 | The Alarming Palsy of James Orr by Tom Lee {Reviewed by STELLA} This strange gem of a book will leave you laughing and unsettled. James Orr, successful project manager, father and husband, wakes one morning to find himself oddly changed. Something is amiss. The victim of Bell’s Palsy, he’s told nothing much can be done, that time will see him right. Unable to speak coherently and looking a little disturbing, he takes sick leave. Now he’s at home, confined to the idyllic New Glades Estate, a housing development of forty-eight identical homes surrounded by ancient woodland, with views over the woods and north to the city skyline, a neighbourhood committee and perfect for the model family. As James’s affliction lingers longer than expected he finds himself depressed and anxious. Work, a central part of his existence, carries on without him, with his projects farmed out to colleagues. His family is self-reliant: his wife not only carries on with her roles but picks up his as well as James sleeps through the days and is weirdly wired and wakeful at night. As the days go by, his behaviour becomes more erratic. He gets ousted from his chair role on the residents' committee and takes to wandering the paths of the woodland. His friends and neighbours treat him with either pity or suspicion. The novel is searingly funny, poking fun at the model urban lifestyle and the small power-plays of the neighbourhood hierarchy. But what is really wrong with James Orr? His marriage is already at a crisis point, his work is meaningless and his relationships with those around him superficial. At some point, he’s become redundant or the world has become something that moves around him. The former structure of his days is no longer relevant as he sees himself sidelined by his illness. From being a fully occupied member of his world he’s been pushed to the sidelines to the point at which he is looking in as though through an opaque glass. Tom Lee’s The Alarming Palsy of James Orr is a fascinating description of a man pushed aside by an affliction. Whether this is a purely physical or a psychological one, the reader will be the judge. Lee gives us a searing jolt in the final pages - one that will make you start reading again, looking through a different lens. |
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Ice by Anna Kavan {Reviewed by THOMAS}
The progressive limitation of the habitable world by advancing cliffs of ice constitutes the only real development in Anna Kavan’s final, uncomfortable, remarkable novel, Ice. In what passes for, or stands in for, a plot, and with what pass for, or stand in for, characters, an unnamed man pursues an unnamed woman in endless iterations. He finds her everywhere he looks but the closer he gets to her the harder she is to see. The ‘girl’ (as he refers to her) is never more than a projection, inaccessible to the fantasist, objectification without object, idealised victim for his fantasies of violent possession. “She always appeared as a helpless victim, her fragile body broken and bruised. There dreams were not confined to sleep only, and a deplorable side effect was the way I had come to enjoy them.” The ‘girl’ is mostly ‘kept’ by either her husband or a by man known as ‘the Warden’, themselves plausibly projections of the narrator, their cruelty towards her the outward expression of the narrator’s desires until such time as he can assume these cruelties for himself. Until such time, the narrator cannot manage to be anything but an observer. He is ineffectual, pursuing the ‘girl’ but incapable of closing the gap between them, eschewing opportunity at the last moment. The actions taken by others are projections of his desires, desires that obliterate the ‘girl’, although she is perhaps less obliterated by projection and objectification than she is a dimensionless creation of that projection and objectification. “It was clear that the Warden regarded her as his property. I considered that she belonged to me. Between the two of us she was reduced to nothing: her only function might have been to link us together. I felt an indescribably affinity with him, a sort of blood-contact, generating confusion, so I began to wonder if there were two of us.” The pursuit and abuse of the ‘girl’ is narrated in countless iterations and variations, some of which would be inaccessible to the narrator unless they are his fantasies or the husband and the Warden are his projections. Many of the narrative branches terminate, perhaps at the girl’s death, leaving the narrative to return and pick up at an earlier point, the slipped stitches undermining the reader’s trust of the text. Just as there are no characters as such who could fulfil the reader’s expectations of characters by manifesting either depth or change, there is no plot development, the narrative endlessly overwriting itself, reinforcing, obscuring and reinforcing itself in a palimpsest written ultimately on the body of the girl, the receiver of wounds. The entire work constitutes an exposition of a deplorable psychological pattern that pervades swathes of literature and society. The narrator avows his role, he feels cheated when others harm the girl: “I was the only person entitled to inflict wounds.” The girl, so to call her, represents “a passive attitude, suggestive both resistance and resignation.” The narrator both exemplifies and abhors his role as oppressor, he envies the peaceful song-filled life of the gentle indris lemurs, about whom he is writing a study, but he knows that their life is beyond his reach: “I knew that my place was here, in our world, under sentence of death, and that I would have to stay here and see it through to the end. I was committed to violence and must keep to my pattern.” The girl’s tears “did not seem like real tears. She herself did not seem quite real. She was pale and almost transparent, the victim I used for my own enjoyment in dreams.” The girl is not real, she is constituted by violence, she loathes the world of the lemurs, anathematic to the complex of which she and her many-faced oppressor are the exemplar. The characters have no history or purpose other than to enact the disease they represent. The narration, in the first person, is a vehicle for an impersonal subjectivity. The repeated eruption of the unconscious into the narrative destroys causality and character and makes development impossible, leaving the narrative curiously disengaged, reminding me somewhat of Kafka’s The Castle. The characters are at once both subject and object, incapable of gaining traction when traction is most intended, animated by suppressed mechanisms that underlie much of literature and art. As the book progresses the walls of ice close around the narrator and the girl, drawing them closer together, “a sheet of sterile whiteness spreading over the face of the dying world, burying the violent and their victims together, obliterating the last trace of man and his works.” Very occasionally in the book, the reality of the ice is destabilised, such as when the narrator glimpses the town he is in, not in ruins and being crushed by ice but bathed in sunshine. The ice is not so much the ice of Ballardian cli-fi, though it is this too, but moves with the force of metaphor (encroaching ice is a motif often experienced by ‘Arctic explorers’ such as Kavan who have long-term heroin addictions (forty years in her case (Kavan identified with the fatally doomed, passive girl in this novel (she also lived for almost two years in New Zealand, acutely aware of her proximity to the Antarctic ice)))). As the ice comes nearer, the girl becomes yet “thinner and paler, more transparent, ghostlike. It was interesting to watch.” When all else has been obliterated by the ice, the narrator and the girl are finally forced into actual contact in a beach house surrounded with wilted palm trees covered in rime. Kavan then provides three endings on top of each other: does the narrator pursue the girl into the ice, where they perish; does he attack her and leave her for dead; or does he reform (“I wondered why I had waited so long to be kind to her”) and flee with her towards the last unfrozen, equatorial zone? This last ‘happy’ option is so implausible as to finally erase the narrator, who retains only the reassuring weight of the gun in his pocket.
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NEW RELEASES
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What is it like, and what are the costs (to oneself and to others), for someone to live an artistic life without compromise? Told is a wide range of voices and styles, this is a remarkable novel in which the margins of life in modern India dissolve into something even stranger. From the author of the Booker-short-listed Narcopolis.
"This novel is a rich harvest. It moves with the strange and flawless certainty of a dream. It is superbly written and its madness is also its strength." - Edna O'Brien
>> "I have a liver condition, I'm reckless and I'm very aware that time is limited."
>> 15 reasons not to become a poet.
Steven's gifts as a poet include the ability to isolate ordinary details as connective routes between times, places and modes of experience. His poems bristle with the particulars of life in the shabby backstreets of Dunedin, but pull with them an allegorical load of illuminating subtlety.
A lightly fictionalised graphic memoir describing a young artist's experiences working in a diner frequented by drunks, junkies, thieves and creeps.
Pond will be appearing during Writers Week at the New Zealand Festival this month.
The absolutely new edition of Vitamin D is packed with recent examples of artists pushing at the edges of the medium.
A fascinating history of the independent territory that, from the 13th to the 17th centuries, resisted (bloodily) integration into either Scotland or England.
Books by Peter Sis are always beautifully and distinctively illustrated. In Robinson, a boy who is shunned by his classmates for dressing as his hero Robinson Crusoe instead of as a pirate like everyone else, persists with enjoying what makes him special until his classmates are attracted to it too.
Debunks the idea that there is no longer such a thing as nature as distinct from society, or that such a distinction no longer matters. Quite the contrary: in a warming world, nature comes roaring back, and it is more important than ever to distinguish between the natural and the social. Only with a unique agency attributed to humans can resistance become conceivable. From the author of the remarkable Fossil Capital, which examined the links between our economic system and the climate crisis.
Seabrook's accounts of his wanderings around the Kentish coast forces English culture to roll over and reveal its dark underbelly.
"I guess you'd call it psychogeography, though this doesn't begin to capture its intense interest, its uncanny spookiness, the way it ensnares you, turning your stomach, messing with your head. A fugitive sort of book, twitchy and mournful, All the Devils Are Here demands to be reread, picked over, endlessly discussed - and yet to know it is somehow not to know anything at all." - Observer "An alternate English history." - Iain Sinclair
Finding the details in these iconic paintings will enable young children to approach artwork fully open to its rewards.
