 | A Short History of Decay by E.M. Cioran {Review by THOMAS} Emil Cioran is the philosopher of personal and collective frailty and failure, of emptiness, of hopelessness, of the eschewing of all answers (“Having resisted the temptation to conclude, I have overcome the mind.”). He rails against society, against both choice and necessity, against all values. I thought I would like him more than I do. Perhaps it is that he trumpets his nihilism, that he shouts out the immanence of our demise from the event horizon of whatever black hole we are heading towards, that his pessimism is, above all, dramatic (does this call its authenticity into question? (I don’t think so)), that makes me tire of him (he should perhaps be read (by me, at least) in small doses). Our differences are perhaps more of temperament than of territory; to me the underlying nullity of existence is more irredeemable than tragic, and I am to a degree suspicious of the heroic trappings and lyricism of his despair. That said, Cioran is an important, interesting (and frequently amusing) thinker, an heir to Nietzsche, and there is much to admire (and be amused by) in his books. His words dissolve civilisation as acetone dissolves paint (that’s got to be a good thing). The contents page of this book reads like the publishing list of an American academic publisher (“Genealogy of Fanaticism – In the Graveyard of Definitions – Civilisation and Frivolity – Supremacy of the Adjective – Apotheosis of the Vague – The Reactionary Angels – Militant Mourning – Farewell to Philosophy – Obsession of the Essential” &c, &c), and the book itself contains enough nihilistic aphorisms to fill a lifetime’s worth of anti-inspirational calendars (now, there’s a publishing project…), for example: “One is ‘civilised’ insofar as one does not proclaim one’s leprosy.” Great stuff. >> Six pleasant minutes with the miserabilist. >> "Without the idea of suicide I would surely have killed myself." >> The Apocalypse according to Cioran. |
NEW RELEASES
These interesting books seek shelf-space in your home.
Jaeggy, whose brief fictions, such as those in I am the Brother of XX, remain as pleasant burrs in the mind long after the short time spent reading them, has here written three brief biographies, of Thomas De Quincey, John Keats and Marcel Schwob, each as brief and effective as a lightning strike and as memorable. Jaeggy is interested in discovering what it was about these figures that made them them and not someone else. By assembling details, quotes, sketches of situations, pin-sharp portraits of contemporaries, some of which, in a few words, will change the way you remember them, Jaeggy takes us close to the membrane, so to call it, that surrounds the known, the membrane that these writers were intent on stretching, or constitutionally unable not to stretch, beyond which lay and lies madness and death, the constant themes of all Jaeggy’s attentions, and, for Jaeggy, the backdrop to, if not the object of, all creative striving. >> Read Thomas's review.
The life and health of a retired psychologist have declined to the extent that he gains insight into the disadvantaged of society and into the forces that oppress them, and also into the faculty of memory that can either liberate or condemn the one who remembers. A novel of Sebaldean scope and resonance.
>>"There are no small fascisms."
Why doesn't Dad do all those cool things he used to do? Why did he stop? (Could it be because having a child was somehow cooler?) From the author/illustrator of Tough Guys Have Feelings Too.
Turtle lives with her father, Martin - her mother disappeared when she was very little. She struggles at school yet in her internal world she is intelligent - knowledgeable and philosophical. Her home life is controlled and confined by a set of predetermined rules and expectations laid down by her disturbed father: a father who believes that the apocalypse is upon them, a paranoid survivalist who insists he is training his daughter to exist against all odds. "This is a tough, but an incredible, novel that reveals the internal world of damage and explores the psyche of Turtle humanely and honestly. With a remarkable character, a plot that keeps you wired, lyrical writing about relationships and nature, My Absolute Darling is compelling and unsettling." - Stella
Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba $28
A girl arrives at an orphanage after the deaths of her parents in a car accident. Her presence is a wound to the orphans' idea of themselves, and they also begin to have a disturbing effect upon the incomer. What role does the girl's doll play in the hazards that soon beset the inmates of the orphanage?
"Barba inhabits the minds of children with an exactitude that seems to me so uncanny as to be almost sinister. Lying behind the shocks is a meditation on language and its power to bind or loosen thought and behaviour. It is about language, wounding, wickedness; but it is also about how fleeting and how vulnerable is the state of childhood innocence – that 'nothing which we are to perceive in this world/equals the power of its intense fragility'." - Sarah Perry, Guardian
>> "All writers have a corpse in their closet."
A beautifully presented survey of all the artworks mentioned in In Search of Lost Time, with quotes and contextual notes.
Franklin loves books and he loves reading to children, but people tend to be scared of him because he is a dragon. Fortunately, Luna knows all about dragons from reading many books about them, and the two spend many hours together discussing the books they have read. To share their love of books with others, they decide to open a flying bookshop (good idea).
If "all art is theft" (Picasso), what can we make of art that deliberately appropriates, subsumes, samples or reconfigures other art? Interesting.
At the heart of the book are the Shiant Isles, a cluster of Hebridean islands in the Minch but Nicolson has pursued the birds much further-across the Atlantic, up the west coast of Ireland, to St Kilda, Orkney, Shetland, the Faeroes, Iceland and Norway; to the eastern seaboard of Maine and to Newfoundland, to the Falklands, South Georgia, the Canaries and the Azores - reaching out across the widths of the world ocean which is the seabirds' home.
"I was entranced - my mind thrilling to the veers and lifts of thought, to the beautiful deftness of the prose. This marvellous book inhabits with graceful ease both the mythic and the scientific, and remains alert to the vulnerability of these birds as well as to their wonder. It is a work that takes wing in the mind." - Robert Macfarlane
Family, society, love and religion clash in this modern reworking of the themes of Antigone. Long-listed for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.
"Home Fire left me awestruck, shaken, on the edge of my chair, filled with admiration for her courage and ambition. Recommended reading for prime ministers and presidents everywhere." - Peter Carey
"My approach to food favours intuition over strict rules and is about using your hands, rushing a little less and savouring the details. It's not food that needs to be placed on a pedestal or admired from afar; it is food that slowly weaves its way into the fabric of your daily life - food for living and sharing."
The online slow food phenomenon has now produced this very beautiful cookbook. Very satisfying - even just to look through.
When a young father kills his over-friendly neighbour and discovers that he is alive again the next day, he repeats the experiment on a regular basis and begins to wonder if he is exempt from the laws of causality. What effect does this have on his relationship with his wife and daughter?
