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Not to Read by Alejandro Zambra {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“I am writing with a great deal of ease and fluidity. One must distrust that,” wrote Clarice Lispector, quoted by the Chilean Alejandro Zambra in one of the essays in this highly enjoyable collection of literary observations on, ostensibly, some of the more interesting largely (but not exclusively) Latin American literature of the last quarter century, literature that distrusts, as Zambra dismisses, the clichéed fluidity of the ‘Magic Realists’ most readily (and lazily) associated with Latin American literature by Western readers. Zambra instead values literature that is hesitant, inventive, always aware of new possibilities, mentally and linguistically supple, striving always towards new forms. “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one,” wrote Walter Benjamin (not quoted by Alejandro Zambra (at least not in this book)). Because the reviews collected here are often of books the reader of Not to Read has not read and by authors with whom the reader (at least this reader) is unfamiliar, the reader at the outset may think they might skip quite a bit of the book, to make reading faster, but Zambra’s book is too interesting, too nicely written, and too enjoyable. There are indeed considerations of many authors the reader has not heard of, but the essays deliver the same fascination as reading Borges’s studies of nonexistent books (Borges thought it more worthwhile, and faster, to write about books that do not exist than to write the books themselves), with the added benefit that, just possibly, works by these authors may already be, or may one day be, available in English. At the very least, one reads to read about the writing and reading of texts, which is, after all, the most interesting thing to read about. The reader might have thought that skipping might save time, but the text runs so lightly and so sprightlyly that the reader is in any case carried forward more rapidly by following the text than they would have proceeded had it been possible to skip. The essays and reviews included inNot to Read also function as a sort of literary autobiography of Zambra himself, his concerns, approaches, influences and motivations, and provide a greater appreciation of his other work, direct yet subtle, playful yet poignant, personal yet politically and socially acute, compact yet wonderfully expansive. Zambra recommends books we are sure that we will like, even though we may never get to read them, but, more importantly, the reasons for his recommendations, his observations on and his responses to these books, provide a portrait of a reader we come quickly to admire, and who we as readers may well wish to be more like, as well as of a writer alert to the possibilities of writing. Zambra is frequently very funny, as he is in the title essay ‘Not to Read’, which starts out as a review of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Have Not Read, which Zambra has himself not read, and carries on to become a deliciously prickly lampoon of opinions formed of books without reading them, intercut with seemingly very valid reasons not to read some writers’ books. Zambra’s concision and lightness (Zambra is an exemplar of the literary qualities Italo Calvino thought most important in his Six Memos for a New Millennium) can produce beautiful sentences, such as this one on Santiago, quivering with a sensitivity that undercuts ease and fluidity and leaves us utterly aware: “It’s the city that we know, the city that would follow us if we wanted to flee from it (from ourselves), with its permanent architectural eclecticism, with the dirty river, almost always a mere trickle, cutting the landscape in half, with the most beautiful sky imaginable in those few days of autumn or winter after it rains, when we rediscover the mountains.” |
>> An interview with Bagieu about the book.
>> Watch Bagieu draw a mermaid.
>> An interview (in French).
>> Someone looks through the book.
>> Live illustration!
>> Other graphic novels by Bagieu.
NEW RELEASES
These books are in the building.
Three decades of the application of Moore's sharp and quirky mind to every cultural manifestation from books to films to politics (and back to books) has left this marvelous residue of essays and criticism.
>> "The route to truth and beauty is a toll road."
When Unn inexplicably disappears, Siss's world is shattered. Siss's struggle with her fidelity to the memory of her friend and Unn's fatal exploration of the strange, terrifyingly beautiful frozen waterfall that is the 'Ice Palace' are described in prose of a remarkable lyrical economy.
"How simple this novel is. How subtle. How strong. How unlike any other. It is unique. It is unforgettable. It is extraordinary." - Doris Lessing
"I'm surprised it isn't the most famous book in the world." - Max Porter
>> Read an excerpt.
>> 1987 film by Per Blom.
Oil paintings of stills from fail videos, apricots plucked from novels, a porn filmmaker memorialising her son, reasons why Hollywood doesn't cast poets in films. Visual art, poetry, prose, photography, music and comedy from emerging artists.
>> There's a playlist!
Arts and letters: Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor, Nick Ascroft, Joseph Barbon, Airini Beautrais, Tony Beyer, Mark Broatch, Danny Bultitude, Brent Cantwell, Rachel Connor, Ruth Corkill, Mark Edgecombe, Lynley Edmeades, Johanna Emeney, Bonnie Etherington, Jess Fiebig, Meagan France, Kim Fulton, Isabel Haarhaus, Bernadette Hall, Michael Hall, Rebecca Hawkes, Aaron Horrell, Jac Jenkins, Erik Kennedy, Brent Kininmont, Wen-Juenn Lee, Zoë Meager, Alice Miller, Dave Moore, Art Nahill, Janet Newman, Charles Olsen, Joanna Preston, Jessie Puru, Jeremy Roberts, Derek Schulz, Sarah Scott, Charlotte Simmonds, Tracey Slaughter, Elizabeth Smither, Rachael Taylor, Lynette Thorstensen, James Tremlett, Tam Vosper, Dunstan Ward, Susan Wardell, Sugar Magnolia Wilson, Kathryn Madill, Russ Flatt, Penny Howard. Results of the 2018 Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Award.
A fascinating insight into the vaguaries and extremities of Berlin's modern history as expressed through the lives of those living on a single street.
Winner of the European Book Prize.
Twenty-five years after his death, four women gather to share their memories of Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Russian Futurist poet whose subsequent uneasy relationship with the increasingly realist Soviet culture machine continued far past his suicide in 1930. In this novel, Mayakovsky's memory is contested on the eve of Stalin's death.
Applying avant-garde approaches to popular musical forms, from 1968 onward, Can opened a sort of crack to the creative unconscious through which flowed enormous amounts of musically liberating energy. This book is in two parts: a biography of the band by Young, and a symposium on musical experimentation by founding member Schmidt, and a consideration of the tentacular reach of the band's influence.
>> 'Halleluhwah' (1971).
>> Live in Soest (1970).
Graeber, author of the excellent Debt: The first 5000 years, argues the existence and societal harm of meaningless jobs. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless, which becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a worth ethic that associates work with self-worth. Graeber describes five types of bullshit jobs, in which workers pretend their role isn't as pointless or harmful as they know it to be: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. He argues that the association of labour with virtuous suffering is recent in human history, and proposes universal basic income as a potential solution.
>> Writing a book about bullshit jobs is not a bullshit job.
The third and final volume of this very valuable source of information about New Zealand's literary history. By the 1960s, Brasch, though very private by temperament, was a reluctant public figure, especially as editor of Landfall. He was also becoming a highly regarded poet, who eventually had six books to his name. Behind the scenes Brasch was increasingly important as an art collector and as patron and benefactor.. Among his friends Brasch counted most of the country's leading artists, writers and intellectuals including Sargeson, McCahon, McCormick, Stead, the Pauls, the Woollastons, the Baxters, Lilburn, Beaglehole, Angus, Oliver, Bensemann, Lusk, Frame and Dallas. These near contemporaries were joined by the talented young, many met as contributors to Landfall- including Gee, Cross, Shadbolt, Duggan, O'Sullivan, Hotere, Tuwhare, Caselberg, Middleton and Manhire. Brasch's lively and sometimes acerbic accounts of such people are a fascinating aspect of his journals. Behind the esteemed poet, editor and public intellectual, however, was a sensitive and often angst-ridden man, who confided his loneliness to his journals.
