 | Extravagant Stranger by Daniel Roy Connelly {Reviewed by THOMAS} There must be a moment when the pull of the end of a life becomes stronger than the push of its beginning, but this moment inevitably passes unrecognised, other than that it becomes at this point (and we won’t be looking for this) suddenly less implausible to call writing about your life ‘Memoir’. Daniel Roy Connelly has lived what some might think of as an interesting life (he has been a diplomat in various countries and a theatre director and scholar) but there is no particular reason for us to be interested in any of that, and every reason to think that Connelly is not particularly interested in any of that either. Instead, Extravagant Strangeris a set of residua, granules of experience that have become grit in his memory, arranged from a sperm’s-eye view of his conception (why he identifies with only half his chromosomal constitution at this point is probably insignificant in light of his overall project of netting the partial and fractured nature of both experience and memory (although we understand the difference between experience and memory we cannot experience this difference)), through childhood and parenthood, until beyond his (projected) death. This is the opposite of a curriculum vitae or Mastermind research; the short impressionistic pieces that comprise the book are refreshingly free from fact, fact forming perhaps a substructure of the memoir upon which the pieces spring forth like small and sudden thorny plants. Each piece is stamped with the voice of its author, entirely personal but entirely outward-looking, full of the kinds of idiosyncratic observation, self-arraignment and wordplay that act as burrs that make moments cling to consciousness and be carried forward, through the evident sadness, joy and irritation that have pulled increasingly strongly at the biographical trajectory of the Connelly’s life (this may be a memoir but it is in no way an autobiography). Does memoir steady us on the corners of the luge, or hold us back a little (or at least give the momentary impression of being held back a little), or does it disemburden us, cast us forward and speed our descent? We are either aware or unaware, and, if the former, all we have is detail, the more particular and the more idiosyncratic the better. |
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NEW RELEASES
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This fascinating (and funny) new novel from the author of The Wish Child (winner of the 2017 Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize) is sieved and assembled from the great flood of words that washed over Chidgey in 2016. Both an experiment in form and an exercise in documentary rigour, this novel is revelatory of the actual texture of life and an interrogation of the processes of memory.
In the second installment of Smith's seasonal quartet, a modern-day Scrooge reassesses her relationships in the context of Brexit Britain and the deep patterns of history and society.
"Luminously beautiful. A novel of great ferocity, tenderness, righteous anger and generosity of spirit." - Guardian
From the 1930s to the 1950s, forced migrants - refugees from Nazism, displaced people after World War II and escapees from Communist countries - arrived in New Zealand from Europe. Among them were extraordinary artists and writers, photographers, designers and architects whose European Modernism radically reshaped the arts in this country. How were migrants received by New Zealanders? How did displacement and settlement in New Zealand transform their work? How did the arrival of European Modernists intersect with the burgeoning nationalist movement in the arts in New Zealand? This book introduces us to a group of `aliens' who were critical catalysts for change in New Zealand culture. An outstanding piece of social and artistic history, beautifully illustrated.
Dr Raspe takes up a position at a psychiatric institution determined to implement his ideals, but instead becomes overwhelmed by the reality of life in the hospital and soon passes beyond the edges of what is commonly thought of as sane, disassembling as he does so society's expedient construct of sanity. For him, and for the reader, the idea of madness is overthrown.
"Rainald Goetz is the most important trendsetter in German literature. In many passages, Goetz achieves the same intensity and concentration of experience as in the disturbing early novels of Thomas Bernhard." — Süddeutsche Zeitung
"This book is a hammer. His texts should come with an epilepsy warning." — Die Zeit
"As a hyper-nervous virtuoso of attentiveness, Rainald Goetz works in the field between authenticity and fiction." — Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"Praise is bad." — Rainald Goetz
>> "He was a doctor. He knew what he was doing." — Marcel Reich-Ranicki, commenting on Goetz slicing open his forehead at the 1983 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize
"The connection between a colony and its founder, centre and margin, is always paradoxical. Where once Britain sent colonists out into the world, now the descendants of those colonists return to interrogate the centre." This book rediscovers four men, born in New Zealand, who achieved fame in Europe as they were forgotten at home: Harold Williams, journalist, linguist, Foreign Editor of The Times; Ronald Syme, spy, libertarian, historian of ancient Rome; John Platt-Mills, radical lawyer and political activist; and Joseph Burney Trapp, librarian, scholar and protector of culture. Edmond, as always, writes thoughtfully and with insight.
Essays towards a better national conversation, including: Morgan Godfery on identity • Jess Berentson-Shaw on social investment • Andrew Judd on racism • Carys Goodwin on climate change • Conor Clarke on dirt • David Cohen on Popper, Plato, Hegel and Marx • Emma Espiner on a tikanga Māori world • Gilbert Wong on growing up Chinese • Giselle Byrnes on why universities matter • Jo Randerson on dying • Māmari Stephens on our threatened marae • Victor Rodger on being actually brown • Maria Majsa on Johnny Rotten • Max Harris on dreams • Mike Joy and Kyleisha Foote on dams • Raf Manji on a new progressive agenda • Sarah Laing on menstruation • Sylvia Nissen on youth and politics • Teena Brown Pulu on three Tongan funerals • Tim Watkin on explaining Trump • Simon Wilson on a radical centre.
Old Rendering Plant by Wolfgang Hilbig $28
One day, a boy follows the odors, oozings, and grime of a polluted creek to the rendering plant that has spewed animal refuse into it for years. He becomes obsessed with the poor creatures that are being made into soap, and in his paranoia he comes to believe that this abattoir is somehow connected to the mysterious disappearances occurring throughout the countryside. Hilbig uses obsessive, hypnotic prose to explore the intersections of identity, consciousness, our frail bodies, and history's darkest chapters.
"An artist of immense stature." - Laszlo Krasznohorkai
A magical survey of 30 writers who are also women, giving insight into their verbal superpowers, biographies and principle works. Powerfully illustrated. Includes Janet Frame, 'Hermit of Hospitals, Belonging and Lost Souls'.
>> Peek at a few witches here.
Many New Zealand women have been left out of the histories of the First World War. As well as the 550 nurses who followed the troops and the women who 'kept the home fires burning', many other New Zealand women were involved in the war, as doctors and ambulance drivers, munitions workers and mathematicians, civil servants and servicewomen in British units, and in many other roles. Tolerton tells these stories for the first time.
Recipes for many of the memorable dishes at the iconic Wellington cafe,a long with thoughtful writing, and photography by Douglas Johns.
Hortense is irritated by the antics of her shadow, but its ability to take on new forms can be useful when you are threatened by bandits.
Quietly thoughtful and nicely presented.
"This is great family cooking: inviting, achievable and simply delicious." - Nigel Slater
When not everything is going your way (or even when nothing seems to be going your way), the preparing and eating of good food can help to get your life back on the rails. S. Tuck shares 100 of her most effective recipes in this attractively presented cook book. This food will help pick you up off the floor.
>> STuck in the kitchen.
The Breakstone family arrange themselves around their perfect daughter Heather, but as Heather grows she becomes the centre of other, darker orbits.
"Heather, the Totality is superb. Weiner conveys the sense that beyond the brilliantly chosen details there was a wealth of similarly truthful social and psychological perception unstated. Then there was the ice-cold mercilessness, of a kind that reminded me (oddly, I suppose, but there it was) of Evelyn Waugh. This novel is something special." - Philip Pullman
"I cringed and shuddered my way through this short, daring novel to its terrible inevitable end. Each neat, measured paragraph carpaccios its characters to get to the book's heart - one of Boschian self-cannibalising isolation. A stunning novel. Heather, the Totality blew me away." - Nick Cave
>> Matthew Weiner, the man who made Mad Men.
In 1962, as a young zoologist, Sutherland lived for 3 months alone in Shackleton's hut in Antarctica's McMurdo Sound, alone, that is, apart from visitors (up to 40 a day) who came to see him living alone in the famous explorer's hut. One of the visitors, Graham Billing, wrote a novel, Foxbrush and the Penguins, based on Sutherland, and this was subsequently made into a film starring John Hurt as Sutherland. Sutherland's own account of his stay is now available for the first time.
A stupendous encyclopedia of typographical evolution and innovation, including not only typefaces but also layout, ornament and aesthetic. Full of information and inspiration.
A memoir of the writer's life in gardens and a consideration of gardens in her reading.
What happens if you throw literature into the Large Hadron Collider? This book is a fictional life told in fragments, each fragment constantly permuting and breaking into further fragments. An adventure in fractalising narrative.
