 | The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro {Reviewed by THOMAS}
In many ways, this ought to have been an awful book but instead it is the opposite: a historical fantasy written against the conventions of historical fantasy. In an extended lull in the eighth-century wars between the Britons and the colonising Saxons, an elderly Briton couple set out to join their son, who long ago left for the next village. The land is covered with a ‘mist of forgetting’, which erases personal and collective history and makes sustained intentional action nearly impossible. They fall in with a Saxon warrior (who has come to kill the dragon whose enchanted breath is the mist of forgetting (oops: spoiler)) and a Saxon boy who has sustained a strange bite, and, at various times, they encounter Sir Gawain, the late King Arthur’s nephew, now elderly, cantankerous and occasionally prone to dischivalry and mental slippage. I don’t want to write too much about what happens, partly because it is important that the reader accompanies the couple in their slow struggle towards narrative memory, and partly because Ishiguro takes great pains to keep the reader from becoming absorbed in ‘the action’. Especially towards the beginning, distance is maintained by an unidentified intrusive narrator saying things like “there would have been elms and willows near the water”, and, throughout, the tropes and clichés of both historical and fantasy fiction are rigorously deflated, and what could have been ‘dramatic’ bits are treated in a deliberately cursory manner compared with the attention given to the glimmers of temporal consciousness shielded by each of the characters. In fact, as well as being an extended meditation on the nature and ambivalent power of memory, the book can also be read as an analogue of the writing of fiction: characters are slowly defined by personal and collective histories, both as narrative is wound about them out of the mists of undefined potential (the setting of this novel in a time where the line between mythology and history is undrawn (at least psychologically) is appropriate) and as their back-stories are induced by slowly moving towards recognition of what it is in their past that propels their actions. For Ishiguro, memory, as well as making identity and sustained intention possible, is the mechanism by which personal and collective trauma forces itself upon the present and upon which further harm is predicated (“vengeance relished in advance by those not able to take it in its proper place”). Ishiguro, never one to write the same book twice, has written an unusual, thoughtful and, ultimately, involving book.
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NEW RELEASES
Just out and just in.
When he was in his late 40s, anxiety and depression overwhelmed Wellingtonian Brent Williams and he walked away from his partner, four children and job. He tells the story of his journey back to the world in this graphic memoir illustrated by Turkish artist Korkut Oztekin.
>> Williams speaks with Kim Hill.
"Walsh toys with notions of realism versus fantasy and autobiography versus fiction. She exposes, and revels in, the absurdity of these boundaries, their indistinctness. Her clever, self-parodying stories capture the existential disarrangement of the writer, but also the existential disarrangement of anyone who finds real life strange and, at times, quite unreal." - Joanna Kavenna, Guardian
"A genuinely original collection, sharp and sparse." - Mike McCormack
>> Read an extract, 'Exes'.
How are mummies made? What's inside a pyramid? A beautifully drawn large-format lift-the-flap book, introducing the world of Ancient Egypt.
Wonderful large-format illustrations of the wonders of the human body. See 3 images at once, or use the filters to untangle them.
If the city is the largest human artefact, how can we 'read' this evidence of the society that produced it?
How Surrealism, female friendship, and the experiences of war, loss, and trauma shaped individual women's transitions from someone else's muse to mature artists in their own right. Includes Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe, Lee Miller and Valentine Penrose, Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini, Frida Kahlo and Jacqueline Lamba.
"Sometimes it feels like I might be the only person awake in the whole country. People might find that a lonely thought. Not me." On icy nights the gritterman spreads grit on the roads and footpaths to reduce the incidence of accidents during the day. Nobody notices this, but that's the way the gritterman would want it. An atmospheric graphic novel reminiscent of Raymond Briggs.
>> The Gritterman website (with music by Weeks).
500 images, 32 varied and outstanding contemporary artists whose practice includes making books. Impressive, and full of interesting ideas.
>> Sample pages on our website!
Ella is fascinated by the old house she sees from the window of her new room. "Keep Out" say the signs, but, after she sees a girl in the house's garden, Ella just has to go in. What does she find out about the house and its secrets? Will she ever be able to get back out? A chilling graphic novel.
A guide to places humans haven't been (much) or spoilt yet. Includes Te Urewera. Very browseable.
"Reinhard Kleist, master graphic novelist and myth-maker has - yet again - blown apart the conventions of the graphic novel by concocting a terrifying conflation of Cave songs, biographical half-truths and complete fabulations and creating a complex, chilling and completely bizarre journey into Cave World. Closer to the truth than any biography, that's for sure! But for the record, I never killed Elisa Day." - Nick Cave
>> Live Mercy.
Delicious Middle-Eastern recipes, from breakfasts to feasts, from the author of the very popular Persiana.
A crystalline exposition of Marx's monumental work, Capital, considered in the context of the late nineteenth century, when it was written, and with consideration of whether its theses need revision for the twenty-first.
"One of the most perceptive and intelligent thinkers the progressive movement has." - Owen Jones
What is a person and what is not? If we rethink our notions of identity can we both include and overcome the notion of species and arrive at a more helpful model of our place on (or in) the planet?
"I have been reading Timothy Morton's books for a while and I like them a lot." - Bjork
Short stories from the author of Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides.
"An excellent collection." - Guardian
"Eugenides is blessed with the storyteller's most magical gift, the ability to transform the mundane into the extraordinary." - New York Times
Short stories fusing fiction and memoir from the author of Family Life.
"There's a great duality to these stories: simple, but complex, funny enough to laugh out loud at, but emotionally devastating, foreign, yet familiar. What a exciting and original writer." - David Sedaris
"He is truly the Chekhov of our time." - Yiyun Li
A beautifully written memoir from Scotland's "high priest of nature writing" (The Times).
"No one writes more movingly, or with such transporting poetic skill about encounters with wild creatures." - Helen Macdonald (author of H is for Hawk)
A lovely new edition of the New Zealand classic account of life on Mount Algidus, a high country station.
A novelist named Amit Chaudhuri visits Bombay, where he grew up, and is troubled by the absence of his childhood friend, his only connection to a city that has changed a great deal.
"Amit Chaudhuri has, like Proust, perfected the art of the moment. He is a miniaturist, for whom tiny moments become radiant, and for whom the complexities of the fleeting mood uncurl onto the page like a leaf, a petal." - Hilary Mantel
In Miss Carbunkle's Home for Wayward and Misbegotten Creatures, the groundlings (part animal and part human) toil in classroom and factory, forbidden to enjoy anything regular children have, most particularly singing and music. For the Wonderling, a one-eared, fox-like eleven-year-old with only a number rather than a proper name - a 13 etched on a medallion around his neck - it is the only home he has ever known. A bird groundling named Trinket gives the Home's loneliest inhabitant two incredible gifts: a real name and a best friend. The pair escape over the wall and embark on an adventure that will take them out into the wider world and ultimately down the path of Arthur's true destiny.
"Every now and then there is published a book that raises the bar in Children and Young adult literature. This is such a book." - Bob Docherty
>> Visit the Wonderling website.
Zeitgeist-defining photographs taken at The Roxy, The Vortex, King's Road and elsewhere capture the underground counterculture at its most energetic.
>> Wire live at the Roxy, 1 April 1977.
La Mere Brazier was the most famous restaurant in France from the moment it opened in 1921. Eugenie Brazier, was the first woman ever to be awarded six Michelin stars. She was the inspiration and mentor for all modern French cooking. This book reveals over 300 of Brazier's recipes that stunned all of France - from her Bresse chicken in mourning (with truffles) to her lobster Aurora - as well as simple traditional recipes that anyone can easily follow at home.
>> et voila.
Set in the midst of a teenaged girl's mourning over the recent loss of her mother, The Disappearances is a mystery made up of literary clues, a mother's buried secrets, and a seven-year curse.
What happens when a man just walks away from his wife and children and doesn't come back? Beautifully translated by Michael Hofmann.
"This inscrutable novel is a haunting love story of subtlety and pathos. Everything is so thoughtfully put together, so gently and subtly observed, that the question of whether Thomas and Astrid will ever be reunited, if such a thing is even possible, gathers an extraordinary pathos." - Tim Parks, Guardian
Bordered by Russia, Armenia, Turkey and Azerbaijan, Georgia's history is a confluence of Western and Eastern influences, and this is reflected in its cuisine. Try Khachapuri (cheese bread), Kebabi (kebabs), Khinkali (dumplings), Ajapsandali (aubergine stew) and Ckmeruli (poussin in garlic and walnut sauce).
Is it always wrong to lie? Should there be limits to personal freedom? Can killing sometimes be justified? Is the free market fair? What is the right thing to do?
"One of the world's most interesting political philosophers." - Guardian
Over the last sixty years, scientists around the world have worked together to explore the fundamental constituents of matter, and the forces that govern their behaviour. The result, so far, is the 'Standard Model' of elementary particles: a theoretical map of the basic building blocks of the universe. With the discovery of the Higgs particle in 2012, the map as we know it was completed, but also extended into strange and wonderful new realms.
A collection is ultra-low-tech handwritten notices seen on the streets of Russia and giving insight into the least glamorous strata of Russian society.
Chichikov offers landowners to buy the rights to the souls of dead serfs, thus reducing their tax obligations. What is the reason for this slinter? Gogol's novel satirises what he saw as the philistinism, pomposity and self-interest of the Russian middle classes of his time.
>> And it's a film, too.
Was the pursuit of scientific truth really what drove Enlightenment science? In Sweden and Britain, both imperial powers, Banks and Linneaus ruled over their own small scientific empires, promoting botanical exploration to justify the exploitation of territories, peoples and natural resources. Regarding native peoples with disdain, they portrayed the Arctic North and the Pacific Ocean as uncorrupted Edens, free from the shackles of Western sexual mores. Were Banks' trousers really stolen when he was visiting Queen Oberea of Tahiti?