Did the writers who left New Zealand during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries need to do so to achieve success? What was the nature of their connections to the New Zealand they left behind? What was the experience of those who returned?
The Beast Player by Nahoko Uehashi $22
One girl links beasts with humankind. She has the power to save them both. Or to destroy them. Erin's family have an important responsibility: caring for the fearsome serpents that form the core of their kingdom's army. So when some of the beasts mysteriously die, Erin's mother is sentenced to death as punishment. With her last breath she manages to send her daughter to safety. Alone, far from home, Erin soon discovers that she can talk to both the terrifying water serpents and the majestic flying beasts that guard her queen. This skill gives her great powers, but it also involves her in deadly plots that could cost her life.
"For twenty-five years, Fekete relentlessly monitored Europe's far right while the continent's leaders preferred to look away. With right-wing extremism finally recognised by the mainstream as a fundamental threat to Europe's future, her indictment of those who enabled, amplified, and aided the rise of the hard right is an essential contribution to the defense of democratic values." - Arun Kundnani
Although later made an icon of 'rugged individualism', the American cowboy was a grossly exploited and underpaid seasonal worker, who waged a series of militant strikes in the generally isolated and neglected corners of the Old West.
On the island of Neverness, youngsters battle through mazes to secure kisses from local girls, a baby is born with a wing for an arm, strangers arrive in the middle of the night, and inhabitants fashion fiddles to play the music of their grief.
"I was thoroughly absorbed. Zoe Gilbert's invented folk-world is sensuous and dangerous and thick with magic." - Tessa Hadley
A good introduction to authentic French cooking techniques.
>> Here they are.
>> And here.
In answering a lot of silly questions about what can and cannot be done in the kitchen, rather a lot of useful information about cooking is conveyed. A funny and attractively illustrated introduction to kitchen culture for young readers.
>> Some spreads here.
When 95 percent of the earth's population disappears for no apparent reason, Mira does what she can to create some semblance of a life: she cobbles together a haphazard community named Zion, scavenges the Piles for supplies they might need, and avoids loving anyone she can't afford to lose. Four years after the Rending, Mira's best friend, Lana, announces her pregnancy, the first since everything changed and a new source of hope for Mira. But when Lana gives birth to an inanimate object - and other women of Zion follow suit- the thin veil of normalcy Mira has thrown over her new life begins to fray.
The orchestra have somehow got scattered around the world. Can you help the conductor to use the clues on their postcards to find them and get them all together?
In Tudor times, heretics, either Protestant or Catholic depending on the wind of current orthodoxy, were relieved of their lives at Smithfield (later to become the famous meat market).
"Deeply researched and fascinating." - Spectator
Every year on St Stephen's Day, Wren Silke is chased through the forest in a warped version of a childhood game. Her pursuers are judges - a group of powerful and frightening boys who know nothing of her true identity. If they knew she was an augur - their sworn enemy - the game would be up. This year, the tension between judges and augurs is at breaking point. Wren's survival, and that of her family, depends on her becoming a spy in the midst of these boys she fears most and using her talent, her magic, to steal from them the only thing that can restore her family's former power for good.
What are the lines of connection between scientific theory and economic realities? Caudwell’s controversial book offers an astute and enduring diagnosis of the maladies of bourgeois epistemology.
Set in the unique landscape of the Camargue in the South of France during WW2, this book tells the story of a young autistic boy who lives on his parents' farm among the salt flats, and of the flamingos that live there. There are lots of things he doesn't understand: but he does know how to heal animals. He loves routine, and music too: and every week he goes to market with his mother, to ride his special horse on the town carousel. But then the Germans come, with their guns, and take the town. Everything changes.
Can a reassertion of humanist rationalism help us to overcome our current woes?
"Words can hardly do justice to the superlative range and liveliness of Pinker's investigations." - Independent
"A singular achievement. Sheehan is masterful in her presentation of the dialectics of nature debates, which begin with Engels and recur throughout the periods covered by this book." - Science and Society
From the early psychedelic work to recent production, with Glaser's own commentary, this book marks half a century at the forefront of graphic design.
>> He's got a website.
A picture book to introduce young readers to this pioneer of computing (1815-1852).
Match the flower cards with the flower history cards.
A wonderful pictorial introduction to Chinese characters.
>> The method is superb.
>> The Chineasy website.
An illustrated look at the interplay of gender and dress in the workplace.
>>"Dressing like a woman means wearing anything a woman deems appropriate and necessary for getting her job done." (excerpt)
>> Men wore clothes to work, too.
New and selected stories from the 30-year career of this American master acutely aware of the uneasy impact of humans on the natural world.
A detailed investigation, including floor plans, elevations and diagrams, of responses to specific locational demands around the world.
Mix and match halves of fantastical beasts from around the world to make new fantastical beasts. Fun.
>> Sample pages.
>> Read Stella's review.
>> "Time, love and the slippery nature of memory."
>> Julian Barnes on the art of fiction.
>> Julian chats with Clive.
>> "Barnes writes with such shattering emotional acuity."
>> Thoughtful answers to interesting questions from Spanish students.
>> The author's website.
>> Mixed doubles, a long tradition.
>> Julian Barnes at VOLUME.
 | The Only Story by Julian Barnes {Reviewed by STELLA} If you enjoyed Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, then you should put his latest novel high on your list (and if you haven’t read either, do). The Only Story describes a relationship, a love story, over several decades. Like in The Sense of an Ending, we enter the head of a man looking back at his relationship from its inception to an end he would not have prescribed. Paul is nineteen, home from university during the summer months and bored by the suburban dulldom in finds himself stuck in. When his mother suggests joining the local tennis club, he does it with a sense of irony, hardly expecting to meet anyone who isn’t a ‘Charlotte or a Hugo’ as he aptly titles the local players. But a mixed double competition sees him paired with the captivating Mrs Susan Macleod. “We are facing one another. I feel at the same time baffled and at ease. She is wearing her usual tennis dress, and I find myself wondering if its buttons undo, or are merely ornamental.” The first part of this book recalls their meeting and subsequent progression to the status of lovers. Told in both the older man’s voice looking back (with all its accumulated knowledge) and from the younger Paul’s perspective, Barnes allows us a glimpse into Paul’s naivety and the rush of first love coupled with dismissive asides to the reader from Paul the older. “The time, the place, the social milieu? I’m not sure how important they are in stories about love.” There are the heartfelt confusions and passions of a young man in a relationship with a woman thirty years his senior juxtaposed with Paul’s unwillingness or inability to reveal all from the privilege of hindsight, with his sometimes flippant commentary. "I never kept a diary...So I'm not necessarily putting it down in the order that it happened. I think there's a different authenticity to memory and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and shifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer". A much less able writer wouldn’t pull this off, but for Barnes it is seamless. The second part of the book looks at Paul's and Susan's life together as a couple in London. Susan has left her husband, but never goes as far as divorcing him or sorting out their shared property. We are never told why she retains her ties to this marriage, one which occurred more out of convenience or duty than love, yet as the story unfolds we get a glimpse of the reasons. Paul's and Susan’s story is a love story like any other, yet there are cracks in the veneer. Susan is a mystery in many ways to Paul, yet, obsessively in love and fiercely loyal, he is either oblivious or unwilling to see aspects that don’t fit his ideal of Susan. When he does, this is torment, and his inability to help her drives him to abandon their relationship. In the third part, we meet Paul - a successful middle-aged man who holds himself emotionally apart, contemplating the opening lines of this book, “Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question”. |
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Concrete by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS}
In a single wonderful book-length hysterical paragraph, Rudolph, Bernhard’s narrator, a middle-aged invalid both incapacitated by and sustained by his neuroses, obsessed with writing his great work on the composer Mendelssohn Bartholdy but of course incapable of even beginning to write, neurasthenically procrastinating and irritated, riven by every possible ambivalence, unable to write whilst his sister is visiting and unable to write unless she is present, hating his sister but dependent upon her, needing his home but stifled by it, rants about everything from making too many notes to the idiocy of keeping dogs. Bernhard’s delineation of an individual whose interiority and isolation has attained the highest degree is flawless, devastating and very funny. No sooner has Rudolph made a categorical assertion than he begins to move towards its opposite: after describing the cruelty of his sister towards him, we become increasingly aware of her concern for him and his mental state; no sooner does he attain the solitude of his grand Austrian country home (soon after the book opens he makes the categorical assertion, “We must be alone and free from all human contact if we wish to embark upon an intellectual task!”, a common fallacious predicate that one commonly inclines towards but which subverts one’s ends (he follows this swiftly with another self-defeating assertion: “I still don’t know how to word the first sentence, and before I know the wording of the first sentence I can’t begin any work.”)) than he is absolutely certain that he must travel to Palma if he is to write his book on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Towards the end of the book, we learn that Rudolph did indeed go to Palma, where he is writing this account (instead of his work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy) after learning of the recent suicide of a young woman he had met there on a previous occasion following the death of her husband (who was discovered fallen onto concrete beneath their hotel balcony). Such was the isolation of Rudolph’s interiority that he was incapable of taking timely action to help the unfortunate young woman, though it was easily within his means to do so, incapable of making authentic human contact, stifled by his own ambivalences and self-obsession (the undeclared ironic tragedy being that he may possibly have returned to Palma in order to help the young woman but that he is of course too late, her suicide triggering the self-excoriation that comprises the book).
