BOOKS@VOLUME #83
What have we been reading?
What books have arrived at VOLUME this week?
What have we got planned for National Poetry Day?
Find out in our latest NEWSLETTER.
14.7.18.
BOOKS@VOLUME #83
What have we been reading?
What books have arrived at VOLUME this week?
What have we got planned for National Poetry Day?
Find out in our latest NEWSLETTER.
14.7.18.
 | Petite Fleur by Iosi Havilio {Reviewed by STELLA} When José’s job goes up in flames, literally, at the fireworks factory, he is at a loss. In a funk, he suddenly finds himself without purpose or motivation. His wife Laura suggests that she goes back to work at the publishing company and leave him to care for their young daughter and home. At first, José feels undermined by his new status, but he quickly falls into the swing of his new role as a domestic star - setting himself cleaning goals and garden projects. As he flourishes, Laura, forced into a more minor role at the publishing company, becomes increasingly embittered and trapped in her job, and this is only further aggravated by Antonia’s increasing rejection of her mother as their daughter gravitates towards José as the primary caregiver. One of the garden projects requires a spade, something that the couple do not possess. One evening, invigorated by his new passions, José knocks on Guillermo’s (the neighbour's) door to borrow a spade. Invited in, a friendship strikes up between the two, and they start to spend Thursday evenings together, drinking and listening to jazz. Guillermo is a jazz obsessive and, as the evening goes on and the drinks go down, he becomes excitable and increasingly animated until José draws the night to a close, often abruptly, with his new found ‘talent’ - a talent so utterly surprising to the reader the first time it happens you will wonder what you have stepped into. Iosi Havilio’s Petite Fleur (named for a jazz piece which is Guillermo’s favourite - he has 125 different recordings) is a lively, macabre and sharply witty portrayal of domestic suburbia, both its bliss and its terrible suffocation. José is a study in paranoia, perfection and obsession - along with odd lapses into clumsiness and childish impulses. As a reader, you will wonder how reliable our narrator is. His clichéd love of Russian literature (Tolstoy), his unwise erotic fantasies and his seeming unconcern for others make José an intriguing character - one whom you want to follow, even when he is repellent. His talent, violent and guiltless, will leave you reeling beyond the last sentence. |
 | Playthings by Alex Pheby {Reviewed by THOMAS} Freud’s consideration of the case of the judge Paul Schreber, and his book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) was instrumental in the formulation of the modern construct of paranoid schizophrenia, and Schreber’s experience, treatment and interpretation have been rigorously exploredand debated by Deleuze, Guatarri, Canetti, Lacan, Calasso and others. Playthings, a novel by Alex Pheby, depicts, sometimes horrifically, sometimes with humour or beauty, sometimes ironically, Schreber’s descent into and experience of madness: his inability to achieve the culturally determined overarching perspective that enables us to function without being overwhelmed by minor details, observations and experiences (of course, none of us do this especially well; our ability to ‘function’ determines which side of the line of ‘madness’ we exist on); his inability to integrate his experiences into ‘useful’ concepts of time and causality; his inability to see others as persons or to interpret their intentions and actions in ways that fit with shared concepts of the patterns of intentions and actions; and his projection of suppressed psychological material onto such others (this dehumanisation of those seen as ‘other’ is a manifestation of the mechanisms by which socially inter-confirmed mass paranoia presented itself as fascism in Germany a few decades later). “It was nothing to him, because they were all nothing. Fleeting-improvised-wretched-plaything-human-beings. Puppets, soul-less automata, clicking and whirring and chirruping to each other on a flat street of false houses and dust blown by the perishing cold wind.” As Pheby zooms in and away from Schreber’s experience, playing always with the perspective that lies at the core of his illness, leaving us uncertain which side of the line between madness and sanity we are experiencing or what constitutes ‘reality’, we as readers become aware of ourselves as the author’s plaything. The key mechanisms of schizophrenia are the key mechanisms of literature; it is only our ability to close the book that keeps us sane. |
National Poetry Day will be celebrated throughout the country on Friday 24 August. We will be marking the occasion with a poetry competition, an interactive poetry map and a live poetry swap in the shop: The Great New Zealand Prose Deletion.
1. Choose one page of New Zealand published prose.2. Make 2 copies of the page.
3. On one copy, delete (perhaps using a marker pen) or erase (perhaps using white-out) everything you don’t want in your poem.
4. Your poem is what remains.
5. Send us both copies by 20 August.
The winner will be announced at VOLUME at 2 PM on National Poetry Day (24 August) and will receive a trophy and a copy of the 2018 Poetry New Zealand Yearbook. >> Download a poster.
The Nelson Poetry Map records and shares connections between poetry and places. Contribute poems to our open-access map, tagged to the locations you associate with those poems. Visit the locations and read the poems on your mobile device (or to take a virtual tour without leaving home). It is anticipated that wandering poetry readers on National Poetry Day (24 August) will encounter fellow poetry readers at various locations. >> Click here to read or contribute. >> Download a poster.