"As vertiginous, airtight and intense as a dream." - Yuri Herrera
Explains not only the history of every imaginable sort of spice, but imparts an understanding that enables the reader to use and combine them effectively when cooking. Wonderful illuminated illustrations throughout.
Alexia is a law student escaping the Greek family that stifles her, and Isaiah is a young Maori returning home to find the family he's lost. Cut loose from their own cultures, they have volunteered to help Isaiah's Taranaki iwi get rid of the fracking that's devastating their land and water. The deeper Alexia and Isaiah go into the fight, the closer they get to understanding the different worlds they inhabit.
Everything that could possibly be wrong with a city was wrong with Calcutta. When Choudhury returned to the city as an adult he found it much unchanged from his childhood, a city of intense localism, very different from the new age of consumption that was revolutionising other Indian cities. Why?
"Beautifully observed and even more beautifully written, The Epic City marks the arrival of a major new talent." - William Dalrymple
Victoria's appetite for life was expressed in her appetite for food: the queen consistently over-ate all her life. Her appetites presided over a revolution in English cuisine.
"Had me at the first sentence." - Nigel Slater
"Zingy, fresh, and unexpected: Annie Gray, the queen of food historians, finds her perfect subject." - Lucy Worsley
>> Gray on the importance of dinner to the British Empire.
Features 30 cutting-edge women photographers from around the world.
>>fire-cracker.org/
Interesting and eclectic set of essays about the diverse characteristics of various languages, and of humans' instinct to communicate.
Following the death of James I in 1625, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham and the king's 'wife' for ten years, was accused of poisoning him. A parliamentary enquiry found cleared him and the circumstance was relegated to the sidelines of history, but Woolley in this groundbreaking book suggests the allegations were in fact true.
When Muddy Waters came to London at the start of the '60s, a kid from Boston called Joe Boyd was his tour manager; when Dylan went electric at the Newport Festival, Joe Boyd was plugging in his guitar; when the summer of love got going, Joe Boyd was running the coolest club in London, the UFO; when a bunch of club regulars called Pink Floyd recorded their first single, Joe Boyd was the producer; when a young songwriter named Nick Drake wanted to give his demo tape to someone, he chose Joe Boyd. Who better to give a deep insight into the creative maelstrom of the '60s music scene than Joe Boyd?
"Omar Robert Hamilton brings vividly to life the failed revolution of 2011 on the streets of Cairo, in all its youthful bravery and naive utopianism." - J.M. Coetzee
"I finished this novel with fascination and admiration. It gives a picture of the inside of a popular movement that we all saw from the outside, in countless news broadcasts and foreign-correspondent reports, a picture so vivid and powerful that it gives a passionate life and reality to what might have been perceived only as abstract principles. A thousand vivid details print themselves on the reader's memory: it will be a long time before we read anything so skilfully brought to life." - Philip Pullman
"Few writers could capture the frenetic speed of an Internet-fuelled uprising alongside the time-stopping corporeal reality of bullet-ridden bodies, all while never losing sight of the love that powered Egypt's revolutionary moment. Omar Robert Hamilton can do all that and more. Crossing borders and generations, he brings us into the movement's effervescent hope and its crushing heartbreak, probing timeless questions about what the living owe to the dead. Unbearable. Unmissable. A dazzling debut." - Naomi Klein
A beautifully illustrated invocation of the wonders to be found outside on a rainy day.
"A brilliant, wise, compassionate and consoling account of death and dying in a secular age. McCrum moves seamlessly from personal testimonies to medical case studies to recent developments in neuroscience. He asks profound philosophical questions about mortality, finitude and the unknown. A uniquely beautiful and significant book." - Joanna Kavenna
"Thoughtful, subtle, elegantly clever and oddly joyous, Every Third Thought is beautiful and - most of all - true." - Kate Mosse
Bhajju Shyam, an artist from the Gond tribe in central India, was commissioned to paint the walls of an Indian restaurant in London, and spent two months in the city. The book that emerged from the journey is a visual travelogue of his first encounter with a western metropolis. Bhajju brings the signs of the Gond forest to bear on the city, turning London into an exotic jungle.
That Was a Shiver by James Kelman $33
Short stories written with great precision and sympathy for the emotional depths below the surfaces of everyday life.
"Kelman brings alive a human consciousness like no other writer can." - Alan Warner
"What Kelman creates here and elsewhere in this collection is an atmosphere of Kafka-esque anxiety and menace, of things falling apart, of centres unable to hold. Like the best short story writers – James Joyce, Kafka, John Cheever, Alice Munro – he has reinvented the form through his audacity not to conform to the expectations of those who underestimate the intelligence and perceptiveness of the reading public. His stories may concern dossers and delusionists, no-hopers and chancers, petty criminals and serial gamblers, but each one is an individual who has been dealt a hand that he must learn to play or lose his lot. What he is offering are slices of lives that most western literature ignores." - Herald Scotland
For forty thousand years, TB has accompanied humans in all their migrations and endeavours, keeping pace even with medical attempts to eradicate it. As TB is developing antibiotic resistance worldwide - has humanity met its match?
A beautifully illustrated guide to making the most mouthwatering cocktails from fruits and herbs that might be in your own garden.
A period in which what was seen as modern with amazing speed appeared old-fashioned, in which huge cities sprang up in a generation, new European countries were created and in which, for the first time, humans could communicate almost instantly over thousands of miles. Evans accounts for revolutions, empire-building and wars that marked the nineteenth century, but also treats illness, serfdom, religion or philosophy, and a host of other things.
Dr James Barry: Inspector General of Hospitals, army surgeon, duellist, reformer, ladykiller, eccentric. He performed the first successful Caesarean in the British Empire, outraged the military establishment and gave Florence Nightingale a dressing down at Scutari. At home he was surrounded by a menagerie of animals, including a cat, a goat, a parrot and a terrier. Long ago in Cork, Ireland, he had also been a mother. This is the amazing tale of Margaret Anne Bulkley, the young woman who broke the rules of Georgian society to become one of the most respected surgeons of the century.
The inanimate female form has often been used by artists to make statements about the objectification of women and to explore the frontiers of individual identity and the replicability of experience. Banks surveys how artificial women can generate political and ethical debate.
The discovery of the psychoactive consequences of LSD was soon followed by its cultural manifestations. These, however took on quite different characteristics depending on their host culture: the psychedelia of the west coast of the US differed in texture from that of the UK. Chapman's fascinating book explores the territory.
>> Chapman's playlist to accompany the book.
From the author of When God Was a Rabbit.