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Sometimes you need more than a pencil and paper.
Come and browse our display of books on writing, or click through to reserve the books you need.
A very enjoyable set of writing classes presented graphically, especially good for those who appreciate the cross-fertilising potential of visual and verbal creativity.
"Words connect the visible track to the invisible thing, like a fragile makeshift bridge cast across the void." Calvino explores what he regards as the cardinal virtues of literature: Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude and Visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth, but Calvino died while writing this book). Very thoughtful.
"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
Cortazar's novels and short stories ignited a whole generation of Latin American writers, and had an enthusiastic following through the Americas and Europe. In this series of masterclasses he discusses his approach to the problems and mechanisms of fiction writing: the short story form, fantasy and realism, musicality, the ludic, time and the problem of 'fate'.
"Anyone who doesn't read Cortazar is doomed." - Pablo Neruda
Useful and fun, this workbook will help you think about your writing in different ways, and find ways to incorporate it into your daily routines.
In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth. How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell?
"Karr is a national treasure-that rare genius who's also a brilliant teacher. This joyful celebration of memoir packs transcendent insights with trademark hilarity. Anyone yearning to write will be inspired, and anyone passionate to live an examined life will fall in love with language and literature all over again. " - George Saunders
Prompts! Exercises! Encouragement!
>> Podcasts!
Writing effectively is partly a matter of not making common mistakes and partly a matter of learning a few key skills.
On the use of collage journaling to prepare the mind for writing.
Doodle, daydream and discover your creativity - then write hard into the wild land of your imagination.
Young creative types can use this book to accelerate their ideas for stories, animations, graphic novels, films, books, &c (and have a lot of fun, too).
A very useful guide for writers, especially on the aspects of a work, such as structure, that should go unnoticed by the reader.
>> Read an excerpt.
"A master class in writing. Every sentence sparkles. A superb book." - Kirkus
"Matchless teaching from a master of the form—seductive, trustworthy and endearingly modest." - Helen Garner
Notable for its range of writing exercises devised specifically for those writing for children.
Fifty writing exercises and countless triggers. Great stuff. Includes contributions from Elanor Catton, Curtis Sittenfeld, Emily Perkins, David Vann, Elizabeth and Sara Knox, Dora Malech and Kirsty Gunn.
"An insightful guide to the stages of writing fiction and memoir without falling into common traps, while wisely navigating the writing life, from an award-winning author and longtime teacher.
A book-length master class." - The Atlantic
A pharmocopoeia of cures for writer's block, plotting and characterization issues, and other ailments writers face when completing a novel or memoir, prescribed by the director of creative writing at Ohio University.
Writing exercises, topics such as the personal and cultural threshold, the four forces that animate poetic language, tactics of revision, ecstasy and engagement as motives for poetry.
Contributions from James Brown, Elizabeth Knox, Tina Makereti, Damien Wilkins, Bill Manhire, Charlotte Wood, Ashleigh Young and Hera Lindsay Bird.
Interesting and enjoyable considerations of storymaking from the author of 'His Dark Materials', 'The Book of Dust', 'Sally Lockhart', &c.
Take one small banal story about a man on a bus and a remark about a button, and rewrite it ninety-nine times according to different constraints, from sonnet to antiphrasis, from onomatopoeia to metaphor, from Dog Latin to double entry, from the gastronomical to the abusive, and you come up with a book that is inventive, erudite and very funny. Raymond Queneau is a verbal acrobat of the first order. Reading this book is to attend a circus of rigours - be prepared to be exhilarated.
Advice on writing, love, sex, suffering, writing (again) and the nature of advice.
“Who owns the words? Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us. Though not all of us know it, yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.” At once iconoclastic and appropriative (most of the book is comprised of unattributed quotes from everyone from from Burroughs to Barthes, from Plutarch to Picasso, from Thoreau to Joyce), Shields maintains that actuality provides sufficient material for creative pursuit and that nothing needs to be (or can be) a game of 'let's pretend'. Shields is bored with the novel, he is fed up with the made up, he wants more immediacy, less artifice, more pace, he wants to be a ‘wisdom junkie’, he wants to feel really alive, he longs to escape his jaded state in the arms of the lyric essay or the memoir. Shields is against fiction (at least in the way it is generally understood), but he is ambiguous about 'reality', too: "There are no facts, only art." As an impassioned call for relevance, excitement and innovation in literature, Reality Hunger makes a challenge that deserves to be met.
A good overview of the purpose, qualities and potentials of a novel, with consideration of 101 novels from the entire history of the form.
A useful handbook for trimming the fat from your prose, leaving it lean, toned and fit for any purpose.
>> Is your writing flabby or fit? Take the test.
An excellent diary with deadlines, writers' events, tips and ways to keep yourself both motivated and organised.
NEW RELEASES
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
An alcoholic film-maker approaches an elderly woman for an oral-history documentary. The woman declines, but tells the film-maker that if she can stay sober for four days she will tell her a story, and other stories beyond that. What emerges is not just a personal story of heartbreak, but something much wider and deeper.
"Masterful. A meditation on storytelling itself." - Daily Telegraph
"A story about telling old stories again, and never quite settling the truth of a childhood long last. This is a delicate, beautiful novel, filled with tender details and sharply evoked, lyrical moments." - Spectator
"There is the most extraordinary sensibility in this book. It is the author's but she gives it to the reader as thirteen year old Paul's out of kilter, isolated, yearning perception. Denied love, this vulnerable boy floats, adrift, through Paris like a lost, living ghost. We see - and feel - through his eyes, and the experience is unsettling, unnerving, strangely delicious. Alicia Drake has achieved something very rare." - Tim Pears
"The enfant naturel of Henry James's What Maisie Knew and Deborah Levy's Swimming Home." - Anne Korkeakivi
This excellent novel, set on the dges of the post-punk music scene of Lanarkshire in the early 1980s, displays remarkable resonance with that of New Zealand in the same period.
"Many of the chapters would work as brilliant standalone short stories." - Guardian
"I wanted to live in this book." - Kim Gordon
>> Read an excerpt.
>> A playlist of appropriate Scottish post-punk tracks.
>> And another (more 'easy listening') playlist.
>> Interview with David Keenan.
What are the root metaphors used by all cultures to impose meaning on the world? Why do we classify ad arrange and divide as we do? What do the ways we think imply for our capacity to face the challenges in what we might like to think of as our future?
An outstanding graphic novel on the miseries (and opportunities) of academia and the epiphanies of procrastination. When Jeanne is accepted on to a PhD course, she is over the moon, brimming with excitement and grand plans - but is the world ready for her masterful analysis of labyrinth motifs in Kafka's The Trial? At first Jeanne throws herself into research with great enthusiasm, but as time goes by, it becomes clear that things aren't quite going according to plan.
"This is a book for anyone who has ever laboured under a deadline, battled a stubborn pig of a boss, or half drowned beneath a wave of bureaucracy and paperwork. Put off what you intended to do today and go out and buy it, right now." - Guardian
Democracies die in three stages: the election of an authoritarian leader, the concentration and abuse of governmental power and finally, the complete repression of opposition and citizens. Following the election of Donald Trump in the US, the first stage seems fulfilled. How can the two following stages be averted?
About the Size of the Universe by Jón Kalman Stefánsson $35
A modern Icelandic saga, spanning the whole twentieth century, and kind of companion-piece to the Man Booker International short-listed Fish Have No Feet.
"Powerful and sparkling. Translator Philip Roughton's feather-light touch brings out the gleaming, fairy-tale quality of the writing." - Irish Times
"Stefansson's prose rolls and surges with oceanic splendour." - Spectator
Food and drink are only pretexts for the real business of a restaurant, which is a jostling for and display of social positioning, and a calibration of functional politics, both withing the staff and in relation to the customers. Ribbat takes us across the dining room and into the kitchen to disentangle the social functions of the restaurant.
Good.
A very interesting account of a transformative time spent as a border control officer on the Mexican-US border.
"This book tells the hard poetry of the desert heart. If you think you know about immigration and the border, you will see there is much to learn. And you will be moved by its unexpected music" - Luis Alberto Urrea
>> "This is work that endangers the soul."
>> "Caught up in the deportation fight."
Political Tribes: Group instinct and the fate of nations by Amy Chua $24
Do our group identities matter more to us than any political issue? Is tribalism a better model to understand both the successes and idiocies of recent political situations than any overarching theory of historical development?
