 | Panorama by Dušan Šarotar {Reviewed by THOMAS} Can peace be attained only in exile? If so, how many layers of exile are necessary to gain sufficient remove from harm? This novel begins with the Slovenian narrator (we might be forgiven, at least at first, for conflating him with the author) in the furthest west of Ireland, in other words at the furthest west of Europe. His guide is Gjini, a fellow Balkan who has lived in Ireland for 11 years, long enough for his foreignness to have been well established (all information about locations in the book, other than the immediately observable, is provided by foreigners to those locations, all knowledge is at a remove). Protected from others by a seemingly impenetrable cultural membrane, the two travel to one location after another in the rain and mud. Everything, even the descriptions themselves, has a soddenness, a heaviness, a peatiness about it, in which old forms are rotted and reduced to traces. The locations are described with great particularity and in great detail, but the people with generality, or indeed plurality, which bestows upon them a ghostly quality. Each location seems populated by the memories of the people who have lived there and who far outnumber the living. Sparsely populated places are thronged with cumulative ghosts, as if reinscribing their residues in a Sebaldean project to rescue those erased by the passage of time, but actually, it seems, doing the opposite, erasing their particularity through repetition in much the same way that memory and the memory of that memory (and so forth) anaesthetises us to the original experience (is this the reason for all literature and art: the replacement of the unassimilable actual by the assimilable ersatz?). Throughout the book, primacy is given to representation over the actual. A view is remarked upon as looking very like a picture of it on the wall, and all information is nested within multiple narratorial shells: the narrator tells us what Gjini tells us that his lost American friend Jane has told him that her mother told her about what had happened such-and-such place, and so forth. Later in the book, as it becomes more obvious that we are reading a novel rather than a memoir, these narratorial shells move from being spoken to being written (for example, the narrator tells (i.e. writes (this is a book)) about receiving a letter from Gjini which relates what Gjini has read in Jane’s journals about such-and-such). The closer to the narrative surface the characters are, the more displaced they are, both in place and in time. This is frequently a displacement of migration and exile, entailing a loss of past, of nationality, of identity, of motivity. It is only once we have reached the third degree of narrative distancing, Jane, that we encounter someone who seems capable of initiating even the slightest action. It is the act of leaving that changes people, that both protects and disempowers them, rather than anything that might happen to them after they leave. A person leaves and thereby changes, leaving only the memory of them describing their memory of something else. Many shells of memory stand in for the actual, acting as a baffle, but what is the unspoken trauma at the back of this novel? The book moves eastward, first to Belgium, where we learn (from Gjini from Jane) about an order of Belgian nuns who moved their convent to westernmost Ireland after the traumas of the first world war. The novel traces a sort of lymphatic route through Europe, gradually and hesitatingly and indirectly reaching back towards the narrator’s home ‘zone’ of the Balkans and the inhumanities suffered there in the Balkans War, the unfaceable reasons, perhaps, for the narrator’s exile. The novel invites comparisons with those of W.G. Sebald in its straddling of the trench between memoir and fiction and in its scatterings of photographs (by the author). Are these images illustrative of the text or stimulants of it? Once thought of, I could not escape the (probably unreasonable) suspicion that the entire text was constructed around a series of images, that the images themselves may be the only points in the novel that touch the ‘actual’. The writing style is also reminiscent of Sebald, with its somewhat old-fashioned style, with its passive verbs, with its too many adjectives subtracting from the impact of the nouns, leaving the nouns as mere adjuncts to their properties. |
 | The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett {Reviewed by THOMAS} For that about which all that can be said is that it exists, the imperative is to go on existing. There is a voice, desperate to go on (longing perhaps to cease but unable to cease) but conscious of the insufficiency of any attempt to go on. Terrified of each full stop and the cessation it threatens, the voice assumes one character after another, each with a ‘story’ or set of circumstances, but these characters and circumstances are quickly abraded and abandoned, unravelled as quickly as they are knitted, insufficient not through their imperfection but because Beckett refuses to let them conceal the essential nature of the fictive act. That which must speak in order to exist must dissemble in order to speak. In ‘successful’ fictions this desperate underlying impersonal subjectivity is obscured by the characters and circumstances it clads itself in and the reader is scintillated by the provisional ‘reality’ of the story, but in his wonderful stuttering attempts to force the mechanisms of fiction to run against their springs and ratchets, Beckett interrogates the workings of the novel and lays bare the usually unexamined assumptions and motivations that underlie the relationship between writer and reader. |
NEW RELEASES
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These short stories come up with one surreally gothic image after another: deeply resonant and affecting beyond the reach of reason.
"This book is twisted and hypnotizing and downright lovely. Reading it is not unlike diving naked and headlong into a bramble of black rosebushes, so intrigued you are by their beauty: it's a swift, prickly undertaking and you emerge the other end bloodied all over." - The Paris Review
Polynesian and then European settlers arrived in New Zealand bringing with them world views and modes of practice that they then began to apply and adapt to the new land. This remarkable book calibrates the varying approaches of the differing peoples who came to Aotearoa, and suggests that a deeper understanding of these mind-sets can lead towards approaches that are more harmonious, not just between cultures but towards the natural world too.
The striving for a different life is one of the markers of modern existence. Can these five characters in Mumbai make better lives for themselves, or can they only achieve dislocation? From the author of The Lives of Others.
"This is a great hymn to poor, scabby humanity-a devastating portrait of poverty and the inhumanity of the rich to the poor. A masterpiece." - Edmund White
"Fans of Neel Mukherjee expect that his books will be exceptional and once again he has produced just that. A State of Freedom is formally audacious, vividly observed, and deeply imagined. Unsentimental yet full of heart, grimly real yet mysteriously dreamlike, with characters who continue to live their complicated lives long after you've turned the last page. Just a beautiful, beautiful piece of work." - Karen Joy Fowler
In the wake of the American Civil War, a septuagenarian who is content to be a reader of newspapers to the illiterate, is given the task of escorting a 10-year-old white girl, who has been a 'prisoner' of the Kiowa tribe for most of her life, back to her relatives. As they travel across the natural and social wilds of Texas they develop a bond across cultures, so that when it is obvious that the girl's relatives have no interest in her escort is faced with the option of becoming, in the eyes of the law, a kidnapper himself.