An inspiring and instructional look at the key cases on the road towards employment equality in the US.
The people who live on the smaller islands of Britain live on islands off the coast of an island. Are they insular or outward looking? Do they live on the past or in an opportunity for a future? Barkham takes island-hops and asks, is there a unifying factor to small islands or are they the supremely resistant to unifying factors?
An acidic revisionist biography, seeking to undermine Freudian psychoanalytic theory by concentrating on flaws in Freud's personality and practice.
"If Freud didn't exist, Frederick Crews would have had to invent him. In showing us a relentlessly self-interested and interminably mistaken Freud, it might be said he's done just that." - New York Times
Lévy, reasonably, locates the wellspring of Jewish identity in traditions of discourse and argument embodied in the Talmud. His positions on Israel, Islam and politics, however, have been met with considerable argument both from within Jewish discourse and from without.
>> He has clashed several times with Michel Houellebecq.
>> BHL (embarrassingly) thought 'Jean-Baptiste Botul' was a real philosopher (rather than a spoof philosopher).
When the sandwich shop frequented by a software engineer closes, its proprietor gives him a sourdough culture. Little does he know this will lead him into a world of secret food markets and adventurers on the frontiers of food and technology. From the author of Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore.
“In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, for someone to play against himself is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.”
In 1942, during the months of his exile in Brazil with his second wife, and during the time that he and she played out master chess games in their isolation, Stefan Zweig wrote his last book, completing it just days before he and his wife’s double suicide. The narrator of the book is a character in the story but not one of the two chess players and, like the author, he is in exile. The game he observes is played between the world champion Czentovic and a Dr. B., the game arranged on a steamer to Buenos Aires. The game between the two is climatic, one calculating on the board, one in his mind, but the dualities don’t end there. The parts of Chess are all aspects of Zweig’s life. When the game ends, life does not end for these characters, but it does for their author.
>> Schachnovelle (1960 (warning - takes longer than reading the book (even if you understand German)))
What really matters to you? What would you change in the world if you could? What brings you happiness? What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? What single word do you most identify with? Two hundred women from around the world, both famous and nonfamous, answer these same five questions. What would your answers be? This monumental book includes photographic portraits of all 200 interviewees.
BOOKS@VOLUME #43 (30.9.17)
Find out what we've been reading, find out about our next Book of the Week, find out what we've got planned for NZ Bookshop Day, find out where you'll be on Saturday 14th October, browse this week's NEW RELEASES, and enter our giveaway competition.
Click through for this week's NEWSLETTER.
This week's Book of the Week is Sara Baume's A Line Made by Walking, a novel of an artist's attempt to regain her mental footing by retreating from (or into) the world.
>> Read Stella's review.
>> There are no answers.
>> "I always wanted to be an art monster."
>> "I actually hate writing."
>> A Line Made by Walking, as well as concerning itself with art (both as process and result), contains photographs taken by the character. Hear Baume discussing what illustrations can contribute to a novel.
>> Baume's previous book, Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither.
>> She reads from this.
>> A Line Made by Walking has just been shortlisted for the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize (awarded for "fiction at its most novel"). >> Hear the judges talk about the shortlisted books here.
>> Find out more about the books on our website.
Previous winners of the Goldsmiths Prize:
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride (2013)
How To Be Both by Ali Smith (2014)
Beatlebone by Kevin Barry (2015)
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack (2016)
>> Baume's books were originally published by the tiny, wonderful Irish publisher Tramp Press (who also brought us Solar Bones). BTW: >> No Dear sirs, please.
>> 'A Line Made by Walking' by Richard Long (1967 (>> recreated by children, 2011))
 | A Line Made by Walking by Sara Baume {Reviewed by STELLA} A young artist is retreating into herself. She finds comfort face-down on the grotty carpet of her small bedsit in Dublin, miserably curled around herself, thinking about the carpets of her childhood and the failure of her adult life. Realising that she must quit her unsatisfactory job at the art gallery, she calls her mother, packs up, eschewing her seemingly few friends, and leaves the city to return to her childhood home. After a week or so in what she refers to as the ‘famine hospital’ - her childhood bedroom, packed with memories and mementos that she has a love/hate relationship with, she asks to stay in her Nan’s rundown cottage. Her grandmother died three years previously and the house with its tired 'For Sale' sign is still vacant. Staying here gives Frankie a sense of being centred, but she is still at odds with herself, and depression is forever on her back. She observes all the decaying mess that is nature and humanity, noticing the rundown, the broken, and the left behind. The nick-nacks of her Nan’s life on the sills of the windows both represent the pointless and the holders of memory - odd talismans. Frankie can’t quite seem to work up enthusiasm for much, but she has the observant eye of an artist. When she spots a dead robin on the roadside, she starts a project: photographs of dead things. Each chapter is entitled a dead animal, representing her finds: mouse, rabbit, fox, hedgehog, badger. The novel is set in rural Ireland: it’s both beautiful and bleak. Sara Baume’s A Line Made by Walking is an intimate portrait of mental illness, anxiety and acute awareness. While it is sometimes gruelling to be inside Frankie’s mind it is also fascinating: a mix between what we all hang onto in our lives (memories and safety nets), what we think but don’t say (Frankie has a tendency to speak ‘reality’ - she doesn’t hold back her thoughts - making observations which are like puncture wounds), and what it means to suffer the anxiety of being or trying to become an artist. Frankie’s issues lie in her deep uncertainty about her life and her inability to produce anything as an artist. Baume cleverly shapes the novel - it is written in the first person with clusters of capsule-like considerations, musings and memories, fleeting thoughts which build to capture this complex person. Interspersed within these deliberations are references to visual artworks - over 70. Frankie is constantly testing herself, drawing on her knowledge, trying to make herself relevant: “Works about Being, I test myself: On Kawara, beginning 1966. A series of paintings showing nothing but the date upon which they were made. He also sent missives to acquaintances and friends which simply read: I AM STILL ALIVE, followed by his signature.” If you know the works it adds further layers to the texture of the writing; if you don’t it leads to further discoveries. The chapters also feature the photographs of the dead animals. Baume isn’t interested in plot, she is investigating what it means to think and feel deeper, what sadness looks like, particularly inside the head of Frankie, a young woman stymied by her inability to act on her desires and overwhelmed by depression. It’s not all gloom; it is lifted by some wry observations, the lack of sentiment, and Baume’s excellent writing - sharp, astute and lyrical. |
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The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison {Reviewed by STELLA}
A woman is dealing with a virus - she’s a nurse, a midwife, and works in a large American city hospital. But this isn’t just any virus, it’s a plague, one that is fatal to nearly all women and children. Babies are stillborn or die soon after birth, their mothers not far behind them. As the authorities shut down borders and quarantine the sick, the medical teams work frantically to find a cure as they fall to the fever. Men are dying too, and the airborne virus is unstoppable. Our heroine awakes from her fever to find the hospital deadly quiet, bodies surrounding her. She leaves and walks home. The electricity is out, the roads quiet, cars abandoned, stores ransacked, no water - chaos, no people. When she wakes to find a stranger in her room, she fights him off and takes flight. And so begins her journey across America - a journey of survival. She quickly realises that she is one of very few women, and to hide she must disguise herself as a man. Groups of marauding men, gang-like in their behaviour, are out to seek every advantage, and women are in demand. Conversely, there are women (queens of a hive) who have their own male harems. There are religious cults. The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison is a disquieting post-apocalyptic novel about the aftermath of a catastrophic plague. It’s a sharp look at gender politics and at power structures, and the speed of collapse of a complex society is all too devastatingly convincing. The novel is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (not so bleak, but just as gritty), Naomi Alderman’s The Power and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, and it is very good. Gripping, intriguing, with a compelling main character who will hook you immediately. Her encounters with others make perfect foils for Elison to explore the strengths and weaknesses of humans in crisis, but it is the months that the midwife spends alone that are the highlights of the novel. Her contemplation of what she had previously and her connection with this ruined world and with the increasingly new world in which she must learn to live are captivating. The series is called 'The Road to Nowhere', and the second, The Book of Etta, takes place 100 years on. Elison is working on the third and final title, The Book of Flora. |