The Poem Swap. VOLUME. Friday 24 August, 2 PM.
Bring a poem > Put your poem in the hat > Draw out a poem > Read the poem aloud > Take the poem home!
>> Read Stella's review.
>> On adapting Antigone and googling while Muslim.
>> Writing and radicalisation.
>> Shamsie in Paris.
>> Home Fire has just been awarded the 2018 Women's Prize for Fiction.
>> The 'story of our times'.
>> The book is a politically and emotionally astute modern version of Antigone.
NEW RELEASES
Your lucky day.
Crudo charts in real time what it was like to live and love in the horrifying summer of 2017, from the perspective of a commitment-phobic peripatetic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker. From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a Brexit-paralysed UK, Kathy spends the first summer of her forties trying to adjust to marriage as Trump tweets the world into nuclear war. But it’s not only Kathy who’s changing. Political, social and natural landscapes are all in peril. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead and the planet's hotting up. Is it really worth learning to love when the end of the world is nigh?
>> The Crudo playlist.
Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist’s defining work, The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and communal, and a new genre – the collective autobiography – in order to capture the passing of time.
"A Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism." - New York Times
"The Years is a revolution, not only in the art of autobiography but in art itself. Annie Ernaux’s book blends memories, dreams, facts and meditations into a unique evocation of the times in which we lived, and live." — John Banville
"One of the best books you’ll ever read." — Deborah Levy
"Ravishing and almost oracular with insight, Ernaux’s prose performs an extraordinary dance between collective and intimate, 'big' history and private experience. The Years is a philosophical meditation paced as a rollercoaster ride through the decades. How we spend ourselves too quickly, how we reach for meaning but evade it, how to live, how to remember – these are Ernaux’s themes. I am desperate for more." — Kapka Kassabova
"A book of memory, of a life and world, staggeringly and brilliantly original." — Philippe Sands
"She is about thirty-three, speaks French fluently. Her character is gay, sweet and ironic, but she has bursts of anger over nothing when she is confined to a straightjacket," write James Joyce of his daughter, Lucia. Whose story is Lucia's story? Lucia Joyce was a lover of Samuel Beckett and an avant-garde dancer. From her twenties she was treated for schizophrenia and spent the last thirty years of her life in an asylum. After her death her letters were destroyed and references to her were removed from archives. Alex Pheby, who is superb at mapping the workings of minds outside the norm (read Thomas's review of Playthings here), fills in the erasures and lacunae in this fascinating novel, not appropriating Lucia's story but shining beams of light towards her from multiple points of view.
"Brilliant, compelling, profoundly disturbing." - Literary Review
"An emotionally powerful and constantly questioning novel, Lucia probes speculation, truth and the fraught ethics of history, biography and narrative itself." - Irish Times
>> The lost story of a Parisian dancer.
Following I Love Dick and Torpor to complete her trilogy of detonations under the wall that lies between fiction and memoir, Aliens and Anorexia unfolds like a set of Chinese boxes, using stories and polemics to travel through a maze that spirals back into itself. Its characters include Simone Weil, the first radical philosopher of sadness, the artist Paul Thek, Kraus herself, and her virtual S&M partner who’s shooting a big-budget Hollywood film in Namibia while Kraus holes up in the Northwest Woods for the winter to chronicle the failure of Gravity & Grace, her own low-budget independent film. Kraus argues for empathy as the ultimate perceptive tool, and reclaims anorexia from the psychoanalytic girl-ghetto of poor “self-esteem.” Anorexia, Kraus writes, could be an attempt to leave the body altogether: a rejection of the cynicism this culture hands us through its food.
>>"I'm just a channel for all that shit."
>> "This female consciousness."
Possibly the most miserable set of cartoons ever assembled.
"With a casual gesture Shrigley points to that hideous shape whose name I've never known - and then he names it. And the name is profoundly, embarrassingly familiar. I'm laughing while frantically searching for a pen, so desperate to capture the feeling he has unearthed in me." - Miranda July
"On the kink of his line Shrigley can shift effortlessly from pathos to paranoia. And his work is funny - very funny; his timing devastatingly effective." - Will Self
>> Have a look at this.
"This collection speaks about beauty, activism, power and popular culture with compelling guile, a darkness, a deep understanding and sensuality. It dives through noir, whakamā and kitsch and emerges dripping with colour and liquor. There’s whakapapa, funk (in all its connotations) and fetishisation. The poems map colonisation of many kinds through intergenerational, indigenous domesticity, sex, image and disjunction. They time-travel through the powdery mint-green 1960s and the polaroid sunshine 1970s to the present day. Their language and forms are liquid—sometimes as lush as what they describe, other times deliberately biblical or oblique. It all says: here is a writer who is experiencing herself as powerful, restrained but unafraid, already confident enough to make a phat splash on the page." —Hinemoana Baker
>> "I always assumed Denis Glover was talking about some other Johnsonville."