"A beautifully written, eminently readable, and uniquely important challenge to conventional wisdom." - J. D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy
On Trust: A book of lies by James Womack $28
Poetry is often regarded as a confessional medium, conveying deeper 'truths' about the poet and their experience. This collection playfully destabilises this preconception, severing the 'I' of a poem from the 'I' of the poet, and assailing such lazy concepts as reliability, sincerity and authenticity.
Long-listed for the 2018 Dylan Thomas Prize.
Do our group identities matter more to us than any political issue? Is tribalism a better model to understand both the successes and idiocies of recent political situations than any overarching theory of historical development?
"A beautifully written, eminently readable, and uniquely important challenge to conventional wisdom." - J. D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy
Poetry is often regarded as a confessional medium, conveying deeper 'truths' about the poet and their experience. This collection playfully destabilises this preconception, severing the 'I' of a poem from the 'I' of the poet, and assailing such lazy concepts as reliability, sincerity and authenticity.
Long-listed for the 2018 Dylan Thomas Prize.
Young & Damned & Fair: The life and tragedy of Catherine Howard at the court of Henry VIII by Gareth Russell $28
A reassessment of the life and role of Henry's fifth wife, from their marriage in 1540 to her beheading less than two years later following one of the more outstanding scandals of Henry's reign.
Fun fact: The night before her execution, Catherine Howard spent many hours rehearsing laying her head upon the block.
Becoming Unbecoming by Una $48
This graphic novel is an indictment of sexual violence against women in all its guises - from the 12-year-old protagonist's classroom to the Yorkshire Ripper case on her television set.
How Money Got Free: Bitcoin and the fight for the future of finance by Brian Patrick Eha $27
Is Bitcoin the way in which the libertarian right will achieve their goal of collapsing the state?
This graphic novel is an indictment of sexual violence against women in all its guises - from the 12-year-old protagonist's classroom to the Yorkshire Ripper case on her television set.
Is Bitcoin the way in which the libertarian right will achieve their goal of collapsing the state?
If cognitive enhancement, smart drugs and electrical stimulation can increase our mental performance, just what is intelligence?
Can You Die of a Broken Heart? A heart surgeon's insight into what makes us tick by Nikki Stamp $33
What is the relation between the physical and metaphorical function of the heart?
The Three Rooms in Valerie's Head by David Gaffney and Dan Berry $40
Serially unlucky in love, to feel better Valerie imagines that her previous boyfriends are dead and that their bodies are kept downstairs in the cellar in a strange, mummified state. Every day she brings them upstairs and speaks with them about what went wrong. Funny and sad.
“One hundred and fifty words by Gaffney are more worthwhile than novels by a good many others.” — The Guardian
Lyla by Fleur Beale $19
The Christchurch earthquakes and their aftermath as seen through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old student.
The Only Girl in the World by Maude Julien $38
Subjected to dreadful ordeals (such as holding an electric fence without flinching) by her fanatical and controlling father, who was convinced his daughter would be an exemplar of a new order of humanity, Julien love of nature and, particularly, of literature somehow enabled her to remain sane.
Mechanica: A beginner's field guide by Lance Balchin $27
A steampunkish selection of robotic animals constructed at the end of the 23rd century to replace the lamented ex-fauna of Earth.
Is This Guy For Real? The unbelievable Andy Kaufman by Box Brown $35
A graphic biography of the actor and comedian who made a career out of making himself contemptible to his audience.
Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a classic, The world of A.A. Milne and E.H. Shepard by Annemarie Bilclough and Emma Laws $60
Full of facsimiles of artwork and early editions, and giving an understanding of how the books came into existence.
What is the relation between the physical and metaphorical function of the heart?
Serially unlucky in love, to feel better Valerie imagines that her previous boyfriends are dead and that their bodies are kept downstairs in the cellar in a strange, mummified state. Every day she brings them upstairs and speaks with them about what went wrong. Funny and sad.
“One hundred and fifty words by Gaffney are more worthwhile than novels by a good many others.” — The Guardian
The Christchurch earthquakes and their aftermath as seen through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old student.
Subjected to dreadful ordeals (such as holding an electric fence without flinching) by her fanatical and controlling father, who was convinced his daughter would be an exemplar of a new order of humanity, Julien love of nature and, particularly, of literature somehow enabled her to remain sane.
A steampunkish selection of robotic animals constructed at the end of the 23rd century to replace the lamented ex-fauna of Earth.
A graphic biography of the actor and comedian who made a career out of making himself contemptible to his audience.
Full of facsimiles of artwork and early editions, and giving an understanding of how the books came into existence.
Attack of the 50 ft. Women: How gender equality can save the world by Catherine Meyer $20
>> A vision of the future? 
The REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE for small presses.
There are some excellent books on the just-announced 2018 short list.
It takes approximately an hour and a half to fly from Berlin to Paris. Upon that hour and a half, a human memory, especially one working at neurotically obsessive speed, can loop a very large amount of time indeed, an hour and a half is plenty of time to go over and go over the things, or several of the things, the unassimilable things, that happened in Berlin, in an attempt to assimilate those things, though they are not assimilable, in an attempt, rather, albeit an involuntary attempt, to damage oneself by the exercise of one’s memories, to draw self-blame and self-disgust from a situation the hopelessness of which cannot be attributed to anything worthy of self-blame or self-disgust but which is sufficiently involved to exercise the self-blame and self-disgust that seethe always beneath their veneer of not-caring, of niceness, the veneer that preserves self-blame and self-disgust from resolution into anything other than self-blame and self-disgust. Upon this hour and a half can be looped, such is the efficacy of human memory, not only, obsessively, the unassimilable things that happened in Berlin but also much else that happened even into the distant past, but, largely speaking, the more recent things that have bearing upon, or occupy the same memory-pocket, not the best metaphor, as the unassimilable things that happened in Berlin, for disappointment and failure seldom happen in a vacuum but resonate with, even if they are not the direct result of, disappointments and failures reaching back even into the distant past, self-blame and self-disgust having the benefit, or detriment, if a difference can be told between benefit and detriment, of binding experiences to form an identity, and, not only this, upon that hour and a half can be looped also an endless amount of speculation and projection as to what may be occurring in the minds of others, or in the mind of, in this case, a specific other, a German-American pianist and composer with whom the narrator, who has been visiting Berlin with her sister, has had some manner of romantic encounter, so to call it, the extent of which is unclear, both, seemingly, to the narrator and, certainly, to the reader, the reader being necessarily confined to the mental claustrophobia of the narrator, on account of the obsessive speculation and projection and also the inescapable escapist and self-abnegating fantasising on the part of the narrator, together with the comet-like attraction-and-avoidance of her endless mental orbit around the most unassimilable things that happened in Berlin, or that might have happened in Berlin, or that did not happen in Berlin but are extrapolative fantasies unavoidably attendant upon what happened in Berlin, untrue but just as real as truth, for all thoughts, regardless of actuality, do the same damage to the brain. Lefebvre’s exquisitely pedantic, fugue-like sentences, their structure perfectly indistinguishable from their content, bestow upon her the mantle of Thomas Bernhard, which, after all, does not fall upon just any hem-plucker but, in this case, fully upon someone who, not looking skyward, has crawled far enough into its shadow when looking for something else. Where Bernhard’s narrators tend to direct their loathing outwards until the reader realises that all loathing is in fact self-loathing, Lefebvre’s narrator acknowledges her self-loathing and self-disgust, abnegating herself rather for circumstances in which self-abnegation is neither appropriate nor inappropriate, her self-abnegation arising from the circumstances, from her connection with the circumstances, from her rather than from the circumstances, her self-abnegation not, despite her certainty, having, really, any effect upon the circumstances. Not at all not-funny, pitch-perfect in both voice and structure, full of sly commentary on history and modernity, and on the frailties of human personality and desire, providing for the reader simultaneous resistance and release, Lefebvre shares many of Bernhard’s strengths and qualities, and the book contains memorable and effective passages such as that in which the narrator recalls playing tennis with her mother-in-law, now her ex-mother-in-law, and finding she is not the type for ‘collective happiness’, or her hilariously scathing descriptions of Berlin’s Sony Centre or of Brecht’s house, now a restaurant, or of the narrator's inability to acknowledge the German-American pianist-composer's wife as anything but 'the accompaniment', or, indeed many other passages, but the excellence of the book is perhaps less in the passages than in the book as a whole. I will be surprised if I read a better book this year. {THOMAS}
If a thought is thought it must be thought through to its end. This formula is productive both of great misery and of great literature, but, for most people, either consequence is fairly easily avoided through a simple lack of tenacity or focus, or through fear. Unfortunately, we are not all so easily saved from ourselves by such shortcomings. The narrator of Ariana Harwicz’s razor-fine novel Die, My Love finds herself living in the French countryside with a husband and young child, incapable of feeling anything other than displaced in every aspect of her life, both trapped by and excluded from the circumstances that have come to define her. She both longs for and is revolted by family life with her husband and child, the violence of her ambivalences make her incapable of either accepting or changing a situation about which there is nothing ostensibly wrong, she withdraws into herself, and, as the gap separating herself from the rest of existence widens, her attempts to bridge it become both more desperate and more doomed, further widening the gap. Every detail of everything around her causes her pain and harms her ability to feel anything other than the opposite of the way she feels she should feel. This negative electrostatic charge, so to call it, builds and builds but she is unable to discharge it, to return her situation to ‘normal’, to relieve the torment. In some ways, the support and love of her husband make it harder to regain a grip on ‘reality’ - if her husband had been a monster, her battles could have been played out in their home rather than inside her (it is for this reason, perhaps, that people subconsciously choose partners who will justify the negative feelings towards which they are inclined). The narrator feels more affinity with animals than with humans, she behaves erratically or not at all, she becomes obsessed with a neighbour but the encounters with him that she describes, and the moments of self-obliterative release they provide, are, I would say, entirely fantasised. Between these fantasies and ‘objective reality’, however, falls a wide area about which we and she must remain uncertain whether her perceptions, understandings and reactions are accurate or appropriate. At times the narrator’s love for her child creates small oases of anxiety in her depression, but these become rarer. Harwicz’s writing is exquisite, both sensitive and brutal, both lucid and claustrophobic, her observations both subtle and overwhelming. As the narrator loses her footing, the writer ensures that we are borne with her on through the novel, an experience not dissimilar to gathering speed downhill in a runaway pram*. (*Not a spoiler.) {THOMAS}
