 | This Little Art by Kate Briggs {Reviewed by THOMAS} A translator interposes themselves invisibly (or quasi-invisibly (invisible by convention)) between the author of a text, for whom the translator stands in the position of a reader, and the reader of that text, for whom the translator stands in the position of the author. The translator negotiates the text on behalf of a reader whose language is not that of the author, and adds, for the eventual reader, another layer in the suspension of disbelief in their willingness to accept that the words of the translator *are* the words of the author while at the same time acknowledging that they are entirely different words in a different language. To translate, in the words of Kate Briggs in her fine, thoughtful work on translation, “complicates the authorial position, sharing it, usurping it, sort of dislocating it.” Although the translator aspires to invisibility as a remaker of text, translators are not, and should not be considered as, by themselves or by others, “neutral, impersonal transferring devices.” The remaking of text in the person of the translator refracts both in their capacities as a reader and as a writer. “I read with my body,” says Briggs. “I read and move to translate with my body, and my body is not the same as yours. Translation is a responsive and appropriative practising of an extant work at the level of the sentence, working it out, a work-out on the basis of the desired work whose energy source is the inclusion of the new and different vitality that comes with and from me.” Translation is the most intimate possible relationship between two persons, though one of those persons may well be unaware of this intimacy. The translator assumes responsibility not only for the words and intentions of the author, but also for their identity as an author, at least in so far as the readers in the host language are concerned. The translator *becomes* the author for those readers. Or, rather, translation is the most intimate possible relationship between three people, for the willingness of a reader to allow the subsuming of their awareness by the author is replicated in the translator-as-reader who must concurrently become the translator-as-author for the host language reader. Briggs describes the relationship she has with Roland Barthes, whose ‘Le Préparation du Roman’ she is translating as ‘The Preparation of the Novel’, and, indeed there are passages in her account in which the identities of the two elide and it is uncertain whose words, and whose ideas, are on the page. Briggs sees the role of the translator as to *identify* with the author, rather than to supplant, or to be compared with, the author. The translator “undertakes to write translations not as a means to demonstrate their expertise but precisely because they know, without knowing exactly how or in what particular ways, doing so will be productive of *new* knowledge.” The constraint of the extant text liberates the translator-as-writer from the perils of self-expression and the impediments to discovery imposed by one’s identity. To express oneself lies within one’s capabilities and is a fundamentally reductive procedure. Only constraints will lead a writer beyond safe territory, and the constraints of an extant text can lead a translator-as-writer to new discoveries about language and about the limits and potentials of praxis of both writing and reading. “Don’t all writing projects,” Briggs asks, “involve working within existing rules and parameters that guide and to some degree direct what is possible to write? All writing is to some greater or lesser extent determined by constraints. The constraints on how far I can go, the limits on my making-up, the limits on doing what I want, are what interest me. They interest me because they instruct me, leading me (forcing me?) outside of what I might already be capable of writing, knowing and imagining. I don’t want to just make something up.” An effective way to make without making up is to remake. Praxis without ego reveals much about the mechanisms of personhood, so to call it, readership, authorship, and about the mechanisms of language that give rise to these roles of praxis. A translation is a product of its time can be replaced by new translations, more in keeping with the times of new readers, perhaps, in the way that the original cannot be so renewed or updated. An original text goes on being the original text. For someone to write it again in the