 | Companions by Christina Hesselholdt {Reviewed by THOMAS} Identity is valent only in the eye of the beholder. Unseen we are lost. Any idea we have of ourselves is less stable than the idea others have of us, and we cannot even, in compensation for this instability, be confident that it has any greater accuracy. What we think of as personality is continually contested between the bearer and the perceiver of that identity, which makes the identity game both useful and fraught, ambivalent and ultimately irresolvable. To think of yourself is to be at once both inside and outside yourself, to experience the disjunction between description and the indescribable to which it has been attached, a project that leads, ultimately, past many useful discoveries, to self-destruction. To think of others, however, is to remain securely on the surface, the only place where footing may be firm (for what that’s worth). To describe another is to inscribe, prescribe or circumscribe a hypothetical space in which a postulated self, with postulated ‘depth’, postulated ‘personality’ and so forth, persists (there is no reason to think this actually to be so but reassurance (the best reason)). We can only ever be certain of a surface, if we can be certain of anything (and if we can’t, we must give certainty another meaning, one that resembles what we take it to mean). Fiction provides the possibility (or the illusion of possibility (which is quite sufficient (and, in any case, will do for possibility if there is otherwise no such thing as possibility))) of transgressing the surfaces that act as borders between the postulated persons that they describe (or prescribe or circumscribe), and to experience viewpoints from beyond, if there is a beyond, those surfaces, or, in any case, to catch in those surfaces the play of reflection that we take for evidence of something beyond those surfaces. Christina Hesselholdt, in her novel Companions, provides narratives and monologues from six viewpoints, those of six old friends now entering middle age, who are finding that the ideas the others have of them are becoming insufficient to contain the momentum of their frustrations and desires, but, at the same time, drawing comfort from their intimacy with those others of whom they have ideas. Although they each speak convincingly in the first person (though some, like Alwilda, exist primarily in the third person in her friends’ accounts of her), it becomes apparent that one voice, Alma, is the (fictional (if this is a work of fiction)) authorial voice, conjuring and postulating the voices of her friends (if our identity belongs to others, can they also use our voice?). Although there are some memorable passages in Alma’s voice, especially those in which she splices her experiences of place with those of (actual) writers, the main focus of the book is her friend Camilla, or, rather, a Camilla-as-postulated-by-Alma-as-postulated-by-the-author, whose habitual relationship with her husband Charles withstands his illness but is shown ultimately to be impermanent (is this, though, a projection by Alma, whose own relationship with Kristian disintegrates in the course of the book, and who seeks to understand the evanescence of feeling in others?). No detail or thought is too mundane or too personal or too uncomfortable to be acknowledged in these monologues (projected on these characters by their friend and creating an ambivalent tension through the intimacy of this transgression of identity). At the end of the book, Alma’s ‘Camilla’ asks: “If I were to ask Alma if a person can take the liberty to write anything at all about another person, what would she say? “‘I would say yes,’ Alma said, ‘it is only a matter of tactfulness. You have to be tactful - and put yourself on the line too, place yourself in exposed positions, pass judgement on yourself (Ibsen believed a person did that automatically when writing).’” |
 | Finnegans Wake by James Joyce {Reviewed by THOMAS} Occasionally, usually when suffering from a fever, my mind takes words and phrases and pulls them apart and recombines them and distorts them and relates them to other words and phrases and hybridises them and separates them from their sense and plays around with their pronunciation. This is distressing. I used to think that this was caused by the neurotoxic side-effect of a pathogen or the delirium of fever, but soon came to believe that this is the nature of language: without our constant yet relatively feeble and fleeting attempts to coagulate it into meaning, language is a heaving sea of chaotic association and permutation, endlessly fertile but ultimately not compatible with sanity. We expend a lot of effort resisting language’s inherent tendency towards chaos, generally with good reason: we seek clarity and sanity. In Finnegans Wake, James Joyce pulls down all the dykes and lets the sea wash over the land. Herein lie all the linguistic symptoms it usually takes illness to induce. Joyce spent seventeen years compulsively holding the idea of the novel underwater, holding it in that moment of uncertainty when drowning and developing gills seem about equally likely. Having prescription for roxithromycin filled before reading this book is probably a good idea.  (Aside: my own copy of Finnegans Wake is of an edition that has 28 pages of ‘Corrections of Misprints’, which make enjoyable Joycean reading in themselves (too bad the misprints were corrected in later editions and this addendum not reproduced)). |
NEW RELEASES
Take your pick.
Allen Curnow: Simply by Sailing in a New Direction, A biography by Terry Sturm, edited by Elizabeth Caffin $70
"Simply by sailing in a new direction / You could enlarge the world." Curnow's 70-year career in the vanguard of New Zealand poetry involved the defining and redefining of poetic sensibilities, moving from an antipodean to an autochthonic focus.
>> Landfall in Unknown Seas (with Lilburn)
>> Stead on Curnow.
John Craske, a Norfolk fisherman, was born in 1881, and in 1917 he fell seriously ill. For the rest of his life he kept moving in and out of what was described as 'a stuporous state'. In 1923 he started making paintings of the sea and boats and the coastline seen from the sea, and later, when he was too ill to stand and paint, he turned to embroidery, which he could do lying in bed. Julia Blackburn's account of his life is a quest which takes her in many strange directions - to fishermen's cottages in Sheringham, a grand hotel fallen on hard times in Great Yarmouth and to the isolated Watch House far out in the Blakeney estuary; to Cromer and the bizarre story of Einstein's stay there, guarded by dashing young women in jodhpurs with shotguns. Threads is a book about life and death and the strange country between the two.
"Oh, what a miraculous book this is: parochial, weird and inconclusive in a way that few books dare to be these days, and illustrated so generously, with something beautiful or interesting on every other page. Buy it, and let it take you out to sea, no sou'wester required." - Rachel Cooke, Observer
"Wonderful. I lay down her book without knowing the cause of the 'mental stupors' that defined Craske's life, or understanding his relationship to his complicated family, but feeling I had inhaled the cold salt of the East Anglian coastline from which he sailed when he was well, and run my fingers across the bright wool of the embroideries he made when he was not." - Telegraph
A breathtakingly wonderful large-format visual history of New Zealand, drawn by the inimitable Gavin Bishop. One of the outstanding New Zealand books of the year.
Who better than the author of I Love Dick to write a gossipy, insightful and memorable biography of the abject angel of the late twentieth century literary counterculture?
"This is an anti-mythic artist biography which feels like it's being told in one long rush of a monologue over late-night drinks by someone who was there. As such, we learn as much much about Kathy Acker as we do about the mores of the artists and writers who surrounded her in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Acker emerges as an unlikely literary hero, but an utterly convincing one." - Sheila Heti
>> Who's afraid of Kathy Acker?
The Holodomor (man-made famine) of 1932-33 killed millions of Ukrainians by starvation, and amounts to genocide. To prevent an uprising, Stalin ensured food shortages, restricted movement, confiscated foodstuffs and prevented foreign aid. Applebaum's careful account makes for horrific reading.
Long-listed for the 2017 Baillie-Gifford Prize.
Which undoes the present more, a shadow cast by the past or one cast by the future? De Kretser's new novel gauges the dissonances between individual and collective identities.
"I so much admire Michelle de Kretser's formidable technique - her characters feel alive, and she can create a sweeping narrative which encompasses years, and yet still retain the sharp, almost hallucinatory detail." - Hilary Mantel
"Michelle de Kretser writes quickly and lightly of wonderful and terrible things. She is a master storyteller." - A.S. Byatt
When a creature dies, its spirit can go looking for somewhere to hide. Some people have space inside them, perfect for hiding. Makepeace, a girl with a mysterious past, defends herself nightly from the ghosts which try to possess her. Then a dreadful event causes her to drop her guard for a moment. And now there's a ghost inside her. The spirit is wild, brutish and strong, but it may be her only defence in a time of dark suspicion and fear. As the English Civil War erupts, Makepeace must decide which is worse: possession or death.
From the author of the Costa Award-winning The Lie Tree.
"Everyone should read Frances Hardinge. Everyone. Right now." - Patrick Ness
Gonçalo Ramires, heir to a family so aristocratic that it predates the kings of Portugal, —charming but disastrously effete, idealistic but hopelessly weak—muddles through his pampered life, burdened by a grand ambition. In part to further his political aspirations, he is determined to write a great historical novel based on the heroic deeds of his fierce medieval ancestors. But the record of their valor is ironically counterpointed by his own chicanery. A combination of Don Quixote and Walter Mitty, Ramires is as endearing as he is frustrating.
"A writer of mesmerizing literary power." —Washington Post
"Portugal’s greatest novelist." - José Saramago
Here's the human body as you've never seen it before. Clever laser cut-outs, flaps and overlays explore every detail of the organs, systems and senses.
When Daniel's 81-year-old father enrolls in the course on the Odyssey Daniel teaches at Bard College, he is always ready to challenge Daniel's interpretations of the great work. When they then travel to the Mediterranean to visit the locations referred to by Homer, Daniel discovers he has much to learn from his difficult father, too.
"A stellar contribution to the genre of memoirs about reading: literary analysis and the personal stories are woven together in a way that feels both artful and natural. A thoughtful book from which non-classicists will learn a great deal about Homer. A funny, loving portrait of a difficult but loving parent." - Guardian
Long-listed for the Baillie-Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.
How do you get published during a skeleton apocalypse? What was the secret of Kafka's lemon drizzle cake? And what plot possibilities does the exploding e-cigarette offer modern mystery writers? All these questions and more are answered in this collection of Gauld's inimitable literary cartoons.
An anthology of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, all concerned with the birds, both native and endemic, of New Zealand.
>> 'Magpies' by Denis Glover.
>>> Arr. Bill Direen #1.
>>>> Arr. Bill Direen #2.
>>>>> Arr. David Farquhar.
>>>>>> Arr. 6 Volts.
The same situation can have quite different interpretations, depending on your perspective. Read in one direction, this piece of graphic invention is a dismal when read in one direction, but full of hope when read in the other. A change of perspective (or reading direction) is all you need to turn your life around.
Paris: books/conversation, love/politics, fidelity/infidelity.
"Edgy and lyrical, acerbic and witty, intellectually incisive but also visceral and bawdy, disarmingly direct and intricately plotted." - Andrew Bennett
Can a penniless writer retain any certainty, even of his own identity, when he is commissioned to ghost-write the memoir of a conman? From the author of the Booker-winning Narrow Road to the Deep North.
120 authentic and healthy recipes from the Peruvian uplands.
>> Peru has, apparently, 492 national dishes.
As 13-year-old Jojo approaches adulthood, how can he find his way in the U.S. South when all seems set for him and his family to fall foul of rural poverty, drug addiction, the penal system, the justice system, racism and illness? From the author of Salvage the Bones.