"Tin Man is Winman's best novel yet. The playful subversiveness still bubbles away but there's a new candour there, an acceptance of needs and flaws that proves deeply touching. This is storytelling as cruelly kind as fate itself." - Patrick Gale
Jewish musical prodigy Lisa Jura Gobalek escaped Vienna to London on the Kindertransport, where she eventually studies at the Royal Academy. How can she learn the fates of her sisters and the rest of her family she left behind?
Regardless of their average incomes, countries or states with greater levels of income inequality have much higher rates of all the social maladies we generally associate with poverty: lower than average life expectancies, mental illness and crime.
Penny is ready to confront injustice wherever she finds it.
"I can't really think of another writer who so consistently and bravely keeps thinking and talking and learning and trying to make the world better." - Caitlin Moran
>> A manifesto for change.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #38 (26.8.17)
This week's newsletter includes our reviews, news, events, courses, competitions, recommendations, new releases and other things.
When something is at rest it is only conceptually differentiated from the physical continuum of its location, but when moving its differentiation is confirmed by the changes in its relations with the actual. Likewise, humans have in them a restlessness, a will to change, a fluidity of identity and belonging that Olga Tokarczuk in her fine and interesting book Flights would see as our essential vitality, an indicator of civilisation so far as it is acknowledged and encouraged, otherwise a casualty of repression or of fear. “Barbarians stay put, or go to destinations to raid them. They do not travel.” Flights is an encyclopedic sort-of-novel, a great compendium of stories, fragments, historical anecdotes, description and essays on every possible aspect of travel, in its literal and metaphorical senses, and on the stagnation, mummification and bodily degradation of stasis. The book bristles with ideas, memorable images and playful treatments, for instance when Tokarczuk reframes the world as an array of airports, to which cities and countries are but service satellites and through which the world’s population is constantly streaming, democratised by movement, no preparation either right or wrong in this zone of civilised indeterminacy. To create a border, to restrict a movement is to suppress life, to preserve a corpse. Tokarczuk’s fragments are of various registers and head in different directions, but several strands reappear through the book, such as the story of a father and young son searching for a mother who disappears on holiday on a small Croatian island. Historical imaginings include an account of the journey of Chopin’s heart from Paris to Poland following his death, the ‘biography’ of the ‘discoverer’ of the achilles tendon, and an account of the peripatetic sect constantly on the move to elude the Devil. For Tokarczuk, we find ourselves, if we find ourselves at all, somewhere in the interplay between impulse and constraint. {Review by THOMAS}
>> Read an excerpt.
>> Read another excerpt. (The Fitzcarraldo Editions edition is also available).
>> "Flights has echoes of WG Sebald, Milan Kundera, Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugrešić, but Tokarczuk inhabits a rebellious, playful register very much her own." - Guardian
>> Visit Olga Tokarczuk's library (and learn Polish incidentally).
 |
Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell {Reviewed by STELLA}
When the Queen Mary, a Victorian liner, sinks, a baby with hair the colour of lightning is found inside a cello case floating on the English Channel. She is discovered by eccentric scholar Charles Maxim, who names her Sophie and takes her into his home, much against the advice of the authorities. While Sophie sometimes eats off an atlas or writes her sums on the wallpaper, she is surrounded by music, words, and love. When the inspectors come, despite the best efforts of Charles and Sophie to tidy and clean the house and make themselves presentable, the authorities conclude that now that she is thirteen Maxim is not a suitable guardian, and Sophie is to be moved to an orphanage where she will be taught to be a proper young lady. In a fit of fury, Sophie destroys the cello case that saved her life, only to find a clue, and away they head over the channel to Paris. On the run from the authorities, Charles and Sophie are mother-hunting. Sophie is convinced her mother survived the sinking of the ship and she’s determined to take risks to find her. Risks that involve a strange boy, Matteo, and a band of wayward children who live above the streets of Paris on rooftops or in treetops, eking out a precarious existence - one that is preferable to the orphanage or workhouse. Can Sophie trust these unusual, secretive children? Will she be courageous enough to face physical danger and determined enough to believe in herself? Katherine Rundell creates magic with her cast of characters and description of place. Sophie is a wild child and determined young woman you warm to immediately: stubborn, intelligent, brave and vulnerable. Matteo is a perfect companion: resourceful, secretive and daring. Charles is an adult who brings the rules, lives by the heart and is loyal to the core. Rundell is an exquisite writer, her pace is spot on, the plot inventive and her language witty. You will find it hard to leave Sophie behind when you close the final page of this adventurous and warm-hearted novel. Fortunately,Rundell has several other titles to her name, the latest has just arrived -The Explorer. |
 | My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent {Reviewed by STELLA} Many debuts come with much fanfare - some of which creates deflation.My Absolute Darling is not one of those. Author Gabriel Tallent can write in the most lyrical way about the most horrific violence and abuse. Unsurprisingly, My Absolute Darling has been compared with A Little Life and The Sport of Kings. Set against the backdrop of the California coast, in Mendocino (where the author grew up), we meet fourteen-year-old Turtle (Julia) - tough, resourceful, able to handle a gun at six, able to survive in the wilderness with little or no equipment, watchful, lonely. Turtle lives with her father, Martin - her mother disappeared when she was very little. She struggles at school yet in her internal world she is intelligent - knowledgeable and philosophical. Her home life is controlled and confined by a set of predetermined rules and expectations laid down by her disturbed father: a father who believes that the apocalypse is upon them, a paranoid survivalist who insists he is training his daughter to exist against all odds, who loves his daughter more than anything. Tallent does not shy from the abuse which Turtle encounters, and his skill lies in the care with which he portrays the relationship between father and daughter and the beauty of his words. Martin and Turtle both have an understanding of nature, of the physical world around them, and this seems to hold them in some kind of warped isolation together. Julia has no friends at school, knows no other life. Her only other true relationship is with her grandfather, an war vet alcoholic who lives in a trailer on the family property. When Julia is with her grandfather you sense her relax. At all other times, Turtle is overly aware and on edge, expecting a poor outcome, ready to be at fault, ‘a useless slit’. This tension overlays the whole book, so even when things are going well in Turtle’s world you sense that this is the calm before the storm and that the storm will be mighty. The tension is so finely wrought that you find yourself torn between turning away and being compelled to stay with Turtle despite your unease. At the half point of the book, Turtle takes off on a trek cross-country (something she does from time to time to save herself from the constant trauma), to be alone. This time she comes across two boys just a little older than herself who are out adventuring, unwittingly unprepared for the elements and completely lost. Turtle follows them into the night and decides to rescue them, and so makes a departure in her life - real contact with others. This encounter becomes a pivotal point in the story: something changes in Turtle, something that Martin senses and feels threatened by. From this point, you understand that merely surviving will not be enough. Turtle will have to use her sharp and finely tuned instincts to decipher her truth and be tougher than she has ever been. And this is a tough, but an incredible, novel that reveals the internal world of damage and explores the psyche of Turtle humanely and honestly. With a remarkable character, a plot that keeps you wired, lyrical writing about relationships and nature, My Absolute Darling is compelling and unsettling. >>This book will be released this week. Let us put a copy aside for you. |