"An exquisite book about the joys of freedom, the discovery of unexpected proprietary love between two people who have never experienced anything like it before, pure adventure in the wilds of an untamed Texas, and the reconciling of vastly different cultures." - New York Times
A lovely, sensitive picture book about a child's friendship with a very old dog.
Soda Pop wears a tea cosy on his head and has brought his son Mazarin up on nothing but sweet buns and love. Every morning Dartanyong emerges from the woodshed with a new identity. This enchanting Swedish classic has made it into English at last.
"There's a sublime sort of craziness to it. Neither Soda Pop nor Mazarin nor Dartanyong speaks a single word of sense, but they will be my friends for life." - Astrid Lindgren [no relation]
On Kawara: 1966 $90
1966 was a pivotal year in the career of one of contemporary art's most radical and rigorous practitioners: it was the year in which the Japanese artist began his series of date paintings, which depict nothing but the date upon which they were painted (the 'Today' series numbered over 3000 on Kawara's death in 2013).
>> 'Today' discussed.
Higashida's previous book The Reason I Jump, which he wrote by indicating letters on a cardboard 'keyboard', gave profound insight, not only into the autistic mind, but into human existence per se. This book continues this account into adulthood, and gives an autist's critique of family, society and education. Also included are a story written by Higashida and an introduction from David Mitchell, who has an autistic son.
>> Writing with autism.
A 9-year-old black child from the Projects adopted by a powerful white family grows up to fulfill his potential only to confront a secret which will recast his entire sense of self.
"Jarring and beautiful, Umrigar’s novel examines complex social issues with brutal honesty, but also creates accessible characters with relatable motives, reminding us of the deep-seated racism that exists even in the places we don’t think to look." - Publishers' Weekly
The 1954 Mazengarb Report crested a wave of moral panic in New Zealand over the characteristics of its youth culture, and, for all its ludicrosity, at least marked the realisation that New Zealand had a youth culture at all. This interesting social history traces youth culture in New Zealand from the 1880s to the 1960s and considers changes in the transition from childhood to adulthood as conceptions of both childhood and adulthood were also changing.
"This remarkable sequence winds and eddies like the Whanganui River, filtering the m=region's many histories into something rich and swimmable. Is verse the future of history?" - James Brown
The human craving for sweetness has been one of the engines of history, not only culturally and politically, but of our natural history too.
Behind every great woman writer stands another woman writer, in these cases: Anne Sharpe (a playwright who was one of Austen's servants), Mary Taylor (the feminist writer who influenced Charlotte Bronte), Harriet Beecher Stowe (George Eliot) and Katherine Mansfield (who had a complex relationship with Virginia Woolf). This book shows how the personal and the literary are strongly entwined.
Perry explores populism in art and politics. What is the cultural link between taste and the Brexit vote?
>> Grayson Perry: What Britain Wants.
An insightful book on the ‘colonisation of everyday life by information processing’, calling for resistance to rule by the tech elite, who quickly appropriate innovations to their own ascendancy (often despite appearances).
"Tremendously intelligent and stylish. A landmark primer and spur to informed and effective opposition." - Guardian
Exes by Max Winter $35
Providence, Rhode Island, contains the only people who could give Clay the background to his brother's suicide. As he collects their stories he begins to piece together a rather bigger picture than he was seeking.
“There is so much blunt beauty in Max Winter’s Exes, so much confidence in the prose and the pacing, that it is easy to miss the bomb he slips into each story until it detonates, taking with it any careful distance you’ve tried to maintain.” —Mira Jacob
"Brilliantly unique and incisive." - Publishers' Weekly
Solving the climate crisis will bring, not sacrifice, but “more security, more prosperity, more jobs, more well-being and better health.”
An intimate exploration of the delicate connection between memory, fantasy, lover and desire, written under strict OuLiPian constraints: a tour de force of experimental queer feminist writing.
Winner of the Prix Médicis.
"For Garréta, it may just be possible that the body occupies the space of language so powerfully as its capacity to produce it." - BOMB
The contents of this book are as varied and interesting as the man himself: Victorian church architecture and liturgy, mysticism, the New Zealand International Exhibition of 1906, the Toi Te Papa exhibition of 2006, traditional and contemporary Maori art, and the artists Thomas Benjamin Kennington, Gottfried Lindauer, Colin McCahon, Tony Fomison, Philip Clairmont and Emily Karaka. Essays from leading curators and writers, including Peter Simpson, Lara Strongman and former Suter curator Anna-Marie White.
Recent world politics has been marked not only by a rejection of the establishment but also by a rejection of the established alternatives to the establishment. The results can either be hopeful or grotesque. Why is this happening?
"Easily one of our best commentators." - David Aaronovitch
Schwob was a pivot of the French Symbolist movement, and this book, based on his relationship with a woman known only as Louise, who died of tuberculosis, immediately became the de facto Bible of the Symbolist movement. Louise here is transformed into the innocent prophet of destruction, Monelle. Schwob tells the stories of her various sisters: women succumbing to disillusionment, caught between the misleading world of childlike fantasy and the bitter world of reality.
It's 1969, and the Apollo 11 mission is getting ready to go to the moon. But for half-black, half-Japanese Mimi, moving to a predominantly white Vermont town is enough to make her feel alien. No matter what the obstacles, Mimi is determined to become an astronaut. A novel in verse.
"This novel stands out with its thoughtful portrayal of race and its embrace of girls in science and technical fields. The verse, though spare, is powerful and evocative, perfectly capturing Mimi's emotional journey." - School Library Journal
A memoir of travel, love and loss, but above all hunger.
"The greatest food writer who ever lived." - Simon Schama
"Poet of the appetites." - John Updike
"She is not just a great food writer. She is a great writer, full stop." - Rachel Cooke, Observer
The Plant Messiah: Adventures in search of the world's rarest species by Carlos Magdalena $40
Magdalena and his team at Kew Gardens have been instrumental in saving a range of rare species from extinction.
>> Meet Carlos Magdalena. 
Around the world, across time, through the periodic table, there is nowhere Kean will not go to tell us all about the ever-present but invisible substance that has reshaped cultures, changed continents and kept us alive. Caesar's last breath? - You're breathing it.
Lavishly illustrated across the full six decades of Hockney's career, and across the full spectrum of media.
>> How do you paint memorable pictures?
Argues that the success of the Bolshevik revolution was dependent entirely upon the social and economic effects of war (and implies that perhaps things weren't so bad beforehand).