"This wrenching new novel by Jesmyn Ward digs deep into the not-buried heart of the American nightmare. A must." - Margaret Atwood
"A powerfully alive novel haunted by ghosts; a road trip where people can go but they can never leave; a visceral and intimate drama that plays out like a grand epic, Sing, Unburied, Sing is staggering." - Marlon James
Prisoner Z is being held at a black site in the Negev Desert with only his guard for company. How did a nice American Jewish boy become first an Israeli spy and then a traitor to his adopted country. What is loyalty worth, and what is worthy of loyalty?
"Nathan Englander's latest is, as usual, superb: a work of psychological precision and moral force, with an immediacy that captures both timeless human truth as well as the perplexities of the present day." - Colson Whitehead
Jerome Cardano, a Milanese of the sixteenth century was a gambler and blasphemer, inventor and chancer, plagued by demons and anxieties, astrologer to kings, emperors and popes. This stubborn and unworldly man was the son of a lawyer and a brothel keeper, a gifted physician and the hereforeto unacknowledged discoverer of the mathematical foundations of quantum physics. Fascinating science biography (and not an astrology book).
Naturalist Joseph Banks accompanied Captain Cook on his first voyage around the world from 1768 to 1771. Banks collected exotic flora from Madeira, Brazil, Tierra del Fuego, the Society Islands, New Zealand, Australia, and Java, bringing back over 1,300 species that had never been seen or studied by Europeans. Upon his return, Banks commissioned more than 700 engravings between 1772 and 1784. Known collectively as Banks' Florilegium, they are some of the most precise and exquisite examples of botanical illustration ever created. The Florilegium was never published in Banks' lifetime, and it was not until 1990 that a complete set in color was issued in a boxed edition (limited to 100 copies) under the direction of the British Museum. The present selection makes these prints widely available for the first time.
The final knuckle-whitening volume in this excellent series. Will Lucy, George and Lockwood solve the mystery of the plague of ghosts that has been afflicting London? Genuinely scary, genuinely funny, and with great characters, if you haven't read this, start with The Screaming Staircase.
"Jonathan Stroud is a genius." - Rick Riordan
Farway Gaius McCarthy was born outside of time. The son of a time-traveling Recorder from 2354 A.D. and a gladiator living in Rome in 95 A.D., Far's birth defies the laws of nature. Exploring history is all Far has ever wanted, but this future seems shattered when he fails his final time-traveling exam. Kicked out of the program with few prospects, Far takes a position commandeering a ship with his own team as part of a black market operation to steal valuables from the past. But during a heist on the sinking Titanic, Far meets a mysterious girl who always seems to be one step ahead of him. She contains knowledge that will bring Far’s very existence into question. Far and his team must race against time and through it to discover the truth: history is not as steady as it seems. From the author of the outstanding 'Wolf by Wolf'.
From the time they meet at Oxford in 1940, David Sparsholt and Evert Dax are drawn together in a relationship which acts as a prism for many of the social changes of the following decades.
"Hollinghurst is a master storyteller. The book is thrilling in the rather awful way that the best Victorian novels are, so that one finds oneself galloping somewhat shamefacedly through the pages in order to discover what happens next." - John Banville
"Hollinghurst's great gift as a novelist is for social satire as sharp and transparent as glass, catching his quarry from an angle just an inch to the left of the view they themselves would catch in the mantelpiece mirror." - The New York Observer
The solar system is a dusty place. Every day approximately 100 metric tons of cosmic dust collides with Earth, mainly in the form of micrometeorites. Most of these mineral particles (iron, nickel, etc.) are smaller than grains of sand, and they are falling down on us all the time and all over the globe. This book shows you how to find and identify (and collect!) micrometeorites, and how to distinguish them from other microstuff.
>> Stardust found.
It's pretty cramped underground, and Worm wants more space. Up above, bird is wanting something too. When they meet, will they both get what they want? A beautiful illustrative book from the artist of The Fox and the Star.
When Victoria was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland on 20 June 1837, she was 18 years old. Her subjects were fascinated and intrigued; some felt sorry for her. Writer Thomas Carlyle, watching her gilded coach draw away from the coronation, said: 'Poor little Queen, she is at an age at which a girl can hardly be trusted to choose a bonnet for herself; yet a task is laid upon her from which an archangel might shrink.' But by the time of her Diamond Jubilee Procession in 1897, she reigned over a fourth of the inhabitable part of the world, had 400 million subjects, and had given birth to nine children. Suffrage, anti-poverty and anti-slavery movements can all be traced to her monumental reign, along with a profound rethinking of family life and the rise of religious doubt. What was her place in all of this?
Collected music journalism from the 1970s and 1980s. Great insight into the culture of rock fame as it never will be again.
Freedom doesn't exist unless you fight for it every day. The activist, Pussy Riot member and freedom fighter Maria Alyokhina gives a passionate account of her arrest, trial and imprisonment in Siberia.
>> Back to jail.
After working in some of the world's outstanding restaurants, including Noma in Copenhagen and El cellar de can Roca in Girona, Turner opened his own restaurant in Australia. This book documents the tribulations and excitements of its first year, and is full of distinctive recipes and atmospheric photographs.
>> A high-end degustation restaurant in a Geelong backstreet.
Is there an anthropological approach that can help us not only to understand who we are and how we fit in whatever society we are in, but also understand others too?
Poetry! Other written stuff! Art! Contributors include J.M. Francis, Stacey Teague, Ruby Mae Hinepunui Solly, Emma Ng, Aimee Smith, Johnny McCaughan, Holly Childs, Rachel O’Neill, Vincent Konrad, Chris Stewart, Fresh and Fruity, Saskia Bunce-Rath, Nina Powles, Lee Posna, Chelsea Houghton, Annelyse Gelman, Courtney Sina Meredith, Jordana Bragg, Joan Fleming, Eleanor Rose King Merton, Helen Rickerby, Louise Compagnone, Estère, Blaek, Finn Johannson, Flo Wilson, WOMB, Maria McMillan, Briana Jamieson, Amy Leigh Wicks, Alison Glenny, Ines Almeida, Anna Jackson, Caroline Shepherd, Rose Lu, Thomasin Sleigh and Erica van Zon, Catarina de Peters, Eamonn Marra, Freya Daly Sadgrove and Hera Lindsay Bird.
Actually, ten books about trees. Come and wander. There are plenty of other tree books in the shop, too.
Nature writing from a professional tree-climber whose work has taken him into the upper strata of forests around the world. Beautifully written.
A tiny seed grows into a pear tree. Lift the flaps to find our what animals live in the garden.
How have 59 trees around the world been the foci of human history? From Luna, the Coastal Redwood in California that became an international symbol when activist Julia Butterfly Hill sat for 738 days on a platform nestled in its branches to save it from logging, to the Bodhi Tree, the sacred fig in India that is a direct descendant of the tree under which Buddha attained enlightenment, Cook and Jenshel reveal trees that have impacted and shaped our lives, our traditions, and our feelings about nature.
A beautiful slip-cased edition of this masterpiece of botanical art.
This biography of an English 'beech-and-bluebell' wood through the seasons and through history both natural and human, is a portrayal of the relationships of humans to nature and a demonstration that poetic writing can be scientifically precise.
"'His remarkable scientific knowledge, intense curiosity and love of nature mean entries erupt with the same richness and variety as the woods they describe. Fortey's enthusiasm for his new wonderland is infectious and illuminating, deep and interesting." - Guardian
A tree is part of a biological network involving other trees, fungi, bacteria, animals and other plants. The ability to widen the organism-model beyond the individual is rewarded with insights and warnings.
Deep in the heart of the treeless city, Frankie dreams of one thousand trees. In her imagination she moves around, between and among them. An excellent introduction to prepositions.
"Trees cannot change their place in the world so they are patient and learn to live where they are."
How has history touched a single tree, both in an intimate and cyclical way, and in an epochal, linear way?
Robert Penn cut down an ash tree and decided to see how many things he could make from it. As he did so, he developed an understanding of our cultural reliance upon trees.
Among the biggest and oldest trees in the New Zealand forest, the heart of Maori carving and culture, trailing no. 8 wire as fence posts on settler farms, clambered up in the Pureora protests of the 1980s: the story of New Zealand can be told through totara.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #42 (23.9.17)
Our NEWSLETTER of news, reviews, competitions, events, new releases and other things.
{STELLA's review}:
The craft beer industry in New Zealand has been on the up and up since the 1980s. Nelson has more breweries per capita than anywhere else in the country: there are several dedicated craft beer bars - The Freehouse and the Craft Beer Depot; and a combination of established brewers (some with a long family history - the Duncans at Founders and the McCashin family of Stoke) as well as more recent additions (Hop Federation in Riwaka and contract brewer Phil McArdle of Horsebox). We grow hops in Motueka (a crop that has once again flourished post-kiwifruit-mass-plantings): these are highly regarded and keenly sought after, and new varieties have been developed including the Nelson Sauvin. While I knew a little of this, I’m gleaning most of my information from Jules Van Costello’s new edition of Brewed: A Guide to the Beer of New Zealand. Now in its second edition, there are more breweries (166 in all) and more tasting notes (over 450), and the book isn’t solely the domain of craft beer producers, with the inclusion of the likes of DB and Lion. The first few chapters of Brewed give an overview of the beer industry now, looking at everyone from the larger commercial players to the more specialist boutique brewers; there’s a brief history of beer in New Zealand, a simple explanation about how beer is made and its ingredients, and notes on cellaring and how to drink your beer (drinking temperatures, glass types). Of particular note is the comprehensive description of beer styles. The main part of the book is an A-Z of breweries with a quick rundown on their history and a spotlight on their signature beers. The Mussel Inn’s Captain Cooker raises its head, along with their eco principles, and brewer Andrew Dixon’s solution to demand for his beer internationally. Emerson’s Bookbinder has long been a favourite of mine (I have to admit that the name drew me), so I’m pleased to discover another book-related beer connection in Oamaru’s Craftwork - owned by Michael O’Brien (bookbinder) and Lee-Ann Scotti - which specialises in traditional Belgian ales. Van Costello has added a star rating system (similar to the Michelin style - he quickly points out that all the brewers are good, that some of them make excellent specialist beers, but others excel on several fronts earning them a star or two.) Of the 166, there are only eight that get the 3-star rating, and from the many listed Nelson breweries three take out 2-star honours: Hop Federation, Sprig & Fern, and Townshend Brewery. The tasting notes list the best from the brewers, with a few tagged 'Must-Tries'! Next time you’re eyeing up the range at the supermarket this will come in handy. Or you could come along and ask Jules Van Costello about his favourites:
>> Jules introduces the new edition.