original language is generally considered a crime against the text (except perhaps when the rewriting is so different from the original as to constitute a commentary or a riff upon it). A translation can be remade without affecting the authenticity of the work. Does this suggest that translation is more akin to reading than to writing (as in the generation of texts), in that the text is fulfilled in an interchangeable other? Is all reading in effect, in any case, a translation from the language of the text’s composition to the language of the reader’s comprehension, even though those languages are ostensibly the *same* language? Is an interlingual translator nothing more (and nothing less) than a textual vector, broadening the scope of the writing/reading project performed by persons whose intimacy is entirely inherent in this vector? In this respect, translation should be considered to take its risks on criteria of soundness and comeliness, rather than on criteria of exactitude or goodness. “My work is fascinating and derivative and determining and necessary and suspect,” says Briggs. “It is everywhere taken for granted and then every so often [inappropriately] singled out to be piously congratulated or taken apart.” |
 | The Absent Therapist by Will Eaves {Reviewed by THOMAS} To read this book is to be drawn into a kaleidophone of voices, first-person narrative fragments, tiny stories bearing the impress of larger, untold stories; wry observations unknowingly made by unobservant people, anecdotes with perfectly deflating punch-lines, almost-jokes that meticulously leave off at being almost-jokes without aspiring to be jokes; gauche quips, mundane miseries treated with both sympathy and humour; small lives writ small and at once satirised and celebrated for their smallness; an encyclopedic accumulation of human experiences of the kind that usually evanesce without being recorded even in the experiencers’ memories let alone on paper. All these thousands of voices are captured pitch-perfectly by Eaves, who, with a cold eye and a warm heart, and with an unbelievably sensitive ear for what all sorts of people say and how they say it (or, what they think and how they think it), has written a very enjoyable book that manages to be both sharp and blunt at the same time to the extent that the distinction between sharp and blunt has been removed. |
THE BOOKER 6
Which of the short list for the 2017 Man Booker Prize have you read so far? Which will be next?
Come along on NZ Bookshop Day (28 October @ 2 PM) to discuss (or to listen to others discuss) the relative virtues of the finalists.
The winner will be announced on 17 October.
Paul Auster’s first book in seven years, 4 3 2 1, follows the life of Archibald Isaac Ferguson born March 3, 1947. It’s not one life though: this Jewish boy born in Newark has 4 lives. Auster tells the story in four strands - in sliding door style. In each part a fateful event at Archibald's father’s business (a burglary, a fire, a tragic accident and a buyout) leads to a change in circumstances for the family, and Archie’s life is determined by how his immediate family respond. Fate plays her part and Archie’s life is altered. The minutiae of Ferguson’s life are delightfully told and, despite the variations in his circumstances, his characteristics along with those of his immediate family keeps the four strands linked together. Auster keeps many things the same, the characteristics, likes and dislikes, interests and talents of the main characters are constant. Circumstance dictates the roles they take and the choices they make. This is excellent writing, taking you into the mind of one life in all its fragmented realities, and capturing a time and place - the American mid-twentieth-century - in all its tumultuous glory. {S}
Linda, 14, and her parents are the last remaining members of a dying commune in the American mid-west. When she becomes attached to the family who move into the cottage across the lake, she begins to sense what has been missing from her life, but when the father of that family arrives, the relationships she had built there are quickly destroyed.
Can love stand against the threat of war? When lovers must flee as refugees, where can they find a safe have for their relationship? Is it ever possible to outrun a feeling of displacement? What hope is there for those who have nowhere that they can belong? Can decency prevail against prejudice and xenophobia? Are we all "migrants through time"?