>> Volumes 1 and 2 are also available.
Poetry drawing its imagery and strength from Cullinane's Irish heritage and her New Zealand home.
"There is an elegance and poise and care in the language of these poems, an unobtrusive mastery and ease in their cadences and rhythms." - Vincent O'Sullivan
Who's hiding? Who's crying? Who's backwards? Te Reo edition.
During his years in a Zen monastery, Proteus has discovered an ability to connect, deep in his mind, with a spherical entity he calls Mosquito. When Mosquito disappears, Proteus sets off in search of answers, only to find that wisdom lies far away from sanity.
When a perfect stranger visits the five misfits, will he be able to inspire them to Achieve, or are they happy as they are, leaving him to look like a perfect fool?
A damning indictment of contemporary state security, this well-researched and cogently argued book looks at the mechanisms by which states, notably the UK and the US, deprive presumed radicals of citizenship, identity and human rights, and, in doing so violate the bases of these concepts for all.
The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy $35
Following Things I Don't Want to Know, this second installment of Levy's 'living autobiography' reveals a writer in radical flux, grappling with life and letters and re-establishing the positions of de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in a contemporary context.
Building on the work of previous biographers, Liedman creates a definitive portrait of Marx and the depth of his contribution to the way the world understands itself. He shines a light on Marx’s influences, explains his political and intellectual interventions, and builds on the legacy of his thought. Liedman shows how Marx’s Capital illuminates the essential logic of a system that drives dizzying wealth, grinding poverty, and awesome technological innovation to this day.
Recurrent financial crises, growing social inequality, and an increasing sense of the destructiveness of capitalism has fueled new interest in this thinker.
Revered throughout the Francophile world, France’s tradition of public intellectual engagement stems from Voltaire and Zola and runs through Sartre and Foucault to the present day. The intellectual enjoys a status as the ethical lodestar of his nation’s life, but, as Sand shows, the recent history of these esteemed figures shows how often, and how profoundly, they have fallen short of the ideal. Sand examines Sartre and de Beauvoir’s unsettling accommodations during the Nazi occupation and then shows how Muslims have replaced Jews as the nation’s scapegoats for a new generation of public intellectuals.
“Combining rigorous historical investigation and passionate political intervention is rare, yet it is precisely what Shlomo Sand has achieved in this well-informed, insightful book. The recent wave of reactionary, Islamophobic intellectuals in France—and elsewhere—has found one of its fiercest analysts. By re-examining the history of the ‘French intellectual’ in the longue durée, Shlomo Sand offers robust criticism of our present—and also helps us imagine how future forms of political intellectuality could emerge.” – Razmig Keucheyan
Follow the emperor penguin through snow, ice and bitter temperatures; watch as the great white shark swims 10,000 km in search of seals; track huge herds of elephants, on their yearly hunt for water and be amazed at the millions of red crabs, migrating across Christmas Island. Lovely illustrated hardback.
Clear recipes for delicious, healthy food.
A novel sifting the histories and stories of Australia's Great Ocean Road along the southern coast of Victoria, reaching back to the thinking of engineer, historian and philosopher F.B. Herschell, a minor player in the road's construction and deeply rooted in the narrator's experience of place.
"Shashi Tharoor is the most charming and persuasive writer in India. His new book is a brave and characteristically articulate attempt to save a great and wonderfully elusive religion from the certainties of the fundamentalists and the politicisation of the bigots." - William Dalrymple
Tharoor lays out Hinduism's origins and its key philosophical concepts, major texts and everyday Hindu beliefs and practices, from worship to pilgrimage to caste. Tharoor is unsparing in his criticism of extremism and unequivocal in his belief that what makes India a distinctive nation with a unique culture will be imperilled if Hindu 'fundamentalists', the proponents of 'Hindutva', or politicised Hinduism, prevail.
Neurosis is not an ailment but the dominant functional mechanism of our society. Medicalisation of neurosis has only provisionally put into into abeyance, but is increasingly ineffective. The essays in this book ask what we can learn about society through the modelling of neuroses, and what paths offer themselves to address the suffering entailed by both.
Who better than Questlove, musician and creative dynamo, to synthesise creative philosophies and provide the tools to focus your capacities in the direction you would like them applied?
>> ?estlove drum solo.
As our approach to mental illness has oscillated from biological to psychoanalytical and back again, so have our treatments. With the rise of psychopharmacology, an ever-increasing number of people throughout the globe are taking a psychotropic drug, yet nearly seventy years after doctors first began prescribing them, we still don't really know how or why they work - or don't work - on what ails our brains.
Beyond Manapouri: 50 years of environmental politics in New Zealand by Catherine Knight $40
“We’re on the cusp of significant shifts in our environment and our attitudes towards it – unfortunately we’ve squandered the opportunity to make incremental change in the area of climate change policy, for instance, and it’s now becoming more urgent to make changes that could have more brutal social and economic consequences." Catherine Knight
This book tracks the development of environmental politics from the 1960s, examines the legislation and establishment of institutions to safeguard habitats, and examines issues such as freshwater management, land use, climate change and the strengthening role of iwi and hapū in environmental management. Timely and important.
The history of milk is the history of human civilisation. From the author of Cod and Salt.
How We Desire by Carolin Emcke $38
Do we sometimes ‘slip into norms the way we slip into clothes, putting them on because they’re laid out ready for us’? Is our desire and our sexuality rather constantly in flux, evolving as we mature, and shifting as our interests change? Can our inner lives and our social roles ever be in harmony?
"Delicate and vulnerable, angry, passionate, clever and thoughtful. An amazing work." - Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
A series of essays springing from Chabon's experiences as a father and his attempts to enact meaningful communication with his children, attempts often stymied by his own unexamined generational prejudices and leading, ultimately, to a deep respect for his children.
A novel based on the author's ancestors' attempt to settle on Sunday (now Raoul) Island in the Kermadecs in the 1870s.