 | Darker with the Lights On by David Hayden {Reviewed by THOMAS} The act of writing is an act of forgetting as much as it is an act of memory. Description replaces experience, if there was experience there to start with, or otherwise description precludes the experience described, permitting experience only of itself. The pencil’s mark obscures whatever line it traces. That which is described becomes digestible as text, becomes definite, finite and defined. Whatever is described becomes ersatz, the currency of exchange between a writer and a reader, the tin chip passed between parties to a language game, pretending understanding, pretending being understood, the cosiest, most intimate of couplings. How reassuring to have one’s expectations fulfilled by text, but how tiresome, this pact-as-habit, this plethora of detail, this obsessive mentioning that enervates the experience that gets obscured by words. But every signifier has its limit. Every mentioned thing is mentioned at the exclusion of another thing, the excluded or unincludable thing that pushes the mentioned into view while remaining, carefully, out of sight, hidden in the place of greater force, unseen, unfaced, the unseeable and unfaceable warping the mentioning by exerting its weight upon it from behind. A reader has no business to supply anything beyond the text, but also has to complete the text with nothing but their own paltry store of experiences to supply the meanings of the words. How to proceed? How to read the unseen mechanics behind but not referred to by the text? The reader too has ungraspable weights that can be induced to rise and touch the undersurface of the text, pressing up upon it as those of the author press down, two sides of one skin, the text the shared rind of two ungraspable depths, if there are such things as depths, otherwise, without depths, a synclastic and anticlastic flexing of the only surface, two dimensions modelled in a third. If it is what is excluded that potentises text, if it is what is destroyed by writing that makes writing do what writing does, then the stories of David Hayden in Darker with the Lights On move like the sharpened tip of a great black crayon as it scribbles out all memory and knowledge. Not in these stories the reassurance of the expected, nor that of continuity or clarity. Answers are not given, perhaps withheld, though withholding requires an existence for which no evidence ensues, but we are participants in the ritual taking away of knowledge, the deanswering of questions, itself a sort of understanding. Many of the stories concern themselves with the tensions between memory and perception, between two times running concurrently, memory snarling on details and producing not-quite-narrative but a stuttering intimation of the vast force of passing time. What unfaceable calamity bridged the idyll of memory with the torment of the present? In ‘Dick’, for me, perhaps, the most memorable story in the collection, the main character is buried to the waist in the sand, declaring snippets of memory, of idyll even, like some character shoved from Beckett to somewhere beyond the apocalypse, declarative not in Beckettian wearidom and decline but in extremis, the object of some cruelty, disoriented by their own presence, spouting words such as those that may have spoken by the condemnee in Kafka’s ‘Penal Colony’ reading aloud the words as they are inscribed into his flesh by the harrow. It often seems Hayden’s characters’ backgrounds are withheld not only from the reader but seemingly also from the characters themselves. They are being dememorised by their stories, or they exist, as perhaps we all do, with great voids where stories could be expected to be. But stories come from somewhere, unseen, and visit themselves upon us. “There were stories everywhere. Stories in the body, stories in and out of time, stories in the chosen and the unchosen, stories under glass, stories under water, stories under flesh, hot and cold, stories in tumult and silence.” Remembering and inventing contest the same attention, preclude each other but find themselves indistinguishable from one another, as a matter of course in fiction, more problematically so in the lives of writers and of readers. The characters are disoriented but grasp at every chance to climb into, or out of, some awareness: “He senses his head thinking, his trunk big and loose, his delicate fingers flickering at the ends of his arms and decides that he is conscious: real.” The stories’ worlds are composed of granules of awareness, snatches of phrases forced out against their silencing. Reading is akin to viewing through a narrow tube: the perspective is limited but the focus is immense. What is not seen is always there, deforming what is seen, but unglimpsable, unassailable beyond the vertigo of any attempt to look in its direction. Hayden produces a spare disorienting beauty on the level of the sentence. His admixture of restraint, even paucity, and excess, produces a surrealism truncated rather than efflorescent, its effects cumulative rather than expansive, a surrealism not the furthest expression of surrealism’s usual tired romantic literary inclinations but of their opposite, their extinguishment, not the surrealism of dreams but of the repetitive banging of the back of the head as the reader is dragged down a flight of steps, their eyes either closed or open. |
 | The Demolition of the Century by Duncan Sarkies {Reviewed by STELLA}
Last weekend I had the pleasure of interviewing writer, film-maker and performer Duncan Sarkies at the Mapua Literary Festival. As part of my preparation I read The Demolition of the Century. This is a novel that skips along apace with its curious plot, wry observations, clever characterisation and farce that borders on slapstick. The tale is told via two voices. Tom Spotswood, a ramshackle alcoholic who, through his association with the local racing industry and an insurance deal, has a big pile of cash, feels under threat. He believes his life is endangered, he skips town, leaving his wife and young son. Spud, the other voice in the novel, makes a living knocking down buildings and flogging their contents, making ends meet for his family. In this novel, the building which some of the action centres around is the Century Theatre, sadly being pulled down rather than restored. When Tom returns to town, looking to connect with his son, Frank, intent on making up for his inadequacies as an absent father, relationships become strained and paranoia sets in (Tom is sure someone is following him) as he tries to chase down the mysterious Robert Valentine. And someone is following him: Spud has a bone to pick with Mr Spotswood and he's tracking him on the streets of Dunedin. And just when it's all coming together, we veer off and realise that there's something else going on here too - a revelation that is both melancholic, bitingly real and heartfelt.
|
Take your pick from these
NEW RELEASES
The Golden Cockerel, And other writings by Juan Rulfo $35
"A necromancer who is as surefooted among the dead as the living, the peerless Mexican legend Juan Rulfo made into book-flesh the elusive smoke and fire of his country, where the surreal is everyday, and the everyday is surreal: to read him is to imbibe Mexico. The legendary title novella - published here in English for the first time on the 100th anniversary of his birth - is a lost masterwork." - Barbara Epler
"To read Rulfo's stories is to inhabit Mexico and, in the process, to have Mexico inhabit you." - Oscar Casares
"You can read Rulfo's slight but dense body of work in a couple of days, but that represents only a first step into territories that are yet to be definitively mapped. Their exploration is one of the more remarkable journeys in literature." - The Guardian
"My profound exploration of Juan Rulfo's work was what finally showed me the way to continue with my writing." - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Great Dixter Cookbook by Aaron Bertelsen $60
New Zealander Bertelsen is gardener and cook at Great Dixter, the house designed by Edwin Lutyens (upon a 15th century remnant) with gardens in the Arts and Crafts style by Christopher LLoyd. This book is a delight both to gardeners, with hands-on seasonal tips, and to cooks, with very appetising versions of classic dishes, many with a distinctly New Zealand flavour, using many of the ingredients you may have just harvested from the garden. The book is very attractively presented, with quietly beautiful photographs. One of the nicest cookbooks of the year.
Nowherelands: An atlas of vanished countries, 1840-1975 by Bjorn Berge $40
Where do countries go when they cease to exist? What are the histories of Biafra, New Brunswick, Labuan, Tannu Tuva, Inini and Eastern Karelia? Each of these defunct states issued their own stamps. Berge takes us to each and shows us some of the lesser-known dead ends of history.
Brewed: A guide to the beer of New Zealand by Jules van Costello $40
A new edition of the definitive guide to the plethora of excellent beers currently produced in New Zealand.
>>> Come and listen to Jules talk (and taste some beer): Monday 25th September, 1 PM @ VOLUME. See you then.
New 'Object Lessons'
This sharp and thoughtful series reveals the vast weights of meaning that pivot on everyday objects. We have just received six new titles:
Veil by Rafia Zakaria $22
Sock by Kim Adrian $23
Eye Chart by William Germano $21
Tumor by Anna Leahy $22
Jet Lag by Christopher J. Lee $22
Whale Song by Margaret Grebowicz $22
Two Kitchens: Family recipes from Sicily and Rome by Rachel Roddy $60
Very nicely written and full of insights into Italian culinary cultures, Roddy's book also contains 120 authentic and approachable recipes that are insights in themselves.
"Rachel Roddy describing how to boil potatoes would inspire me. I want to live under her kitchen table. There are very, very few who possess such a supremely uncluttered culinary voice as hers, just now." - Simon Hopkinson
>> Yum.
Melville: A novel by Jean Giono $38
A beautifully written mix of fiction, biography, philosophy and criticism, originally written to introduce French readers to the author of Moby-Dick, which Giono had translated for Gallimard, now at last translated into English.
>> Melville continues to inspire and fascinate other writers.
Egon Schiele: Drawing the world by Klaus Albrecht Schroder $95
As well as providing an excellent survey of the artist's distinctive work, Schroder helps the reader to decipher the allegorical nature of many of them and to appreciate the passions and ambivalences that drove the artist.