Fiona Mozley’s Elmet is an unsettling portrayal of family and loss, of violence and deep love. Daniel is looking for someone following the path north - following the railway tracks across the moor and through the townships of Yorkshire, taking in the layers of time, of history, in a subtle, almost unconscious manner. It’s as though Daniel carries with him not only his own past, but the stories of all those wandering and searching. Mozley’s narrator is a gentle loving boy, a young man who lives for his sister, Cathy and to please his Daddy. The family have returned to the land eking out a life, their home built by Daddy’s hands from the woods that surround them, with odd jobs, trades of goods and services and hunting for food. Cathy and Daniel live a solitary life, no longer attend school, yet have an understanding of their environment and a care for the wilderness that surrounds them. Yet all is far from serene. Daddy is known for his fighting prowess and a violence that brews within him. Simmering under the surface are hurts and unsettled scores, pride and suffering. The setting is beautifully described, almost dreamlike at times, yet the prose always fizzes with an underlying tension, a sense of something dreadful to come, and of secrets, of things unsaid. The violence is raw and brutal, it has a gothic element reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and the work is seething with history alongside its clearly contemporary setting. {S}
George Saunders is an astounding writer whose gift for story-telling makes Lincoln in the Bardo a pleasure to read and thoroughly absorbing. Using first-hand accounts and a cacophony of voices (from the spirit world) this is predominately a dialogue-driven novel. The year is 1862, the Civil War rages in America and Abraham Lincoln's son Willie dies of a fever. Lincoln is inconsolable and this is the story of his grief and his visits to the young boy's grave. Willie is in the Bardo and it is here that his father comes, stricken with grief. In this place, the cacophony of voices telling this story and their fascination with the living one who enters their world, are intriguing. Not only do these voices give an insight into the times, but their stories of woe are both tragic and entertaining. Saunders gets the pitch just right. A story of grief and familial love against a backdrop of tragedy and crisis, Lincoln in the Bardo is a gem for its stylistic endeavours and the interplay between lightness and dark. {S}
The first of Smith's projected seasonal quartet, set in post-Brexit Britain, addresses the subjective experience of time and the consequences this may have on personal and political relationships. Smith deftly weaves past and present, age and youth, desire and loss, hop and regret into something like the verbal equivalent of the torrent of modern life in all its contradictions, possibilities and limitations. Smith's use of language, both playful and precise, is hugely energetic and always a pleasure to read.
NEW RELEASES
(@ VOLUME now)
When Diana Wichtel moved to New Zealand as a child with her mother and siblings, her father, a Polish Jew who had jumped off the train to the Treblinka extermination camp in World War II and who had hidden from the Nazis for the rest of the war, failed to follow them as planned. In adulthood, Wichtel began to wonder what had become of him, both before and after his brief presence in her life. Her search for answers led towards the Warsaw ghetto and to consider the ongoing consequences of trauma. Very well written.
>> Wichtel talks to Kim Hill.
It's 1956 and Iola arrives on the island of Ibiza, on the fringes of Franco's Spain, with little more than a Spanish phrasebook and an imagination shaped by literature and movies. Soon she meets a fascinating American photographer who falls in and out of focus: is he really a photographer, and who exactly is the German doctor he keeps asking her about? Nothing is stable or quite as it seems, and the mysterious doctor, when he appears, takes Iola for a picnic on a salt island, where she is brought close to a brighter, harsher reality.
From the author of Gifted.
Learn to cook instinctively by increasing your awareness of four variables and learning how their interaction can achieve delicious results whatever the ingredients.
"Samin Nosrat has managed to summarize the huge and complex subject of how we should be cooking in just four words. Everyone will be hugely impressed." - Yotam Ottolenghi
>> In her own words.
A contemporary rewriting of King Lear, as part of the 'Hogarth Shakespeare' series, from the acid-tipped pen of one of the sharpest (and blackly funniest) satirists of contemporary mores. Henry Dunbar has handed over control of his global media corporation to his two eldest daughters and is stuck in his dotage in a care home in the Lake District. When he escapes into the hills, who will find him first, the two daughters keen to strip him of his estate or his youngest daughter, Florence?
"Of all the novelist and play matches in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, that of Edward St Aubyn with King Lear seems the finest. Shakespeare’s blackest, most surreal and hectic tragedy sharpened by one of our blackest, most surreal and hectic wits. Our ur-text about the decay of patriarchal aristocratic power reimagined by a writer whose central subject is the decay of male aristocratic power." - Guardian
Egan follows the Pulitzer-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad with this historical novel set in Depression era and post-Depression era New York, a period in which modern American history was put on a new track.
"This is a novel that will pull you in and under and carry you away on its rip tides. Its resonances continue to wash over the reader long after the novel ends." - Guardian
A completely absorbing consideration of the processes, impetus, experience and results of translating.