"It’s a strange and rewarding book, and one which channels a stylized, almost hermetic environment—which seems to fit the themes of both supercolliders and the inner workings of the human psyche." - Electric Literature
>> Is this a "total novel"?
Before Eggars was a writer he was an illustrator. In this book he presents a series of animals, both wild and domestic, with plaintive or pseudo-Biblical texts. Odd and rather touching.
"I think a picture is more like the real world when it's made out of the real world." Produced between 1958 and 1960, Rauschenberg's illustrations transpose photographic and found imagery to the canvas and overwork it with other media.
>> Read the book and look at the pictures.
>> Rauschenberg is not the first artist to tackle the subject.
The latest neurological research shows how our brains are softwired (or live-wired!) rather than hardwired. This endless malleability enables us to reconceptualise our world and to construct experience. Where do new ideas come from? Eagleman, whose book The Brain is the best introduction to the philosophical and psychological implications of neurological research, teams up with composer Anthony Brandt to explore our need for novelty and our capacities to produce it like no other animal.
A curated selection of maps that take cartography in new directions. Interesting.
Between 1823 and 1828 Leopardi set aside the lyric poetry he has become most famous for to concentrate on this set of 24 stories, mostly dialogues, which address the range of philosophical themes that underlie both his academic and poetic writings.
Tracing its development from the traumatic Peasants' War of early sixteenth-century Germany to contemporary Islamism, Toscano tears apart the sterile opposition of 'reasonableness' and fanaticism. Toscano suggests that fanaticism results from the failure to formulate an adequate emancipatory politics.
Being able to describe, evaluate and generate reasoning and arguments effectively, appropriately and sympathetically is a key life, professional and academic skill. But there are hidden complexities inherent in this approach, and it has limits when employed as a form of persuasion.
A beautifully illustrated large-format book from the wonderful 'Welcome to the Museum' series. The latest facts with a retro feel.
Stunning, as you would expect. Leibovitz's sure and incisive eye captures layers of subtlety beneath each exquisite surface. Sumptuous, large-format production.
Can a clever young inventor uncover a ruthless pirate's heart of gold?
Detailed hand-painted maps that provide a cartographic representation of 35 major films. Plus essays (also fun).
>> DeGraff is also responsible for Plotted: A literary atlas.
How do people make an impact on the world? Fiction and nonfiction.
What are the challenges, rewards and pitfalls of biographical research and writing?
"Holmes writes beautifully. A masterly performance by the greatest literary biographer of his generation." - The Oldie
1922, the year that Modernism was born.
An investigator studying the recordings of a machine that can read memories finds evidence of more persons than she ought to in the mind of a reclusive novelist who has died in police custody. Inventive (bonkers).
"Gnomon is an extraordinary novel, and one I can't stop thinking about some weeks after I read it. It is deeply troubling, magnificently strange, and an exhilarating read." - Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven
"Harkaway is J.G. Ballard's geeky younger brother." - Times Literary Supplement
An interesting memoir from the folk music revival catalyst, left-leaning political activist and feminist.
>> 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face'.
The textiles featured include male and female garments, hats and headdresses, rugs and felts, children's clothing, dolls, tent hangings, amulets and animal harnesses.
On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner died in New York City after a police officer put him in what has been described as a "chokehold" during an arrest for selling "loosies," or single cigarettes. The final moments of his life were captured on video and seen by millions, sparking an international series of protests that built into the transformative "Black Lives Matter" movement. Weeks after Garner's death, two New York City police officers were killed by a young black man from Maryland, in what he claimed was revenge for Garner's death. Those killings in turn led to police protests, clashes with New York's new liberal mayor, and an eventual work slow-down.
If only.
Holly Dunn design.
HOW JEWISH IS THAT?
A few books from our shelves on Jewishness, Jewish issues and history for Jews, the Jew-curious and people who like interesting books.
Arendt's analysis of the conditions that led to the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes is a warning from history about the fragility of freedom, exploring how propaganda, scapegoats, terror and political isolation all aided the slide towards absolutist domination. A warning for our times (even though first published in 1951).
Baram navigates the conflict-ridden regions and hostile terrain to speak with a wide range of people, among them Palestinian-Israeli citizens trapped behind the separation wall in Jerusalem, Jewish settlers determined to forge new lives on the West Bank, children on Kibbutz Nirim who lived through the war in Gaza, and ex-prisoners from Fatah who, after spending years detained in Israeli jails, are now promoting a peace initiative.
"Written with great talent, momentum and ingenuity. It expands the borders of literature to reveal new landscapes." - Amos Oz
"A book that is a fascinating and charged document about the meaning of home, security and freedom, on both sides of the divide." - NRG
Socialists, Communists, Bundists, Zionists, Trotskyists, manual workers and intellectuals: before the Holocaust decimated their numbers and laid waste to the land their radicalism addressed, the Jewish communities between Russia and the Baltic brought forth a swathe of new ideas compounded of idealism and doubt. The book examines what was lost, and what might have been.
If Alaska rather than Israel had become a Jewish homeland after World War 2, and if the streets of its capital Sitka then quaked in fear of Ultraorthodox gangsters with sidelocks, how will Detective Landsman and his half-Jewish, half-Tlingit sidekick Berko solve a murder case that stretches back to the elusive Rebbe Gold and beyond? A hilarious novel, with lashings of noir tropes.
26 writers (including Colum McCann, Rachel Kushner, Colm Toibin, Dave Eggers, Madeleine Thien and Eimear McBride) from 14 countries bear witness to the human cost of the 50-year Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
"Moving, heartbreaking, and infuriating, testifying to the chilling cruelty of Israel's policy toward Palestinians. Deeply unsettling and important." - Kirkus
>> Trailer.
Essays on Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Chagall, and on the Jews under Stalin and of the 'remnants of a race' after Hitler, as well as on the causes and results of Zionism.
"Exceedingly vivid." - TLS
The psychologist specialising in PTSD recounts her own experiences surviving Auschwitz (where she was forced to dance for Josef Mengele) and those of the people she has helped.
"The Choice is a gift to humanity. Dr. Eger's life reveals our capacity to transcend even the greatest of horrors and to use that suffering for the benefit of others." - Desmond Tutu
Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) was a German-Jewish artist primarily remembered as the creator of an autobiographical series of paintings 'Life? or Theater?', consisting of 769 individual works painted between 1941 and 1943 in the south of France, while Salomon was in hiding from the Nazis. In October 1943 she was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where she and her unborn child were gassed to death by the Nazis soon after her arrival. Her life forms the basis of Foenkinos's beautiful, indignant book.
>>Some of her work can be seen here.
A prominent Viennese psychiatrist before the war, Frankl observed the way that both he and others in Auschwitz coped (or didn't) with the experience. He noticed that it was the ones who comforted others and who gave away their last piece of bread who survived the longest, and he asserts that everything can be taken away from us except the ability to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances.
During 2000 years of exile, Jews have spread across the world, bringing their culinary traditions with them and adapting and adopting the cuisines of their host societies. This book travels from North Africa across Europe and into India, showing all the subtle variations and innovations of essentially Jewish dishes.
In 1929, the Soviet government set aside a sparsely populated area in the Soviet Far East for settlement by Jews. The place was called Birobidzhan. The idea of an autonomous Jewish region was championed by Jewish Communists, Yiddishists, and intellectuals, who envisioned a haven of post-oppression Jewish culture. By the mid-1930s tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, as well as about a thousand Jews from abroad, had moved there. The state-building ended quickly, in the late 1930s, with arrests and purges instigated by Stalin. But after the Second World War, Birobidzhan received another influx of Jews those who had been dispossessed by the war. In the late 1940s a second wave of arrests and imprisonments swept through the area, traumatizing Birobidzhan's Jews into silence and effectively shutting down most of the Jewish cultural enterprises that had been created.
Jewish musical prodigy Lisa Jura Gobalek escaped Vienna to London on the Kindertransport, where she eventually studies at the Royal Academy. How can she learn the fates of her sisters and the rest of her family she left behind?
Moscow, 1953. Three secret policemen arrive in the middle of the night to arrest Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an actor from the defunct State Jewish Theater. But Levinson, though an old man, is a veteran of past wars, and he proceeds to assemble a ragtag group to help him enact a mad-brilliant plot: the assassination of Stalin (no less). While the setting is Soviet Russia, the backdrop is Shakespeare: A mad king has a diabolical plan to exterminate and deport his country's remaining Jews.