 | These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy {Reviewed by THOMAS} The desire to understand must not be confused with the desire to know, especially in biography. Too often and too soon an accretion of facts obscures a subject, plastering detail over detail, obscuring the essential lineaments in the mistaken notion that we are approaching a definitive life, whereas such a life, even if it were possible, could not be understood. Instead a labour of whittling is required, a paring from the mass of fact all but those details that cannot be separated from the subject, the details that make the subject themself and not another, the details therefore that are the key to the inner life, so to call it, of the subject and the cause of all the extraneous details of which we are relieved the necessity of acquiring (unless we find we enjoy this as sport). Jaeggy, whose brief fictions, such as those in I am the Brother of XX, remain as pleasant burrs in the mind long after the short time spent reading them, has here written three brief biographies, of Thomas De Quincey, John Keats and Marcel Schwob, each as brief and effective as a lightning strike and as memorable. Jaeggy is interested in discovering what it was about these figures that made them them and not someone else. By assembling details, quotes, sketches of situations, pin-sharp portraits of contemporaries (some of which, in a few words, will change the way you remember them), Jaeggy takes us close to the membrane, so to call it, that surrounds the known, the membrane that these writers were intent on stretching, or constitutionally unable not to stretch, beyond which lay and lies madness and death, the constant themes of all Jaeggy’s attentions, and, for her, the backdrop to, if not the object of, all creative striving. How memorably Jaeggy gives us sweet De Quincey’s bifurcation, by a mixture of inclination, reading and opium, from the world inhabited by others, his house a place of “paper storage, fragments of delirium eaten away by dust”, and poor Keats, whose “moods, vague and tentative, didn’t settle over him so much as hurry past like old breezes,” and Schwob, with his appetite for grief tracing and retracing the arcs of his friends’ deaths towards his own. These essays are so clean and sharp that light will refract within them long after you have ceased to read, drawing you back to read again. Is the understanding you have gained of these writers something that belongs to them? Too bad, you will henceforth be unable to shake the belief that you have gained some access to their inner lives that has been otherwise denied. |
 | Letters from a Lost Uncle by Mervyn Peake {Reviewed by THOMAS} “You will understand, unless you are very stupid, how exciting it is after so many years spent in searching for the White Lion, to feel so close to him.” The characters of Peake’s fictions, finding conventional society too narrow to contain them, turn their backs upon all that is familiar, traditional and expected of them and choose the path of loneliness that is the only alternative, monopraxis establishing no maps to variance, to learn that the path of loneliness is one to be beaten for oneself. Where there is no route forward a route must be made forward, and to carry on is to carry on with no companion but perhaps an oddity not of the same order of being as oneself. This is a melancholy path but it would be gritless to despair for to despair is the intended fate of all who turn their backs on lit windows and dining tables. One such wanderer, a “lost uncle”, though to whom he is lost is unclear, finds himself, one-legged but with a useful spike to complete his complement of limbs, more suited to the hazards and loneliness of arctic wastes than he is to human company, and travels north in search of the White Lion, whose image he has seen on a stamp. The longing of the Peakesean wayfarer draws him to the cold far edges of the mind, where snow may be swept by wind into a vast column, clearing the underlying ice so that the monsters that swim beneath may grin up as he passes. He has only a mutant turtle-dog named Jackson for company and to carry his gear. And the lion? Single-mindedness such as the uncle’s cannot fail, but the prize is bound to disappoint, the White Lion to be vast but old and on the point of death, the animals of the North all gathered for its farewell. And out of such loneliness, from this nowhere to which such uncles belong, from these experiences from beyond the usual ambit of experience, why these letters posted back to an undifferentiated nephew, these, in this case, distinctive pencil drawings with typewritten scraps of text pasted on? Does the letter, the book, the artefact, the text perform an inward urgency, tethering the sojourner to a sanity from which they might otherwise be distant? Or is there a magnanimity in production when to not produce would be less draining: does a writer imagine that the world might somehow be better (or worse) for their imposing their words upon others or upon at least the possibility of others? The task of an explorer is to explore. Is there any quest that does not leave a trace? |
Contestants were required to choose a piece of spam, junk mail or advertising and to write a poem using only the vocabulary of their chosen junk. We were overwhelmed with the number of entries - many thanks to everyone.
Winner: Janine Martig
Flawless Audrey
Seamless
Perfect
Confident
I can be you
As perfect as you
I correct my errors
to be as flawless as you
I can be you
I + work = you
It's the way
All that work
to be you
Perfect
Seamless
Flawless
To be Audrey
Can I be as confident
as you?
Audrey?
Can I?
Audrey?
All that work...
Judges' comment: This poem uses the limited vocabulary of the advertisement to wring a huge amount of pathos out of the fact that grammatical insecurity is merely a manifestation of personal insecurity.
Commended: Joe Papps
An unsolicited open-access map,
the map with no connections between national places,
separate locations,
there is no limit.
A sheet, a copy,
originating from various wandering locations,
mobile encounters,
there is no limit.
Following the day,
you associate streets with volumes of phantom space,
virtual tours,
there is no limit.
Contribute to this new piece,
ensure your billstickers amount to your name,
send or deliver,
there is no limit.
A junk arrangement,
you will no doubt amount to the spam you receive,
estimate twenty years,
there is no limit.
Judges' comment: This poem cleverly appropriates the vocabulary of the competition instructions to explore the existential threats and opportunities of the concept of the limit (or the constraints of its absence). 'Phantom space' is a concept that deserves a whole book.
Commended: Jeannette Cook
Black chook
you are luscious,
velvet smooth, sumptuous, silky,
elegant as you run by the river
below our cellar door.
We are impressed by the red-gold
of your powerful head,
your beautifully structured form
as you scoop ripe fruit
onto your palate.
Big, weighty, generous,
a champion layer delivered to us laden.
Today we collected two -
smooth in the hand they lay
like white stars.