Universe: Exploring the astronomical world by Paul Murdin $90
A sumptuous collection of 300 images giving an overview of humanity's conceptions of the cosmos, from the earliest times to the latest discoveries and imaging techniques.
>> See some sample pages here.
Some possible Solutions by Helen Phillips $23
Stories in which the ordinary opens suddenly up into the surreal and in which the surreal opens up into the ordinary, from the author of The Beautiful Bureaucrat.
"This stunning collection establishes Helen Philips as one of the most interesting and talented writers working today. In atmosphere and setting, her stories are often reminiscent of Kafka and Atwood, yet her voice and style are entirely her own. A fascinating, unsettling, and beautifully written work." - Emily St John Mandel
"Comparisons to Margaret Atwood and Karen Russell would not be unjust, nor would they be helpful; Phillips is carving her own, messier territory. As beautifully as she embraces and executes the fantastical, she's even better when the surreal remains a mere lurking possibility." - New York Times
Crocodile Tears by Andre Francois $30
"Crocodiles have funny toothbrushes. And they love warm baths. They carry you out on the lake, pull you to town, and take you to school. They know how to tell good stories. But if you step on the tail of a crocodile, it will get terribly angry, and it will bite you. Then it will pretend to be very sorry."
>> The book described by Quentin Blake.
The Book of Emma Reyes, A memoir in correspondence by Emma Reyes $38
Reyes was born into extreme poverty in the slums of Bogota, escaped a convent for orphans at nineteen and became an artist and intellectual of the Kahlo/Rivera circle, and a writer much admired by Marquez.
"Some works of art feel more unlikely, more miraculous than others, and Emma Reyes' remarkable epistolary memoir is one of them. I don't think I've read many books of such power and grace, or that pack such an emotional wallop in so short a space. The very fact that this book exists is extraordinary. Everything about it . . . is astonishing." - Daniel Alarcon
"No other book I've ever read has left me so deeply involved with its author, and so grateful for that involvement." - Diana Athill
The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington by Joanna Moorhead $40
Moorhead tracked down her father's black-sheep cousin in Mexico and recorded much of the artist and writer's life about which information is not otherwise available. One of the key but woefully neglected Surrealists, Carrington took refuge in the Surrealist enclave in Mexico, where she was also involved in the women's liberation movement of the 1970s.
>> The lost Surrealist.
>> Carrington @ VOLUME.
The Graybar Hotel by Curtis Dawkins $33
Stories evoking the experience of prisoner, written by an author serving life imprisonment for murder (without parole).
"Compelling and real, remarkable for its modesty, realism and humanity. Dawkins has produced a book that is not only moving and genuine, but genuinely important; one that, without resorting to shock tactics, powerfully conveys the perverse inhumanity of mass incarceration." - Guardian
"Unlike any other short story collection I've ever read. The Graybar Hotel is not a 'prison-book.' It is a mirror, held up to our culture of incarceration. There is a current of electricity running through this book, a shocking voltage of truth." - Nickolas Butler
America: The cookbook by Gabrielle Langholtz $70
An encyclopedic survey of 50 states with contributions from over 100 chefs and food writers, absorbing and recombining countless ethnic cuisines into the vast panoply (and is there any panoply that is not vast?) of over 800 dishes of all sorts.
>> Have a look inside.
The Secret Life of the Pencil: Great creatives and their pencils by Alex Hammond and Mike Tinney $22
Is there a mainline from the fingers to the brain? The pencil is undergoing a resurgence in designer, artist and writer circles. This book is a collection of portraits of the very various pencils used by creative people.
Peggy Guggenheim: The shock of the modern by Francine Prose $33
Much insight into the defiantly unconventional art collector whose attention helped many the 20th century artists enter the modern canon and the galleries (often via her bed).
"Subtle and attentive." - Guardian
>> Art addict.
Apollo by Zack Scott $45
A splendid infographic guide to the programme of Apollo missions, their failures and triumphs.
The Freddie Stories by Lynda Barry $35
Tales of adolescence in all its awfulness and vulnerability, with Freddie's imagination providing the only escape, collected from Barry's ongoing 'Ernie Pook's Comeek'.
Acid Trip: Travels in the world of vinegar by Michael Harlan Turkell $50
Vinegar is all the rage, with an exciting repertoire of flavours and health benefits. This "richly narrated" cookbook is complete with recipes from chefs around the world, interviews with artisanal producers and instructions for making your own vinegar.
Hope Without Optimism by Terry Eagleton $33
What is the history of hope? What distinguishes hope from other positive-facing concepts? Eagleton considers Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope, and the various sub-species of hope prevalent in the Stoics, Aquinas, Marx and Kierkegaard. What are hope's prerequisites, and how can hope concepts help us understand ethics and religion?
The Palestinian Table by Reem Kassis $60
150 varied, delicious and totally authentic dishes, from simple breakfasts and street food to celebratory feasts. Nicely presented.
>> Sample pages.
Huia Short Stories 12: Contemporary Maori fiction $30
Short stories and extracts from novels, from the Pikihuia Awards, showcasing a diversity of established and emerging talent.
Plywood: A material story by Christopher Wilk $65
Plywood is an astonishingly versatile material, made by gluing together layers of cross-grained veneers, creating a pliable board that can be stronger than solid wood. Stylish and practical, plywood offers huge possibilities for experimental design, and it has been used to make a wide range of products, from aeroplanes, boats and automobiles to architecture and furniture. This book traces the history of plywood from its use in 18th-century furniture, through its emergence as an industrial product in the 19th century, to a material celebrated by 20th-century modernists such as Alvar Aalto and Charles and Ray Eames. An ideal material for the digital age, plywood has become popular again in recent years and is widely used in contemporary design and manufacture.
A People's History of the French Revolution by Eric Hazan $28
A bottom-up history highlighting the struggle for emancipation and the transformative ideals that underpinned the Revolution.
Also new: The French Revolution, From enlightenment to terror by Ian Davidson (also $28). How can idealism go wrong?
The Tunnel Through Time: A new route for an old London journey by Gillian Tindall $38
The modern Crossrail system is just one of the ways London has been crossed from East to West. Tindall makes the journey through many centuries of construction, destruction and renewal.
Venice: A traveller's reader edited by John Julius Norwich $30
It is impossible to visit Venice without writing about it. The writers here selected have, being rather good writers, written about it rather well. A place-by-place tour with Byron, Goethe, Wagner, Casanova, Jan Morris, Robert Browning, Horace Walpole, Mark Twain, Henry James and a host of others for company.
The Econocracy: On the perils of leaving economics to the experts by Joe Earle, Cahal Moran and Zach Ward-Perkins $30
"Our democracy has gone profoundly wrong. Economists have failed us. Politicians have lied to us. Things must change. This fearless new book will help make it happen." - Owen Jones
International Indigenous Rights in Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Erueti $40
In 2010 New Zealand endorsed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. What are the implications of this for the rights of tangata whenua?
Truth to Power: An inconvenient sequel by Al Gore $40
An urgent call to action to counteract climate change, and also a message of hope. More urgent, even, than An Inconvenient Truth (2006).
Both are also films:
>> An Inconvenient Truth.
>> Truth to Power.
Alcohol/Алкоголь by Damon Murray $45
A compilation of Soviet counter-alcohol propaganda posters and graphic design. How does the vilification of alcohol differ from society to society?
>> Back in the USSR.
The Sleepy Book by Charlotte Zolotow and Vladimir Bobri $33
All animals, and all people, sleep in their own way. This gentle, poetic book is perfect for creating the perfect conditions for a good sleep.
NEW RELEASES
"A necromancer who is as surefooted among the dead as the living, the peerless Mexican legend Juan Rulfo made into book-flesh the elusive smoke and fire of his country, where the surreal is everyday, and the everyday is surreal: to read him is to imbibe Mexico. The legendary title novella - published here in English for the first time on the 100th anniversary of his birth - is a lost masterwork." - Barbara Epler
"To read Rulfo's stories is to inhabit Mexico and, in the process, to have Mexico inhabit you." - Oscar Casares
"You can read Rulfo's slight but dense body of work in a couple of days, but that represents only a first step into territories that are yet to be definitively mapped. Their exploration is one of the more remarkable journeys in literature." - The Guardian
"My profound exploration of Juan Rulfo's work was what finally showed me the way to continue with my writing." - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
New Zealander Bertelsen is gardener and cook at Great Dixter, the house designed by Edwin Lutyens (upon a 15th century remnant) with gardens in the Arts and Crafts style by Christopher LLoyd. This book is a delight both to gardeners, with hands-on seasonal tips, and to cooks, with very appetising versions of classic dishes, many with a distinctly New Zealand flavour, using many of the ingredients you may have just harvested from the garden. The book is very attractively presented, with quietly beautiful photographs. One of the nicest cookbooks of the year.
Where do countries go when they cease to exist? What are the histories of Biafra, New Brunswick, Labuan, Tannu Tuva, Inini and Eastern Karelia? Each of these defunct states issued their own stamps. Berge takes us to each and shows us some of the lesser-known dead ends of history.
A new edition of the definitive guide to the plethora of excellent beers currently produced in New Zealand.
>>> Come and listen to Jules talk (and taste some beer): Monday 25th September, 1 PM @ VOLUME. See you then.
This sharp and thoughtful series reveals the vast weights of meaning that pivot on everyday objects. We have just received six new titles:
Veil by Rafia Zakaria $22
Sock by Kim Adrian $23
Eye Chart by William Germano $21
Tumor by Anna Leahy $22
Jet Lag by Christopher J. Lee $22
Whale Song by Margaret Grebowicz $22
Very nicely written and full of insights into Italian culinary cultures, Roddy's book also contains 120 authentic and approachable recipes that are insights in themselves.