"Dynamic, compelling and revisionist." - Simon Sebag Montefiore
Some other histories of the revolution at VOLUME:
The History of the Russian Revolution by Leon Trotsky
October: The story of the Russian Revolution by China Mieville
A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes
A crucible in which children can spark ideas for stories, books, animations, graphic novels, comics, or whatever narrative art takes their fancy.
>> Miles rabbits on.
>> The Brothers McLeod meet Pythagoras.
An engrossing memoir from his poor beginnings in Tennessee through his rise through the music industry and his prominence in the civil rights movement in New York and elsewhere.
"A marvellous documentary of black America and life lived in the raw." - Spectator
>> The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
>> Someone has compared 15 translations.
>> Someone has animated the Inferno.
WHO IS WHO by Ann Braunsteiner and Dan Braulsh
The video work in the window of VOLUME as part of Illuminate 2017 (supported by Uniquely Nelson and Arts Council Nelson) is inspired by Dan Braulsh's Dissociative Identity Disorder with an early onset when he was at the age of seven.
"WHO IS WHO is a short prose animation, descriptive to a living in the shadows of Braulsh's dreams, fractures and surroundings. Braulsh is unable to interact or control his dissociative personalities, but has learned to be aware of their existence, their creative lives, even if for Braulsh himself it means to be absent, in a dream state, stand still or losing time.
With Braunsteiner involved in this collaboration the question deepened about WHO IS WHO and to whom belong the memories transcribed in the short prose/animation of a fractured, dystopian reality, where wolves, consuming the empty skins of a past existence, are protectors of a new order, where a landscape has forever changed its face and a child becomes the narrator of a bare new world."
Dan Braulsh & Ann Braunsteiner, 2017
>>Publication here (PDF).
WATCH FULL-SCREEN AND ON LOOP FOR BEST VIEWING
Come and watch at night.
The video work in the window of VOLUME as part of Illuminate 2017 (supported by Uniquely Nelson and Arts Council Nelson) is inspired by Dan Braulsh's Dissociative Identity Disorder with an early onset when he was at the age of seven.
"WHO IS WHO is a short prose animation, descriptive to a living in the shadows of Braulsh's dreams, fractures and surroundings. Braulsh is unable to interact or control his dissociative personalities, but has learned to be aware of their existence, their creative lives, even if for Braulsh himself it means to be absent, in a dream state, stand still or losing time.
With Braunsteiner involved in this collaboration the question deepened about WHO IS WHO and to whom belong the memories transcribed in the short prose/animation of a fractured, dystopian reality, where wolves, consuming the empty skins of a past existence, are protectors of a new order, where a landscape has forever changed its face and a child becomes the narrator of a bare new world."
Dan Braulsh & Ann Braunsteiner, 2017
>>Publication here (PDF).
WATCH FULL-SCREEN AND ON LOOP FOR BEST VIEWING
Come and watch at night.
VOLUME POETRY SPAM
Junk poetry competition
1. Choose one piece of spam or junk mail, an advertisement or other unsolicited words (either received by e-mail or printed).
2. Write a poem using only the vocabulary of the piece of spam or advertising you have chosen. (Hint: the more restricted the vocabulary, the better the results are likely to be.)
3. Send or deliver your poem and a copy of the originating spam or advertising to VOLUME by Friday 18 August.
4. Ensure that your name and contact details are included on a SEPARATE sheet.
5. There is no limit to the number of entries you may submit (just as there is no limit to the amount of spam you may receive).
The winner will be announced on National Poetry Day (25 August) and also in the VOLUME newsletter the following day. The winner will receive a trophy, a copy of the 2017 Poetry New Zealand Yearbook and US$1000000 in a bank account in a country with no reciprocal banking arrangement with New Zealand.* >> Download the full details.
*One of these prizes is a con.
The NELSON POETRY MAP records and shares connections between poetry and places. Contribute poems to this open-access map, tagging them to the locations you associate with those poems. Visit the locations and read all the poems on your mobile device (or take a virtual tour without leaving home). Wandering poetry readers on National Poetry Day (25 August) will no doubt encounter fellow poetry readers at various locations. Click through to use the map!
Featured publisher: LES FUGITIVES
Les Fugitives publishes only short books that have been written by award-winning, female, francophone writers who have previously not been translated into English. Founded in 2015, they have published three astoundingly good books so far. {Reviews by Thomas}
Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger $30
Léger was commissioned to write a short biographical entry on Barbara Loden for a film encyclopaedia but ended up writing a very interesting and quite unusual book. Loden directed one film, >>Wanda (1970), about a woman who leaves her husband and who, passively and therefore pretty much by chance, attaches herself to a man who is planning a bank robbery for which, following his death in a police shoot-out and despite her lack of initiative and her not even being present at the robbery (she took a wrong turn in what was supposed to be the getaway car), she will be sent to jail for twenty years. The book operates on many levels simultaneously: it is ‘about’ Léger’s attempts to excavate information about Loden, principally beneath the ways in which she has been recorded by others, notably her husband the Hollywood director Elia Kazan, who also wrote a novel in which Loden features, thinly disguised; it is ‘about’ Loden’s making of the film Wanda; it is ‘about’ the character of Wanda in that film, a character Loden played herself and with whom she strongly identified personally; it is ‘about’ the tension between the “passive and inert” Wanda character with whom Loden identifies and Loden as writer and director, and about the relationship between author and character more generally in both an literary/artistic and a quotidian sense; it is ‘about’ Léger’s search for and discovery of the true story that inspired Loden to make the film, a botched 1960 bank robbery after which the passive and inert Alma Malone politely thanked the judge for handing her a twenty-year sentence; it is ‘about’, therefore, the relationship between inspiration and execution, and between actuality and fiction; it is ‘about’ portrayal and self-portrayal and ‘about’ who gets to define whom (“To sum up. A woman is pretending to be another, in a role she wrote herself, based on another (this, we find out later), playing something other than a straightforward role, playing not herself but a projection of herself onto another, played by her but based on another.”); it is ‘about’, cumulatively, the way in which, as she delved more deeply into the specifics of another whom she sought to understand, Léger come up more and more against the unresolved edges of herself so that the two archaeologies became one (she also ended up learning quite a lot about her mother and the imbalanced mechanics of her parents’ relationship). When Wanda was released in 1970, it was disparaged in many feminist circles for its portrayal of a passive woman. Léger shows the film to be a useful mirror in which to recognise passivity as not only an impulse for self-erasure on a personal level but as part of the wider social mechanisms by which women are erased and colonised by projections, and in which the feminist critique and frontline necessarily become internal and self-reflexive. There is also in this book a strong sense of the inescapability of subjectivity, that in all subject-object relationships the subject perceives only and acts only upon a sort of externalised version of itself (the object being passive and without feature (effectively absent, effectively unassailable)); and also that when attempting to be/conceive of/portray oneself one has no option but to use the template of that with which one identifies but which is not in essence (whatever that means) oneself (except to the extent that one’s ‘self’ perhaps exists only in the mysterious act of identification). Oh, and Léger‘s writing is exquisite. (>>Read an extract)
Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi $30
Devi does an excellent job of inhabiting the heads and capturing the patterns of thought that occur just on the brink of consciousness of the four narrators of this account of young lives in the slums of Port Louis in Mauritius. Just as a plughole communicates its force at all times to the entire contents of a basin, even to the molecules that have not yet begun to circle or descend, there is throughout the book a sense that a hopeless future is pulling upon the characters, that their descent will be at first slow and then sudden, that the world for them is tilted and greased, that their voices are impermanent, that they will become those that now harm them and are caught by harm. “One day we wake up and the future has disappeared.” In a milieu where the energies of sex and violence already run in the same channels, where currency is extracted in rape, beatings and murder, how can the voices of individuals, and how can moments of happiness and beauty, be preserved as more than corruscations swallowed, first slowly and then suddenly, by future shadow? Is to fight against your fate a way of preserving your independence from it, for a short moment at least, or does fighting it draw it more tightly entangled upon you?