"Lord of the Flies as if written by Barbara Kingsolver." - Writers' Review
"A thrilling story of love and courage, brutality and hope all told with equal measures of deep humanity, imagination and elan. Lydia Syson has an amazing gift of bringing history alive through richness of language, dramatic pace and fabulous visual imagery." - Anne Sebba
>> The author on Radio NZ.
 | Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Who eats in a cage? Or with a caged mouth?” There is either writing or not-writing (even though not-writing may be as specific concerning what is not written and writing is concerning what is), and the dividing line between the two is not so much a wall as a cliff, an inequality more effective than a barrier. Anne Boyer’s collection of prose poems, Garments Against Women, is everywhere alert to the ways in which the world as experienced by those who live in it is riven by inequalities. Those who wield a power or who benefit from the wielding of that power have little perceptual overlap with those upon whom that power is wielded or who suffer from the wielding of that power, but, interestingly, the advantaged live in a world of more restricted truth, even though the disadvantaged may feel the effects of this restriction. This asymmetry acts as a constraint upon those to whom falls more heavily the burden of existing, “lives diminished by the arrangement of the world,” their time forced into objects and taken from them by what is termed an ‘economic system’. Boyer’s poems interrogate her relationship with objects, for instance the garments she sews or that she buys from thrift shops: “the fabric still contains the hours of the lives” - can these hours have their value restored? For whose benefit have these hours been put into objects? If “writing is the manufacture of impossible desires,” can we write of or read of objects without involving ourselves in the mechanisms by which time is taken asymmetrically from workers? Is it possible for an object to not exist except as a vicarious object, “an object which exists only as it might exist to another”? Are all objects more vicarious than not? “I am the dog who can never be happy because I am imagining the unhappiness of other dogs,” writes Boyer. How it is possible to write, even to imagine writing, even if one had the time to write, without writing ‘garments’ that are designed by and are to the benefit of those who have confined ‘writing’ in the narrow world of their advantage? Whose roles must be challenged and overhauled? “I will soon write a long, sad book called A Woman Shopping, writes Boyer, an self-described “addict of denial”, in the poem ‘A Woman Shopping’. “It will be a book about what we are required to do and also a book about what we are hated for doing.” Everyone is smothered by their role: “If a woman has no purse we will imagine one for her.” “Everyone tries to figure out how to overcome the embarrassment of existing,” but the real struggle is “not between actor and actor. It’s between actors and the stage.” Boyer’s poems provide subtle and often surprising insights into the relationships between individuals and their roles, desires and scripts, personal and societal misfortunes, struggle and survival, despair and surprising joy. Can writing effect real change? “I thought to have a name was to become an object,” writes Boyer. “I thought I was a charlatan. I was mistaken. I was not a charlatan, I was a search term.” |
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{STELLA}: In the lead up to my interrogation of crime novelists Alan Carter and Paul Cleave, I’ve been delving into the world of nasty criminals, psychopaths, serial killers, crooked (just bad) cops and a whole host of no-gooders - along with shocked bystanders, good, yet compromised, cops, and a few ethically staunch good detectives. There are suspects and victims, crime scenes and murder weapons. The most recent criminal activities on record are Marlborough Man by Alan Carter (you can read my review here) and A Killer Harvest by Paul Cleave. To begin my investigation I went back to the first in Cleave’s Christchurch crime noir series, The Cleaner. The premise sounded good: Joe the Janitor working at the police station - a simple fellow who goes unnoticed in the tense and busy world of criminal investigations and unsolved murders. Yet Joe knows more than he’s letting on: he’s got information the police would love to have about the man who's been labelled ‘The Christchurch Carver’. He knows about his penchant for knives, that he is methodical and thorough. The detectives are slow to see the pattern of victims and, when they do, they are hardly working together to solve the crime. There are dirty cops intent on their own pleasures. The clock is ticking, the media are demanding answers and they are no closer to finding the carver. The Cleaner would have been a very good straight crime story about a serial killer if it hadn’t been for the other factors that blow it out of the mold. These are Cleave’s tight writing, wry, if somewhat startling humour - Joe’s Mum is extremely memorable - and a woman named Melissa. And believe me, you will never look at a pair of pliers in quite the same way again! All Cleave’s books are set in Christchurch - the gritty underbelly of the garden city. Raw, nasty and eerie, it’s the perfect backdrop for serial killers, revenge and the dark internal worlds of both the crims and the cops. A Killer Harvest is aptly named. Blind and robbed of his family, Joshua believes he is cursed - that there is a family curse. When Joshua’s father is killed on the job, an opportunity arises for the teen to see. His father has gifted him his eyes. A successful operation changes the teen’s life - but at what cost? What does Joshua know, and what is he sensing? His dreams are confusing - he sees his father falling but he’s also inside his head looking out. Can cellular memory have anything to do with the images he’s seeing? There are secrets that maybe no one wants to or should know. A darkness is rising - one worse than being blind. Added to this is a man on a rampage. His father’s killer is dead, but Simon Bower’s best mate Vincent has tipped over the edge. And he’s out to set the record straight - to avenge his mate’s killing at the hands of the police. Cleave explores memory, secrets and motivations for good and evil in this taut thriller at the centre of which ordinary lives revolve and innocent people are in jeopardy.
The special public inquisition takes place this Thursday at Elma Turner Library. >> Invite your friends. >> Do some preparatory reading. |
Use our Book of the Week to make new mythical beasts out of pre-existing mythical beasts. The pages of Myth Match: A fantastical flip-book of extraordinary beasts are split, providing endless permutations, both of the pictures and (cleverly) the descriptive text.
>> See how the book works.
>> The book is designed by Good Wives and Warriors.
>> How the book was made.
>> Try it yourself.
NEW RELEASES
Newly released.
In turns funny, angry and insightful, Lockwood's memoir of growing up with a father several times larger than life in a world several sizes too small for them both is not quite like anything else. Lockwood's Motherland, Fatherland, Homelandsexuals positioned her as an American approximation of Hera Lindsay Bird.
"Lockwood's prose is cute and dirty and innocent and experienced, Betty Boop in a pas de deux with David Sedaris." - The New York Times
>> "Anything that happens from here is not my fault." (Lockwood in Wellington.)
What is it like to be a hammer, a screw, a file, a sponge? Why do different tools have different 'characters'? If tools are the extension of human capacities and intentions, what do they tell us about ourselves? Both witty and profound.
On April 11, 1931, Virginia Woolf ended her entry in A Writer s Diary with the words "too much and not the mood". She was describing how tired she was of correcting her own writing, of the cramming in and the cutting out to please readers, wondering if she had anything at all that was truly worth saying. These issues underlie these essays by Chew-Bose: the contrapuntal forces of her external and internal worlds, the relationship between inner restlessness and creative production, the clash of identity and individuality. The work is informed by the sensibilities of MAggie Nelson, Lydia Davis and Vivian Gornick and quotidian frustration.
"Our generation has no-one else like Durga Chew-Bose: a cultural critic who isn't afraid to get personal, a romantic nostalgic with a lemony twist who applies her brilliance to life as it is currently lived. It's a profound and glorious relief to encounter this book." - Lena Dunham
>> The power of uncertainty.
"She thought that it was precisely when things get uncomfortable or can't be shown that something interesting comes to light. That is the point of no return, the point that must be reached, the point you reach after crossing the border of what has already been said, what has already been seen. It's cold out there." This hybrid novel - part research notes, part fictionalised diary, and part travelogue - uses the stories of polar exploration to make sense of the protagonist's own concerns as she comes of age as an artist, a daughter, and a sister to an autistic brother. “It’s much easier to get to the Arctic than to reach certain areas of one’s self.”
A novel comprised of personal and formal investigations into the possible links between the assassination of Rafael Uribe Uribe in 1914, the man who inspired Garcia Marquez's General Buendia in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and of the charismatic Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, the man who might have been Colombia's J.F.K., gunned down on the brink of success in the presidential elections of 1948.