>> Translation in the first person.
In this sequel to Henry James's A Portrait of a Lady, Banville assumes not only James's mantle but his eye and pen.
“When I speak of style, I mean the style Henry James spoke of when he wrote that, in literature, we move through a blessed world, in which we know nothing except through style.” - John Banville
" Banville makes James something all his own." - Guardian
"Banville is one of the writers I admire the most - few people can create an image as beautifully or precisely." - Hanya Yanagihara (author of A Little Life)
Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A sales assistant makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the dresses she sells. A woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest.
"Carmen Maria Machado is the best writer of cognitive dysphoria I’ve read in years. " - Tor
"Life is too short to be afraid of nothing." - Machado
Everyone wants something different for breakfast, but what will Malcolm give them? A lovely story.
Images, moments, feelings, persons. Hoard acts as a great poetic sieve, scooped through Adcock's life in New Zealand and the UK, through her reading, dreams and relationships.
Appealingly presented, fun to use, full of authentically easy and manifestly delicious dishes, each with an easiness rating (ranging from "not so difficult" to "so not difficult").
>> You can make this.
Fox and Rabbit live quite far away, in a bright little house beyond the molehills. In each of these 11-and-a-half stories they try new ways to go to sleep and say good night. Sometimes they swing from the ceiling.
It was a family that fate drove into the siege of Stalingrad, the Vilna ghetto, occupied Paris, and even into the ranks of the Wehrmacht. Mazower's British father was the lucky one, the son of Russian Jewish emigrants who settled in London after escaping the civil war and revolution. Max, the grandfather, had started out as a socialist and manned the barricades against tsarist troops, but never spoke of it. His wife, Frouma, came from a family ravaged by the Great Terror yet somehow making their way in Soviet society. How did the confluence of these histories form the person Mark Mazower is?
Centuries of people moving about have left tracks on the landscape, many of them almost erased by other land use and movement patterns. Moffat follows some Roman roads, pilgrims' ways, drove roads, turnpikes, ghost railroads and sea roads to evoke for us a different and often surprising view of landscape and history.
A wolf who has never seen a rabbit and a rabbit who has never seen a wolf become the best of friends. What happens when they play at scaring each other?
>> And here they are!
Nixey shows that, far from being meek, the early Christians set about destroying as much of Classical culture as possible, and repressing, persecuting and murdering those who disagreed with their new religion.
"Simon Schama takes the reader through a grand sweep of Jewish history, but he makes it so personal you begin to feel you know the men and women whose lives shine out from the pages, and their foibles, and you get a sense of the fragility of their lives and their determination to survive. It's a brilliant piece of work" - Rabbi Julia Neuberger
"Profoundly illuminating." - Guardian
Short-listed for the 2017 Baillie-Gifford Prize.
>> An interview with Schama.
The aspects of ourselves that we hold as being the most human are in fact the ones that we share most widely with other animals.
From the author of The Hidden Life of Trees.
Pissing Figures, 1280-2014 by Jean-Claude Lebensztejn $20
An incisive illustrated essay on urinating figures in figurative and sculptural art.
>> No urinating in the streets of Belgium.
What is the relationship between Modernism and the development of literary nationalism in New Zealand? As colonial mores receded and gender and sexuality identities became more diverse, what did this mean for the production and reception of literature? Our literary history is not just about texts, but is a forgotten history of feelings and changing modes of experience.
The appearance in the political arena of white supremacists, xenophobes, militia leaders, and mysterious 'Alt-Right' leaders was not as sudden as it might have seemed.
A beautifully executed graphic novel telling of a sensitive boy's coming-to-terms with the complexities of the relationships within a family riven by unhappiness.