"Darkly playful and generous with quick insights into the vast weirdness of its landscape." - The Washington Post
"A brilliant novel that is at once surreally comic, suspenseful if slightly cracked and punctuated with eruptions of violence, but with a poignant ending . An extraordinary, rich and surprising tale of intrigue Paul Goldberg has been aptly compared to a whole constellation of Jewish literary geniuses Sholem Aleichem, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, E.L. Doctorow, Michael Chabon and even the Coen brothers. Goldberg possesses a voice and vision that are entirely and uniquely his own." - The Jewish Journal
A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman $28
This taut depiction of a stand-up comedian falling apart on stage in front of an audience wanting entertainment won Grossman the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. Why are we so transfixed by tragedy, our own and others'? In reading literature, are we like Dovaleh's audience, seeking entertainment from the miseries of others?
"Unrelentingly claustrophobic. The violence that A Horse Walks into a Barexplores is private and intimate. Its central interest is not the vicious treatment of vulnerable others but the cruelty that wells up within families, circulates like a poison in tight-knit groups, and finally turns inward against the self. Searing and poignant." - New York Review of Books
>> Some things wrong in Israel.
The Librarian of Auschwitz by Antonio Iturbe $30
14-year-old Dita is confined in the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The several thousand residents of camp BIIb are inexplicably allowed to keep their own clothing, their hair, and, most importantly, their children. Fredy Hirsch maintains a school in BIIb. In the classroom, Dita discovers something wonderful: a dangerous collection of eight smuggled books. She becomes the books' librarian. Based on a true story. 
Conversations with Kafka by Gustav Janouch $32
Janouch met Kafka as a seventeen-year-old, and they took to taking long walks together, with Janouch recording everything afterwards, as id he were Kafka's Boswell. "Life is infinitely great and profound as the immensity of the stars above us. One can only look at it through the narrow keyhole of one's personal experience. But through it one perceives more than one can see. So above all one must keep the keyhole clean." Includes record of Kafka's opinions on Jewish concerns. Introduction by Francine Prose. 
With the digressive range and vigour of Sebald but without his crucial narratorial slipperiness, Jenner wrings meaning out of minute detail and subtly interrogates both memory and the clichés that so easily take its place. In the last part of the book she makes one of the most difficult of literary approaches: the Holocaust and the tendrils of antisemitism that appear in unexpected places. Where Sebald succeeds in addressing the trauma of the Holocaust by writing around its edge, pointing to it with all the details that appear to be about something else, Jenner succeeds by approaching it directly but by writing always about her approach, about herself and about asking how it could be possible to think about the Holocaust from her situation in present-day New Zealand, if it is possible to think about the Holocaust at all.
A dazzlingly intelligent dual-narrative novel concerning, on the one hand, a retired New York lawyer who 'disappears' to Tel Aviv, and, on the other, a novelist named Nicole Krauss who comes home to find herself already there, and so sets off towards the point the narratives meet. Elegant and replete with Kraussian themes of memory, solitude and Jewishness.
"Restores your faith in fiction." - Ali Smith
"Charming, tender, and wholly original." - J. M. Coetzee
A child exposed to experiences of a kind and scale that cannot be assimilated will create their own mythology to make life liveable. Otto Dov Kulka was a child in Auschwitz, and went on to become a prominent historian of the Holocaust. This book is remarkable as it deals specifically with the internal aspects of surviving in an intolerable situation, young Otto’s ‘Metropolis of Death’. Millions of people, each with their own personal narrative, were subsumed by a single narrative (one which led to the gas chambers and crematoria). It is unfortunate that even many of the most sympathetic portrayals and histories tend to reinforce the single narrative, the erasure, and it is interesting to read Kulka express his feelings of alienation when reading or watching accounts of concentration camp experiences. One of Kulka’s achievements in this deeply thoughtful book is to show how an individual can retain that individuality, and even find a sort of beauty and meaning, even under the irresistible weight of a subsuming narrative such as the ‘immutable law of the Great Death’.
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 texts?
Primo Levi assesses his life in terms of the chemical elements he associates with his past, from his birth into an Italian Jewish family through his training as a chemist, to the pain and darkness of the Holocaust and its aftermath.
"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion." What did Albert Einstein mean by this?
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).
"My mother, my family and Judaism are nested inside each other. I am Jewish and always Jewish; it's analogous with family, however hard it is, and however strained, it can never be disavowed. I remain, as my therapist put it, 'enmeshed', all tangled up in the family hoard. This book has been both a continuation of my conversations with them, and an attempt to untangle myself." Limburg's brother's suicide triggered for her a re-examination of her genetic and cultural heritage, as she attempted to hold onto her individual identity.
"Important and impassioned. This book illuminates with skill and clarity, not only the peculiarly disturbing world of the Holocaust deniers, but also the methods they have used to distort history, the motives that have driven them to do so, and the vulnerabilities of our educational systems, our culture, and ourselves that have made so many in our society ready to listen to them." - New York Times
>> This book was the focus of a libel suit by Holocaust denier David Irving, which failed notably and decisively. This was made into the film Denial.
Looking in detail at Benjamin's celebrated but often mysterious text, and restoring the philosophical, theological and political context, Löwy seeks to highlight a complex relationship between redemption and revolution in Benjamin's philosophy of history.
Examines the confluence of religious and secular antiauthoritarian thought that did much to set the groundwork such remarkable twentieth century thinkers as Martin Buber, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukacs.
"Meet Bram Presser, aged five, smoking a cigarette with his grandmother in Prague. Meet Jakub Rand, one of the Jews chosen to assemble the Nazi’s Museum of the Extinct Race. Such details, like lightning flashes, illuminate this audacious work about the author’s search for the grandfather he loved but hardly knew. Working in the wake of writers like Modiano and Safran Foer, Presser brilliantly shows how fresh facts can derail old truths, how fiction can amplify memory. A smart and tender meditation on who we become when we attempt to survive survival." - Mireille Juchau
Excellent and amusing graphic biographies.
Were Israel's kibbutzim a practical expression of the socialist ideal of absolute equality, or were they an assault on those aspects of culture, such as the individual and the family, that could resist indoctrination?
A young man's erotic and intellectual obsessions open the way for him to re-examine the history in the consequences of which he is immersed.
"This book is compassionate as well as painfully provocative, a contribution to some sort of deeper listening to the dissonances emerging from deep within the politics and theology of Israel and Palestine." - Rowan Williams, New Statesman
"Oz engages with urgent questions while retaining his right as a novelist to fight shy of answers: it's a mark of his achievement that the result isn't frustrating but tantalising." - Daily Telegraph
The war of 1967 dramatically redrew the map of Israel and Palestine, and changed the lives of millions of people both in the Middle East and across the world. Analysing the historical origins of the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza in the 1920s and 30s, Pappe goes on to examine the bureaucratic apparatus that has been developed to manage this occupation, from the political, legal, financial and even dietary measures to the military and security plans put in place over almost half a century.
Without refrigerators, whether in a European ghetto last century or wandering in a desert millennia ago, Jewish culture has developed a wide array of different methods to preserve food. This book is the ultimate guide to fruit jams and preserves (such as Queen Esther's Apricot-Poppyseed Jam or Slow Cooker Peach Levkar to Quince Paste, Pear Butter, and Dried Fig, Apple, and Raisin Jam), pickles and other savory preserves (including Shakshuka, Pickled Carrots Two Ways, and Lacto-Fermented Kosher Dills), and recipes for the use of preserves in holiday preparations, such as Sephardic Date Charoset, Rugelach, and Hamantaschen.
Two visits to the Auschwitz concentration camp end in silence.
Rees' book is remarkable for the amount of new information gathered from 25 years worth of interviews with Holocaust survivors and perpetrators. This research enables not only a reassessment of the social mechanisms that induced and permitted genocide but also of the range of the victims' responses. Also recorded here is the resistance, albeit ultimately futile, of individual stories to the overwhelming story that subsumed them.
>>> Also arrived this week: Denying the Holocaust: The growing assault on truth and memory by Deborah Lipstadt ($30), which asks why Holocaust deniers like David Irwin are on the rise in a post-factual world.
Two axes define the space of the Jewish Museum in Berlin: the 'axis of exile' and the 'axis of the Holocaust'. Ripp's mother's family chose the axis of exile, whereas his father's was consumed by the axis of the Holocaust. Ripp uses the stories of both sides of his family, and a journey he made to visit memorials through Europe, to give deft and subtle insight into the fatal spasm of anti-Semitism that emerged in the middle of the twentieth century.
A diverse selection of everyday and festival dishes , from the authority on Jewish cooking.
What place is there for literature in the political dimension of our lives? Rose considers Zionism, Israel-Palestine, post-Apartheid South Africa and the American national fantasy post-9/11, and the works of Freud, Grossman, Sebald and Gordimer.