"Absolutely hypnotic, a display of tense, agile, intelligent narrative, it takes conspiracy to a whole other level." - El Cultural
"With utmost skill, Vasquez has us accompany him in his detective work, proposing a reflection on ghosts from the past and the inheritance of blame, doubt and fear." - El Pais
"Juan Gabriel Vasquez has many gifts - intelligence, wit, energy, a deep vein of feeling - but he uses them so naturally that soon enough one forgets one's amazement at his talents, and then the strange, beautiful sorcery of his tale takes hold." - Nicole Krauss
Ada has always been unusual. As an infant in southern Nigeria, she is a source of deep concern to her family. Her parents successfully prayed her into existence, but something must have gone awry, as the young Ada becomes a troubled child, prone to violent fits of anger and grief. But Ada turns out to be more than just volatile. Born “with one foot on the other side,” she begins to develop separate selves. When Ada travels to America for college, a traumatic event crystallises the selves into something more powerful. As Ada fades into the background of her own mind and these alters—now protective, now hedonistic—move into control, Ada’s life spirals in a dangerous direction.
>> Read an extract.
>> What is an ogbanje?
What is the relationship between a person and their possessions? What extra burden do these possessions bear when the person dies and what extra difficulty or comfort do they extend to those left behind? When her mother died, Walker was left to search through a dilapidated, cluttered house min search of someone she found she had never really known.
A good selection, well illustrated, from Eileen Gray, Lora Lamm and Lella Vignelli, to Kazuyo Sejima, Hella Jongerius and Neri Oxman.
Grove Press, and its house journal The Evergreen Review, revolutionized the publishing industry and radicalized the reading habits of the "paperback generation." Barney Rossett founded the company on a shoestring in 1951 and it became an important conduit through which avant-garde and European literature, and the works of Beckett, Burroughs, Brecht and Malcolm X became available in the US.
>> Rossett obituary (2012).
>> Much discussion in this institution.
From the author of The Rest is Noise, this book collects some of his best writing on classical and popular music - everything from Brahms to Bjork.
>> Ross will be appearing with soprano Bianca Ross and Stroma at the Nelson School of Music on 27 May.
A very nicely done picture book about a girl who became ill from planting seeds in her ears and nose went on to be a designer who would not be limited by tradition or rationality.
Following the death of his mother, Max Friedman comes to believe that he is sharing his brain with a tumour. As Max becomes focused on controlling the malignant tenant, he starts to lose touch with his friends and family, and with reality itself – so Max’s father sends him off to the artsy Baldwin School to regain his footing. Soon, Max has joined a group of theatre misfits in a steam-punk production of Hamlet. He befriends Fish, a gril with pink hair and a troubled past, and The Monk, a boy who refuses to let go of the things he loves. Max starts to feel happy, and the ghosts of his past seem to be gone for ever. But the tumour is always lurking in the wings – until one night it knocks him down, and Max is forced to face the truth.
"Grief becomes something oddly beautiful – and beautifully odd." - Kirkus
"`It must be possible to find a balance,' I say, `between deathly boredom and a too-violent life.' `There isn't a balance,' he says. `It's always all or nothing.'" A novel based on the author's own experience of running away from a humdrum existence in France and finding the intensity she seeks on board a rough fishing boat operating from the Alaskan island of Kodiak.
"An untamed successor to Conrad and Melville." - l'Obs [!]
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. New edition.
>> Read Thomas's review.
In 1817 James Parkinson identified the disease since named after him. He was also a political radical and a fossil-hunter, and worked with Edward Jenner to set up smallpox vaccination clinics across London. He deserves to be better known.
How did the period of Soviet cultural outreach affect the production of children's books in other countries? Apart from the interesting text, which shifts the focus of international children's book production, the book is packed with delightful examples of illustration and book design.
Artists, athletes, pirates, punks, and other revolutionaries.
From the olive trees of Athens to the Eucalyptus trees of Australia, discover the place of trees in history and mythology across the world. Every climate, every nation has its tales of trees, true or legendary, that help us understand ourselves and the natural world around us.
This book describes, both analytically and statistically, the migration of Maori into cities since 1945 and the changes in Maori position and participation in the New Zealand economy.
Essays range from an explication of the historical roots of racism in the US criminal justice system to an examination of modern-day police killings of unarmed black men. The authors discuss and explain racial profiling, the power and discretion of police and prosecutors, the role of implicit bias, the racial impact of police and prosecutorial decisions, the disproportionate imprisonment of black men, the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, and the Supreme Court's failure to provide meaningful remedies for the injustices in the criminal justice system.
"Somewhere among the anger, mourning and malice that Policing the Black Man documents lies the pursuit of justice. This powerful book demands our fierce attention." - Toni Morrison
Any questions?
Can we live a better and more fulfilling life if we thought of it as a game? Playing is more rewarding than winning. Also available: Psychology for a Better World.
>> Harre talks about the book on Radio NZ National.
Well written, insightful, medically accurate, emotionally helpful. Local author.
What does it mean to be human? Love triangles, office politics, police raids, illegal drugs, academic elites and near-death experiences can offer insights, if Rowland Smith's experiences of these are anything to go by. Can Shakespeare and Freud (and Rowland Smith) help us build new models of psychology? Yes, possibly.
Essays on Israel/Palestine from this outspoken advocate of the two-state solution and opponent of Israeli settlement in the Occupied Territories. Oz appeals to the deep tradition of Jewish humanism to seek a way forward from impasse. "No idea has ever been defeated by force. To defeat an idea, you have to offer a better idea, a more attractive and acceptable one."
"He lived alone in his rustic lair, / A toothless wolf with silver hair." Is a wolf-in-human-clothing a threat to nursery rhymes? Yes, on the evidence of this book from "the scratchy cardigan of New Zealand poetry", very likely. Huge fun.
The 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards
Winners (+ judges' comments)
THE ACORN FOUNDATION FICTION PRIZE
The New Animals is a strange, confrontational, revelatory novel that holds a mirror up to contemporary New Zealand culture. Adam handles a large ensemble of unrooted characters with skill. She gets beneath the skin of her characters in ways that make the reader blink, double-take, and ultimately reassess their sense of the capabilities of fiction. A transition late in the novel is both wholly unexpected and utterly satisfying. It’s stylistically raw and reveals a good deal in a modest way. The New Animals is so vivid in imagery and imagination that the judges haven’t stopped thinking about it since. In this category in 2018 it’s the book with the most blood on the page. It will give you an electric shock. It will bring readers back from the dead.
POETRY AWARD
The 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Poetry Award is for a book by an esteemed and celebrated poet who contributes greatly to the New Zealand writing community. Night Horse delights in animals, reflects on the well-being and the passing of friends and family, and the minutiae of care, such as the poem about ironing a friend’s shirts in return for hospitality, or the friend whose swollen feet will only fit slippers despite racks and racks of shoes, or the sublime answer of Pope Francis to a child who asked how Jesus walked on water — ‘He walked as we walk’ — or the car lights focused on a horse at night entranced by moonlight, or lovers holding hands. These poems are gentle, uplifting, tender, humorous, well-crafted and luminous.
ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION AWARD
Tuai: A Traveller in Two Worlds presents an evocative picture of young Māori travelling to England; their encounters with people, illness and industry there, and their return home. Tuai is empathetically written, providing the reader a window into a contested time of meeting, conversion and enterprise. The text and illustrations work in concert, presenting a rounded and rich experience for the reader, enhancing the breadth and depth of the research explored within.Key moments are presented so richly that they envelop and captivate the imagination. The care the authors have given these histories, acknowledging the autonomy that mātauranga Māori has in wider Aotearoa historical narratives, is striking, and we need more of it.