Blue Self-Portrait by Noémi Lefebvre $30
It takes approximately an hour and a half to fly from Berlin to Paris. Upon that hour and a half, a human memory, especially one working at neurotically obsessive speed, can loop a very large amount of time indeed, an hour and a half is plenty of time to go over and go over the things, or several of the things, the unassimilable things, that happened in Berlin, in an attempt to assimilate those things, though they are not assimilable, in an attempt, rather, albeit an involuntary attempt, to damage oneself by the exercise of one’s memories, to draw self-blame and self-disgust from a situation the hopelessness of which cannot be attributed to anything worthy of self-blame or self-disgust but which is sufficiently involved to exercise the self-blame and self-disgust that seethe always beneath their veneer of not-caring, of niceness, the veneer that preserves self-blame and self-disgust from resolution into anything other than self-blame and self-disgust. Upon this hour and a half can be looped, such is the efficacy of human memory, not only, obsessively, the unassimilable things that happened in Berlin but also much else that happened even into the distant past, but, largely speaking, the more recent things that have bearing upon, or occupy the same memory-pocket, not the best metaphor, as the unassimilable things that happened in Berlin, for disappointment and failure seldom happen in a vacuum but resonate with, even if they are not the direct result of, disappointments and failures reaching back even into the distant past, self-blame and self-disgust having the benefit, or detriment, if a difference can be told between benefit and detriment, of binding experiences to form an identity, and, not only this, upon that hour and a half can be looped also an endless amount of speculation and projection as to what may be occurring in the minds of others, or in the mind of, in this case, a specific other, a German-American pianist and composer with whom the narrator, who has been visiting Berlin with her sister, has had some manner of romantic encounter, so to call it, the extent of which is unclear, both, seemingly, to the narrator and, certainly, to the reader, the reader being necessarily confined to the mental claustrophobia of the narrator, on account of the obsessive speculation and projection and also the inescapable escapist and self-abnegating fantasising on the part of the narrator, together with the comet-like attraction-and-avoidance of her endless mental orbit around the most unassimilable things that happened in Berlin, or that might have happened in Berlin, or that did not happen in Berlin but are extrapolative fantasies unavoidably attendant upon what happened in Berlin, untrue but just as real as truth, for all thoughts, regardless of actuality, do the same damage to the brain. Lefebvre’s exquisitely pedantic, fugue-like sentences, their structure perfectly indistinguishable from their content, bestow upon her the mantle of Thomas Bernhard, which, after all, does not fall upon just any hem-plucker but, in this case, fully upon someone who, not looking skyward, has crawled far enough into its shadow when looking for something else. Where Bernhard’s narrators tend to direct their loathing outwards until the reader realises that all loathing is in fact self-loathing, Lefebvre’s narrator acknowledges her self-loathing and self-disgust, abnegating herself rather for circumstances in which self-abnegation is neither appropriate nor inappropriate, her self-abnegation arising from the circumstances, from her connection with the circumstances, from her rather than from the circumstances, her self-abnegation not, despite her certainty, having, really, any effect upon the circumstances. Not at all not-funny, pitch-perfect in both voice and structure, full of sly commentary on history and modernity, and on the frailties of human personality and desire, providing for the reader simultaneous resistance and release, Lefebvre shares many of Bernhard’s strengths and qualities, and the book contains memorable and effective passages such as that in which the narrator recalls playing tennis with her mother-in-law, now her ex-mother-in-law, and finding she is not the type for ‘collective happiness’, or her hilariously scathing descriptions of Berlin’s Sony Centre or of Brecht’s house, now a restaurant, or of the narrator's inability to acknowledge the German-American pianist-composer's wife as anything but 'the accompaniment', or, indeed many other passages, but the excellence of the book is perhaps less in the passages than in the book as a whole. I will be surprised if I read a better book this year.
>>Read an extract here.
Visit the publisher's website to find out more about Les Fugitives and about these books and authors.
Visit the publisher's website to find out more about Les Fugitives and about these books and authors.
Home: New writing is edited by Thom Conroy and published by Massey University Press.
Contributors:
Selina Tusitala Marsh
Martin Edmond
Ashleigh Young
Lloyd Jones
Laurence Fearnley
Sue Wootton
Elizabeth Knox
Nick Allen
Brian Turner
Tina Makereti
Bonnie Etherington
Paula Morris
Thom Conroy
Jill Sullivan
Sarah Jane Barnett
Ingrid Horrocks
Anna Gailani
Helen Lehndorf
James George
Ian Wedde
>> Read Stella's review.
>> An interview with the editor.
>> An article about the book.
>> Sarah Jane Barnett's essay, 'Suffering is Optional'.