"A mishmash, at once merry and pensive, of personal memoir, a history of left politics in postwar England, a portal into a lost Jewish London and a portrait of the artist as a nervy young man." - Guardian
In January 1898 the newspaper l'Aurore published 'J'accuse', an open letter from Zola accusing the French government of anti-Semitism in the treatment and unlawful jailing of Alfred Dreyfus. The letter was successful in provoking the government to sue Zola for libel, thus reopening the Dreyfus case, and, following his conviction and to avoid jail, Zola fled to London, where he continued to defend Dreyfus until his death from carbon monoxide poisoning due to a blocked chimney. Rosen fills in all the details and the colour.
On the 2nd of August 1947 a young man gets off a train in a small Swedish town. He has survived the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, and the harrowing slave camps and transports during the final months of Nazi Germany. Now he has to learn to live with his memories. In this book, Goran Rosenberg returns to his own childhood in order to tell his father's story. It is also the story of the chasm that soon opens between the world of the child, suffused with the optimism, progress and collective oblivion of post-war Sweden, and the world of the father, haunted by the shadows of the past.
"Many years ago there lived in Zuchnow, in Russia, a man named Mendel Singer. He was pious, God-fearing and ordinary, an entirely commonplace Jew." So Roth begins his novel about the loss of faith and the experience of suffering. His modern Job goes through his trials in the ghettos of Tsarist Russia and on the unforgiving streets of New York.
When human rights lawyer Philippe Sands received an invitation to deliver a lecture in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, he began to uncover a series of extraordinary historical coincidences. It set him on a quest that would take him halfway around the world in an exploration of the origins of international law and the pursuit of his own secret family history, beginning and ending with the last day of the Nuremberg trial.
"Unforgettable. A delicious cacophony of conversations and clamorous arguments echoing across history." - Daily Telegraph
"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.
A Boy in Winter by Rachel Seiffert $35
A novel correlating Jewish, Ukrainian and German experiences in the days following the Nazi invasion of a small town in the Ukraine in 1941, and seeking comprehension of the guilt burden still passed down through generations.
Black Earth: The Holocaust as history and warning by Timothy Snyder $30
We have come to see the Holocaust as a factory of death, organised by bureaucrats. Yet by the time the gas chambers became operation more than a million European Jews were already dead: shot at close range over pits and ravines. They had been murdered in the lawless killing zones created by the German colonial war in the East, many on the fertile black earth that the Nazis believed would feed the German people. It comforts us to believe that the Holocaust was a unique event. But as Timothy Snyder shows, we have missed basic lessons of the history of the Holocaust, and some of our beliefs are frighteningly close to the ecological panic that Hitler expressed in the 1920s. As ideological and environmental challenges to the world order mount, our societies might be more vulnerable than we would like to think.
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 Nazi's 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.
The city known variously in history as Lviv, Lwow, Lemberg and Leopolis in eastern central Europe was once a city where cultures and ethnicities (Jewish, Polish, Ukranian, Austrian) met and enriched each other, but, in the twentieth century, it became a city in which cultures and ethnicities obliterated each other. In the first half of this book, 'My Lwow', Josef Wittlin, looking back from exile in the 1940s, celebrates the rich texture of the city in which he grew up. The second half of the book, 'My Lviv', is written by human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, who travelled to Lviv, now in the Ukraine, in the last several years, partly to learn more about his grandfather, who had lived there in the early twentieth century, but spoke little of that phase of his life, and partly to research his remarkable book, East West Street: On the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity – terms coined by Lvovians Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht – which won the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction.
Jewish survivors of World War Two converge on a cafe in Melbourne and tell their very various stories.
>> Stella and Thomas have each reviewed this book.
>> On coffee and procrastination.
>> Did Mozley really write this novel on her phone?
>> Elmet was a Brittonic kingdom in sixth-century Yorkshire.
>> The writing of Ted Hughes, like that of Mozley, is rich with imagery of their native Yorkshire and its history.
>> Catapulted into fame.
>> What are Mozley's favourite books?
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The Wonderling by Mira Bartók {Reviewed by STELLA}
A woebegone creature without a name, referred to as Puddlehead, Plonker or Groundling but known as Number 13, has grown up in a horrible orphanage run by the bitter and nasty Miss Carbunkle. The Home for Wayward and Misbegotten Creatures is not a place you would want to call home. Groundlings, creatures of all kinds, some part human, part creature, live a miserable existence which consists of school, where they are reminded that their sole purpose is "to toil and suffer in silence", and work in the factory - a factory where Miss Carbunkle is up to some kind of no good. The Wonderling, as he will be known later, is a shy, gentle fellow, part fox, part dog, part human, with one ear, who stutters and tries to remain unnoticed. One day he sees a group of bullies tormenting a small creature and, despite his terror, steps in to rescue the bird-like Trinket. Trinket and the Wonderling become firm friends. Trinket, an enterprising and mechanically minded young bird, gives the foxy groundling his first name, Arthur. She's determined to escape the orphanage - no easy task with its fortifications, boarded-up gates, mastiffs pulling on their chains, and sneaks among the orphans willing to relay information to the nasty Carbunkle or the snivelling Mr Sneezeweed. Escaping the orphanage will be just the first in the adventures for the pair. After a chaotic yet successful escape, Trinket and Arthur find themselves on the road, heading towards the city of Lumentown. Trinket must first go to the sea to track down her Uncle, while Arthur, with an address, a scrap of blue blanket and a gold key, heads towards the town alone. He makes friends and enemies on the way and falls into the path of the charming, not altogether trustworthy Quintus, who helps him to learn a trade. Arthur’s attempts to find his family or find out who he is become more and more distant, and when he's captured and sent under to a filthy and grim world to work in the mine it seems like it's the end of the line. Will he ever find Tintagel Road, see his friend Trinket again or find out who he really is? Running alongside Arthur’s story is the mystery of Miss Carbunkle. Why is she so nasty and what is she up to in her factory? Why does she wear those ridiculous red wigs and who is her twin sister? There is plenty of adventure and magic in this fantastical world, with nods to Dickens and elements of steampunk. Add in a map, adorable illustrations and compelling writing all packaged in a divine hardback, Mira Bartok’s The Wonderling: Songcatcher is a wonder. The next in the series will be called The Singing Tree. |
 | Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders {Reviewed by THOMAS} The Bardo Thodol (generally known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead) is a Tibetan text describing the fate of consciousness after death, the torments and wonders experienced by an individual due to patterns of attachment built up while alive and the rigours that must be undertaken in order to erase the impediments that comprise the personality in order to prepare for rebirth. Lincoln in the Bardo is, then, a sort of American Book of the Dead, a sort of ghost story told from the point of view of the ghosts, spirits whose attachment to elements of their pre-death existence prevents their dispersal after death, resulting in them thronging the cemetery in which their bodies have been laid, caricatures or exaggerations of themselves, restlessly, compulsively repeating those circuits of existence and patterns of thought to which they were most attached, for better or for worse, unable to admit or accept or perceive that they are dead. Most ghost stories tell of the intrusion of a spirit of a dead person into the world of the living; Lincoln in the Bardo tells of the intrusion of a living person into postmortem territory of the undeparted dead. Abraham Lincoln, stricken by the death of his young son Willie in 1862, paid visits at night to keep company with the boy’s corpse in the sepulchre. In this book, his presence, and his love for Willie, is immensely attractive to the dead, representing the life they are desperate to rejoin. But there is nothing ghoulish about this book; it is both poignant and comic. The author has clearly had an immense amount of fun writing it, and it is a pleasure to read. Just as historical texts often quote other texts or primary sources, the book begins as an assemblage of presumably authentic quotes regarding the night upon which Willie died, which was also the night of a presidential banquet. This form established, unusually for a novel, the book progresses as a multivocal narrative in the voices mainly of various spirits who have not been able to disperse after death, and who, as they converse (and it is conversation that drives this novel), do so in the reported speech of each other. The primary concern of these spirits is the ordinary content of their lives and their relationships, the very things that are usually overlooked by history, especially history of momentous periods such as the American Civil War, during which this book is set (and which provides some of the dead that appear in it). To the extent that this book shines a light upon history, it is a history not of acts but of motivations. Motivations are always both ordinary and individual, and do not much change through history, enabling a real sympathy between these mostly imagined past people and the reader of the book. The writer, like a ghost himself (like any writer to the world of their book), moves in and out of persons, takes up and abandons the voices of others as if they were clothing. There are some tender moments between Lincoln and his son, which enable the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ moment which changes everything for the ghosts but also marks the start of Lincoln’s acceptance of his son’s death and a sense of resolution that will carry him forward into his presidency and through the war. Lincoln in the Bardo has just been awarded the 2017 Man Booker Prize. |
 | The Wolf, the Duck and the Mouse by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen {Reviewed by STELLA} The new picture book from the award-winning duo of Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen is a charmer. I was drawn in by the cover, a wolf between the trees, his two eyes naively drawn on one side of his head. Look a bit closer and you spot the duck and the mouse. The colour palette, sombre blacks, greys and ochres with the occasional lively accent, is classic Klassen. The drawings, with their collage-like characteristics, are atmospheric and playful, and Klassen is adept in capturing the protagonists, giving the story those extra layers of quirkiness. And his style is perfect for this story, a fable-like tale, which starts with misadventure yet becomes a delightful reflection on collaboration, complete with humour. A mouse is travelling through the forest when he meets a wolf and, alas, he is eaten. The wolf, fortunately, swallows this small morsel whole, and just when the poor mouse dreads this is the end, he hears a noise coming from within the belly. A duck is happily ensconced in the belly-home of the wolf, enjoying a very safe and civilised life, yet sometimes giving the poor wolf a guts ache. The duck, a clever fellow, helpfully calls up suggestions for a cure and the companions are well catered-for, including celebratory wine on occasion. All goes along well enough until the hunter comes a-calling…. Delightfully told and wonderfully illustrated with just the right balance of wit and tension, this will be a picture book to enjoy multiple times. |
 | The Missing Pieces by Henri Lefebvre (Reviewed by THOMAS} This book is comprised of one long list of works of literature and art that do not exist, either because they have been lost or destroyed (either by the writer or artist or by external intention or by misadventure or natural disaster) or because they were never completed, or, in some cases, never started. Lefebvre provides a catalogue of holes (and these are just the identifiable holes – the list of things that do not exist is, I suppose, infinite), an incantation of absence, and we are left wondering, How would the cultural landscape be different if these works existed? What sort of cultural force is exerted by absence? Is disappearance the universal primary force against which we all struggle? Human endeavour, even at its most ‘exalted’, is a ragged, tentative and highly vulnerable thing. This is perhaps where its value lies. |
NEW RELEASES
November is upon us and so are these New Releases.