ROYAL SOCIETY TE APĀRANGI AWARD FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION
The toughest task of any book, whatever the form, is to make a sentence so good that you just have to read the next one, and the next one, and then wish it could just about go on forever. So it is with Driving to Treblinka. From the first page, Diana Wichtel’s memoir draws you into a fascinating ancestry: the story of a girl growing up in Canada, her mum a kiwi, her dad a Polish Jew, a man who leapt in desperation from a concentration-camp-bound train, a moment around which everything in this book orbits. Wichtel’s curiosity, alternately upsetting and uplifting, turns invisibly into a kind of mission. At its heart this is a family story, but one which cannot but shine a light on the vestiges of anti-Semitism that linger in Europe today. It is not just a beautifully written book, but an important book, too.
HUBERT CHURCH BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION
A novel that shimmers with feverish, fatalistic intensity, Baby is a strange and strangely moving love story built on obsession, narcissism and damage. It is a much deserved recipient of the Best First Book Award for Fiction. Guest international judge, Alan Taylor, says of Baby: ‘Baby is the kind of novel that lingers in the memory long after you put it down. It is raw, bleak, blackly funny, unpredictable and unsentimental, with shafts of sunny lyricism and passages of clean prose that are veined with menace. It is by any standard a remarkable debut novel by a young writer who has set a very high bar for herself. Where Annaleese Jochems goes from here is anyone’s guess but wherever it is, the truly curious will want to follow her.
JESSIE MACKAY BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY
Fully Clothed and So Forgetful by Hannah Mettner (Victoria University Press) $25
In Fully Clothed and So Forgetful Hannah Mettner opens doorways into thought and meanings that lie beneath the surface. Adept at ‘making strange’ — dislocating the ordinary and the familiar — she stretches the imagination of both writer and reader. Mettner has something to say beyond massing detailed description and merely reporting back. Fully Clothed and So Forgetful reveals a writer who knows how to turn a poem into something else — the mark of poems of discovery and not mere invention. The collection’s opening poem, 'Higher Ground,' is an example of the mobile possibilities in this poetic approach. It combines the referential list poem with the oomph of slam and the reticent praises of psalms. These poems of poise and deceptive complexity demonstrate Mettner’s considerable talent.
JUDITH BINNEY BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION
Caves: Exploring New Zealand's subterranean wilderness by Marcus Thomas and Neil Silverwood (Whio Publishing) $80
The photographs in Caves are undeniably exquisite. They depict moments of wonder, an otherworldliness that a dedicated few access. Through the marriage of photographs and infographics this book provides a more general readership the privilege of seeing the subterranean parts of New Zealand’s environment that remain comparatively unknown. At times, the images and the narrative can be unnerving as we read of the deaths that come with discovery and view seemingly bottomless caverns, but the overarching feeling is one of awe at the immense beauty of our islands and the courage of the tightknit community of people that traverse them.
The photographs in Caves are undeniably exquisite. They depict moments of wonder, an otherworldliness that a dedicated few access. Through the marriage of photographs and infographics this book provides a more general readership the privilege of seeing the subterranean parts of New Zealand’s environment that remain comparatively unknown. At times, the images and the narrative can be unnerving as we read of the deaths that come with discovery and view seemingly bottomless caverns, but the overarching feeling is one of awe at the immense beauty of our islands and the courage of the tightknit community of people that traverse them.
E.H. MCCORMICK BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION
Powerful, poignant, and not infrequently profound, Driving to Treblinka is an outrageously assured example of a first book. Diana Wichtel’s story goes way beyond the usual family memoir. In search of her father’s history Wichtel travels by memory and aeroplane and time to Poland, to the Jewish ghetto and a miraculous escape from execution at the Nazi death camp in Treblinka to a new life in Canada – and to another heart-wrenching, years-long unexplained family fissure. As uplifting as it is upsetting, Driving to Treblinka delivers an engrossing account of a life, and the indelible legacy of the Holocaust through generations.
The winners will be announced on Tuesday 15th May. How similar will the results be to those generated by our Ockhameter? The VOLUME Ockhameter category winners: Poetry: The Yield by Sue Wootton (Otago University Press); Fiction (Acornometer): Sodden Downstream by Brannavan Gnanalingam (Lawrence & Gibson); Illustrated Non-Fiction: Tuai: A traveller in two worlds by Alison Jones and Kuni Kaa Jenkins (Bridget Williams Books); General Non-Fiction: Driving to Treblinka: A long search for a lost father by Diana Wichtel (Awa Press). Click here for the full Ockhameter results. The winner of the copy of each of the four eventual category winners is Mary Mottram. Many thanks to all entrants, and many thanks to all the publishers for supporting the Ockhameter.
>> Read Stella's review.
>> O'Sullivan reads and talks.
>> "The best New Zealand novel of 2018." (The Spinoff)
>> O'Sullivan has a long and rich career as a poet and writer of short stories.
>> The cover is by Keely O'Shannessy.
>> Focus! (a book trailer for O'Sullivan's poetry collection Us, Then).
>> O'Sullivan will be at the Marlborough Book Festival in July (recommended).