We lovers from across the world
built on this estate below the range
to share our passion
for simple things. Your delicious offer
has made us rich.
Judges' comment: This poems nicely turns the adjective-laden vocabulary of advertising inwards to construct a carefully patterned and very personal poem.
NEW RELEASES
These books have come in asking for you.
We have in us a restlessness, a will to change, a fluidity of identity and belonging that Olga Tokarczuk in her fine and interesting book Flights would see as our essential vitality, an indicator of civilisation. Flights is an encyclopedic sort-of-novel, a great compendium of stories, fragments, historical anecdotes, description and essays on every possible aspect of travel, in its literal and metaphorical senses, and on the stagnation, mummification and bodily degradation of stasis. The book bristles with ideas, memorable images and playful treatments.
>> Read Thomas's review.
The three-day siege of the Battle of Orakau in 1864, in which 1700 Imperial troops laid siege to a hastily constructed pa sheltering 300 Maori men, women and children, marked the end of the Waikato War. Ihimaera tells the history from the point of view of a Moetu, a boy on the side that refused to submit and fought to the end. With facing texts in English and Maori (by Hemi Kelly). First-hand accounts and documentary illustrations appended.
A dazzlingly intelligent dual-narrative novel concerning, on the one hand, a retired New York lawyer who 'disappears' to Tel Aviv, and, on the other, a novelist named Nicole Krauss who comes home to find herself already there, and so sets off towards the point the narratives meet. Elegant and replete with Kraussian themes of memory, solitude and Jewishness.
"Restores your faith in fiction." - Ali Smith
"Charming, tender, and wholly original." - J. M. Coetzee
>>"What is ‘real’ and what isn’t, and do such questions even apply, really, to something that is entirely a construction, from beginning to end?"
As well as being a deeply thoughtful writer, Coetzee has always been a deeply thoughtful reader, and his essays are helpful in unlocking the work of other writers, including, here, Beckett, Walser, Murnane, Goethe and Kleist.
"I want to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap and the sink, the garden chair close to the wall beneath the kitchen window, the sun, the water, the trees." Following the remarkable quasiautobiographical 'My Struggle' series, Knausgaard has begun to produce an impressionistic personal encyclopedia of the world to appear in four seasonal volumes. The first begins as a letter to his unborn daughter and proceeds to catalogue the wonders and banalities of elements of the natural and human worlds, and of their effect on each other. Illustrations by Vanessa Baird.
>> The sun: "utterly unapproachable and completely indifferent."
>> "I am back writing good sentences."
"Meet Bram Presser, aged five, smoking a cigarette with his grandmother in Prague. Meet Jakub Rand, one of the Jews chosen to assemble the Nazi’s Museum of the Extinct Race. Such details, like lightning flashes, illuminate this audacious work about the author’s search for the grandfather he loved but hardly knew. Working in the wake of writers like Modiano and Safran Foer, Presser brilliantly shows how fresh facts can derail old truths, how fiction can amplify memory. A smart and tender meditation on who we become when we attempt to survive survival." - Mireille Juchau
"We didn't want to be like twins-we wanted to be twins. We wanted to be absolutely identical. But because we hadn't been born twins, we had to make ourselves the same-and part of that, of course, was having to go through all our most important experiences together." Rowing partners Johann and Ludwig are best friends, but that's not enough. To defeat the region's current champions, identical twins from a nearby town, they must become twins too. Ludwig has a plan: they will eat, sleep, breathe and even think in perfect harmony. Only then will they have a chance of winning. But Johann has a secret he's been keeping from his friend-and when Ludwig begins acting strangely, Johann realises that his 'twin' wants to put their bond to the ultimate test.
Centred on a community of immigrants who have traded their endangered lives as artists in China and Taiwan for the constant struggle of life on the poverty line in 1990s New York City, the stories that make up Sour Heart examine the many ways that family and history can weigh us down, but also lift us up.
"As I read, I quickly realized this was something so new and powerful that it would come to shape the world, not just the literary world, but what we know about reality. Zhang's version of honesty goes way past the familiar, with passages that burst into a bold, startling brilliance. Get ready." - Miranda July
"Obscene, beautiful, moving." - The New Yorker
>> Jenny Zhang and Lena Dunham.
From his seat in the tiny aeroplane, Fred watches as the mysteries of the Amazon jungle pass by below him. He has always dreamed of becoming an explorer, of making history and of reading his name amongst the lists of great discoveries. If only he could land and look about him. As the plane crashes into the canopy, Fred is suddenly left without a choice. He and the three other children may be alive, but the jungle is a vast, untamed place. With no hope of rescue, the chance of getting home feels impossibly small. Rundell, author of The Wolf Wilder, writes beautifully as always.
Exhaustive and magisterial, this biography benefits from its author's first-hand knowledge and from his access to Hillary's personal papers. It reveals dimensions of Hillary's life not hitherto examined.
Why are the institutions of representative democracy seemingly unable to sustain themselves against forces they were designed to manage, and why does it matter?
When a beautifully made coffin turns up for Edvard's grandfather, whose death is nowhere in sight, Edvard begins to unravel the mystery of his lost uncle and dead parents, an unravelling that takes him from the remote Norwegian farmstead where he grew up to the Shetland Islands, to the historic battlefields of France. The novel is neatly dovetailed throughout, just like the woodwork that runs through it. From the author of the incomparable Norwegian Wood.
>> Mytting speaks with Kathryn Ryan.
The first concrete evidence for Desmond arrives when he stood for parliament in Hawkes Bay in 1884 (coming last of three candidates). He continued to campaign against landlords, bankers and monopolists, and for Maori against the settlers (and aligning himself with Te Kooti). By the time he left New Zealand in 1892, Desmond had already formulated the first version of Might is Right, his notorious manifesto of extreme social Darwinism, in which he proposed that the strong have an evolutionary duty to uproot and supplant the weak (including Christians).
Kells runs his finger along the shelves and wanders the aisles of libraries around the world and through time, both real and imagined, with books and without, and ponders the importance of the library as a representation of the human mind.
Everything from the fundamentals (types of flours and starters; stages of fermentation; basic doughs and fillings) through to recipes for breads (baguettes, sourdoughs, speciality breads, flavoured breads, oil breads and milk breads), Viennese pastries (croissants, pains au chocolat, apple tarts) gateaux (flan patissier, pistachio and apricot tart, spice bread), brioches (Parisian, praline, plaited, layered and cakes) and biscuits (sables, madeleines, almond tuiles).
