test of time. It reaches back to the beginning of art by way of its political economy of the everyday, its honest humor about the ridiculousness of the writer’s experience in 21st century life, its emphasis on solidarity with the exploited. There is no other book from this year I’d more like to read again." - Jonathan Sturgeon, Flavorwire
Corballis argues with both God and Chomsky to persuade us that language is indeed the product of evolution and has its precursors throughout the animal kingdom.
A devastating portrait of urban poverty in the US, both of the mechanisms of inequality and its effects. Now it paperback.
"Essential. A compelling and damning exploration of the abuse of one of our basic human rights: shelter." - Owen Jones
The concept of number arose from our attempts to divide and grapple with the 'real' world, but numbers also exist in a world of their own, independent of the 'real' world. What are the relationships between the two?
England is in a state of environmental and economic crisis. Under the repressive regime of The Authority, citizens have been herded into urban centres, and all women of child-bearing age fitted with contraceptive devices. A woman known as 'Sister' leaves her oppressive marriage to join an isolated group of women in a remote northern farm at Carhullan, where she intends to become a rebel fighter. But can she follow their notion of freedom and what it means to fight for it? Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
Detective Gordon has retired, and Buffy is the sole detective at the small police station in the forest. It is not easy for a police officer to be alone. Especially when there are strange noises outside the station at night. Buffy decides to seek out Gordon to help solve the mystery. After all, two police think twice as well as one. Two police are twice as brave!
This enjoyable series began, logically, with The First Case, followed, complicatedly, by A Complicated Case.
Whether he is tracking great yellow bumblebees in the Hebrides or orchid bees through the Ecuadorian jungle, Goulson's wit, humour and deep love of nature make him the ideal travelling companion.
We work against it every day but it holds our lives together. How on earth did we explain its effects before we had the theory?
"The finest cosmology writer of our day." - Matt Ridley
>> Newton's theory has a musical application.
Sometimes things happen (storms, babies, magic, hairdressers, practical jokes) and things just aren't the same afterwards, and sometimes these changes make us laugh. A very silly before-and-after book.
What have we been reading this week?
What is the Ockhameter?
What is our next Book of the Week?
Find out by reading our newsletter.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #19 (15.4.17)
>> Read Thomas's review.
>> Manhire's reading life.
>> The title poem is Manhire's eulogy to his friend Ralph Hotere.
>> Also new from Manhire: Tell Me My Name, a book of poetic riddles (with a CD by Hannah Griffin and Norman Meehan, and photographs by Peter Peryer).
>> Bill reads a poem.
>> Manhire at the Curioseum.
>> In the poetry archive.
>> "I've eaten Kentucky Fried Chicken and quite liked it."
 | Some Things to Place in a Coffin by Bill Manhire {Reviewed by THOMAS} The proximity of death can be noticed not so much in our thinking about death as in the effect it has on the qualities of our thinking about everything else. Why is it that some particulars, either small details of the present or instances from often far in the past, unexpectedly present themselves with a clarity and a grain that familiarity has robbed us of the capacity to see or has prevented us from noticing? Or is it that the intensity of this nothingness bends the light as it drags everything towards it, uprooting these particulars from their quotidian sockets and causing them to be seen with strange clarity as they are drawn towards a point of dissolution, whereas other particulars are shucked of urgency and released into a new inconsequence. In the face of that of which the mind cannot conceive the senses speak with urgency, we experience simultaneously a grasping and a relinquishment, a change in contrast and in texture, if we may call them that, a new sense of purpose indistinguishable from resignation. In this book, Bill Manhire’s first collection in seven years, 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. Wearing his art so lightly as at times to resemble artlessness, Manhire tests the strengths of finer and finer threads to very subtle effect. The book is arranged in four sections: firstly a set of poems through the progression of which poetry itself is pared away and memories grasped with the effect of grasping at water, drawing us through a beauty indistinguishable from sadness, a thinness like the distinct threads of gauze that remain after the pile has been worn off fabric. Each line marks the move towards silence: There is a thin, high scraping./ Then no noise of any sort at all. The second section was commissioned to mark the centenary of the Battle of the Somme and is an achingly beautiful sequence about loss at simultaneously the most specific and most universal scales. The third section is more linguistically playful, sometimes almost desperately so, and includes some pieces with the texture of songs, textures in which chasms open up to underlying voids, and also the title poem, written as an elegy to Manhire’s friend Ralphe Hotere. In the fourth section, ‘Falseweed’, small particles of poetry, dissolved already into the medium which bears them towards silence, converge and recombine in unexpected ways, squeaking out most affectingly before being redissolved. The final poem ‘The Lake’ is a farewell to language and to poetry and to the resisting of the pull to dissolution: Rapture. Quiet canoe. / I am defeated, done with speaking. |