Darker With the Lights On by David Hayden (Little Island Press) $32The act of writing is an act of forgetting as much as it is an act of memory. Description replaces experience, if there was experience there to start with, or otherwise description precludes the experience described, permitting experience only of itself. The pencil’s mark obscures whatever line it traces. That which is described becomes digestible as text, becomes definite, finite and defined. Whatever is described becomes ersatz, the currency of exchange between a writer and a reader, the tin chip passed between parties to a language game, pretending understanding, pretending being understood, the cosiest, most intimate of couplings. How reassuring to have one’s expectations fulfilled by text, but how tiresome, this pact-as-habit, this plethora of detail, this obsessive mentioning that enervates the experience that gets obscured by words. But every signifier has its limit. Every mentioned thing is mentioned at the exclusion of another thing, the excluded or unincludable thing that pushes the mentioned into view while remaining, carefully, out of sight, hidden in the place of greater force, unseen, unfaced, the unseeable and unfaceable warping the mentioning by exerting its weight upon it from behind. A reader has no business to supply anything beyond the text, but also has to complete the text with nothing but their own paltry store of experiences to supply the meanings of the words. How to proceed? How to read the unseen mechanics behind but not referred to by the text? The reader too has ungraspable weights that can be induced to rise and touch the undersurface of the text, pressing up upon it as those of the author press down, two sides of one skin, the text the shared rind of two ungraspable depths, if there are such things as depths, otherwise, without depths, a synclastic and anticlastic flexing of the only surface, two dimensions modelled in a third. If it is what is excluded that potentises text, if it is what is destroyed by writing that makes writing do what writing does, then the stories of David Hayden in Darker with the Lights On move like the sharpened tip of a great black crayon as it scribbles out all memory and knowledge. Not in these stories the reassurance of the expected, nor that of continuity or clarity. Answers are not given, perhaps withheld, though withholding requires an existence for which no evidence ensues, but we are participants in the ritual taking away of knowledge, the deanswering of questions, itself a sort of understanding. Many of the stories concern themselves with the tensions between memory and perception, between two times running concurrently, memory snarling on details and producing not-quite-narrative but a stuttering intimation of the vast force of passing time. What unfaceable calamity bridged the idyll of memory with the torment of the present? In ‘Dick’, for me, perhaps, the most memorable story in the collection, the main character is buried to the waist in the sand, declaring snippets of memory, of idyll even, like some character shoved from Beckett to somewhere beyond the apocalypse, declarative not in Beckettian wearidom and decline but in extremis, the object of some cruelty, disoriented by their own presence, spouting words such as those that may have spoken by the condemnee in Kafka’s ‘Penal Colony’ reading aloud the words as they are inscribed into his flesh by the harrow. It often seems Hayden’s characters’ backgrounds are withheld not only from the reader but seemingly also from the characters themselves. They are being dememorised by their stories, or they exist, as perhaps we all do, with great voids where stories could be expected to be. But stories come from somewhere, unseen, and visit themselves upon us. “There were stories everywhere. Stories in the body, stories in and out of time, stories in the chosen and the unchosen, stories under glass, stories under water, stories under flesh, hot and cold, stories in tumult and silence.” Remembering and inventing contest the same attention, preclude each other but find themselves indistinguishable from one another, as a matter of course in fiction, more problematically so in the lives of writers and of readers. The characters are disoriented but grasp at every chance to climb into, or out of, some awareness: “He senses his head thinking, his trunk big and loose, his delicate fingers flickering at the ends of his arms and decides that he is conscious: real.” The stories’ worlds are composed of granules of awareness, snatches of phrases forced out against their silencing. Reading is akin to viewing through a narrow tube: the perspective is limited but the focus is immense. What is not seen is always there, deforming what is seen, but unglimpsable, unassailable beyond the vertigo of any attempt to look in its direction. Hayden produces a spare disorienting beauty on the level of the sentence. His admixture of restraint, even paucity, and excess, produces a surrealism truncated rather than efflorescent, its effects cumulative rather than expansive, a surrealism not the furthest expression of surrealism’s usual tired romantic literary inclinations but of their opposite, their extinguishment, not the surrealism of dreams but of the repetitive banging of the back of the head as the reader is dragged down a flight of steps, their eyes either closed or open. {THOMAS}
It is overwhelmingly, facetiously tempting to call Gaudy Bauble a detective novel, principally because it is one (a fake detective novel is just as much a detective novel as a non-fake one, if there can be such a thing as a non-fake detective novel). In Gaudy Bauble the detectives, so to call them, never actually detect anything, they never leave their flats (except for dental repairs, &c), they are effectively ineffectual, placebos, and, when the lost budgerigar that triggered the investigation, so to call it, returns, it is not due to any detecting on their part. “Is not detective work labelling work?” states a voice, presumably that of P.I. Belahg, a writer mainly not writing the script for a television series seemingly entitled Querbird, being filmed by Blulip, Belahg’s lesbian Gilbert-and-George-like double, a film-maker whose ideas change faster than they can be realised. The investigation gains no traction not because there is a lack of evidence but because there is too much. Everything is evidence of something (or of everything). The investigation gains no traction because it is too thorough. The details are too much evidence to amount to anything in particular, only to everything. Every detail, every association, every etymological permutation, every taxonomy, every history, every identity is interrogated and dissolved, every distinction is ruptured, the narrative, so to call it, constantly derailed by detail and by the refusal of detail to retain a fixed identity. In total flux, attributions and prescribed identities function as little more than costumes (clothes have more stable identities than persons), everything mentioned becomes activated by that mentioning, becomes a protagonist, pulls the plot, so to call it, towards it, off course, if it could be said ever to have had a course, or to be a plot. The world, after all, consists not of plot, which is always a fictive result of arbitrary interpretation of an unjustifiably normative kind, but of details, details about which little of certainty can be said without making similarly normative transgressions against their true nature, which lies not in identity but in momentum. In flux, in the tohubohu which is the natural state of all entities and from which entities become exiled at the moment they become entities, the state to which all entities long to return, the only certainty that can be maintained is that of momentum, if a certainty can be maintained at all. Gaudy Bauble retains all the excitement and pace and rigour of a detective novel. More and more characters appear, change names, blur their distinctions, overwhelm the narrative from locations in its margins or beyond: “There can never be too many crackpot agents. There could never be too much hyperactive riffraff interfering with events.” The dichotomy between the performative and the authentic is constantly ruptured, as if this dichotomy were a wall set to measure and constrain us, against which it is our nature to rebel, to seek release into illimitable inclusivity. The conflation of the performative and the authentic manifests in a doubling of entities, not only of P.I. Belahg and Blulip, but of the actual and the representation: budgerigar and statuette, tooth and denture, the characters and their appearances on the TV show Querbird. All categories are in flux. There may be a lost budgerigar, a broken tooth, statuettes, and so forth, but these categories are not exclusive of other categories, and tend always, by ontological clinamen, towards these categories. This ontology, since something must be said, or since the author, in choosing to write the novel, has put it about that something must be said in order for the novel to be written, makes language the territory in which this clinamen, this queerness in the nature of the particles, will in this instance be traced. All presences, all absences, all substances, all entities, all dissolutions, all metamorphoses, all wounds and all healing of wounds, are exercises of language, are both problems of language and solutions to these problems of language. Waidner, with nothing more constrained than hyperactive brilliance, somehow combines the register of Janet & John or the Teletubbies with that of specialist academic obscurantism without being anywhere between these poles, for only the extremes are worth conflating. At times there are similarities of rhythm with texts written under lipogrammatic or other artificial constraints, or with the lyric style of Mark E. Smith, or with impromptu dramatic performances using only the text of foreign-language phrasebooks (recommended). “Might sea urchin odontogenesis, fully understood, provide the biochemical tools to transform mainstream prosthodontics?” But, really, the book is quite unlike anything else, and is an exemplar of the sort of enjoyable and uncompromising queering experiment at the edge of literature and with the substance of literature itselfthat literature so desperately needs if it is to open new potentials within itself. When the novel comes to a (sort-of) end, new, more fluid entities have been achieved in a game of ‘real-life’ Exquisite Corpse, the budgerigar has returned, the momentum of the investigation has been expended. “The truth is the only thing left now. The truth ate everyone else alive.” {THOMAS}
A sprawling but incisive retelling of King Lear, set against a backdrop of tradition, misogyny and corruption in modern India.