Authentic and achievable recipes from the northeast of Italy, attractively presented.
In 2015 a tumour in the language centre of her brain robbed Blain of her ability to speak. After the rigours of treatment, she set about rebuilding her linguistic capacities through writing. At the same time, her mother was losing her faculties to Alzheimer's disease. An interesting meditation of the place of language in our conception of ourselves.
Being a teenager is hard enough without someone else using your body to commit murder. With the help of his 'ghost pimp,' Andy earns extra cash renting his body to spirits hungry for a taste of the corporeal world. But one day his body is returned battered and bruised, and he finds himself accused of a murder he doesn't remember committing. With the police on his trail and time running out, Andy must embark on a dangerous quest to catch the spectral killer, unaware he's a pawn in a larger conflict between supernatural forces. Exciting YA fiction from local author Mike Moreaux.
Continues the project begun in What Lies Beneath into the sixties, sexual liberation, literature and Thatcherism.
Ten years old and irrepressibly curious, Ellie lives with her fisherman father, Peter, on the wild North Yorkshire coast. Her mother's breakdown is discussed only in whispers, with the promise 'better by Christmas' and no further explanation. Steering by the light of her dad's sea-myths, her mum's memories of home across the water, and a fierce spirit all her own, Ellie begins to learn how her world is put together (or pulled apart).
The elder daughter of working-class Korean immigrants, Casey inhabits a New York a world away from that of her parents. As Casey navigates an uneven course of small triumphs and spectacular failures, a clash of values, ideals and ambitions plays out against the colourful backdrop of New York society, its many layers, shades and divides.
"Ambitious, accomplished, engrossing. As easy to devour as a 19th-century romance." - New York Times
"This big, beguiling book has all the distinguishing marks of a Great American Novel. A remarkable writer." - The Times
Nature writing from a professional tree-climber whose work has taken him into the upper strata of forests around the world. Beautifully written.
Orhan Pamuk’s tenth novel, The Red-Haired Woman, is the story of a well-digger and his apprentice looking for water on barren land. It is also a novel of ideas in the tradition of the French conte philosophique. In mid-1980s Istanbul, Master Mahmut and his apprentice use ancient methods to dig new wells. This is the tale of their back-breaking struggle, but it is also an exploration—through stories and images—of ideas about fathers and sons, authoritarianism and individuality, state and freedom, reading and seeing.
Doudna's discovery of the genome editing capacities of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) has provided scientists with potentially the most powerful interventional tool yet in the field of genetics.
Bread, vinegar, kvass, yoghurt, butter, sauerkraut, kimchi, natural sodas, scrumpy, mead, pickles, kefir, creme fraiche, buttermilk, kombucha, cheese, miso, tempeh: you can make it all. Gentle and thorough.
"Like a fox running over snow there is a lightness, a poetic grace and a keen focus to these stories. Sharp, true and always hinting at a larger world, the work has a fable-like quality. Devour this delightful book in one sitting, then savour the stories all over again. " - Frankie McMillan
Illustrations by Rachel J. Fenton.
>> The back of a woman walking away. Radojkovich's flash fiction.
Engaging columns on literary travel.
"An insightful guide to the stages of writing fiction and memoir without falling into common traps, while wisely navigating the writing life, from an award-winning author and longtime teacher.
A book-length master class." - The Atlantic
What is at the top of the ladder? Who knows.
Exposes political economist James McGill Buchanan as the architect behind the right's relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatise public education, and curb democratic majority rule.
A grand history of China's deep and recent history told through its relationship and management of water.
The City of the Secret Rivers by Jacob Sager Weinstein $23
London is crisscrossed with sewers and underground rivers. Can Hyacinth, recently arrived from the US locate the magically charged drop of water that will prevent another Great Fire? Who can she trust?
Serious critical consideration of the 2017 Nobel Literature laureate from Simon Armitage, Christopher Butler, Bryan Cheyette, Patrick Crotty, Aidan Day, Mark Ford, Lavinia Greenlaw, Hugh Haughton, Daniel Karlin, Paul Muldoon, Nicholas Roe, Pam Thurschwell and Susan Wheeler. A new edition, with a perceptive introduction by Will Self.
>> You know something is happening.
The psychologist specialising in PTSD recounts her own experiences surviving Auschwitz (where she was forced to dance for Josef Mengele) and those of the people she has helped.
"The Choice is a gift to humanity. Dr. Eger's life reveals our capacity to transcend even the greatest of horrors and to use that suffering for the benefit of others." - Desmond Tutu
Spices, grilled food, health food, vegan food, caramel, hamburgers, chilli hot dogs, avocado cheeseburgers, granola, lobster rolls, hamburgers, French-style tacos, fro yo, hamburgers, kale pizza, acai bowls, shrimp pad thai and hamburgers. Excellent photographs; part of the 'Cult Recipes' series.
Find out what we've been reading.
Find out what you'll be reading next.
Find out about our Writing for Children workshop.
Find out about the Mapua Literary Festival.
Find out about National Poetry Day.
Find out what you'll be reading next.
Find out about our Writing for Children workshop.
Find out about the Mapua Literary Festival.
Find out about National Poetry Day.
Minicry is a microscopic 24-page minizine illustrated by Kate Depree, featuring mini-things like haiku, jokes, tweets, poems, lists and more by Zarah Butcher McGunnigle, Courtney Sina Meredith, Uther Dean, Ashleigh Young, Guy Montgomery, Ruby Mae Hinepuni Solly, Alice May Connolly, Kirsten McDougall and Henry Cooke.
>> Brought to you by the people who bring you Mimicry.
>> Visit the Mimicry FaceBook page and like it.
>> Twittering tweets.
>> New voices in poetry are sought.
>> Are you hungry now?
We have full-size books from some of the contributors to Minicry:
Can You Tolerate This? by Ashleigh Young
Tess by Kirsten McDougall
Tail of the Taniwha and Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick by Courtney Sina Meredith
and several of them are into Sport.
>> Holly Hunter was inspired to make Minicry by Peach Spell.
Now make your own minizine and come and show us.
Friday 25 August is National Poetry Day. Make some resolutions now as to how you will mark this day with your friends and family. We will be announcing the winner of our Poetry Spam competition (you will be able to read the winning poem in next week's newsletter). Thank you for all the entries! 
On Friday, go out and about with your mobile device and read poems at the locations people have tagged them to on the Nelson Poetry Map - you may well meet other poetry readers reading there. In the mean time, keep adding poems (your own or those by others).