 Review by STELLA | Home: New writing is an excellent collection of essays from New Zealand writers. Each essay chosen by editor Thom Conroy takes you on its own journey, personal yet universal. In his introduction, Conroy reflects on the concept of 'home' being at the forefronts of our minds, with increasing homelessness and a growing population of ‘stateless’ people. Several of the essays reflect on the precarious lives of refugees and the travails, as well as the hopes, of migration. Lloyd Jones in 'Proximity' blends his encounters with the homeless and with Syrian refugees in Europe with his childhood memories of what was an acceptable home, with humanity and care. Diane Comer’s reflections and regrets on moving, of crossing the Pacific several times in her lifetime, endlessly seeking ‘home’, planting gardens that will continue to bloom long after she has left, are honest and revealing it seems for both the reader and writer. And leaving, yet not looking back, resonates through Iraqi-born Anna Gailani’s 'A Token of Patience'. And arrival, whether it is actual or virtual, is a concept that creeps into many of these essays. Ingrid Horrocks in 'Oscillations' cleverly talks about those places between memory and the actual, past and present, and finding her ‘home’ – a place true to herself. Sarah Jane Barnett draws on the connection between running and the body, on a certain point of connection that centres and eclipses suffering, creating a sense of home in oneself at a physical and mental level. Other essays point to environment, both urban and natural. Paula Morris’s 'Greys Avenue' is a riff on the layers of her street, on its history and the wider story of the changing urban landscape. The essay is a matrix of her family history; Morris discovered that her great-grandfather had also lived on the street at some stage. In Laurence Fearnley’s essay, she explores her neighbourhood by scent, curious to discover how, by concentrating with this sense of smell, familiar places of home can be recorded and explored anew. 'Home Without Now and Then' takes us into Elizabeth Knox’s memory of her childhood homes, and the homes of her mother - places she can’t inhabit any longer at the right times – needing to use the phone in the Paremata house but finding herself in the Raumati one. This is just a taste of the twenty-two essays. They are honest, moving and thoughtful, various in style and content, all a delight to read. To contemplate what 'home' means to us in a physical, emotional and philosophical sense, Home: New writing is a marker of social and cultural history as well as of politics, on the grand and small scale. |
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Kingdom Cons by Yuri Herrera {Reviewed by STELLA}
I’ve been late to come to Herrera’s work, and now I’m surprised it’s taken me so long to get there. Herrera is a revelation. He has been feted as Mexico’s greatest living novelist and his third novel Signs Preceding the End of the World was awarded Best Translated Book Award in 2016, beating stiff and outstanding competition from Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard. The first novella in his ‘Border Trilogy’, Kingdom Cons has just been translated into English. Unusually, in the English translations, the last has come first and the first last. Loosely a trilogy, all the books (the second being The Transmigration of Bodies) deal with borders, physical, psychological and metaphysical. Kingdom Cons is fable-like in its construction, telling the story of the Artist, a wandering musician who sings songs for his supper, and the King, the Capo, the head of a palace, bejewelled and all powerful. The novella opens in the cantinas of Mexico where Lobo is singing popular ballads of humour and humility for a few coins. When a drunkard refuses to pay for his song, the King intervenes and the Artist finds himself taken into a powerful world of passion, violence and high-stakes jealousy. The world of the drug cartel is subtly played out in this tale; the story could as easily be any time or situation where inequalities thrive and those that play hardest and fastest climb to the top, only to watch with increasing paranoia for the knife to come. Lobo’s place in the palace is a lowly one, a place that protects him in its powerlessness but also leaves him vulnerable, yet he is increasingly intrigued by the machinations and power of the court. Accepted by the King initially as a harmless distraction, he later becomes an object of annoyance. His relationships with others in the power structure become increasingly complex, and his dangerous obsession with a beautiful, damaged young woman, the Commoner, compromise his former inconsequential existence. As defections occur and the King’s position becomes precarious, the tension mounts. When Lobo is sent on a mission to spy, he inadvertently makes a mistake, one that could crush him. Herrera’s ability to take you into this maelstrom of epic emotion and action is measured, holding you both aloft and completely compelled. His work deserves a second and close reading. In these slim volumes, he conjures up worlds and ideas that sideswipe you: dynamic and intelligent, they will hit you in both the gut and the mind. |
We are delighted to announce (in association with Bridget Williams Books) that Max Harris, author of The New Zealand Project, will be speaking in Church Street, at Kush, on Thur
sday 17 August at 6 PM. Ink this into your diary now. Stella will be in the chair. Addressing the key challenges of climate change, the future of work and social justice, Max encourages us to look ahead with hope – and to develop a new political vision based on the values of care, community and creativity. Click here for full details and a printable poster.  | At the Lightning Field by Laura Raicovich {Reviewed by THOMAS} ‘The Lightning Field’ is a one-mile-by-one-kilometer grid of 400 evenly spaced 4.5m-8m high stainless steel poles in the remote desert of New Mexico, constructed by Walter De Maria in 1977 such that it would support a regular hypothetical slab precisely on all points. As well as being an attractor for lightning, which is frequent in that area, the grid is an attractor for artists, scientists and other people who have an inclination to correlate the sphere of experience with the sphere of speculation (if such things may be thought of as spheres). Although the field can be circumambulated, to be within it is to experience it as of infinite (or non-finite) extent: the pattern of the grid resolves its regularity at the distance beyond which no effort is required to bring objects into focus, but is indistinguishable closer up. Within this implied infinity of regularity, of spaciotemporal generality, the irregular, the specific, is more noticeable, and, by implication, more measurable, as if the grid were a graph upon which to plot the curve of experience, the clinamen of the actual as opposed to the general, the phenomenon of perception in contrast to that which is perceived. This mathematics is the mathematics of subjectivity. The viewer, so to call a person entering the field, is thrown back upon their own intrusion, “the burden of response is placed not on the sculpture but on the spectator”, who thereby becomes aware primarily of themselves. The heightened awareness of oneself and of particular phenomena within the field is only mystical if by mystical we mean a separation of the particular from the general. “The Lightning Field is not a magical plane. Within the desert there are few distractions from the acts and implications of perception.” And yet the separation of the particular from the general allows us to study not only the particular but the general also. Synthesis is a problem resolved by scale; analysis is a problem resolved by shape. The search for patterns and symmetries, especially those that appear on both the infinitesimal and infinite scales, supersedes the study of divisible phenomena. Space and time reveal themselves as properties of phenomena that allow these phenomena to relate, rather than as a medium or media in which they occur. The grid is a framework within which the curve of experience can be more clearly perceived and also a framework for extrapolating that experience beyond the prescribed ground. It is a space for the study of the relationship between the particular and the general, between the actual and the theoretical, between the individual and the class of which it is both a representative and a promulgator. The Lightning Field is a mechanism for the “recalibration of time and space. … It presents measurement, space and time in combinations that alternately adhere to and confound regularity, suggesting something far less rational, like the inaccuracy of a memory or the way lightning sprawls across the desert sky.” The regularity of the arrangement is an attractor of the irregular force of lightning, the beautiful ‘natural disaster’ that the artist (the artist who made the field, or any artist who seeks, at least figuratively, to attract an electric strike to their grid of regular effort) so longs for, the most potent and least predictable of phenomena. |