>> 'For a Cigarette and a Blanket.'
This is the voice of someone who is both at home and not at home in the world. Sam Duckor-Jones’s fresh, funny, dishevelled poems are alive with art-making and fuelled by a hunger for intimacy. Giant clay men lurk in salons, the lawns of poets overgrow, petrolheads hoon along the beach, birds cry ‘wow-okay, wow-okay, wow-okay’.
"Gorgeous and contrary." —Jenny Bornholdt
"If attention is an act of love, then this is a collection that attends to art and life in such a way as to collapse any distinction between the two." —Chris Price
>> Hear Duckor-Jones on the radio and look at some of his sculptures.
"If everybody lived a life like mine, there would be no need for novels." - Albert Einstein.
An interesting novelistic treatment of Einstein's life, mixing documentary and fictional sources, springing from a chance telephone call that occurred near the end of Einstein's life. Princeton. New Jersey. 14th March 1954: 'Albert Einstein speaking.' 'Who?' asks the girl on the telephone. 'I'm sorry, ' she says. 'I have the wrong number.' 'You have the right number,' Albert says. So began a friendship.
Fraser and Jaeggi take a fresh look at the big questions surrounding the peculiar social form known as 'capitalism', upending many of our commonly held assumptions about what capitalism is and how to subject it to critique. They show how, throughout its history, various regimes of capitalism have relied on a series of institutional separations between economy and polity, production and social reproduction, and human and non-human nature, periodically readjusting the boundaries between these domains in response to crises and upheavals.
Eggleton's new collection "possesses an intensity and driven energy, using the poets recognisable signature oratory voice, strong in beat and measure, rooted in rich traditions of chant, lament and ode. Mashing together the lyrical and the slangy, celebrating local vernaculars while simultaneously plugged in to a global zeitgeist of technobabble and fake news, Eggleton recycles and repurposes high visual culture and demotic aural culture."
A beautifully presented and thoughtfully selected survey of the persistence of myths in visual culture.
A modern-day counterpart, perhaps, to George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, this book was awarded the 2018 Orwell Prize for political writing. “It’s not just a lament against austerity but as much a hymn in praise of the power of the individual. It’s both a big social critique and a big call to individual liberty and empowerment. McGarvey says individuals matter and people really do have control of their own destiny, but they are also caught in a social condition that can be a trap.” (Orwell Prize judges). McGarvey grew up living in poverty. He suffered domestic abuse, his mother died young, leaving her school-age children behind her, and Darren fell into a trap of drug and alcohol addiction. But he managed to pull himself out of this. Now, Darren is a successful columnist and advocate for change, representing many NGOs and organisations in the Third Sector.
>> About the author.
>> a.k.a. Loki the Scottish Rapper.
A remarkable multivocal novel depicting the results of centuries of disenfranchisement and racism on Native American communities in the US.
"This is a novel about what it means to inhabit a land both yours and stolen from you, to simultaneously contend with the weight of belonging and unbelonging. There is an organic power to this book, a revelatory, controlled chaos. Tommy Orange writes the way a storm makes landfall." - Omar El Akkad, author of American War
“There There has so much jangling energy and brings so much news from a distinct corner of American life that it’s a revelation." - New York Times
>> "There is a monolithic version of what a Native American is supposed to be."
The most comprehensive survey of the representation of, and meanings of, the human body in art of all periods and cultures. Thoughtful, provocative, and frequently surprising.
In 1986 Derek Jarman discovered he was HIV positive and decided to make a garden at his cottage on the barren coast of Dungeness. Facing an uncertain future, he nevertheless found solace in nature, growing all manner of plants. While some perished beneath wind and sea-spray others flourished, creating brilliant, unexpected beauty in the wilderness. Modern Nature is both a diary of the garden and a meditation by Jarman on his own life: his childhood, his time as a young gay man in the 1960s, his renowned career as an artist, writer and film-maker. It is at once a lament for a lost generation, an unabashed celebration of gay sexuality, and a devotion to all that is living. A new edition, with an introduction by Olivia Laing.
>> Visit the gardens at Prospect Cottage.
>> Meet Derek Jarman.
>> Some of Jarman's remarkable films.
>> Olivia Laing, Philip Hoare and Sarah Wood discuss Derek Jarman.
As a child, Helen Lewis discovered a suitcase in a cupboard at home. It contained horrific photographs taken by her father, a combat photographer, of the atrocities committed at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Lewis charts her father's upbringing in the East End of London, where he and his family experienced English anti-Semitism, his career documenting humanity at its worst, and the impact this had on him in the years afterwards.
>> Visions of hell.