A man of deep ambivalences, contradictions and vulnerabilities, Edward Lear was unable to act on his deepest feelings but produced some of the oddest poetry of his time, as well as a body of art both serious and comic. Jenny Uglow, who could almost be said to specialise in biographies of odd characters who both exemplify and stand apart from their times, is Lear's perfect biographer, forensic yet sensitive to the most hidden corners of his psyche, his playfulness and his melancholy.
"Jenny Uglow has written a great life about an artist with half a life, a biography that might break your heart." - Robert McCrum, Guardian
When a mouse is swallowed by a wolf, a duck already resident in the wolf's belly shows it what a good life can be lived there. How can they defend their home against a hunter?
Two friends travel to Iceland to experience the settings of (and to retell!) the Icelandic sagas they are both so fond of, and to find Gislason's roots. What is the relationship between land and stories, both ancient and modern, both culture-defining and personal? Where are the Vikings now?
>> "Tales of blood feuds and dangerous women, fugitives and warrior poets."
>> How they came to write the book.
An interesting and attractive guide to the food of Lisbon replete with recipes for every meals of the day and with evocative photographs.
>> Mendes tells a little about himself.
The main difference between The Bookshop in Scotland's Book Town of Wigtown and Black Books is that business at The Bookshop proceeds without a script and the odd customers are all (or mostly) actual members of the public rather than actors. As Bythell shows, running a booklover's paradise may not always feel like you're in paradise yourself, but booksellers wouldn't have it any other way (that is to say, they are of no use for any other occupation).
>> A shop with books in.
>> Shaun shows us how to reconfigure with a broken Kindle.
An exquisite graphic novel account of the explorations and inner life of the Venetian merchant who travelled through Asia as far as Chine in the thirteenth century.
>> Have a look at Tabilio's website.
The latest advances in neuroscience have bearing on the dilemmas of both philosophy and psychology. Before he died, Sacks drew together some of his incisive essays on consciousness and on the relationship between the brain and the mind, experience and memory, to be presented as this important addition to his oeuvre.
"Some of the best, funniest, bleakest, most unsettling short stories I've ever read." - The Times
"Always enjoyable, virtually incapable of dullness or slack sentences. His stories reveal truths about modern life while still feeling beautifully invented." - New York Times
"By far and away one of the most inventive, adventurous and accomplished fiction writers in the US today. Most of all, he is a mesmerising storyteller." Lionel Shriver
Fiennes journeys to Croft Castle & Parkland (Herefordshire), Clapham Common, Northfield Wood, The Weald, Knockwood & Secret Wood (Tenterden), Windsor Great Park, Runnymede (Surrey), Sherwood Forest, Cranborne Chase (Dorset), Kingley Vale (W. Sussex), Kipling's house (South Downs), Wistman's Wood (Dartmoor), Wayland Wood (Norfolk), Queen's Wood (Highgate), Hardcastle Crags (W. Yorkshire), Glover's Wood (Sussex), Smithy Wood (Sheffield). So many woods, and so much history, has been lost.
"Written with a mixture of lyricism and quiet fury, Fiennes's book winningly combines autobiography, literary history and nature writing. It feels set to become a classic of the genre." - Observer
Led by revolutionary foment in Europe, British intellectual and radicals in the 1790s formulated new ways of thinking, feeling and acting that would have far-reaching consequences through literature, art and social dynamics, what Edmund Burke called "the most important of all revolutions, the revolution of the sentiments." The project involved the complete rethinking of the relationship between the individual and society, between the individual and nature, between an individual's inner and outer lives.
The outstanding psychogeographer strikes out on a series of solitary walks and collaborative expeditions to make a final reckoning with a capital stretched beyond recognition. Here is a mesmerising record of secret scholars and whispering ghosts. Of disturbing encounters. Night hospitals. Pits that become cameras. Mole Man labyrinths. And privileged swimming pools, up in clouds, patrolled by surveillance helicopters. Where now are the myths, the ultimate fictions of a many times revised city?
What were the concerns of ordinary New Zealanders during war? The war divided New Zealanders and involved many in acts of brutality that affected their families and communities when they returned. What price did New Zealand pay for the outcome of the war?
"Stevan Eldred-Grigg defies classification. He can swoop from the historical to the contemporary, from lyric to polemic, from fiction to faction. He's unsettling as well as absorbing." - David Hill
A Modernist classic only now translated into English, The Weight of Things tells of a traumatised young woman's descent into first domesticity and then suffering. Admired by Jelinek and Sebald, Fritz is a recipient of both the Robert Walser Prize and the Franz Kafka Prize.
"There is a class of artists whose work is so strange and extraordinary that it eschews all gradations of the good and the mediocre: genius and madness are the only descriptors adequate to its scale. Such is the case of the Austrian novelist Marianne Fritz." - Adrian Nathan West
The natural world is full of fascinating instances of convergence: phenomena like eyes and wings and tree-climbing lizards that have evolved independently, multiple times. Convergence suggests that evolution is predictable, and if we could replay the tape of life, we would get the same outcome. But there are also many examples of contingency, cases where the tiniest change - a random mutation or an ancient butterfly sneeze - caused evolution to take a completely different course. So are we humans, and all the plants and animals in the world today, inevitabilities or evolutionary freaks?
Seventeen year old Ivan Isaenko is a life long resident of the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely III Children in Belarus. For the most part, every day is exactly the same for Ivan, which is why he turns everything into a game, manipulating people and events around him for his own amusement. Until Polina arrives. She steals his books. She challenges his routine. The nurses like her. She is exquisite. Soon, he cannot help being drawn to her and the two forge a romance that is tenuous and beautiful and everything they never dared dream of. Before, he survived by being utterly detached from things and people. Now, Ivan wants something more: Ivan wants Polina to live.
Excellent retellings, with excellent illustrations. Crossley-Holland's versions are both enjoyable and scrupulous to the sources.
"Kevin Crossley-Holland is the master." - Neil Gaiman
Suggests that the requisites for language, and indeed language itself, were present as early as Homo erectus one-and-a-half million years ago.
Advances in medical science has meant not only that we live longer but that we spend more of that time dying. How has this changed our view of the world and our place in it?
"It's impressive how Tatiana was able to recreate the personality of my mother, including her sense of humour. It is very well written and very moving. I'm sure my mother would have loved this book." - Tessa Montgomery d'Alamein (daughter of Daphne du Maurier)
Twenty-one women, from Boadicea to Nicola Sturgeon, who stood out against their times and provided new ways for history to move forward.