 Review by STELLA | All This by Chance is Vincent O'Sullivan's third novel, over a decade in the making. It follows a family over several generations from post-war England 1947 to Europe mid-2000s. Stephen escapes the full employment, good food and unbearable dullness of rural New Zealand for a grim post-war London. Here he meets Eva, a striking young woman of Eastern European descent. Eva, whose real name eludes her, was sent as a young child from the ever-increasing chaos of Germany to the safety of her adoptive parents, a caring and educated Quaker family. Life is surprising and happy for our young pharmacist, in love with Eva, surrounded by empathetic elders who present positive role models for a young man with a fraught relationship with his father. Yet, on a chilly London day, a letter and news of the past change the nature of the couple’s relationship to each other and the past that they attempt to keep at a distance. Eva’s great-aunt Ruth has arrived in London, a survivor from Poland awash in her own mind - the doors firmly shut to the memories that torment. O’Sullivan writes deftly, introducing us to these characters, engaging us with the joys and sorrows of their respective lives without sentiment, with rich descriptions of place and brief encounters and conversations that allow snippets of information, piquing our curiosity yet never hammering a ‘message’ home. Religion and faith, science and rationality play out across these pages with both ease and tension as the various family members exercise their love, frustrations, confusions and anger. In Stephen and Eva’s children, we glimpse the impact of the Holocaust on the next generation: David, obsessed with his family past and a desire to find his place, his Jewishness, vents against his father and is frustrated by his inability to track down the answers he so desperately craves. His sister Lisa, rational and pragmatic, seems to be untouched by the impact of her family’s past, yet the death of her mother and great aunt and their buried histories have life-changing repercussions: her closest relationships are shaped by the past that she carries with her willingly or not. This generation is unable to capture a past too raw, too close to contemplate the depth of damage: the secrets - lost in burnt papers, buried in denial and swallowed by those who have knowledge but do not wish to burden others - will not reveal themselves. Esther, David’s daughter, wanting to understand the burdens her family carry, is the secret-hunter, never setting out to resolve the mysteries of her family but drawn and compelled to understand, spurred by her father’s unhappiness, her aunt’s life and her own eagerness to bring history out from the closest. On many levels this is a novel about the intergenerational relationships of family - the humour and the drama that binds people together, about the impact of the past on the present, while also presenting a humane and prescient analysis of the world we live in now: its borders, prejudices and ambitions. All This By Chance reminds us that our history is not chance but of our making, even when encounters and actions may seem coincidental. O’Sullivan’s taut writing, compelling settings over time and place, and memorable characters make All This By Chance a compelling and thoughtful novel. |
 | Murmur by Will Eaves {Reviewed by THOMAS} No algorithm can entertain a proposition as being both true and not true at the same time. This necessary computational allergy to contradiction enabled Alan Turing during his time at Bletchley Park in World War 2 to significantly decrease the time it took to break the German codes (“from a contradiction you can deduce everything,” he wrote), thus saving many lives. It would also provide a good test for ‘thought’ as opposed to ‘computation’ in artificial intelligence, and have implications for the eventual ‘personhood’ or otherwise of machines. “Machines do nothing by halves,” writes Will Eaves in Murmur, a beautifully written, sad and thoughtful novel based on Turing. Machines cannot but incline towards explication, whereas it is our inability to access the mind of another that verifies its existence as a mind.* “It isn’t knowing what another person thinks or feels that makes us who we are. It’s the respect for not knowing,” writes Eaves. In 1952 an English court found Alan Turing guilty of ‘Gross Indecency’ for admitted homosexual activity (then a crime in Britain), and he submitted to a year-long regime of chemical castration via weekly injections of Stilboestrol rather than imprisonment. Turing’s chemical reprogramming, speculates Eaves, struck at the core of his identity, his mind at first barricading itself within the changing body and then seemingly inhabiting it once more, but resourceless and compliant. Is personhood always thus imposed from without, or does personhood lie in the resistance to such an imposition? What conformity to expectations must be achieved or eschewed to accomplish personhood? The murmur inMurmur is an insistent voice that rises from Alec Prior’s (i.e. Alan Turing’s) sub-computational mind as it reacts to, and reconfigures itself on the basis of, its chemical reorientation. A narrator in the third person, waiting in ambush in mirrors and other reflective surfaces, Prior’s reflection, assails and supplants Prior’s first-person narrative, breaches the functional boundaries of his identity, describes Prior as “a man in distress, a prisoner of some description?”, unpicking his autonomy, and acting as a catalyst for the emergence of material (memories, voices, impulses) from the deep strata of Prior’s mind, much of it foundational (such as Prior’s formative relationship with a fellow student at high school), atemporal or, increasingly, counterfactual (a series of imagined letters between Prior and his friend and colleague June, with whom he was briefly engaged (parallelling Turing’s relationship with Joan Clarke, June was unconcerned by Prior’s homosexuality but he decided not to go through with the marriage) veers towards a confused and non-existent future in which a child of theirs remarks to Prior, “You’re changing. You’re lots of different people, lots of things, and all at once.”). What is the relationship between memory and fantasy, and what is the pivot or fulcrum between the two? When the first-person narration restabilises it is a new first person, one constructed from without (“There was another me, speaking for me.”). Consciousness is detached from what it contains, but made of it. “I am the body in the bed. I’m what sees him. I am the room.” But it is consciousness’s detachment from its object, its resistance to connection (a machine cannot help but connect), its yearning for what it is not and what is not (“yearning is a sort of proof of liberty”), its inaccessibility, its ability to see itself from the couch of its exclusion (“a shared mind has no self-knowledge,” writes Eaves-as-Prior-as-Turing), its cognisance of the limitations of narrative, its capacity to suspend disbelief in fictions, its ability to use a contradiction as a stimulant to thought rather than a nullification, its fragility and tentativeness that distinguishes thinking from computation. Artificial intelligence will not achieve personhood through mimesis, learning or algorithmic excellence, but only, if ever, through qualities that eschew such virtues: “We won’t know what machines are thinking once they start to think.” * “As soon as one can see cause and effect working themselves out in the brain, one regards it as not being thinking, but a sort of unimaginative donkeywork. From this point of view one might be tempted to define thinking as consisting of ‘those mental processes that we don’t understand’. If this is right, then to make a thinking machine is to make one that does interesting things without our understanding quite how it is done.” - A.M. Turing (‘Can Automatic Calculating Machines Be Said to Think?’ (1952)) |
NEW RELEASES
A weekly bulletin from VOLUME. 11.5.18
Acting and not acting each have their consequences, shunting lives onto quite different tracks. This long-awaited new novel from Duigan stretches the web of consequences from post-Twin Towers Wellington across time and space as far as a houseboat in Amsterdam in the 1970s. How do Peter and Moira respond to the new roles fate casts upon them?
"The New Ships is a gripping novel about lost children and a very fine portrait of family life in all its beauty and betrayal. Intricate, compelling, and deeply moving." —Anna Smaill
"Beautifully fluid, elegant, assured and calm, intellectually right and morally true." —Emily Perkins
A lively, fluid and iconoclastic theory of reading emerges from Zambras essays and observations of literature, its production and its consumption. Zambra is always good company: playful, irreverent and thoughtful
"When I read Zambra I feel like someone's shooting fireworks inside my head. His prose is as compact as a grain of gunpowder, but its allusions and ramifications branch out and illuminate even the most remote corners of our minds." - Valeria Luiselli
>> Alejandro Zambra is also against poets.
>> Read Thomas's reviews of Zambra's excellent Multiple Choice and My Documents.
"I've never seen anyone write about the relationship between childlessness, writing, and mother's sadnesses the way Sheila Heti does. I know Motherhood is going to mean a lot to many different people - fully as much so as if it was a human that Sheila gave birth to - though in a different and in fact incommensurate way. That's just one of many paradoxes that are not shied away from in this courageous, necessary, visionary book." - Elif Batuman
"With each of her novels, Sheila Heti invents a new novel form. Motherhood is a riveting story of love and fate, a powerful inspiration to reflect, and a subtle depiction of the lives of contemporary women and men, by an exceptional artist in the prime of her powers. Motherhood constitutes its own genre within the many-faceted novel of ideas. Heti is like no one else." - Mark Greif
>> On failures of the word 'mother' and other failures.
“We, who are no longer being loved, must chose between revenge and understanding.” A short, thoughtful, beautifully written novel about the reassessment of personal history in the wake of loss, and the liberation this can provide. When Elinor's husband dies, she writes a series of letters to his long-dead first wife, the woman whose children she has raised.
"A compassionate and often edifying commentary on the elasticity of love, the strength it takes to move forward after a death, and the power of forgiveness." - Publishers Weekly
Like many 13-year-old girls, Sofia’s main worries are how to get some groovy go-go boots, and how not to die of embarrassment giving a speech at school. But when her older brother starts talking about protests and overstayers, and how Pacific Islanders are being bullied by the police, a shadow is cast over Sofia’s teenage days. Through diary entries, this book describes the terror of being dawn-raided and provides an insight into the courageous and tireless work of the Polynesian Panthers in the 1970s as they encourage immigrant families across NZ to stand up for their rights.
>> Find out more about the Polynesian Panthers.