Sefia knows what it means to survive. After her father is murdered, she flees into the wilderness with her aunt Nin, who teaches her to hunt, track, and steal. But when Nin is kidnapped, leaving Sefia completely alone, none of her survival skills can help her discover where Nin's been taken. The only clue to both her aunt's disappearance and her father's murder is the odd rectangular object her father left behind, an object she comes to realise is a book, an item unheard of in her illiterate society. With the help of this book, and the aid of a stranger with dark secrets of his own, Sefia sets out to rescue her aunt and find out what really happened the day her father was killed.
A personal account of daily study of the Talmud, which contains the teachings and opinions of thousands of rabbis (dating from before the Common Era through the fifth century CE) on a variety of subjects, including Halakha (law), Jewish ethics, philosophy, customs, history, lore and many other topics. Can a life be entirely governed by text?
In shedding the last vestiges of colonial society in exchange for the trappings of a modern democratic nation, the 1920s and 1930s in New Zealand set a blueprint for state intervention and assistance that remained unchallenged for the next 50 years.
A selection of non-fiction and journalism, with topics ranging from sport to pornography to Princess Di.
"Amis is as talented a journalist as he is a novelist, but these essays all manifest an unusual extra quality, one that is not unlike friendship. He makes an effort; he makes readers feel that they are the only person there." - Rachel Cusk
Since Michael Illingworth assumed the first fellowship in 1966, Otago University has hosted a sequence of outstanding New Zealand artists. This book surveys, therefore, the changing flavour of New Zealand art in the last half century, and is supported with reproductions, commentaries and interviews.
A compelling blend of social and natural history, featuring a string of memorable characters from the back-country.
"A brilliant feat of screwball participatory journalism." - Jay McInerney
Baxter's prose (like his poetry) wrestled with contradictions, anxieties and competing impulses - just as he wrestled with the society in which he lived, or from which he withdrew.
Essays by Janet Wilson, Sharon Matthews, Paul Millar, Lawrence Jones, John Davidson, Nicholas Wright, Hugh Roberts, Kirstine Moffat, Paul Morris, Doreen D'Cruz, Peter Whiteford, and Greg O'Brien
With influences ranging from illuminated manuscripts, Persian miniatures, naive artists, European art history and popular culture, this Dunedin artist's distinctive work teems with figures and throngs with disconcerting detail.
>> Visit the artist's website.
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 outstanding graphic memoir illustrated by Turkish artist Korkut Öztekin.
>> Sample pages and information on the book's own excellent website.
>> How did the book come about?
>> Williams speaks with Kim Hill.
>> Images from the RNZ gallery.
>> Depression just said, "You've got to face this."
>> The dark secret of Wellington philanthropist Sir Arthur Williams.
>> Images from the RNZ gallery.
>> Depression just said, "You've got to face this."
>> The dark secret of Wellington philanthropist Sir Arthur Williams.
>> New Zealand help lines for depression and anxiety:
EMERGENCY: Call 111
EMERGENCY: Call 111
Lifeline New Zealand: 0800 543 354 (Help anyone - 24/7)
Suicide Crisis Helpline: 0508 828 865 (Help anyone - 24/7)
Youthline: 0800 376 633 (Help young people & their families - 24/7)
Find a list of specialist NZ helplines here
The Lowdown – Help young New Zealanders recognise and understand depression or anxiety
Depression.org – Help New Zealanders recognise and understand depression or anxiety  |
Elmet by Fiona Mozley {Reviewed by STELLA}
One of the two debut novels shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker prize, Fiona Mozley’s Elmet is an unsettling portrayal of family and loss, of violence and deep love. Daniel is looking for someone following the path north - following the railway tracks across the moor and through the townships of Yorkshire, taking in the layers of time, of history, in a subtle, almost unconscious manner. It’s as though Daniel carries with him not only his own past, yet all the stories of those wandering and searching. Mozley’s narrator is a gentle loving boy, a young man who lives for his sister, Cathy and to please his Daddy. The family have returned to the land eking out a life, their home built by Daddy’s hands from the woods that surround them, with odd jobs, trades of goods and services and hunting for food. Cathy and Daniel live a solitary life, no longer attend school, yet have an understanding of their environment and a care for the wilderness that surrounds them. Yet all is far from serene. Daddy is known for his fighting prowess and