"If someone in every country were to write a book like this, scholars might finally admit there are two things - history and the past - and they are not the same." - Gloria Steinem
"Lynch's wonderful third novel follows a teenage girl through impoverished Ireland at the height of the Great Famine. Lynch's powerful, inventive language intensifies the poignancy of the woe that characterizes this world of have-nothings struggling to survive." - Publishers Weekly
Why are some films good and the rest rather less than good? 'Gordy Lasure' will show you how cinema works.
"A work of shimmering, glimmering genius." – Stephen Fry
>> The 'Alan Patridge of film' reads from his book.
A beautifully presented and wonderfully quiet cookbook, with 130 plant-based recipes for all occasions.
It's 5pm on New Year's Eve in the Villa Nightmare, and as Shadow Sorcery Minister Beelzebub Preposteror's thumb-striking clock counts down each hour with an "Ouch!", Minister Preposteror draws closer to missing his midnight deadline for fulfilling his annual quota of evil deeds and being "foreclosed".
Pivotal texts from a major thinker of the New Left on Marx and Trotsky, Luxemburg, Lenin and Althusser, fetishism in Capital, justice, political organisation, revolutionary mass action and party pluralism, and an analysis of the literary power of Trotsky's writing.
"This book is a wry, critical friend to both writer and reader. It is filled with cogent examples and provoking statements. You will agree or quarrel with each page, and be a sharper writer and reader by the end." - Hilary Mantel
"A mishmash, at once merry and pensive, of personal memoir, a history of left politics in postwar England, a portal into a lost Jewish London and a portrait of the artist as a nervy young man." - Guardian
At once a history of and guide to navigating without sextant and almanac.
Essays on sixteen individual animals immortalised by humans.
"I've spent decades reading books on the roles animals play in human cultures, but none have ever made me think, and feel, as much as this one. It's a devastating meditation on our relationship to the natural world. It might be the best book on animals I've ever read. It's also the only one that's made me laugh out loud." - Helen Macdonald, New York Times
Another outstanding and stylish vegetarian cookbook from Anna Jones.
"Brilliant." - Nigel Slater
Very accomplished night and low-light landscape photography from a Nelson-resident photographer and bookseller.
>> While stock lasts, receive a free copy of Barney's previous book Night Visions.
>> Visit the photographer's website.
Lenin's originality and importance as a revolutionary leader is most often associated with the seizure of power in 1917. But, Zizek argues in this new study and collection of original texts, Lenin's true greatness can be better grasped in the very last couple of years of his political life. Russia had survived foreign invasion, embargo and a terrifying civil war, as well as internal revolts such as at Kronstadt in 1921. But the new state was exhausted, isolated and disorientated in the face of the world revolution that seemed to be receding. New paths had to be sought, almost from scratch, for the Soviet state to survive and imagine some alternative route to the future. Zizek suggests that Lenin's courage as a thinker can be found in his willingness to face this reality of retreat lucidly and frontally.
A squirrel drops a nut. After winter a nut tree sprouts. A particularly charming pop-up book.
>> This is how it works.
Cover designs for 25 textbooks used by Harry Potter and the other students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
>> Have a look at the designs.
The pieces that comprise the first three titles of our new series of short interesting texts came to us unbidden in various ways, but each demonstrates the strong connection between memory, identity and place. We are very pleased to be launching our publishing imprint with such excellent work.
28.10.2017
VOL 001: Overcoats by Eddie Saxon $5
A short autobiography of a long life, told through a succession of overcoats.
VOL 002: Two Visits to Auschwitz by Bernard Redshaw and Michelanne Forster $5
Two visits to the Auschwitz concentration camp end in silence.
VOL 003: Transit in Marrakech by David Coventry $5
A travelling writer makes an unexpected connection with a customs official in Marrakech.
Very many thanks to all of you who helped us celebrateNZ Bookshop Day and the importance of your bookshop to your community. We were overwhelmed with the range of book-positive and bookshop-positive activities you thought up and undertook. Thank you for coming in to see us, bringing in your friends, bringing us coffee and cake and flowers, posting about us on social media, photographing yourselves and your family reading, singing us songs, buying books, making us drawings and models,
reading to us from your favourite books, participating in our Man Booker discussion, attending the launch of our publications, photoshopping us into the Nelson Masked Parade(!), and telling us some really awful literary jokes. The winner of our Bookshop Bingo draw and recipient of a six-month VOLUME Reading Subscription is Amy Shattock. Many thanks to all entrants! A bookshop is the expression of the passion of its community. 
>> Read Stella's review below.
>> Two other books from Lyra's world: Lyra's Oxford and Once Upon a Time in the North.
>> Daemon Voices (Pullman on storytelling).
>> La Belle Sauvage is also available in hardback.
>> "The philosophical underpinning of this book is deeply concerned with how authoritarian regimes take power."
>> Pullman: "'The Book of Dust' is about Dust. ... 'The Book of Dust' is not a sequel or a prequel but an equel."
>> 5 minutes with Philip Pullman.
>> The Golden Compass film was based on Northern Lights.
>> On Dust.
>> He's already finished writing the sequel!
>> Some other books by Pullman.
Review by STELLA:
The first in 'The Book of Dust' trilogy is a triumph. I sat down and read it in one sitting and there was no way anything was going to interrupt me (you have been warned!). It’s been almost 20 years since The Amber Spyglass, the third book in 'His Dark Materials' series, and leaving the world of Lyra was difficult for many. La Belle Sauvage is set 10 years before Northern Lights, Lyra is a baby in the care of the nuns at Godstow near Oxford. We are back in the world of daemons, the struggle between the religious order and scientific learning, and the mysterious questions about Dust. The Magisterium’s power is growing in Brytain and there is an increasing sense of unease in the populace. Here we meet Malcolm, an eleven-year-old boy - curious, inventive and good. He helps out at his parent’s pub, clearing glasses and scrubbing pots, he lends a hand to the nuns across the river and it is here he comes across Lyra and her daemon, Pantalaimon. While 'His Dark Materials' references Milton’s Paradise Lost, this series belongs to Spenser’s Faerie Queen, with touches of the Biblical Great Flood and Gothic storytelling. It feels like all the questions you still had as a reader after completing the previous trilogy are now going to be visited again, amplified - and maybe some answers might be forthcoming. While many of the characters are familiar, we learn more about them and their ambitions. Lyra’s mother, Mrs Coulter, is ever more daunting and compelling and Lord Asriel, her father, maddening and heroic. We are introduced to the fledgling secret organisation formed to resist the fascist and fanatical power-keepers, and the wonderful Hannah Reif, a reader of the wonderful Alethiometer, as well as the strange and dangerously obsessive former scientist who haunts Malcolm. Malcolm is drawn into a world which becomes increasingly dangerous and complex, and his loyalty toward the child is undaunting. As tensions rise, so do the rivers. It rains and rains, and Malcolm, tipped off by a Gyptian, readies his boat, the beautiful canoe, La Belle Sauvage, keeping an eye on the welfare of the child, Lyra. He rescues her as the walls of the nunnery collapse, and, along with the tough and mealy-mouthed Alice, who works at the pub, they start a journey down the Thames, across a flooded Brytain, in swift and dangerous currents. It’s a perilous journey physically, emotionally and mentally, stretching the youths to the edges of their capabilities. Pullman pulls no punches with La Belle Sauvage, with its allegorical layers and deliberations on science, religion and the psyche. It's dark, compelling and incredibly intriguing. Complex, intelligent writing for children, teens and adults alike.
 | Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman {Reviewed by STELLA} With a title so emphatically sure of itself, you know that something is up and you are curious to find out what. Gail Honeyman’s debut novel,Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, draws you in immediately. You meet Eleanor - an unusual woman in her thirties who lives alone works in an office (the same place she’s been since she finished university), and follows her own particular set of rules which result in an austere, simple life devoid of indulgence or frivolities, friends or family. As we travel alongside Eleanor, some peculiarities come to our attention: she drinks cheap vodka from Friday night until work on Monday and has a weekly call from Mummy on a Wednesday - an event that fills her with increasing discomfort. What starts as a quirky, amusing tale about an oddity becomes more endearing as Eleanor Oliphant becomes besotted with a musician, someone the reader sees clearly for what he is, but poor Eleanor is blind to. Yet this obsession is the making of her: as she plans her fantasy relationship she inadvertently becomes connected with the world around her. This is helped by a coincidental incident where she, along with her workmate Raymond, help an elderly man who has collapsed in the street. This incident leads to a budding friendship with Raymond, an unusual situation for Eleanor, who has never had a friend. As the story goes along, we begin to build a clearer picture of our heroine. Her childhood in foster homes, her contact with social workers, and her horrendous mother. The first part of this novel is called Good Days and we sense that Eleanor is running from something, living in a bubble to protect herself from a past that is haunting her. Honeyman keeps the tone light in this part, with gags, most visited upon and by Eleanor with her odd behaviour and often inappropriate remarks. The final third is the Bad Days, where Eleanor’s fantasy world has crumbled and the influence of Mummy looks as if it might destroy her. But Eleanor Oliphant (not her real name) is made of sterner stuff and while the reveal at the end is a shocker, this novel is ultimately a charmer (even when dealing with the damaging consequences of a disturbing childhood) which embraces the life-affirming power of friendship and care. |
 | Book of Mutter by Kate Zambreno {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Writing is a way not to remember but to forget,” suggests Kate Zembrano in this book concerning both her grieving for her mother and her struggle to be free of her mother, who in some ways became more dominating after her death than she was when alive. “Or if not to forget, to attempt to leave behind,” continues Zembrano. The past dominates the present, not so much in the way in which the present is disposed as in the disposition of our minds towards it: that which we are foolish enough to think of as ourself is dependent utterly upon memory, upon the power of what is not us in the past. This dominance by the lost and unreachable (we cannot assail its moment of power for it lies against the flow of time) is most oppressive when we are unaware of it. Paradoxically, we need to remember in order to escape the past and exist more freely (if existing freely is our predilection). But merely to open ourselves to the past through memory is insufficient to free ourselves of it. To gain control it is necessary to assume authorship, not to change what we cannot reach against time, but to create a simulacrum that is experienced in the place of the experience of the past, a replacement that alters the grammar of our servitude, simultaneously a remembering and a forgetting. “In order to liberate myself from the past I have to reconstruct it. I have been a prisoner of my memories and my aim is to get rid of them,” said Louise Bourgeois. Since her mother’s death, Zembrano’s thoughts have been increasingly focussed on her loving but dominating mother, to the extent that her mother is taking over her life (“Sometimes my mouth opens up and my mother’s laugh jumps out. A parlour trick”). Very possibly, this influence was operative when her mother was alive, but it was at least concentrated in a person who could be interacted with and reacted against. Now “she is everywhere by being unable to be located.” Zambreno’s perceptive book is a study, through self-scrutiny, of the ambivalences of grief and of memory, and also of a path beyond grief: “If writing is a way of hoarding memories - what does it also mean to write to disown?” Not that either remembering or forgetting does any favours to the departed. Without an actual person upon whom an identity, a history, a character may be postulated, and without the generation of new information, however minor, that is possible only by living, the definition of that person belongs to anyone and no-one. Identity becomes contested in the absence of the arbiter. What remains but the impress, somewhere in the past, the shape of which must henceforth suffice as a stand-in for the departed? For better or for worse the pull is to the past, towards the unalterable occurrences that have what could almost be considered as a will to persist through whatever has received their impress. And the struggle for authorship is complicated by the persistence of objects. Death instantaneously transforms the everyday into an archive. Zembrano’s visits to her parents’ house in the years after the death of her mother brings her into contact with objects that have lost their ordinariness, the possessions of her mother’s that her father wishes to enshrine, objects that have stultified, that have not been permitted to either lose or accrete meaning. Both comfort and trap, the archive preserves the dominance of the pastper se, preserves the fact of loss more than that which has been lost. Advances in medical science have meant that more of our lives, and more of the end period of our lives, has come to be defined by illness. Increasingly few of us reach our end without being overwritten by the story of its approach. Zembrano captures well her mother’s struggle with the disease that killed her, not so much over the her survival or otherwise as over how she would be remembered, over whether the idea others had of her would be replaced by the story of a disease. All memory proceeds as a scuffle between selection and denial, between nostalgia and resentment, between freedom and attachment, between the conflicting needs of actuality and representation. Memory is the first requirement of forgetting. |
 | My Private Property by Mary Ruefle {Reviewed by THOMAS} What is a reader to do when confronted with a set of short, various prose pieces written by a poet who has reached the other side of cleverness and who approaches the inarticulateness beyond from the bank of her accomplishments rather than from that of incapacity? To the problems attendant upon the *facts* of her existence Ruefle applies questions that are inextinguishable by answers. Many of the pieces in My Private Propertyread almost as encyclopedia entries to the ordinary, cataloguing its wonders for some alien to whom the quotidian and the unusual have equal strangeness. This cleansing of the faculties of the grime of familiarity is the essence of the poetic mode. The subjective is left immediate/unmediated, revealing and affirming the value of individual experience and demonstrating the particular, however ordinary, as the haunt of meaning, the profundity of which is not limited by the fact that it does not extend beyond the confines of its domain. There is little of value to be had from a generalisation. In this set of exemplars in a science of the particular, the said subjectivity, isolated as a distillate, is poured by Ruefle into successive containers other than herself, with no loss of efficacy, and it is this transmigration of viewpoint that gives the pieces of My Private Property an exhilaration, a poignancy and a liberty that demonstrate poetry’s essentially astringent quality upon the impediments of identity that cloud our sympathies and shorten our perceptions. |
NEW RELEASES
They're new.
A fragmentary "factless autobiography" attributed by Pessoa largely to his semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares but left unedited and uncompleted (if such a project could be completed) at Pessoa's (and, by extension, Soares's) death. The book is a Modernist masterpiece of existential observation and self-observation, with musings on the scattershot distribution of meaning in everyday life.
>> "The weirdest autobiography ever."
>> "A writer in flight from his name."
>> On the destruction of the 'I'.
Fiction addresses itself to fact and fact addresses itself to fiction. These pieces range all over the place, occasionally observing themselves transforming from essay to fiction (or vice-versa), asking themselves, and us, what is the nature, or value, of truth?
100 recipes for dishes mentioned in favourite books. Includes Marmalade (A Bear Called Paddington), Tunna Pannkakor (Pippi Longstocking), Crab & Avocado Salad (The Bell Jar), Stuffed Eggplant (Love in the Time of Cholera), Coconut Shortbread (The Essex Serpent), Madeleines (In Search of Lost Time), Figs & Custard (Dubliners), Chocolatl (Northern Lights) and Smoking Bishop (A Christmas Carol).
"A work of rare joy, and one as wholly irresistible as the food it so delightfully describes. It is a glorious work that nourishes the mind and spirit as much as the body, and I could not love it more." - Sarah Perry (author of The Essex Serpent)
>> Crytallised ginger to please Agatha Christie
"Jenny Erpenbeck's magnificent novel is about the 'central moral question of our time,' and among its many virtues is that it is not only alive to the suffering of people who are very different from us but alive to the false consolations of telling 'moving' stories about people who are very different from us. Erpenbeck writes about Richard, a retired German academic, whose privileged, orderly life is transformed by his growing involvement in the lives of a number of African refugees—utterly powerless, unaccommodated men, who have ended up, via the most arduous routes, in wealthy Germany. Erpenbeck uses a measured, lyrically austere prose, whose even tread barely betrays the considerable passion that drives it onward." — James Wood, New Yorker
"Profound, unsettling and subtle." - The Guardian
From the author of Visitation and The End of Days.
"These are glowing, moving prose poems of hallucinatory intensity. The wit and bracing honesty of the memories, from awkward to adulatory, take you through a powerfully personal journey (for the reader as much as the writer) in each poem and in the sequence overall. The sense of timing is exquisite. A masterclass in how to turn a scene, a moment, so that it catches the light just so in the final sentence. Connelly combines the autobiographical courage of Heaney and Hill with the symbolic technique and the reach and ambition of the French masters of the form and the effect is mesmerising." - Luke Kennard
Why do humans keep and cherish some animals i their homes and yet regard others as a source of food or sport? Our relationship with animals tells us much about our own nature as a species and as individuals. A thoughtful and enjoyable book.
As it says. Nice dustwrappered hardbacks.
"Garner is scrupulous, painstaking, and detailed, with sharp eyes and ears. She is everywhere at once, watching and listening, a recording angel at life's secular apocalypses. Her unillusioned eye makes her clarity compulsive." - James Wood, New Yorker
Interesting and enjoyable considerations of storymaking from the author of 'His Dark Materials', 'The Book of Dust', 'Sally Lockhart', &c.
>>>>> The hardback edition of La Belle Sauvage is now in stock.
99 literary sensations whose stars have set are re-elevated in this charming book.
The world had to reboot itself after the Second World War, but what was to be saved, what could be rebuilt, and what was to be made entirely new? In the first few years of relocations, reinventions and redirections set in place many of the tropes that have defined the world since. In 1947, production began of the Kalashnikov, Christian Dior created the New Look, Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex, the first computer bug is discovered, the CIA is set up, Hassan Al-Banna drew up the plan that remains the goal of jihadists to this day, and a UN committee was given four months to find a solution to the problem of Palestine.