Technological progress, though it may be fuelled by mixes of quite unspecific impulses, cannot proceed through vague gesture. Without absolute precision, mechanisms will not work or will soon wear and break. This book, by the author of The Surgeon of Crowthorne, Pacific and Krakatoa, introduces us to key engineers whose struggle with and mastery of the finer points of making have underlaid the scientific and industrial revolutions and made possible all those everyday things we take for granted (cameras, computers, watches, telephones, washing machines, cars). Winchester has the remarkable ability to give a vivid immediacy to the moments he describes and give depth to bits of pivotal history that are usually passed over too quickly. It is this ability to give a third dimension to overlooked pieces of fact that makes Winchester’s books always completely absorbing.
Two teenagers, left by their parents in London after World War 2 under the protection of a man called The Moth and his mysterious companions, only realise much later the significance of what happened in this time and the truth about what they thought was their mother's betrayal.
"His best novel since The English Patient." - New York Times
"A miraculous achievement." - David Herkt
Typically completely out of synch, at least with us, Knausgaard finishes his seasonal quartet of assembled short prose, diaries and letters to his newborn daughter. No writer has striven harder than Knausgaard to make the mundane and the profound seem so similar.
>> A man for all seasons.
>> Meet Knausgaard in Auckland next weekend.
>> "Contemporary fiction is overrated."
Hunt set out to experience the named winds of Europe, from the Helm to the Bore to the Foehn to the Mistral. Along the way he met meteorologists, storm chasers, mountain men, eccentric wind enthusiasts, sailors and shepherds. Interesting.
"Travel writing in excelsis." - Jan Morris
"A thrilling and gorgeous tale, packed with meteorological wonder." -Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun
What the Night Sings by Vesper Stamper $37
A beautifully illustrated novel of a teen Holocaust survivor who struggles to come to terms with her history and her Jewishness, and to rediscover her love of music, which she though she had lost for ever.
>> Book trailer.
An introduction to Māori culture (including tikanga on and off the marae and key rituals like pōwhiri and tangihanga), Māori history (from the beginning of the world and the waka migration through to Māori protest and urbanisation in the twentieth century), and Māori society today (including twenty-first century issues like education, health, political economy and identity).
On a walk from Ivry to Saint-Denis, roughly following the meridian that divides Paris into east and west, and passing such familiar landmarks as the Luxembourg Gardens, the Pompidou Centre, the Gare du Nord and Montmartre, as well as forgotten alleyways and arcades, Hazan interweaves historical anecdotes, geographical observations, and literary references to reveal the revolutionary history of the city of Robespierre, the Commune, Sartre, and the May '68 uprising. Many of these landmarks are generally unrecognised, and often threatened by development.
The first-ever collection of Ashbery's collage work (interesting!), with a selection of related poetry.
>> All the kitsch.
In the midst of a mysterious environmental crisis, as London is submerged below flood waters, a woman gives birth to her first child, Z. Days later, the family are forced to leave their home in search of safety. As they move from place to place, shelter to shelter, their journey traces both fear and wonder as Z's small fists grasp at the things he sees, as he grows and stretches, thriving and content against all the odds. This is a story of new motherhood in a terrifying setting: a familiar world made dangerous and unstable, its people forced to become refugees.
"I can't remember ever having read a novel quite as sparing or as daring as The End We Start From, or one that delivers so mighty an impact from such delicate materials. " - Jim Crace
"An exceptional, alarming and beautiful book, which still echoes months after I finished reading it. Megan Hunter is a writer of unnerving power." - Evie Wyld
The transformation in the nineteenth century of the concept of 'work', in the West at least, into one of employment for wages made invisible other kinds of work, especially that done by women, subsistence farmers and in the third world. This book takes a revelatory global and cross-gender view on the whole complex and contradictory history of work, both paid and unpaid.
If reason is useful for survival, why haven't animals other than humans evolved it? If reason is commensurate with reality, why does it produce so much nonsense? Reason seems to have developed from, and it reliant upon, a rich social environment and appears to be more of an interactive tool designed to persuade and justify rather than to produce anything we might call 'truth' about our world.
The definitive guide to Cuban cuisine and food culture, with 350 recipes suited for home cooking and representing the variety of influences, from Spanish to Chinese to Soviet.
This collection of Timothy Leary's selected papers and correspondence opens a window on the ideas that inspired the counterculture of the 1960s and the fascination with LSD that continues to the present. The man who coined the phrase "turn on, tune in, drop out," Leary cultivated interests that ranged across experimentation with hallucinogens, social change and legal reform, and mysticism and spirituality. Includes much on Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Marshall McLuhan, Aldous Huxley, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and Carl Sagan.
>> A message to young people (1966).
Is our constant fixation on postponing death stopping us from living?
From fermentation and smoking to test-tube steaks, irradiation and 3-D printed pizzas, the processes by which humans have preserved food beyond its natural arc of decay reveal deeper forces and changes in society.
It is common to think of the refugee crisis as a recent phenomenon, but Dr Pietro Bartolo, who runs the clinic on the Italian island of Lampedusa, has been caring for its victims - both the living and the dead - for a quarter of a century.
"An urgent, wrenching dispatch from the front line of the defining crisis of our times. Bartolo is at once the saviour and the coroner to boatload after boatload of migrants who risk everything to cross the deadly seas. It is also a damning indictment of the broader, collective indifference of humankind to both the drowned and the saved." - Philip Gourevitch
Follows the river from its source on Mount Ruapehu, through Lake Taupo and into the Tasman Sea, a journey of 425 km and through centuries of vital history.
"A tour de force. The book weaves together so many people, ideas, trends, occurrences, and above all Parisian places, into a tapestry of fascinations - a distillation of the essence of an amazing time. The best book of its kind I have ever read." - A.C. Grayling
"Poirier does not shy away from exposing the joy and pain of experimental living or from exploring with sensitivity the moral ambiguity of living through the Occupation. Compulsive reading." - Anne Sebba
Poetry as comfort, poetry as confrontation.
When the Nazis took over the town of Piotrkow in Poland and began to round up the Jewish population, Jewish teenager Gucia Gomolinska chose (and was able) to 'pass' as a Pole. Her journey through Germany and her experiences through and after the war make for compelling reading.
Argues that it is literature, rather than science or philosophy, that provides the most accurate picture of the development and operaions of human conscious.
"The chilling description of cruel or absent parents is oddly exhilarating, and makes one see one’s own life anew. What a book this is, so much more alert and open and alive than so many slightly disappointing memoirs by otherwise great writers, with their plodding lists of relatives and schools and terraced homes and who had lunch or sex with whom. Much of Tremain’s canvas is heartsinkingly familiar — anyone with neglectful or absent parents will identify — but somehow the young Rosie Thomson never quite relinquishes either hope or joy. Perhaps that’s the nascent writer in the woman who would eventually become Rose Tremain. Again and again, she finds ‘wonder’ in the emotional and actual landscape around her, as she waits, sometimes with an almost excruciating trust and patience, to ‘find my place in the world’." - Spectator
Decades after the colonial powers withdrew Africa is still struggling to catch up with the rest of the world. When the same colonists withdrew from Asia there followed several decades of sustained and unprecedented growth throughout the continent. So what went wrong in Africa? Is the West helping Africa, or making matters worse?
BOOKS @ VOLUME #73 (5.5.18)
News, reviews, awards, links, opportunities, new releases, recommended reading: our latest NEWSLETTER.