 | Notes on Suicide by Simon Critchley {Reviewed by THOMAS} Whether life is worth living or not is not something that can be philosophically contested, but, if life is not worth living, or if life is at least regarded by some persons in some situations as not worth living, whether suicide is justifiable in addition to being understandable is perhaps open to examination. Critchley interrogates the standard arguments against suicide and finds them unsupportable (in this he is much aided by an afterword from David Hume). The general argument in justification of suicide, or, rather, against the proscription of suicide, is one of what I would call ‘possessive individualism’, the assertion of the absolute freedom to dispose of oneself as one chooses. This argument leaves unexamined the easy belief that the bundle of impulses, tendencies and glimmerings of consciousness that we think of as ourselves in fact belong to or ‘are’ us, rather than being mere nodes in a field of impulses, tendencies and glimmerings and indivisible from the other nodes therein. In fact, we find ourselves constantly constrained by the wider consequences of an act of freedom to the extent that this freedom is not free, and thus suicide can never be merely the sovereign removal of oneself from the hole into which one had otherwise been consigned. From the individualistic point of view, suicide is both an assertion of oneself as the sole subject of one’s life and the relinquishment of oneself as the subject, a determination to be relieved of an unbearable subjectivity, to stop experiencing the story from the point of view of a character, to become, for the instant that the story ends, the reader of that story, a reader who will perish, as all readers do, in the cessation of the story. Critchley considers Cioran’s assertion that suicide is the recourse of optimists: “Is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?”, and makes some concluding attempts to the effect that it is the fact that life is not worth living that makes life worth living. In this he strays beyond the philosophically reachable consideration of suicide into areas in which it is not possible to make assertions without being at least judgemental if not insensitive. If there is an argument against suicide it is not that life is worth living (or that life is not worth living), but, perhaps, part of a more general one against the possessive individualism upon which our culture, and indeed modern consciousness itself, depends. |
NEW RELEASES
Some of the interesting books that have leapt from the cartons this week.
Scroll through to browse. Click through to have.
One of the first Maori travellers to Europe, Tuai, a young Ngare Raumati chief from the Bay of Islands, took the opportunity in 1817 to visit England and elsewhere, observing Pakeha culture and technology in its own place. He returned in 1819, planning to integrate new European knowledge and relationships into his Ngare Raumati community, but the situation at home had changed in his absence.
Mary is hired to play the part of the Emotional Girlfriend (alongside a Maternal Girlfriend, a Mundane Girlfriend, an Angry Girlfriend, &c) in a research project called The Girlfriend Experiment, which seeks to discover why two people, drawn together by forces beyond their control, can wake up one day as strangers to one another.
"For Lacey’s remarkable skill to be fully embraced, we may need a new genre to categorize her work under. Lacey’s books are not really novels, in a similar way that Woolf’s The Waves, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, or Rachel Cusk’s Outline are arguably not really novels. Still, no matter how you categorise them, it seems inevitable that her books will find a larger audience. Her sentences are like reading an iconic prose style before it’s become iconic." - Los Angeles Review of Books
Lacey's previous novel Nobody is Ever Missing, set largely in New Zealand, was an international literary sensation.
>> She's got a paperclip upon her wrist.
An excellent New Zealand essay collection on the theme of 'home', with contributions from Selina Tusitala Marsh, Martin Edmond, Ashleigh Young, Lloyd Jones, Laurence Fearnley, Sue Wootton, Elizabeth Knox, Nick Allen, Brian Turner, Tina Makereti, Bonnie Etherington, Paula Morris, Thom Conroy, Jill Sullivan, Sarah Jane Barnett, Ingrid Horrocks, Nidar Gailani, Helen Lehndorf, James George and Ian Wedde.
This taut depiction of a stand-up comedian falling apart on stage in front of an audience wanting entertainment won Grossman the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. Why are we so transfixed by tragedy, our own and others'? In reading literature, are we like Dovaleh's audience, seeking entertainment from the miseries of others?
"Unrelentingly claustrophobic. The violence that A Horse Walks into a Bar explores is private and intimate. Its central interest is not the vicious treatment of vulnerable others but the cruelty that wells up within families, circulates like a poison in tight-knit groups, and finally turns inward against the self. Searing and poignant." - New York Review of Books
>> Some things wrong in Israel.
Written in one long sentence (in which line breaks perform as a higher order of comma), McCormack’s remarkable and enjoyable book succeeds at both stretching the formal possibilities of the novel (for which it was awarded the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize) and in being a gentle, unassuming and thoughtful portrait of a very ordinary life in a small and unremarkable Irish town. The flow of McCormack’s prose sensitively maps the flow of thought, drawing feeling and meaning from the patterning of quotidian detail as the narrator dissolves himself in the memories of which he is comprised. This wash of memory suggests that the narrator may in fact be dead, the narrative being the residue (or cumulation) of his life, the enduring body of attachments, thoughts and feelings that comprise the person. Few novels capture so well the texture of a person’s life, and this has been achieved through a rigorous experiment in form. New edition.
An absolutely stunningly beautiful large-format illustrated guide to the wonders and variety of the plant world. Seldom do we use so many adjectives to describe a book. Part of the 'Welcome to the Museum' series.
White Trash: The 400-year untold history of class in America by Nancy Isenberg $45
Isenberg argues that the voters who boosted Trump all the way to the White House have been a permanent part of the American fabric, and reveals how the wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlements to today's hillbillies. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery.
"A masterly and ambitious cultural history." - New York Times
"A gritty assault on American mythmaking." - Washington Post
For the first time, every Dior haute couture collection has been plucked from the catwalk and put into one book. Endlessly stimulating.