"Rachel Roddy describing how to boil potatoes would inspire me. I want to live under her kitchen table. There are very, very few who possess such a supremely uncluttered culinary voice as hers, just now." - Simon Hopkinson
>> Yum.
A beautifully written mix of fiction, biography, philosophy and criticism, originally written to introduce French readers to the author of Moby-Dick, which Giono had translated for Gallimard, now at last translated into English.
>> Melville continues to inspire and fascinate other writers.
As well as providing an excellent survey of the artist's distinctive work, Schroder helps the reader to decipher the allegorical nature of many of them and to appreciate the passions and ambivalences that drove the artist.
A sumptuous collection of 300 images giving an overview of humanity's conceptions of the cosmos, from the earliest times to the latest discoveries and imaging techniques.
>> See some sample pages here.
Stories in which the ordinary opens suddenly up into the surreal and in which the surreal opens up into the ordinary, from the author of The Beautiful Bureaucrat.
"This stunning collection establishes Helen Philips as one of the most interesting and talented writers working today. In atmosphere and setting, her stories are often reminiscent of Kafka and Atwood, yet her voice and style are entirely her own. A fascinating, unsettling, and beautifully written work." - Emily St John Mandel
"Comparisons to Margaret Atwood and Karen Russell would not be unjust, nor would they be helpful; Phillips is carving her own, messier territory. As beautifully as she embraces and executes the fantastical, she's even better when the surreal remains a mere lurking possibility." - New York Times
"Crocodiles have funny toothbrushes. And they love warm baths. They carry you out on the lake, pull you to town, and take you to school. They know how to tell good stories. But if you step on the tail of a crocodile, it will get terribly angry, and it will bite you. Then it will pretend to be very sorry."
>> The book described by Quentin Blake.
Reyes was born into extreme poverty in the slums of Bogota, escaped a convent for orphans at nineteen and became an artist and intellectual of the Kahlo/Rivera circle, and a writer much admired by Marquez.
"Some works of art feel more unlikely, more miraculous than others, and Emma Reyes' remarkable epistolary memoir is one of them. I don't think I've read many books of such power and grace, or that pack such an emotional wallop in so short a space. The very fact that this book exists is extraordinary. Everything about it . . . is astonishing." - Daniel Alarcon
"No other book I've ever read has left me so deeply involved with its author, and so grateful for that involvement." - Diana Athill
Moorhead tracked down her father's black-sheep cousin in Mexico and recorded much of the artist and writer's life about which information is not otherwise available. One of the key but woefully neglected Surrealists, Carrington took refuge in the Surrealist enclave in Mexico, where she was also involved in the women's liberation movement of the 1970s.
>> The lost Surrealist.
>> Carrington @ VOLUME.
Stories evoking the experience of prisoner, written by an author serving life imprisonment for murder (without parole).
"Compelling and real, remarkable for its modesty, realism and humanity. Dawkins has produced a book that is not only moving and genuine, but genuinely important; one that, without resorting to shock tactics, powerfully conveys the perverse inhumanity of mass incarceration." - Guardian
"Unlike any other short story collection I've ever read. The Graybar Hotel is not a 'prison-book.' It is a mirror, held up to our culture of incarceration. There is a current of electricity running through this book, a shocking voltage of truth." - Nickolas Butler
An encyclopedic survey of 50 states with contributions from over 100 chefs and food writers, absorbing and recombining countless ethnic cuisines into the vast panoply (and is there any panoply that is not vast?) of over 800 dishes of all sorts.
>> Have a look inside.
Is there a mainline from the fingers to the brain? The pencil is undergoing a resurgence in designer, artist and writer circles. This book is a collection of portraits of the very various pencils used by creative people.
Much insight into the defiantly unconventional art collector whose attention helped many the 20th century artists enter the modern canon and the galleries (often via her bed).
"Subtle and attentive." - Guardian
>> Art addict.
A splendid infographic guide to the programme of Apollo missions, their failures and triumphs.
Tales of adolescence in all its awfulness and vulnerability, with Freddie's imagination providing the only escape, collected from Barry's ongoing 'Ernie Pook's Comeek'.
Vinegar is all the rage, with an exciting repertoire of flavours and health benefits. This "richly narrated" cookbook is complete with recipes from chefs around the world, interviews with artisanal producers and instructions for making your own vinegar.
What is the history of hope? What distinguishes hope from other positive-facing concepts? Eagleton considers Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope, and the various sub-species of hope prevalent in the Stoics, Aquinas, Marx and Kierkegaard. What are hope's prerequisites, and how can hope concepts help us understand ethics and religion?
150 varied, delicious and totally authentic dishes, from simple breakfasts and street food to celebratory feasts. Nicely presented.
>> Sample pages.
Short stories and extracts from novels, from the Pikihuia Awards, showcasing a diversity of established and emerging talent.
Plywood is an astonishingly versatile material, made by gluing together layers of cross-grained veneers, creating a pliable board that can be stronger than solid wood. Stylish and practical, plywood offers huge possibilities for experimental design, and it has been used to make a wide range of products, from aeroplanes, boats and automobiles to architecture and furniture. This book traces the history of plywood from its use in 18th-century furniture, through its emergence as an industrial product in the 19th century, to a material celebrated by 20th-century modernists such as Alvar Aalto and Charles and Ray Eames. An ideal material for the digital age, plywood has become popular again in recent years and is widely used in contemporary design and manufacture.
A bottom-up history highlighting the struggle for emancipation and the transformative ideals that underpinned the Revolution.
Also new: The French Revolution, From enlightenment to terror by Ian Davidson (also $28). How can idealism go wrong?
The modern Crossrail system is just one of the ways London has been crossed from East to West. Tindall makes the journey through many centuries of construction, destruction and renewal.
It is impossible to visit Venice without writing about it. The writers here selected have, being rather good writers, written about it rather well. A place-by-place tour with Byron, Goethe, Wagner, Casanova, Jan Morris, Robert Browning, Horace Walpole, Mark Twain, Henry James and a host of others for company.
"Our democracy has gone profoundly wrong. Economists have failed us. Politicians have lied to us. Things must change. This fearless new book will help make it happen." - Owen Jones
In 2010 New Zealand endorsed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. What are the implications of this for the rights of tangata whenua?
An urgent call to action to counteract climate change, and also a message of hope. More urgent, even, than An Inconvenient Truth (2006).
Both are also films:
>> An Inconvenient Truth.
>> Truth to Power.
A compilation of Soviet counter-alcohol propaganda posters and graphic design. How does the vilification of alcohol differ from society to society?
>> Back in the USSR.
All animals, and all people, sleep in their own way. This gentle, poetic book is perfect for creating the perfect conditions for a good sleep.
LONG SUFFRAGE
In 1893 New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world to grant all women the right to vote. 19 September is Suffrage Day. You might like to mark the occasion by considering these half-a-dozen books on the politics of women in New Zealand:
Professor Barbara Brookes' achievement is phenomenal, spanning two centuries from 1814-2015. Looking at our society through the stories of women, the book tells the political and social history of New Zealand from a female perspective. In the early chapters Brookes covers Maori women’s place within Maoridom and early Paheka contact, early settler roles as missionary wives and traders, the colonial era where roles for both Maori and Pakeha women were altered by the circumstances of a new country, the tensions that arose and the changes to female roles either by design or necessity. The tone is perfectly set - readable, interesting history with enough analytical depth and a wealth of knowledge that places this work among our best histories. The overarching themes are dotted with specific examples of women and their lives in early New Zealand, giving both a depth of analysis and fascinating insights on a personal level, bringing history alive. These vivid accounts are well-illustrated with photographs, sketches, paintings, and maps on most pages.
"This book presents a rich and ranging collection of Maori women speaking from the nineteenth-century archive. The hopes, the persistence, the effort to set down a cause are all apparent in the words of women presented in these pages. It is in various measures an inspiring, instructive and agonising read." - Charlotte Macdonald, Victoria University of Wellington
>> Disrupting the narrative of our colonial history.
Coleman argues that Colclough was just as important as Kate Sheppard for the New Zealand women's movement in New Zealand.
A full facsimile of the 270-metre long petition, with biographies of many of the 24000 signatories.
"I began to pull the threads of my experience back together. Instead of divergent stories about public failure, private torment, and postnatal distress, I started telling myself a united story: the truth, or as close as I could get to it." A Rhodes scholar and former Green MP, Holly Walker tells the story of how she became one of New Zealand's youngest parliamentarians, how motherhood intervened, and how she found solace and solidarity in the writings of women.
In 1847, Gatland left London high society and travelled first to California during the gold rush, and then to New Zealand, about the social conditions of which (and the prevalent attitude towards women) she makes some very fresh observations.
Risking Their Lives: New Zealand abortion stories, 1900-1939 by Margaret Sparrow $40
Does New Zealand's demographic gender disparity provide an opportunity to reconsider prejudices against singleness and nontraditional relationships?
Kate Sheppard is one of the 100 outstanding women featured in this inspiring book.
>> Read more about women's suffrage in New Zealand <here.
Find out what we've been reading.
Find out what you'll be reading next.
Our latest newsletter: BOOKS @ VOLUME #41 (16.9.17)
edited by Kate De Goldi and Susan Paris and packed full of stories, illustrations and amusements from top New Zealand writers and illustrators is this week's BOOK OF THE WEEK.
“We channelled our younger selves: curious, discerning, up for anything. We tried to make a book we wish we’d be given. All the content is commissioned. This meant we were able to achieve a good balance of gender, ethnicity, and rural/urban experiences. We wanted to reach as many kinds of readers as possible.” - the editors
>> Find out who's included.