Long-listed for the Republic of Consciousness Prize.
>> Modern rewritings of King Lear tend to have Lear the CEO of a corporation. See also Dunbar by Edward St. Aubyn.
This collection from centres upon the difficulties of communication and the way thoughts may never be fully communicable and yet can overwhelm you. Attrib. celebrates the tricksiness of language just as it confronts its limits. The stories are littered with the physical ephemera of language: dictionaries, dog-eared pages, bookmarks and old coffee stains on older books.
"Vividly imagined instants of mental disarray." - Guardian
>> Attrib. has been awarded the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize!!
>> Read Thomas's review (below).
>> The author reads an extract and you listen.
>> "It's a book about time. It's a book about detail."
>> "Visionary power." - James Wood
>> "Why is it always a girl who is missing?"
>> Reservoir 13 won the 2017 Costa Novel Award.
>> "McGregor has revolutionised the most hallowed of mystery plots."
>> Also read McGregor's The Reservoir Tapes: 15 back-stories of characters in Reservoir 13.
THOMAS'S REVIEW:
 | Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor
There are thirteen reservoirs in the moors above the village in central England near which a thirteen-year-old girl disappears, reservoirs that must be continually monitored and repaired if they are to continue their function and withstand the effects of time. The girl separates from her parents and disappears. Reservoir 13 seems at first as if it might be going to be a sort of thriller, but if it is a thriller it is an infinitely dissipated thriller, a thriller infinitely slowed (the book is thirteen years long without any resolution for the fate of the missing girl). The mode of expectation built in the reader, however, cannot be discharged, the suspense of a thriller is not lessened but transposed, heightening our awareness of every detail of this novel, this archive of the minutiae of human behaviour and of the natural world, this essay in the great, awful equivalence of all things, in which each breakfast, the behaviour of each bird is freighted with significance, but not with the sort of significance from which plot is usually built. Not only is this book a thriller that overturns the expectations of a thriller while still achieving the effects upon the reader of a thriller, it is a novel that overturns the expectations of a novel (plot, protagonists, ‘viewpoint’, shape, interiority, &c) while achieving the effects upon the reader of a novel. Written scrupulously in the flat, detached, austere tone of reportage, infinitely patient but with implacable momentum, a slow mill grinding detail out of circumstance, a forensic dossier on English rurality, the novel is comprised of detail after detail of the human, animal and vegetative life in a small rural community over thirteen years. The narrative, so to call it, shifts, within paragraphs, from subject to subject, or, rather, from object to object (there is an ambiguity of agency to the term ‘subject’), the persons, the nature, the seasons all particles borne on and changed by the awful impersonal force of time. McGregor’s swift, precise sentences heighten our awareness and make every detail, every observation first beautiful and then, cumulatively, horrific, with the horror of time passing, of the great destructive central force of nature that is time. Time suffocates the mystery of the girl’s disappearance, and, in McGregor’s forensic description, everyday life and the rhythms of nature of a community in which a crime may have been committed become more terrifying than the possible crime itself, whatever it may have been. Each detail is indeed a clue, but not a clue towards the solution of a crime so much as a clue towards understanding the kind of world in which this crime, whatever it was, if a crime was committed, a crime against a young woman, even a child, could be committed, and in which such a crime seems to have no real consequences. The crime may be submerged beneath the accretion of quotidian concerns but the increasingly panic-inducing alertness for clues spreads out upon the whole countryside and the whole community, infecting them with suspicion, even culpability for unspecified and even indefinable crimes, for guilt is not predicated upon crime. McGregor writes with terrible understatement, cumulatively insinuating suspicion and distaste upon his characters. We are first drawn in, then repelled, then detached. As detail is heaped upon detail, as the narrative focus becomes more and more diffuse, as each season is repeated, as the characters move closer to and further away from each other, as agency is grasped at and relinquished, as time deprives them of their situations and capacities, as the tone of the novel becomes flatter, if possible, as the events, such as they are, become less and less interesting, largely through repetition, certainly less and less consequential, the reader is not bored, as might be expected, but more and more fascinated and appalled, caught in the awful forward, or, worse, circular motion, not wanting to miss a word, a sentence, a clue to what becomes an existential crime. The guilt for every disappearance, for all harm, for all loss, for each act done or not done, lies with time. Everything will be erased. Everything will be lost, but, even worse, everything will continue.
|
 | Witchfairy by Brigitte Minne and Carl Cneut {Reviewed by STELLA} When you want to fall into a picture and enter the world of a character without even reading a word, you know that you have been beguiled by some very luscious images. From the moment you pick up this book, you will be entranced. The cover and title invite you in, although with some caution as you contemplate the blue-black woods and the word witch. But there is also the word fairy with its dream-like airy qualities and a rich floral carpet which a child, cherub-faced and determined, roller-skates through. She’s heading towards the edge of the book cover. Yet more temptation: follow her and open the book. In the first paragraph we are introduced to Rosemary, a fairy, who has received a wand for her birthday, something all darling fairy children want, but not Rosemary, who is most put out. When you want roller-skates, a stupid magic wand is a disappointment. Her mother wants her to be like the other fairy children, who clutch their special toys, wands and handbags; who have the bows nicely tied in their hair, their pretty hats and frocks just so. They are sweet and have little tea-parties and tête-à-têtes just so. “They ate their cake without making crumbs. They drank tea without spilling a drop...They told only the sweetest stories with their honeyed voices.” Rosemary’s mother says no to roller-skates, worried about falls and nosebleeds, and the disgrace of the being a fairy whose hat might be askew or dress dirtied. Rosemary declares, much to her mother’s horror, “I want to be a witch”. And no one can persuade her to change her mind. Exasperated, her mother declares that witches cannot live in golden turrets - they live in the wood, so Rosemary packs her bags and flies away. Her mother knows she’ll be back soon. The witch’s wood is gloriously dark compared with the pink, red and white pages of the fairy castles. Yet it is the perfect place for Rosemary. She builds a treehouse and a boat and forages for berries and nuts. She explores the forest, which has wonderful carpets of flowers, all in hues of red - a red which has become a signature colour for the illustrator and is commonly called ‘Cneut-red’. She meets the witches, who are delightfully drawn with angled faces, grey hair and long pointed noses in contrast to the fairies who have rosy cheeks and small pert noses. We first see the witches poking their heads out of the river watching Rosemary. Are they dangerous? Author and illustrator make us wait a few pages to find out the true nature of the witches. They are kind and generous, reminiscent of kindly aunts and grandmothers, welcoming and encouraging Rosemary. They give her roller-skates and teach her how to ride a broom. Life in the woods is good and Rosemary is having a ball. Minne deftly uses words. You can almost hear Rosemary stamp her foot in defiance, even though this is never described. You can feel Rosemary’s wistful wantings even though these are not explicitly said. Minne’s skill as a writer, combined with Cneut’s illustrations, his ability to render facial emotions and to use colour, the warm reds and the cold blue-blacks to intensify those emotions and the tension inherent between Rosemary’s two worlds, will make Witchfairy a new favourite for many. Yet is the content that takes it that next layer deeper. Witchfairy tells the story of a girl who feels out of place, who doesn’t want to be what she was born to. The world of golden turrets isn’t for her - she wants to run and chase the wind, to get grubby and play a few tricks. Being a witch is a fine thing, but Rosemary wistfully looks up at the moon and wonders about her other life. And Rosemary’s mother misses her so much, she decides to visit her. They find out together who Rosemary is: neither fairy nor witch but a combination of both, a witchfairy. This is a charming adventure about a curious young child and her desire to be herself, as well as a mother’s acceptance and love of her child in whatever guise that takes. |
We have reviewed some of our favourite picture books for The Sapling, the New Zealand website dedicated to conversations about children's books. Click though to read the reviews and to browse their excellent website.