>> Lost in the woods.
In 1761 six men left Copenhagen by sea: a botanist, a philologist, an astronomer, a doctor, an artist, and their servant. Disliking and distrusting one another from the start, they nevertheless reached the Yemen, the first organised European mission to do so. Continually seeking to undermine each other in every way possible, the expedition reached Turkey and Egypt and then continued into the desert which proved their ultimate undoing. Only one member returned to Denmark, to find that their expedition had been almost entirely forgotten and that all the specimens that had been sent back had been neglected and spoiled. The notebooks, diaries and sketches lay forgotten until the 20th century.
Influential art writers consider the work of influential art writers, including Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of the Modern Movement, Alfred Barr's monograph on Matisse, E.H. Gombrich's Art and Illusion, Clement Greenberg's Art and Culture, and Rosalind Krauss's The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Required reading.
Two women wishing to reignite their writing careers and their personal lives reunite after twenty years of domestic compromise at a writers' conference and begin to feel the irresistible pull of each other's gravity. How much have they lost sight of themselves?
"Completely engrossing." - Claire Messud
In 2010, the Human Rights Commission found that Asian people reported higher levels of discrimination than any other minority in New Zealand. Yet although anti-Asian prejudice has a long history in New Zealand, it is seldom publicly acknowledged.K. Emma Ng shines light onto the persistence of anti-Asian sentiment in New Zealand. Her anecdotal account is based on her personal experience as a second-generation young Chinese-New Zealand woman and those of other young Asian-New Zealanders. When Asian people have been living here since the Gold Rush, she asks, what will it take for them to be fully accepted as New Zealanders?
Young children can match 27 animals to their homes and make them happy. Older children will enjoy using this as a memory game.
Janouch met Kafka as a seventeen-year-old, and they took to taking long walks together, with Janouch recording everything afterwards, like Kafka's Boswell. "Life is infinitely great and profound as the immensity of the stars above us. One can only look at it through the narrow keyhole of one's personal experience. But through it one perceives more than one can see. So above all one must keep the keyhole clean." Introduction by Francine Prose.
Sixteenth century Venice, renowned for its mirrors; 1958 Venice Beach, California; 21st century Venice Casino, Las Vegas: this genre-splicing, time-shifting grand novel has been compared with the work of David Mitchell, Umberto Eco and Herman Hesse.
"Audaciously well written." - The New York Times
"With near-universal appeal, Seay's novel is a true delight, a big, beautiful cabinet of wonders that is by turns an ominous modern thriller, a supernatural mystery, and an enchanting historical adventure story." - Publishers' Weekly
An incomparable account from The Guaridan's refugee correspondent, who travelled to 17 countries and interviewed hundreds of refugees.
"A must-read for our times." - Yannis Varoufakis
Almost everything we think we know about Jane Austen is wrong. Her novels don’t confine themselves to grand houses and they were not written just for readers’ enjoyment. She writes about serious subjects and her books are deeply subversive. We just don’t read her properly - we haven’t been reading her properly for 200 years. Now in paperback.
"A sublime piece of literary detective work that shows us once and for all how to be precisely the sort of reader that Austen deserves." - Guardian
After the Second World War, the Nuremberg Tribunal became a symbol of justice in the face of tyranny, aggression and atrocity. But it was only a fragment of retribution as, with their Allies, the British embarked on the largest programme of war crimes investigations and trials in history. This book exposes the deeper truth of this endeavour, moving from the scripted trial of Goering, Hess and von Ribbentrop to the makeshift courtrooms where the SS officers, guards and executioners were prosecuted. Was justice done?
Duley was commissioned by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to document the refugee crisis. Over the next seven months, he criss-crossed Europe and the Middle East attempting to put a human face to one of the biggest humanitarian crises of our time. The result are a reminder that the crisis and the responses it provokes have an impact on actual individual people. Powerful.
"Michael Bess's detailed and humane book adeptly surveys some eye-opening developments in current technology (bionic vision, thought-controlled machines and so forth), and foresees that future humans will enjoy double the average healthy lifespan of today, leading to lives of multiple marriages and career changes." - The Spectator
Mountainous regions are home to only ten percent of the world's population yet host a strikingly disproportionate share of the world's conflicts. Mountains provide a natural refuge for those who want to elude authority, and their remoteness has allowed various practices to develop and persist in isolation, resulting in a combustible mix those in the lowlands cannot afford to ignore. A new way of looking at conflict.
The Palestine Festival of Literature was established ten years ago as an attempt to break the cultural siege resulting from the Israeli military occupation. Contributions here from many leading writers, including Teju Cole, Molly Crabapple, Selma Dabbagh, Geoff Dyer, Yasmin El-Rifae, Adam Foulds, Henning Mankell, Claire Messud, China Mieville, Pankaj Mishra, Deborah Moggach, Michael Palin, Kamila Shamsie, Gillian Slovo, Alice Walker, China Achebe, Michael Ondaatje and J. M. Coetzee.
One of the most important of the early Expressionists, Paula Moderson Becker is most remembered for her searching, sensitive self-portraits.
1851, Salem, Massachusetts. Has the drunken McGlue killed a man? Was it his best friend? More urgently, can he get another drink? A novella from the Booker short-listed Eileen.
"Wonderful." - Guardian
"Strange and beautiful." - Los Angeles Times
Emerging from the trad-jazz clubs of the early '50s, skiffle was adopted by kids who growing up during the dreary, post-war rationing years. This the the story of jazz pilgrims and blues blowers, Teddy Boys and beatnik girls, coffee-bar bohemians and refugees from the McCarthyite witch-hunts. Bragg traces how the guitar came to the forefront of music in the UK and led directly to the British Invasion of the US charts in the 1960s.
>> Donny Lonegan's 'Rock Island Line' hit the charts in 1956 and sales of guitars in the UK suddenly rocketed from 5,000 to 250,000 a year.
>> Another man with a guitar.
Perhaps no aspect of the natural world is more hidden by the projection of human response to it than the dawn chorus and birdsong in general. This interesting book shows us how little we really know about birds.
Who are the public intellectuals of the internet age? Who are the vehicles for necessary thought in the face of modern populism? This book makes a few suggestions, including Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler.