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Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is a debut novel from Patti Yumi Cottrell. Our unreliable narrator Helen Moran, ironically nick-named Sister Reliability, receives a call while waiting for her flatmate’s new Ikea sofa to be delivered to their tiny apartment. It’s her uncle telling her that her adoptive brother has died. Helen immediately decides to leave New York and head home to Milwaukee with the sole purpose of investigating his death. Estranged from her adoptive parents - she hasn’t seen them for 5 years - she arrives on their doorstep with inappropriate questions, criticisms and demands. This would all seem rather tiresome if it wasn’t for Cottrell’s ability to create a character like Helen Moran. Helen is 32, childless, lives in a tiny shared apartment, and is partially employed as a counsellor helping troubled youth. She, like her brother, who isn’t a blood relation, is Korean and her family members are always referred to as ‘adoptive’ - the adoptive parents, the adoptive brother etc. Helen Moran looks at the world through a lens that is peculiarly off-beat but also probing, bringing truths that maybe should remain nameless to the surface. At times, being inside Helen’s head felt like a psychotic episode - the author intends you to feel uncomfortable. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is a sharp look at what growing up Asian-American in suburbia looks like, how being an outsider - not having a sense of belonging - affects the ways in which you observe the world around, and why unhappiness leads to suicide for some and a determination to embrace life for others. While Helen is hardly likeable, her determination to make the most of what she has - while living in New York, she wrote an essay about how to survive on next to nothing in the city; she cares for troubled youth, breaking the rules of her workplace in an attempt to make meaningful connections - and her unwavering close observations of people to reveal what makes life tick are strangely admirable. When we hear Helen described as looking like a homeless person we are hardly surprised - by this stage we have been in the head of Moran for a while and watched her decide that her parents’ grief is a balding middle aged man who eats pizza; she has taken apart the bouquets of flowers and dumped them a bucket of bleach-saturated cleaning water to be helpful, she has eaten the whole special cake which is meant for mourners, she has rifled through her parents' home in her detective endeavours to make sense of her brother’s suicide. Mostly it’s her behaviour and thoughts that lead you to think she is mad. However, as you read on, the day of the funeral approaches and as relatives and friends arrive with their sentimental pat comments, you wonder who’s deranged? One of the best things about Cottrell’s writing is her ability to embed so much humour, alongside philosophical musings from our odd narrator, into a story about disorientation and dislocation. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is blackly funny and will appeal to fans of Miriam Toews and Nell Zink.
{Reviewed by STELLA}
>> Listen to Stella reviewing this book on RNZ National. |
 | The collection of essays, Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole, ranges across literature, art and politics. As a writer, photographer and art historian, Cole ranges widely. The essays, first published in the New York Times Magazine, are 55 moments of lucid thought: some are personal responses to Cole’s travels, his interest in photography and his fascination with several authors, while others are pointed commentary and questions about politics and society and the ways in which artists and writers interpret or present a viewpoint. Teju Cole has his opinions and these are intelligent missives. The essays are arranged in three sections. ‘Reading Things’ includes an interesting interaction with V.S.Naipaul, and a search for W.G. Sebald’s grave which is charmingly reminiscent of Sebald’s own work. As Cole ventures out across Norfolk with Jason the taxi driver, he is simultaneously journeying with Sebald. ‘Seeing Things’ deals with visual observations, predominantly contemporary photography. Here Cole’s ability and knowledge as a photographer gives this section real depth, and his ability to appreciate as well as add critical interpretation of the photographer’s intention raises some thought-provoking questions about the role of visual observation, the ability of a photograph to capture a moment and the lies that images can be. Cole looks at photographers who exhibit in art galleries alongside those who use google and instagram as a platform to communicate their work. The third section ‘Being There’ is firmly rooted in place and travel. The essays are fine examples of ponderings on politics and society, and in many of them Cole ventures into the conversation around racial politics in Africa, America and Europe. His interests range widely in this section - there are essays about drone warfare, terrorism’s personal impact, home and belonging. The first essay in this section, ‘Far Away from Home’, is a gem - Cole is in Switzerland and is overcome with an unexpected fascination with the Alps and the idea of Fernweh (a German expression meaning ‘one simply wants to be far away’). Teju Cole’s essays are places where you can journey - he pulls his ideas together with references to writing, art and history, giving texture to the well-constructed sentences. They are provocative, stimulating and rewarding. Cole will be attending the Auckland Writer’s Festival in May - worth catching if you’re in Auckland.
{Reviewed by STELLA}
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 | 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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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.