Charco Press is a new publisher of contemporary literature in translation from Latin America. Based in Edinburgh, Charco is run by Argentinian-born Carolina Orloff and New Zealand-born Samuel McDowell. Click through to visit their website and learn more about these authors and their books. Their first five titles are all from Argentina:
If a thought is thought it must be thought through to its end. This formula is productive both of great misery and of great literature, but, for most people, either consequence is fairly easily avoided through a simple lack of tenacity or focus, or through fear. Unfortunately, we are not all so easily saved from ourselves by such shortcomings. The narrator of Ariana Harwicz’s razor-fine novel Die, My Love finds herself living in the French countryside with a husband and young child, incapable of feeling anything other than displaced in every aspect of her life, both trapped by and excluded from the circumstances that have come to define her. She both longs for and is revolted by family life with her husband and child, the violence of her ambivalences make her incapable of either accepting or changing a situation about which there is nothing ostensibly wrong, she withdraws into herself, and, as the gap separating herself from the rest of existence widens, her attempts to bridge it become both more desperate and more doomed, further widening the gap. Every detail of everything around her causes her pain and harms her ability to feel anything other than the opposite of the way she feels she should feel. This negative electrostatic charge, so to call it, builds and builds but she is unable to discharge it, to return her situation to ‘normal’, to relieve the torment. In some ways, the support and love of her husband make it harder to regain a grip on ‘reality’ - if her husband had been a monster, her battles could have been played out in their home rather than inside her (it is for this reason, perhaps, that people subconsciously choose partners who will justify the negative feelings towards which they are inclined). The narrator feels more affinity with animals than with humans, she behaves erratically or not at all, she becomes obsessed with a neighbour but the encounters with him that she describes, and the moments of self-obliterative release they provide, are, I would say, entirely fantasised. Between these fantasies and ‘objective reality’, however, falls a wide area about which we and she must remain uncertain whether her perceptions, understandings and reactions are accurate or appropriate. At times the narrator’s love for her child creates small oases of anxiety in her depression, but these become rarer. Harwicz’s writing is exquisite, both sensitive and brutal, both lucid and claustrophobic, her observations both subtle and overwhelming. As the narrator loses her footing, the writer ensures that we are borne with her on through the novel, an experience not dissimilar to gathering speed downhill in a runaway pram*. (*Not a spoiler). {Review by THOMAS}
>>Die, My Love has just been short-listed for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
>>Die, My Love has just been short-listed for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
Fireflies by Luis Segasti $30
How do we make our histories? Why is it that memory assembles certain illuminated moments into a kind of story? Segasti is fully aware that each moment in life or literature is an amalgam of numerous stories and times, all having bearing on a moment's experience, and concocts this novel with, among other referents, dashes of Joseph Beuys, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Japanese poets and Russian cosmonauts.
How do we make our histories? Why is it that memory assembles certain illuminated moments into a kind of story? Segasti is fully aware that each moment in life or literature is an amalgam of numerous stories and times, all having bearing on a moment's experience, and concocts this novel with, among other referents, dashes of Joseph Beuys, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Japanese poets and Russian cosmonauts.
On the eve of an important battle, a colonel is visited in his tent by an indigenous woman with a message to pass on. A man sets about renovating the house of his childhood, and starts to feel that he might be rebuilding his own life in the process. At a private clinic to treat the morbidly obese, a caregiver has issues of her own. Stories of immigration, marginality, history, intimacy and obsession from an acclaimed Argentinian author.
In a nameless suburb in an equally nameless country, every house has a room reserved for the president. No one knows when or why this came to be. It’s simply how things are, and no one seems to question it except for one young boy. Can anyone - the narrator? even the reader? - be trusted to tell the truth? Overtones of Cortázar and Kafka potentise the sinister mystery surrounding the room that is both many rooms and no room.
A Buenos Aires slum is transformed into a tiny utopia when a transvestite is led by a divine revelation to steer the community. The lively separatism of the shantytown attracts and then subsumes a journalist at first intent only on a story.
>> Read an extract.
>> Meet the Publisher.
NEW RELEASES
A few of the interesting books that arrived this week.
In a strange but possibly possible future Ireland where it never stops raining and where violence is the chief currency, the Kid, having fallen in love with the Earlie King's daughter, vows to care for their babby (although he is only 13). A lively and inventive novel from a fresh Irish writer.
"Mashing ancient myth with a miserable future, Denton’s fierce and distinctive debut should set the books world alight." - Irish Times
When an aging musician's reaches out to a feral child, he begins to question the borders between civilised and wild, between acceptable and unacceptable, and between natural and unnatural. Ecological aware, multileveled and beautifully written.
"Takes its place amongst Crace's finest novels." - Guardian
"The book blazes with anger." - Irish Times
River by Esther Kinsky $38
A woman moves to London and begins a series of walks along the River Lea, precisely recording what she sees. As the narrative progresses, the associative qualities of her experiences provide access to tributaries of memory, both personal and collective, reaching back to a place where stories seep into consciousness and collect themselves on the margins of experience.
"There’s a timeless quality to River. How much is fact and how much is pure fiction? It hardly matters. River exists in a hinterland between personal and universal strands of truth. Esther Kinsky has produced a minor-key masterpiece. Iain Galbraith’s English translation could well be one of the best new translations of 2018." — Asymptote
An anthology of examples of contemporary innovative and nonconforming literary forms in English emerging at the intersections of prose, poetry, art, performance, political activism; the whole being a sort of cultural resistance movement to ascendant nationalist and reactionary contexts.
In 1969, the four Gold children, Simon, Klara, Daniel, and Varya, visit a psychic on Manhattan’s Lower East Side who predicts the date each of them will die. The novel then follows how the siblings deal with the news. How does foreknowledge affect the choices we make? How would the way we live our life change as we approached what we knew to be its end?
"It's amazing how good this book is." - Karen Joy Fowler
How do we make our histories? Why is it that memory assembles certain illuminated moments into a kind of story? Segasti is fully aware that each moment in life or literature is an amalgam of numerous stories and times, all having bearing on a moment's experience, and concocts this novel with, among other referents, dashes of Joseph Beuys, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Japanese poets and Russian cosmonauts.
As Elissa Washuta makes the transition from college kid to independent adult, she finds herself overwhelmed by the calamities piling up in her brain. When her mood-stabilizing medications aren't threatening her life, they re shoving her from depression to mania and back in the space of an hour. Her crisis of American Indian identity bleeds into other areas of self-doubt: mental illness, sexual trauma, ethnic identity, and independence become intertwined. Compelling and inventively written, this is not only a portrait of a woman at the battle-front of her own life but a rethinking of the form of memoir.
On the eve of an important battle, a colonel is visited in his tent by an indigenous woman with a message to pass on. A man sets about renovating the house of his childhood, and starts to feel that he might be rebuilding his own life in the process. At a private clinic to treat the morbidly obese, a caregiver has issues of her own. Stories of immigration, marginality, history, intimacy and obsession from an acclaimed Argentinian author.
A very useful guide for writers, especially on the aspects of a work, such as structure, that should go unnoticed by the reader.
>> Read an excerpt.
On a small farm in Normandy, as Hitler rises to power in Germany, young Ludo comes of age in the care of his Uncle Ambrose, an eccentric mailman, kite-maker, and pacifist. Ludo’s quiet existence changes the day he meets Lila, a girl from the aristocratic Polish family who own the estate next door. Lila begins to reciprocate his feelings just as Europe descends into war. After Germany invades Poland, Lila and her family disappear, and Ludo’s journey to save her from the Nazis becomes a journey to save his loved ones, his country, and ultimately himself. A French classic, finally translated into English.
>> Romain Gary is a great big liar.
In a nameless suburb in an equally nameless country, every house has a room reserved for the president. No one knows when or why this came to be. It’s simply how things are, and no one seems to question it except for one young boy. Can anyone - the narrator? even the reader? - be trusted to tell the truth? Overtones of Cortázar and Kafka potentise the sinister mystery surround the room that is both many rooms and no room.
A man with a preternatural ability to find emerging artists, Richard Bellamy was one of the first advocates of pop art, minimalism, and conceptual art. At home both in New York's arts Bohemia and glittering upper-crust salons, Bellamy was a catalyst for fame for many artists in the mid-to-late twentieth century.
What was it like to have a body in the nineteenth century? How did attitudes towards bodies shape social practices? How did the physical particularities of individuals affect the course of collective history? Hughes will make you think differently both about historical personages and about life in the Victorian era.
"A dazzling experiment in life writing. Every page fizzes with the excitement of fresh discoveries. Each page becomes a window on to a world that is far stranger than we might expect." - Guardian
Interesting comparisons can be made to the work of Rita Angus and others practicing in New Zealand in the same period.
Generally regarded as the one of the purest examples of the Nouveau Roman novels of which Robbe-Grillet outlined the theory in For a New Novel (1963), Jealousy is narrated by an invisible uninvolved observer who can be postulated as the jealous husband of the character known only as A, whose suspicion that A. is having an affair with a neighbour constantly brings the reliability of the narrative into question. Robbe-Grillet's 'phenomenological' writing has a rigour and clarity still stands as an object lesson for contemporary writers.
What is the black spot that is spreading across a flamboyant gambler's vision? More importantly: what does it mean?