>> Lots of teasers on the AnnualAnnual FaceBook page.
>> Appreciation from The Sapling.
>> Last year's Annual was hugely popular with children, critics and gift-givers. It is still just as fresh as the day it was published.
>> Visit the Annual website.
>> Children's annuals have a long history. Here is a short history.
>> Some amusements you can download.
>> On creating the first Annual.
We can gift-wrap and send this book to wherever and whoever you would like.
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Ostro by Julia Busuttil Nishimura {Reviewed by STELLA}
Occasionally I treat myself to a new cookbook. There are many I would like to have on the shelves in the kitchen, but we don't have the room for all the gorgeous cookbooks that arrive at VOLUME. So, for a book to make the cut, it has to be extra tempting. Ostro from Melbourne foodie Julia Busuttil Nishimura made the cut. I was immediately attracted to the book (by its cover!). Usually, I don’t like cookbooks with a picture of the chef front and centre - even though I understand the marketing reasons for doing so. Anyway, here is Julia, relaxed, sated looking - a pose that says food is a delight and should be enjoyed - the look that you may have on your face when you’ve tasted something delicious or about to indulge. The subtitle, "The pleasure that comes from slowing down and cooking with simple ingredients", is so apt for her Italian/ Mediterranean influenced food and her philosophy about food and lifestyle: Slow down and enjoy. The recipes are divided into several categories, including Bread & Pizza, Vegetables, Pasta & Grain, Seafood & Meat, and Desserts - as well as cakes! There are everyday recipes, food for families, and special occasion dishes. The food style suits our climate and coastal location, where we enjoy the benefits of wonderful, fresh local produce. I can’t wait to make and eat 'Soft Polenta with Bitter Greens and Walnuts' (just right for this time of year), 'Roasted Broccoli with Lemon, Garlic and Anchovy Crumbs', and 'Whole Orange Cake with Candied Fennel Seeds' (and many others: the gnocchi, the pizzas…. the roasted peach tart). Cookbooks not only have to have sumptuous recipes (ones that you will cook), they also have to look good to entice me to open and explore them. And this is a beautiful book. PS: Also new - Yotam Ottolenghi’s and Helen Goh's Sweet - All Ottolenghi's cookbooks are superb and this is no exception. Just looking at these sweet treats makes you want to rush home to don your apron and have a reason to bake something splendid! |
 | Walks With Walser by Carl Seelig {Reviewed by THOMAS} “When what is distant disappears, what is near tenderly draws nearer,” said Robert Walser, according to Carl Seelig, about walking in the fog. Walser’s collar is crooked, or worn, or both, he carries his furled umbrella under his arm along the mountain path, his hat is battered, the band torn, he is wearing a suit, somewhat raffish, somewhat the worse for wear, but he has no overcoat. Walser does not feel the cold, says Seelig. He enjoys the clouds, the rain. He distrusts clarity. Walser enjoys his walks with Seelig but asks Seelig not to call for him on any day but Sunday, so as not to disturb the routine of the asylum, in Herisau. There he assembles paper bags with glue, sorts beans and lentils, cleans the rooms. “It suits me to disappear,” says Walser, according to Seelig, “as inconspicuously as possible.” Even from his early days, according to Seelig, who did not know Walser in his early days and so must have had this information from Walser, or possibly another source, though no other source suggests itself, Walser took long walks to overcome the effects of nightmares. Or anxiety. Or the panic that results from the inability to engage. Not that Walser suffers from the inability to engage, exactly, though he seldom talks without prompting, not even to Seelig, says Seelig. Seelig spends little time with Walser in the asylum, but instead on the mountain paths, walking in the cloud, and in the rain, the best weather, to the small village inns where they enjoy this wine or that, or beer, or cider, and cutlets, or fied egges, or dumplings, or cheese pies, whatever they are, or meatloaf, and pommes frites, or cabbage, or mashed potatoes and peas and white beans. Seelig records it all, afterwards, each detail of the walk and of the food and the drink and the waitresses, and every word that Walser speaks, we suppose, or, anyway, at least the essentials. With great equivalence. Off they walk again together, over the ridge, around the base of the mountain, Switzerland has many ridges and many bases of mountains, to clear their heads after the wine, and then to catch the train that will return Walser to the asylum and Seelig to wherever Seelig lives. Walser “harbours a deep suspicion of the doctors, the nurses, and his fellow patients, which he nonetheless skilfully tries to hide behind ceremonial politeness,” says Seelig, who either observes Walser more frequently than is recorded or has this information from the doctors. Seelig becomes, after all, Walser’s guardian after the deaths of Walser’s brother Karl and his sister Lisa. He republishes Walser’s work. To no avail. But Seelig is invisible to us, through making Walser visible when Walser doesn’t want to be visible. Seelig is Walser’s Boswell. Seelig is the narrator of Walser now that Walser narrates nothing. “Restraint is my only weapon,” says Walser, narrates Seelig. The restraint that made Walser significant as a writer is no different from the restraint that stopped him writing. “The less plot a writer needs, and the more restrained the setting, the more significant his talent,” says Walser, the author of, first, novels, then stories, then feuilletons, thenmicroscripts approximating a millimeter in height in pencil on tiny scraps of paper, hidden about his person, in the Asylum in Waldau, unrecognised as actual writing until after his death, until they were deciphered in the 1990s, then nothing. When he first meets Seelig, because Seelig admires Walser's writing, Walser has already stopped writing. He has written nothing since he left Waldau and entered Herisau. Walser blames Hitler. Or society. Or the new superintendent at Waldau, according the Seelig. Walser blames editors, critics, other writers, according to Seelig. Walser’s work was admired by Kafka. He was admired by Benjamin, Sebald, Bernhard and Handke, according to them. To mention only a few. One critic called The Tanners “nothing more than a collection of footnotes,” according to Walser, according to Seelig. The Assistant was true, which is a surprise, at one time you could visit the advertising clock designed by Tobler, says Walser, says Seelig. Walser wrote the book in six weeks. The world changed. Walser changed, or he failed to change. He was celebrated and then increasingly ignored. He found it hard and then harder to get his work published. Even in the newspapers. “I could not perform for society’s sake,” says Walser, of his failure, according to Seelig, “All the dear, sweet people who think they have the right to criticise me and order me around are fanatical admirers of Herman Hesse. They are extremists in their judgement. That’s the reason I have ended up in this asylum. I simply lacked a halo, and that is the only way to be successful in literature,” says Walser to Seelig, according to Seelig, not without bitterness. Writing can only be done if it is the only thing done. Once, Walser alternated his writing with jobs as a servant or as a clerk, for money, for the time to write. Now he does not write. He wants to disappear. “It is absurd and brutal to expect me to scribble away even in the asylum. The only basis on which a writer can produce is freedom. As long as this condition remains unmet, I will refuse to write ever again,” says Walser, as recorded by Seelig. Walser’s turning away is from writing and from life. Walser's ceremonial politeness is his way of not existing, or of existing in his own absence. He is distant and withdrawn. He likes long walks, alone, we find out later, or with Seelig. He talks with Seelig, a little, when prompted, but not with others. As far as we know. The withdrawal that gives his writing such brilliance is the withdrawal that makes life unlivable, in the end, or at some point some way before the end, when one lets go of something, it is uncertain what, that everyone else grasps, naturally, or, more commonly, desperately, whatever it is, that keeps them clutching their lives. Walser, says Seelig, failed to take his own life, on more than a single occasion. His sister showed him the asylum at Waldau. He could think of no option but to enter. He did what was expected. He is diagnosed, when the term becomes available, as a catatonic schizophrenic, whatever that means, but his enjoyment of the walking, of the scenery, of the food and more especially the drink, and of the waitresses, seems genuine, at least through the eyes of Seelig, who knows him better than anyone, who sought him out because of his work and befriended him in the asylum and who accompanies him on long walks, who records everything and is sympathetic and transparent, at least to us, so that there is no reason to doubt Walser’s small and simple pleasures as they are recorded by Seelig, an affectionate man, on the level of smallness and simplicity at which they are experienced by Walser, who has set about perfecting smallness and simplicity until it resembles so very little it is almost nothing. Who is the sworn enemy of his own individuality. Who shows no emotion when told of the death of his brother, whom he loves, who refuses to break his routine to visit his sister, whom he loves, when she lies dying and asks him to come. “I too am ill,” says Walser, says Seelig. He doesn’t want to do what the other patients in the asylum aren't doing. He has an intestinal ulcer. “Must I be sick?” he asks the doctor, “Are you not satisfied to have me here in good health?” He refuses the operation. Just as well. “Is it true that you destroyed four unpublished novels?” asks Seelig. “That may be,” answers Walser, according to Seelig. Seelig says that Walser’s brother’s wife Fridolina had been told by Walser’s sister Lisa that Walser had destroyed a photograph of himself that had been taken by his brother Karl. “That may be,” answers Walser, records Seelig. Walser is convinced of his failure. At least of his inability to perform as he is expected to perform, to be successful as a writer, though he has an ambivalence towards success, to live even an ordinary life. Everything must be made smaller. “The snow has now turned to hail,” describes Seelig, of the weather. Walser carries steadfastly on. A life is full of details, even when those details are small, or insignificant, if there is such a thing as insignificant. If you wish to disappear you pay attention to the small. You have relinquished everything else and are relinquishing that too, with great care. The doctor says Walser has a disease of the lungs. It affects his heart. He should not leave the asylum grounds, says the doctor, according to Seelig. Walser accompanies Seelig to the train. The next time they walk, Walser does not walk well, says Seelig. He tires and stumbles. It seems there is not much of life left. Almost nothing. One day Walser goes for a walk. They find him later, face-up in the snow. |