On Friday, come and have a look at our Poetry Day display and receive a swingeing discount if you are prepared to read a verse from the poetry book you want out loud.
Participate in, or just go along to listen to, the 'open mic' poetry event at the Elma Turner Library, 27 Halifax Street, Nelson, from 12 noon to 2 PM on Friday 25th. There are events all around the country.
20/20 Collection. To mark 20 years of National Poetry Days, 20 poets have been chosen, who each feature one of their poems and each has chosen another poet, who also have a featured poem. Click through to have a look.
Nelson-resident poet David Kārena-Holmes is Bluff-resident poet Cilla McQueen's chosen poet. We have a range of David's work in stock, and editions by him and others from his tiny peripatetic Maungatua Press.  Reviewed by STELLA |
Tess by Kirsten McDougall is a finely crafted novel that hooks you from the moment you meet the young woman hitch-hiking her way into small-town New Zealand. Tess is uneasy, troubled by something and wary of anyone that tries to help her. When Lewis, a middle-aged dentist, picks her up, he is distinctly wary too - he doesn’t wish to be seen as predatory. It’s raining and the young woman on the side of the road is soaked and reminds him of his daughter who he’s recently had a falling out with. Lewis is also dealing with his own grief and loneliness. His mother is in an old folks' home and doesn’t recognise him, although occasionally asking after his pretty wife, unknowingly rubbing salt into a wound. Lewis’s wife was the victim of an accidental death, one we learn later in the book has disrupted his family and made their lives unbearable for several years with secrets, blame and guilt. When Lewis ends up inadvertently looking after Tess, who becomes briefly ill with a fever, each of their lives is affected by the other. Both are lost and running from pain in their own way. Lewis needs to find a way back to his adult children, to rebuild his relationships with them, ease his way back into life rather than an alcohol-dulled semblance of one. Tess needs to face herself and her own secrets and fears. The novel is described as a "gothic love story", and there is an unusual element to this tale of relationships. Tess has an inherited supernatural power which she finds a curse as well as a curiosity. In the hands of a less able writer, this would have felt forced or unbelievable, but McDougall weaves this aspect into the novel convincingly and without guile. As Lewis and Tess muddle along, we are drawn into their stories, each revealed piece by piece through the conversation between the characters, flashbacks and observation. Life moves into a calm pattern, one in which Tess gardens and rights the neglected home and Lewis is relieved of his loneliness. There are times when the relationship is almost derailed, yet somehow they find the companionship or safety they need. So, just as everything seems to be running smoothly until Lewis’s tumultuous daughter, Jean, arrives on the scene and all turns on its head. Confrontations on various levels arise, between daughter and father; between the guest, Tess, and Jean; and Tess’s past catches up with her. This a novel about vulnerability, about women and power (or lack of it), about how anger can take you in the wrong direction yet also empower you to make the right choices and be courageous. McDougall writes convincingly, edging you closer to the truth: here is an observation of love, of surviving and of letting go of hurt. It’s also a novel of surprises - definitely worth delving into.
|
 | The Hideout by Egon Hostovský {Reviewed by THOMAS} “All the love I am able to wring out of my desolate heart, all the feeling and devotion I may be putting into these lines, is released in me only because I know that I shall soon die.” The Hideout takes the form of a long valedictory letter by a Czech engineer to his wife from the cellar in France in which he has been hiding in an attempt to wait out the Second World War. The engineer confesses to his wife that, out of boredom of family life, in 1939 he followed a young Jewish widow, Madame Olga, to Paris, and that he dared not return to Czechoslovakia after the German invasion as he believed that the Germans would be hunting for him because he had destroyed the blueprints for an anti-aircraft gun-sight he had invented. When the Germans then invade France, he accepts the offer of a Dr Aubin, a man of indeterminate taste and ambivalent personality, to hide in the cellar of his house in Normandy until the war ends. Ominously, when they meet, Dr Aubin tells the engineer of a ‘cousin’ who was kept in the cellar as he slowly went mad: “he didn’t last long.” The book goes on to chart the disintegration of the engineer’s mental and physical capacities, describing his killing of a German soldier and ending with his consent to blow up a ship on behalf of the Resistance with the cost of his own life. It becomes clear that, by the time of writing, the engineer lives in a world that has for a long time had little resemblance to actuality, but it is unclear exactly when this divergence became established. I would contend that the insanity overwhelmed him quite early in his narrative, and his particular dangers are entirely delusional. There is no evidence that the Germans were in fact at all interested in his destruction of the blueprints, and they would hardly recognise him or be looking for him in France in any case. His whole flight and secretion is perhaps a sublimation of his guilt about his infidelity, his lack of specific danger contrasting with the real danger faced by the Jewish widow Madame Olga, whom he abandons as soon as the Germans invade France. The engineer tells of his years hiding in the cellar of the house of the Mephistophelian Dr Aubin, the delineation of whom may or may not be in reference to an actual person. He tells of the torment he suffers when Dr Aubin has a German soldier boarding in the house above his head, a man who peers into the cellar, noseless and demonic. Clearly by this time Dr Aubin and the boarder are little more than projections of the engineer’s paranoia, serving to reinforce the ‘necessity’ of his self-incarceration. When Dr Aubin suggests that the Germans “aren’t fighting against people but against nature,” he affronts the engineer’s certainty that the Germans are interested in his ‘crime’ against them, and his suggestion that the the Germans may not in fact be interested in his anti-aircraft gun-sight merely makes the engineer deeply suspicious of Dr Aubin and strengthens his insane resolve. “My memories and my visions were like blocks which I could use to built infinite structures.” Isolated in his own head, the engineer so misconstrues his own history that he cannot experience his present surroundings as anything beyond his delusions. He sees from his cellar window his “little double,” a child playing with an imaginary dog, and when he finally sees a German soldier (a “German soldier”), it is, implausibly, his only German school-mate (in SS uniform), and the engineer immediately tells him all his secrets. When Fischer offers the engineer safe passage in return for his anti-aircraft gun-sight, a way out of the cellar, the engineer kills him with a spade and hides the body under his bed until Dr Aubin eventually returns and disposes of it. Clearly, by this time, the Fischer figure is as real as the child’s ‘dog’, evidence that the engineer’s mental deterioration is reaching a critical point. The Hideout is such a good depiction of delusional paranoia and attendant claustrophobia partly because we have only the narrator’s own words with which to grapple with his reality, and partly because delusional dangers often convincingly clad themselves in the semblance of real dangers in times when everyone’s version of reality is distorted by fear. |