"The Blot sets a high bar for 2017's fiction. There are moments of genuine, inexplicable tenderness as well as the sarcasm, venality and schadenfreude that swirl around the book. It also shows that the genre best equipped to speak truthfully about the world we are in is not a flat-footed and sententious realism, but un-realism." - Scotland on Sunday
"The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it." Orwell's clarity of thought is a healthy tool in a post-truth world. Read what he has to say about freedom, ethics, honesty and propaganda.
Traces the fashion arcs of the 1960s and 1970s, when designers worked hard to keep pace with social change. Well documented with historical and garment photographs.
Returning to Iceland to visit his dying father, a writer thinks deeply about the passing of time and of life perched on an island of black lava pushed at on all sides by implacable ocean. In the memories of tte narrator and his father a century of change, both personal and cultural, becomes apparent.
Long-listed for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
"Powerful and sparkling. Translator Philip Roughton's feather-light touch brings out the gleaming, fairy-tale quality of the writing, making this novel an impassioned and lyrical read. Stefansson brings out the history of a place and its people in a way few contemporary writers ever manage." - Irish Times
The great epic poem, compiled by Lönnrot in the nineteenth century from Finnish and Karelian folklore and mythology, contains much that is very ancient and demonstrates an alternative path to consideration of the human condition, so to call it, especially in its relation to the forces of nature, so to call them.
In 1945, on the eve of his trial for the pro-Fascist broadcasts he produced in Italy, Pound was declared insane and committed to an institution, where he stayed for ten years, holding salons for visitors. Swift enters these uncomfortable waters to learn more about this strange man and about the relationship between his life and his poetry.
The so-called 'Buried Army' that so amazed the world when discovered in Shaanxi Province in 1974 continues to provide new insights into life and death in China in the late third century BCE, and to pose new questions.
A selection of the best food writing from 'The Poet Laureate of Appetite', and author of the hugely enjoyable The Raw and the Cooked.
"A celebration of eating well and drinking even better as a recipe for the good life." - Kirkus
A nicely presented new collection of stories in which Oates typically at once coolly condemns and warmly sympathises with her characters, their lives careening out of bounds.
A sensitively illustrated true story of a violin's survival of the horrors of both The Somme and Gallipoli, and of the collective efforts of ordinary soldiers to protect it and return it to its owner when they became separated.
A half-life's account of one man's struggles to understand himself through the intensities and regrets of his erotic fixations.
"A rewarding excavation about one man’s inner life, mapping out the way our emotional and romantic ties can shape our self-knowledge for the rest of our lives." - Lambda
"A Proustian tale of conflicted desires." - The New York Times
"The stakes could not be higher in this bloody, muscular and adrenaline-charged memoir from a pioneering heart surgeon. `Surgeons are meant to be objective,' Westaby tells himself, `not human'. What makes this book so fascinating, and so moving, is the terrible tension between these necessary qualities." - Sunday Times
Turn the flap and trace the outlines to complete the creatures in this madcap interactive tale of the meetings of similars.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #61 (10.2.18).
Read our latest NEWSLETTER. Find out what we've been reading. Find out about our after school book groups. Find out about this week's new releases. Find out about International Book Giving Day.
This week's BOOK OF THE WEEK is Lloyd Jones's new novel The Cage.
>> Read Thomas's review.
>> Jones discusses the book with Gregory O'Brien.
>> Radio from across the ditch.
>> Some book club notes!
>> If you're in Wellington on Tuesday 13th, go to the launch at Unity Books.
>> Jones wrote this book in anger over the ill-treatment and passivity Jones observed directed by ordinary citizens towards Syrian refugees in Hungary. Here are some other books at VOLUME dealing with the refugee crisis:
Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck (reviewed by Stella)
Charges by Elfreide Jelinek (reviewed by Thomas)
Mediterranean by Armin Greder (a powerful wordless picture book)
Violent Borders: Refugees and the right to move by Reece Jones
Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours by Slavoj Žižek
I Can Only Tell You What My Eyes See by Giles Duley
Refugee Boy by Benjamin Zephaniah
Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System by Alexander Betts and Paul Collier
The New Odyssey: A history of Europe's refugee crisis by Patrick Kingsley
Crossing the Sea: With the Syrians on the exodus to Europe by Wolfgang Bauer
The Bone Sparrow by Zana Fraillon
Illegal by Eion Colfer, Andrew Donkin and Giovanni Rigano
The Right to Have Rights by Alastair Hunt, Stephanie DeGooyer, Werner Hamacher, Samuel Moyn and Astra Taylor
The Quiet War on Asylum by Tracey Barnett
 {Reviewed by STELLA} | Han Kang's semi-autobiographical The White Book is a contemplation of life and death. It’s her meditative study of her sibling’s death at a few hours old, and how this event shapes her own history. Taking the colour white as a central component to explore this memory, she makes a list of objects that trigger responses. These include swaddling bands, salt, snow, moon, blank paper and shroud. “With each item I wrote down, a ripple of agitation ran through me. I felt I needed to write this book, and that the process of writing would be transformative, would itself transform, into something like a white ointment applied to a swelling, like a gauze laid over a wound.” Han Kang was in Warsaw - a place which is foreign to her when she undertook this project - and in being in a new place, she recalls with startling clarity the voices and happenings of her home and past. The book is a collection of quiet yet unsettling reflections on exquisitely observed moments. These capsules of text build upon each other, creating a powerful sense of pain, loss and beauty. Each moment so tranquil yet uneasy. Han Kang’s writing is sparse, delicate and nuanced. Describing her process of writing she states, “Each sentence is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time’s keen edges are constantly renewed. We lift our foot from the solid ground of all our life lived thus far, and take that perilous step out into the empty air.” You can sense the narrator’s exploration and stepping out into the unknown in her descriptions of snow, in her observations as she walks streets hitherto unknown, and in her attempts to realise the view of her mother, a young woman dealing with a premature birth, and the child herself, briefly looking out at the world. Small objects become talismans of memory, a white pebble carries much more meaning than its actuality. Salt and sugar cubes each hold their own value in their crystal structure. “Those crystals had a cool beauty, their white touched with grey.” “Those squares wrapped in white paper possessed an almost unerring perfection.” In 'Salt', she cleverly reveres the substance while at the same time cursing the pain it can cause a fresh wound. The White Book is a book you handle with some reverence - its white cover makes you want to pick it up delicately. A small hardback, the text is interspersed with a handful of moody black and white photographs. This is a book you will read, pick up again to re-read passages, as each deserves concentration for both the writing and ideas. |
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The Weight of Things by Marianne Fritz {Reviewed by THOMAS}
The degree of control any of us have over our life is undoubtedly, if measured against the degree of force bearing down on us in the form of history, negligible, but we are generally spared realisation of the full extent of this negligibility unless history rolls more heavily upon us, especially if we are constituted to, or are caused to, lie where its tread impacts uncushioned upon its path. History hits the unfortunate hardest: those at the bottom of the heap, so to call it, are society’s most expendable and the first to absorb the impact of the weight of things. Our social structures are largely concerned with positioning others to take our place in the way of approaching disaster. Marianne Fritz’s novel The Weight of Things is written is a brisk, almost satirical tone, yet it slowly, as it jumps back and forth in time, closing in on the pivotal act of the book, reveals depths of suffering and harm absorbed by its most vulnerable characters. What does it mean to survive when others do not survive? What does it mean to have a body following a disaster that deprived so many of theirs (and that continues to press itself towards the destruction of the bodies of the survivors)? Following the Second World War, Berta learns from Wilhelm that Rudolph, the music teacher whose child she carries, has been killed, and that Rudolph has charged Wilhelm to care for Berta. He marries her and she bears two children: Little Rudolph and Little Berta. The attention shown Berta by the two men draws the envy of Berta’s sister Wilhelmina, who is intent on poisoning the relationship and taking Berta’s place. The doubling of the characters’ names: Berta/Little Berta, Rudolph/Little Rudolph, Wilhelm/Wilhelmina serves to further depersonalise the forces that act through them, limited as they are in their capacities to understand those forces, as well as to manifest the contrapuntal musical structure of the novel. Wilhelm, with his job as a ‘chauffeur and come-hither boy’ for an aristocratic playboy, puts his employer’s interests before those of his family, and, with his ‘chauffeur philosophy’ (he extols the virtues of seeing obstacles early enough to avoid them), preserves his ignorance and passivity as Berta falls under the weight of things. Despite the love she expends on her children, Berta cannot see them ultimately as anything other than failed creations for which she is responsible, in a world in which a worthwhile life is impossible. The act she commits is so much a result of the mental collapse which manifests itself in her, though its mechanisms remain beyond her and opaque to her, that it is not inconsistent with her natural fatalism and resignation (the weight of things having conditioned her to its irresistibility). The frame narrative of this multitemporal novel has Wilhelm and Wilhelmina visiting Berta in the psychiatric hospital (or ‘fortress’) in which she is contained, where a final cruelty is visited upon her and she commits the ultimate resignation, demonstrating that more harm can be done to subjectivity that its removal from the world.
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