Gosh. We have found ourselves on the short list of Retail NZ's 'Retail Hotlist' awards for 'Best Provincial Retailer'. If you like, you can vote for us here (voting closes on Tuesday 8 May).
They say: "There’s something about independent bookstores that inspires intense passion in their customers. Many of New Zealand’s best-loved indies are venerable instutitions that have served their shoppers for decades, but at a little over one year old, Volume is the upstart little sister to this kind of bookstore. Co-founders Stella Chrysostomou and Thomas Koed haven’t let their combined 35 years of experience in the book trade stop them from moving fast and taking risks." We say: Everything VOLUME does is made possible by all of you. Thank you.  | The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer {Reviewed by STELLA} Meg Wolitzer delivers a cutting analysis of the feminism of ‘our time’. InFemale Persuasion, we meet Greer Kadetsky: young, idealistic and yearning for attention; and Faith Frank: ageing, dynamic, pragmatic and fearful of irrelevance. While the novel is set in the world of ‘new feminism’, and Wolitzer references feminist movements and philosophies, and floats these concepts through the guise of her characters’ actions and their words, The Female Persuasion is much more about the relationship between these two women and their relationships with others. Greer Kadetsky arrives at university, sans her childhood boyfriend, Cory, the only strong relationship she possesses, as an awkward, geeky and naive student intent on getting through. From the first days, she is thrown together with the more outrageous and politicised Zee, who drags her along to a lecture by the celebrated 70s feminist Faith Frank. From here an admiration is born and Faith Frank, for whatever reason, takes an interest in Greer. Years on, university complete and stranded in her small hometown of Macopee with her ex-hippie parents, Greer gets up the nerve to approach Faith for a job on the fem magazine, Bloomer. All a little too late, Greer arrives for an interview on the day the magazine folds, no longer relevant or appealing to the new wave of feminism. Yet Greer’s luck holds when Faith Frank invites her to apply for an assistant role in a new women’s foundation, LOCI, backed by Emmett Shrader, a corporate billionaire of some dodgy dealings. Ironically, she never seriously questions the locus of power, too enamoured with Faith Frank and all she stands for. She will do anything for Faith. It’s hard to wholeheartedly like Greer or Faith, and you shouldn’t, yet you can understand the idealism of the younger and the pragmatism of the older. Wolitzer shows up organisations and their power structures for what they are: mechanisms to get things done, yet also mechanisms which place power in the hands of a few, with willing acolytes ready to jump. After reading a few reviews of this book, I was surprised that many had missed Wolitzer’s irony and wit that plays out throughout the book. Wolitzer is similar to Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides in style: dramatic relationship plots are layered over popular culture, and her social commentary often cuts to the quick. It often had me laughing out loud (those unforgettable moments when the team are at the summer house and Greer goes along with the pack tucking into her rare steak even though she’s a vegetarian). In Female Persuasion the all-white liberal female world of privilege of the LOCI foundation will make you wonder who this sanitised feminism is for. How will our classic good girl, Greer, respond when she is confronted with the truth? Added to this mix are the compelling voices and stories of Cory and Zee. Both have epiphanies driven by dramatic events or hard choices that help them develop from cardboard cut-outs of what they think they should be in their early 20s to the people they become a decade on, and this keeps you engaged with this novel at a deeper and fundamentally more human level. |
 | The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa {Reviewed by THOMAS} "How often it pains me not to be some other banal individual, whose life, because it is not mine, fills me with longing. I envy in everyone the fact that they are not me," wrote Fernando Pessoa as Vicente Guedes in what is now considered the ‘first phase’ of The Book of Disquiet, a vast assortment of passages found unedited on variously sized pieces of paper in a trunk after Pessoa’s death in 1935 and variously selected, assembled and translated and made into books by various persons presuming the intentions of Pessoa (though what his intentions were for this material is far from clear). This new and first complete edition assembles the fragments in chronological order for the first time (so far as this can be determined), allowing us to take a cast of Pessoa’s thinking in the two ‘phases’ of the book (or, rather, ‘book’). The first phase contains material written by Pessoa as Vicente Guedes from 1913 to 1920, and the second phase contains material written as Bernardo Soares in the early 1930s, possibly intended to subsume the material previously written as Guedes (the Soares material being more descriptive, lighter in tone than the first section, almost glibber, Pessoa-as-Soares writing almost as someone who has read Pessoa-as-Guedes and seeking to make Guedes’s ideas his own). Pessoa contributed to Portuguese literature under 81 identified heteronyms, pseudonyms and personae (see the list here), each with a distinct style and intellectual life. The first ‘phase’ of The book of Disquiet as it now stands is a sustained if dissipated assault on identity, especially as thought of by a person when thinking of themselves. “Your real life, your human life, does not belong to you but to others. In all your real-life actions, you do not live, you are being lived,” writes Guedes. The constraints of identity are imposed from without, are socially determined, are a trap for the spirit. True liberation, for Pessoa (if any opinion can be attributed to Pessoa himself, beyond that of the heteronyms), is only achieved by withdrawal of the actual self from the world (if such a self can be said to exist) so completely as to allow the construction of personae to do the living for them, leaving their author in immaculate isolation and absolute indifference. “I myself don’t know if the ‘I’ I am setting before you really exists. I live aesthetically in another being. I have sculpted my life like a statue made of a material alien to myself. Sometimes I don’t even recognise me, so alien to myself have I become,” writes Guedes. One rather sketchy passage describes the requisite method of progressive isolation, disengagement and intensification of the imaginative faculties (through a stage in which imagining a battle produces “actual bruises”), becomes logically fraught, peters out with the note “Certain difficulties,” and then gathers luminously into the object of the thread of thought, the creation of new selves: “We will be able to create at second hand. We will imagine ourselves a poet writing, and he will write in one style, while another [imagined] poet might write in another, and so on, all of them original,” each creating or accessing a private reality otherwise unachievable.“In the presence of ourselves we are never alone, we are witness to ourselves, and it is therefore important to act always as we would before a stranger. We can never be at ease.” Pessoa writes as another person about the inauthenticity of their identity, of the clinamen of personality, of the heteronyms' creation of further heteronyms that presumably could not have been created by Pessoa himself (and so forth). The outsourcing of the business of living to fictional persons does not come without its “dangers to the spirit”: lassitude, loneliness, boredom, emptiness. A protective ‘mist’ drifts through the book (in ‘real life’, Pessoa supplemented this mist with alcohol). “If the mist dissipates, all hard surfaces bruise the part of me that knows them to be hard. It is as if someone were using my life to beat me with.” But in the absence of authenticity, every fiction is valid, every speculation true, every reality virtual. “I lie recumbent in my life, and I do not even know how to dream the gesture of getting up.” |
>> I Must Be Living Twice: New and selected poems, 1975-2014.
>> Chelsea Girls, Myles's autobiographical novel of surviving as a poet in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, assailed the 'wall' between memoir and fiction.
>> Merk.
>> Myles would have made a good US President.
>> The story behind the presidential bid.
>> Myles will be NO LONGER appearing next week at the Auckland Writers Festival as their event has been CANCELLED.
>> Myles will be judging this year's Sarah Broom Poetry Prize.
>> Meet Myles at her home page.