What is money and why does debt exist? Where do wealth and inequality come from? How come economics has the power to shape and destroy our lives? An excellent primer, using stories to explain and question the drivers of society.
""The reason Varoufakis seems to have captured the imaginations of so many is that his words about the European crisis speak universal truths about democracy, capitalism and social policy." - Guardian
14-year-old Dita is confined in the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The several thousand residents of camp BIIb are inexplicably allowed to keep their own clothing, their hair, and, most importantly, their children. Fredy Hirsch maintains a school in BIIb. In the classroom, Dita discovers something wonderful: a dangerous collection of eight smuggled books. She becomes the books' librarian. Based on a true story.
A comprehensive exploration of the concepts behind eight centuries of development of specifically Japanese garden aesthetic. A beautifully produced book.
"The act of seeing, and the concentration of seeing, takes an effort. The gardens impose that effort on you if you want to see them. It's another way of ordering your vision, and it slows down your vision." - Richard Serra
>> See sample pages.
It's the end of the holidays for Mark, Annie and Pudding. They've spent the summer in a cottage on the edge of a forest in the countryside, but they haven't had any really exciting adventures to tell their classmates back at school... Until, on their final visit to see the Frog King of a nearby pond, they find a frightened young girl crying in the woods. The curiously named Macadamia tells them she has lost Clementine, and so the three children set out on a quest to find her. But they are not the only ones looking for Clementine, and a storm is approaching, bringing with it a night full of surprises.
A properly functioning city should be able to address the environmental, economic, and social challenges of the twenty-first century.
>> It is all a matter of tuning.
The neoliberal experiment has brought society and the environment to the brink of disaster (and for many, over the brink). But humans are characterised not as much by competitive individualism as by altruism and co-operation. How can these be built into a politics that addresses the crises the world currently faces?
Text and poetry by outstanding writers, atmospheric photography and memorable recipes from the Hawke's Bay vineyard/retreat/bistro known as Black Barn.
Postulates the Parthenon as the focus of cult rituals focussed on human sacrifice and emphasising the difference of Classical civiclisations from the succeeding Western Christian centuries.
A portrait of the late Stuart age, lavishly illustrated with art and objects associated with Pepys and his diaries.
Sleep is one of the most important aspects of our life, health and longevity and yet it is increasingly neglected in twenty-first-century society, with devastating consequences: every major disease in the developed world - Alzheimer's, cancer, obesity, diabetes - has very strong causal links to deficient sleep. Until very recently, science had only cursory answers to the questions of why we sleep, what good it served, and why its absence is so damaging to our health. Can increasing the amount and quality of our sleep improve our lives?
An Auckland city father's won account of his life, from his birth in Edinburgh in 1817, and covering much of the civic development of Auckland, lavishly illustrated throughout with artworks from his collections.
An impressive collection of masks, costumes, instruments, set paintings and objects provides an excellent introduction to the practices of Noh and Kyogen threatre and their importance in Japanese cultural history.
Scott is one of New Zealand's favourite and longest-serving political cartoonists, columnists and satirists. Find out about the many unsuspected facets of his life.
When his attempt to invade England as King of Scotland ended in defeat by the Republic's forces at the Battle of Worcester in 1651, Charles managed to elude capture (despite the difficulty in disguising such a recognisable man) for over six weeks and escape to exile in Europe.
When Frank is rescued from bullies by the misfit Nick, she makes a friend whose possession of strange secrets leads Frank to discover there is more to life than she had thought.
"Extraordinary. As moving, strange and profound as Skellig." - Guardian
Looking at people who like looking at birds tells as much about people as about birds. Brunner has written an interesting history of an obsession.
"An exquisitely beautiful book. These stories about birds are ultimately reflections on the curious nature of humanity itself." - Helen Macdonald (H is for Hawk)
Includes an excellent selection of rarely seen exemplars of veteran workwear. Lots of fresh style inspiration here.
In the decade since Yunus first began to articulate his ideas for a new model of economics, thousands of companies, nonprofits, and individual entrepreneurs around the world have embraced them. From Albania to Colombia, India to Germany, newly created businesses and enterprises are committed to reducing poverty, improving health care and education, cleaning up pollution, and serving other urgent human needs in ingenious, innovative ways. Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in alleviating poverty.
Can the Russian classics provide guidance on the personal conundrums of modern life? Possibly. Fun.
Kupe! Thomas Brunner! Freda du Faur! Kieran McKay! Kelly Tarlton! Other people!
Actor Tom Hanks cherishes his collection of vintage typewriters so much that he has written seventeen stories, each featuring a vintage typewriter.
>> A love affair with vintage typewriters.
A very full history of and guide to the notable India Pale Ales of the world.
An observant farmer, Young suggests that there is much we can learn from cattle.
"Delightful. It alters the way one looks at the world."- Alan Bennett
Featured publisher: HARD PRESS
Hard Press is an independent publishing house committed to publishing peripheral and experimental writing not limited to, nor benefiting from, any established convention.
>> Visit the Hard Press website.
Dan Nash's collection of poetry and drawings explores the possibilities of the mind and writing in the liminal space before sleep. Filled with violence, fantasy and tenderness, these prose poems are as unsettling as they are absurdly comical, perverting our desires, the momentary banality of life, and possibilities of poetic meaning.
Manon Revuelta’s collection of poetry and prose writing Girl Teeth conspicuously explores her relationship to the past and its interventionist hum on in the present. Coupling the openness of poetic imagining with intimate essayistic portraits of progenitors, this collection exposes the mechanics of language, the body, and how we might imagine a place in the world with all that has come before to which we’re bound.
The only words generally accepted to be actually written by Cleopatra VII of Egypt herself are “ginesthoi” or “make it so”, signing off a series of tax exemptions for Publius Canidius, one of Mark Antony’s generals. Although the exemptions and privileges are unromantic, and ordinary enough for a Ptolmaic court, the legendary and literary loading of the relationship between Cleopatra and Antony freight these words with subtexts and implications that exceed their denotation. The correlation or disjunction of inclination and obligation, of power and desire, of declaration and implication are themes that run also through Ginesthoi, a collection of poems by Evangeline Riddiford Graham published by the tiny and interesting Hard Press in Auckland. Presented as a series of fragments, much in the manner of the scraps of text discovered by archeologists, these poems are partial unearthings of an emotional life as intent upon concealing itself as it is upon revealing. What are we make of these twists of words, half earnest, half mocking, leaping back and forth across millennia, overlapping past and present while simultaneously reinforcing and dissolving the distinction between the two? There are two moments of awareness, one sealed in the past, encased in a museum cabinet or a memory, isolated from its context but preserved beyond a healthy span, resonating compulsively in its isolation until it has become little more than this resonation, and the other pausing in the present, gazing at the artefact in its current out-of-context context, attempting to make contact with the past moment, the past awareness or experience, to catch its eye, to pretend that the past reciprocates the gaze, or glimpse, or at least entertains the possibility of such a gaze or glimpse, to make believe, even to believe, if one can make oneself believe, that one can be not only aware of oneself in the past but that that past self can be somehow aware of the present self being aware of it, a game of memory working in both directions. In fact this is what we always do with memory: we are caught in a trap of tense, completed actions in the past are restrained there, playing in our memories or in our imaginations, if memories and imaginations can be distinguished from one another, but sealed in the perfect tense, whereas, though our present awareness may enter this case, cast itself backwards, project itself into the past, it can do so only at the expense of losing the capacity to act, to make things different to any effective degree. Expression is always ambivalent: to share a thought is to isolate oneself, to shut oneself within that thought; or, rather, perhaps, expression is quadrivalent: to share a thought is to shut oneself within that thought but, as the sharing of a thought is dependent upon a medium which necessarily replaces whatever is it applied to, both for the one to whose thought the medium is applied and the one, either specified or more generally implicated, to whom the sharing is directed, the act of sharing creates always a counterfeit artefact, at best a gloss, or label, upon the authenticity it causes to be lost. If poetry is the archeology of subjective experience, the poems of Ginesthoi are artefacts with all the clarity, obscurity and productive ambiguity of the papyrus fragment of Cleopatra VII to which they so playfully refer. {Review by THOMAS}
>> Some photographs from Evangeline Riddiford Graham's recent reading at VOLUME.
Our latest NEWSLETTER (21.10.17).
Find out what we've been reading.
Find out what's happening at VOLUME on N.Z. BOOKSHOP DAY.
Find out about some interesting new releases.
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