Artists are gatekeepers of the subconscious [*snigger*]. Who better to turn to for creative and life inspiration? [*snort*]. This set of 50 tongue-in-cheek 'divination' cards is a great way to become familiar with the thought processes of a wide range of artists, historical and modern. Fun (and possibly helpful).
Uses Canterbury University's superb Logie Collection to illustrate consideration of the myths and meanings of gods and heroes.
We also have in stock a superb catalogue to the superb Logie Collection.
>> But just for one day.
Very usable postcards ready to complete (or not) and send.
Sometimes children need a little help insulting their friends and family (not to mention teachers and strangers). This useful flip-book allows the user to mix-and-match their insults, extend their repertoire (by more than 60 million) and become even more endearing than they are already.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #30 (1.7.17)
Find out what we've been reading, and about some excellent new releases, and about our next Book of the Week, and about the Nelson Poetry Map and about our Poetry Spam competition. All in our latest newsletter.
Writers represented:
Anahera Gildea - Patricia Grace - Nic Low - Mary Rokonadravu - Tusiata Avia - Witi Ihimaera - Alexis Wright - Gina Cole - David Geary - Kelly Joseph - Cassandra Barnett - Jione Havea - Serie Barford - Dewe Gorode - Victor Rodger - Tina Makereti - Michael Puleloa - Courtney Sina Meredith - Kelly Ana Morey - Sia Figiel - Anya Ngawhare - Paula Morris - Selina Tusitala Marsh - Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada - Albert Wendt
Images:
Fiona Pardington - Pati Solomonia Tyrell - Shane Hansen - Rosanna Raymond - Robert Jahnke - Cerisse Palalagi - Lisa Reihana - Yuki Kihara
>> Paula Morris: "The most subversive coffee table book of the year."
>> Stories can save your life.
>> Should we be worried about the ethic representation in New Zealand publishing?
>> Expanding perceptions of the Pacific world.
>> Makereti's five favourite Maori and Pasifika books.
>> The marginalisation and pigeonholing of ethnic minorities in UK publishing.
>> The whiteness of the publishing industry in the US.
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Zeustian Logic by Sabrina Malcolm {Reviewed by STELLA}
If only real life could be like as magical as the stars in the night sky, as escapist as the stories of the Greek gods he tells his little brother to help him sleep at night, or as logical as a mathematical equation. Tuttle (Duncan) would rather look at stars, visit the Carter Observatory and play computer games with his mate, Attila the Pun, but life has other, more urgent things in train for our nerdy teen. Tuttle’s Dad, a once famous, now infamous, mountain climber has been missing, presumed dead in a storm on Mt. Everest, accused of leaving his paying customer to die on the mountain. Tuttle is determined to find out the truth, but more pressing still are his mother’s fall into depression, his younger brother’s anxiety, and how to make sure the family are fed, get to school on time and avoid all the hassles of the social worker and the persistent journalist. And Tuttle also has the aggravating presence of Boyd, the petrol head neighbour who drives him insane. Zeustian Logic is reminiscent, in style, of Kate De Goldi’s The 10pm Question, with its compelling main character, serious issues – in this case the death of a parent and the fallout this has for a family – mixed with humour and compassion, against a backdrop of the everyday ups and downs of being a young teen coping with secondary school and of attempting to find resolutions to sometimes impossible problems. The book is cleverly set a year on from the event that changes this family’s lives – the relations and friends have been supportive and cared for them but now everyone has got on with their lives while Tuttle and his mother and brother are still living in a limbo-land, one in which grief is still ever-present, where the pressures on this young man are reaching a breaking point. Sabrina Malcolm has written a brilliant book about a boy coping with the death of his father and the impact that grief has on a family. In this climate of chaos, sadness and anger, Malcolm avoids clichés and resolution to create an ultimately affecting story about recovery from trauma and how family are the anchor points in their own constellation. |
 | Craving by Esther Gerritsen {Reviewed by STELLA} Translated from Dutch, Esther Gerritsen is my new favourite author. Witty, sharp-toothed and dysfunctional, Craving is a darkly comic portrayal of a mother-daughter relationship at the edge of what could be called 'best practice'. Elisabeth is dying. When she sees her daughter, with whom she has a strained relationship, cycling past her unexpectedly, she finds herself compelled to impart this news immediately, knowing that it’s not an appropriate time, knowing that somehow she got it wrong, yet she’s unable to help herself, unable to act as a parent should. She needs to let this go. Coco is understandably thrown by this news. At the outset of this novel, you are aware that Elisabeth acts strangely, is emotionally unsympathetic and probably has a form of Asperger’s or the like. The reader is set up to see Coco, the daughter, as the unwanted child: since the age of five she has seen her mother rarely, spending one night a week with her as a child and as an adult becoming further distant. There are stories of an uncaring mother, who would rather have been at work – as a gilder of picture frames - a mother who locked her young child in a room. Yet not all is so straightforward. Are there monsters or only darlings? Elisabeth, like many young mothers, left at home while her husband’s work became increasingly important and his wife’s psychological complexities increasingly unattractive and the dull but reliable Miriam more attractive, desired space and quiet. Loving a sleeping child was easy, an awake mobile and energetic ‘little fish’ more problematic. As we meet Elisabeth and Coco, one dying, the other a young woman, we are confronted by their inability to communicate honestly, by the games they both play. Coco, determined to spend time with her mother, announces that she is moving home, and Elisabeth, in her guilt at not being the perfect mother, feels unable to resist this force, her daughter. Yet what is that drives Coco, revenge? Compassion? Or an irresistible urge to scratch a scab that won’t heal? As Elisabeth's health falters and the past becomes increasingly up-close and personal, as Coco picks at that scab and Elisabeth’s mind wanders in and out of the past and present, Coco’s behaviour becomes more erratic. Her relationship with the older, self-centred Hans begins to lose its veneer of love, and her desire to debase herself with meaningless encounters reflects her inability to connect in any meaningful way with the people closest to her. Likewise, Elisabeth’s closest, most honest relationships are with her boss, Martin, and her work colleagues, while her family leave her itching to escape and lock the doors. Obsessive craving for something neither mother nor daughter can quite put their finger on binds them in this fraught relationship. This is a fascinating, darkly amusing novel. Gerritsen writes with a calm and open hand, seemingly normal dialogue and encounters are sent spinning with a twist of a word into the internal psychologies of these darling monsters. I’m looking forward to reading Gerritsen’s other translated work, Roxy. |