a violence that brews within him. Coming back to the village also means returning to his past and the connection with the children’s mother, who has long disappeared. Simmering under the surface are hurts and unsettled scores, pride and suffering. Cathy is tough and sure, aware of her surroundings and the impending doom while her brother blithely carries on in his childlike way. The family’s presence on the land raises the ire of the landowner, Mr Price, and highlights a community riven between the landowning classes and the working and unemployed poor. Described as a 'rural noir', the story opens with Daniel on the road, the setting feels timeless - is it the past or some altered future? In fact, it is the present. It’s a beguiling opening that draws you in and endears the narrator to you: a young man searching, loyal to his family, as he tells his story of what has gone before, of their lives in the house, the simple pleasure of crafting their own way, making from scratch, following the rules of nature rather than the laws of man. The setting is beautifully described, almost dreamlike at times, yet the prose always fizzes with an underlying tension, a sense of something dreadful to come, and of secrets, of things unsaid. The violence is raw and brutal, it has a gothic element reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and the work is seething with history alongside its clearly contemporary setting. It’s a remarkable debut novel and a fitting contender for the prize. |
 | Worlds from the Word's End by Joanna Walsh {Reviewed by THOMAS} Language is the expression of intention, but to what extent does this intention spring from the utterer and to what extent does it inhere in language itself? (While we’re at it, we could (but will not) consider the extent to which the intentions inherent in the reader affect what is read or those in the hearer what is heard). The stories of Joanna Walsh’s latest collection are of such lightness that they ride the subtlest of semantic breezes and are carried to destinations implied in language that heavier material will not reach, falling from its vector under its own weight. Like those of Italo Calvino (who also saw lightness as a virtue), Walsh’s brief, crystalline stories imply more than they can objectively said to contain, even though they have objective rigour in their extrapolation of potential from scientifically isolated material, often linguistic anomalies that we had not thought of as linguistic anomalies, idiomatic remarks or the quirk of a turn of phrase to which we have been blinded by familiarity. Any of these stories could be subjected to an analysis that would exceed the length of the story. Walsh compulsively (for compulsively read scientifically) speculates upon the nature of lives in which an impulse becomes permanent or a tendency is liberated from the factors that ultimately, or immediately, ordinarily negate it. Would would it be like if words literally failed? What would it be like if waiting in a railway station was never ended by the appearance of the person waited for? What if a young girl really did kidnap the gangster Enzo Ponza and end up having him about the house forever after (“to challenge him would be to acknowledge his existence”)? Each narrator is indigenous to their story, and we are engaged in realigning our perceptions to match theirs, without the author performing the indignity of forcing the opposite upon them (a fairly usual narratorial method). In each, Walsh conducts a delicate interplay between detail and meaning, neither overwhelming the other which it embodies or which embodies it. Strangely familiar existences spring from language itself. “I am walked but, also, I am walking. Wait. What if I walked without being walked. Where would I (who would I) walk?” In ‘The Suitcase Dog’, Walsh not only imagines the language that would be used by a dog to distill its experiences of the world and of itself, but, at another step of remove, the language that would be used by a suitcase imagining itself to be a dog using the language that would be used by a dog, but contained within the fairly limited imaginative projections of a suitcase. Which sounds more complicated than it reads. It is Walsh’s ability to nuance the simplest of sentences that allows her/them to give access to the subtlest of observations and the narrowest (as in precisest) of perspectives. These brief paragraphs waft meaning that they can hardly be said to contain, but there is nothing vague or tentative in that wafting. In each, the reader’s reading faculties are sharpened in “thinking about the story - which is always to be thinking about thinking about the story.” |
 | 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.
|
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)
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{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.