 | One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in a Small Box by Deb Olin Unferth, Sarah Manguso and Dave Eggers {Reveiwed by STELLA} McSweeney’s know how to make intriguing and innovative books. One Hundred and Forty-Five Stories in a Small Box is just that. The box with artwork by American artist Jacob Magraw-Mickelson draws your attention before you even notice the three small cloth-covered hardback books sitting within. In green, cream and puce, each volume contains a collection of short-short stories from three authors. All have a gift for this form, and pull in the absurd, the very funny and the affecting to great cumulative effect. The writing is pungent yet also sparse, nuanced yet light - breathless and meaningful in their single gulps. The authors Dave Eggers, Sarah Manguso and Deb Olin Unferth each have their particular style, and these writings butt up against each, as well as spring off each other successfully. (I've been reading them a volume at a time, but I'm curious to go back and intersperse the authors' writings). The volumes are titled Minor Robberies (Unferth), Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape(Manguso) and How the Water Feels to the Fishes (Eggers). After picking up the Manguso volume in the bookshop and reading a few, this collection of 145 stories quickly convinced me that it had a place on our home bookshelf, and I’ve been enjoying exploring these short-shorts ever since. |
 | Nobody is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey {Reviewed by THOMAS} For reasons she is never quite able to formulate, Elyria flees her marriage and New York and runs away to New Zealand, where she wanders about, seemingly incapable of either achieving or escaping personhood (the closest she achieves to a self-nullifying stability is when working in the garden of an aging poet, who eventually frees himself of her with the necessarily blunt observation, “You are a sad person, and I’m not a person who can tolerate other people’s sadness”). Elyria is caught in a tourniquet of self-observation which borders at times on the hysterical (perhaps the ultimate result of all self-observation). She thinks back to the early period of life with the person who became with her husband, when “I was not an observer of myself, but a be-er of myself, a person who just was instead of a person who was almost”, but we know that this relationship, with a man Elyria met because he was the last person her sister talked to before her suicide, was both formed and deformed by a trauma Elyria could not face, a trauma which the relationship is unable to either heal or address. Although Elyria recognises she has a problem with authenticity (“A rational person would feel upset instead of just knowing she was upset.”), this appears to be incurable, existential, as she is manifestly incapable of relaxing the vigilance that keeps her ‘inner wildebeests’ hidden and thus prevents her escape into authenticity: “I was not a person but just some evidence of myself”. Only at the end of the book, when she has returned and been rejected by her husband and is walking through New York in torrential rain, does she perhaps (but only perhaps) exhibit an awareness of her surroundings that is not distorted by self-obsession, but this clarity (possibly fleeting, possibly terminal) is predicated on a relinquishment that is uncertain in its implications. |
The winners of the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults have just been announced!
2017 Margaret Mahy Book of the Year: SNARK by David Elliot
Copyright Licensing NZ Young Adult Fiction Award: The Severed Land by Maurice Gee
Esther Glen Award for Junior Fiction: My New Zealand Story: Bastion Point by Tania Roxborogh
Elsie Locke Award for Non Fiction: Jack and Charlie, Boys of the Bush by Jack Marcotte
Picture Book Award: That's Not A Hippopotamus! by Juliette MacIver and Sarah Davis
Te Kura Pounamu Award: Te Kaihanga Māpere by Sacha Cotter, translated by Kawata Teepa, illustrated by Josh Morgan
Russell Clark Illustration Award: Snark by David Elliot
Best First Book Award: The Discombobulated Life of Summer Rain by Julie Lamb
BOOKS @ VOLUME #36 (12.8.17)
Our newsletter of reviews, news, events, new releases and other recommendations.
 |
The New Zealand Project by Max Harris (Reviewed by STELLA}
At a time when we face unprecedented challenges - climate change, rising inequality, economic uncertainties, a rapidly changing concept of ‘work', just to mention a few - we are also seeing an increased disillusionment and more pointedly a dissociation with politics and a lack of discourse (even in an election year). Why is it that many don’t vote, and why is it that political conversation doesn’t happen around every dining room table? We have seen a gradual decline in involvement in politics on either a small, local scale or a grander scale in recent decades, particularly in the face of neoliberalism over the last 40 years or so, accelerated by the accusation of governments being more in cahoots with big business and their own social groupings than with people they claim to represent. There are exceptions, for instance Obama’s successful presidential campaign (yet once in ‘power’, it’s debatable whether much really changed) that harnessed swathes of America and gained the attention worldwide.The economic collapses of 2007-8 could have made a difference in the way that people viewed and made use of political tools, yet, despite the 1% movement and other similar protest movements, the banks were rescued, a few figureheads went to jail and the world carried on in that boom/crash manner of capitalism. The phenomena of Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK have given us a glimpse, though, of what might be achieved when people feel engaged with the political system. But sitting right along side this is Brexit (a vote which harnessed the will of disgruntled and disenfranchised) and likewise Trump for similar reasons. Max Harris’s book, The New Zealand Project, isn’t looking at what has been, so much as at what can be: an optimistic discussion about where we are, and a suggestion of new way forward. Harris is an Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and this Project is part of his work on political systems and the need to change the principles at the core of these systems. In The New Zealand Project, Harris is interested in values, a ‘politics of love’, and how the ideas of community, care and creativity can make a difference in building a better society. These three elements are the anchor stones for talking about inequality, economic structures, foreign policy, decolonisation, social infrastructure (health, education and housing), climate change and a politics that engages people and their power to play a positive role in their political lives. Harris is unashamedly idealistic, something which I also noted in Chloe Swarbrick’s address at a recent event in Nelson, and this positivity has also grabbed the attention of the public in the rise of Jacinda Ardern. It’s refreshing and, while I probably fall into the cynic camp when it comes to politics, I can’t help but feel buoyed by the fact that there are new ideas and energy on the horizon, ideas that don’t necessarily come from traditional left/right paradigm. Talking in terms of positivity and values or 'love politics' might give you the wrong impression. The New Zealand Project is a serious, intelligent and thoughtful vision that challenges our preconceptions, tackles the tough questions, and gives us a framework on which to think about New Zealand’s political future and how changes in political concepts are vital to creating a better society for all. It is incredibly detailed, given the breadth of its content, and while reading it I wanted my post-it notes handy so I could come back to intriguing ideas, questions raised and thoughts triggered. Max Harris wants a discussion - he wants people to ask questions and debate concepts. This is a book that should be read, absorbed and discussed. And you can find out more from the author himself - Max will be in Nelson on Thursday 17th (see above). |