Clear and detailed.
"A thrilling and inspiring read! For too long these extraordinary women have been hidden from history. Rise Up, Women! should be a standard text in all schools. And it will be a treasured handbook for today's feminists." - Harriet Harman (British MP and QC)
A bittersweet, hope-filled look at two quirky families that have broken apart and are trying to find their way back to one another.
Rare Books Uncovered: True stories of fantastic finds in unexpected places by Rebecca Rego Barry $28
Hugely enjoyable and bristling with personalities and anecdotes, this book perfectly captures the decades of the high and low life of the crazed American who arrived in London in 1957, plugged into the literary and arts scene through his affair with Doris Lessing, had therapy with R.D. Laing, got involved with the CND and with more subversive movements, and indulged in pretty much everything that could be indulged in. Sigal's anxieties and insecurities, together with his wonderful style, make this memoir deeply human and enjoyable.
Everything that doesn't work is a mark of our humanity. Jonas is starting to feel that life hasn't worked out the way he thought it would. Divorced and lonely, with nothing much to live for, he decides to buy a one-way ticket somewhere, anywhere, with no intention of coming back.When he arrives at the strangely deserted airport, in the barren holiday resort (the cheapest last-minute deal he could find), and ends up on the doorstep of Hotel Silence, which has definitely seen better days, it seems the ideal place to put an end to it all. There isn't any dinner, the plumbing barely works, and the hotel staff seem somewhat distracted. But as his relationship with May and her small son Adam grows into friendship, he begins to understand the traumatic story of this war-torn country, Jonas discovers reasons to carry on.
Who better than Tim Parks to ask us along on his enquiry into what consciousness is, consciousness's relationship to matter, who and what might be conscious, and how technology is changing our ideas about it.
Remarkably good analysis of the evolution and design considerations of fonts.
Each fascinating illustrated letter of the alphabet contains another alphabet: An alphabet of Alphabets, an alphabet of Birds, an alphabet of Creepy-crawlies, an alphabet of Dinosaurs, &c, &c. Fun.
At last - the Communist Manifesto as a graphic novel!
BOOKS @ VOLUME #82 (7.7.18)
Read our latest NEWSLETTER and find out what we've been reading, about the newest new releases, and about our events, courses and competitions.
 | The Mapmakers' Race by Eirlys Hunter {Reviewed by STELLA} Meet the Santander family - explorers and mapmakers. When Ma misses the train, Sal, the twins Joe and Francie, along with young Humphrey, are on their own, making their way to Grand Prospect as entrants in the Great Mapmakers' Race, a competition to map a railway route through the uncharted wilderness from Grand Prospect to the port at New Coalhaven. The fastest team wins the prize, and the best map, the grand prize, will become the new railway. And all this needs to be done in 28 days! Arriving in Grand Prospect, the children are scoffed at and almost not allowed to race. No one has much faith in them, despite their parents’ reputation as fine explorers and excellent mapmakers. The children have to go on - it’s their only hope of raising the funds to track down their father, who has been missing for months on an expedition. Surely Ma will find a horse, get another train, catch up with them somewhere. Four children stranded in Grand Prospect with no money, a minimum of supplies, a four-year-old in tow, no horses to carry their load of supplies, and competing with several adult teams who have brawn, wonders or money at their fingertips: teams like Cody Cole and his Cowboys - tough men with fine horses - their symbol a rifle and a telescope crossed over a map; the Solemn Team - scientific and logical; and Sir Montague Basingstoke-Black and his mountaineers - pipes firmly tucked in mouths, astride their mechanical horses that will never tire. But the real stars of this book are the inventive and brilliant Santander children. Setting out on the road, they meet Beckett - a local lad - who gives them a helping hand. Resourceful and savvy, Beckett procures donkeys and food and has a few tricks up his sleeve. Enticed by the idea of the railway, he joins the Santanders - luckily for them, as neither cooking nor rationing the food supplies are part of the children's skill set. Amazing talents they do have, though: Joe is the surveyor, cutting ahead, often through prickly thorns and thick undergrowth, to find and make the best path; Sal is the mathematician, working the altimeter, calculating the inclines and declines and solving the technical problems; Francie is the map-maker - a brilliant artist - who can fly, take herself above the landscape and see it from a bird’s eye view; and Humphrey notices - the keen observer - things that the others miss. The Mapmakers' Race is an exciting, well-paced adventure from New Zealand author Eirlys Hunter. There are illustrations by Kirsten Slade throughout, and each chapter starts with a map marking out the journey and giving the reader teasers as to what might happen in the next few pages. Chapter eleven’s drawing includes the Impenetrable Cliffs of Doom, Camp Comeuppance and Camp Exhaustion. There will be bears, bats, tricks and treats, wild rivers, endless climbs, snow and storms. There are scary stories, magical tales and funny episodes around the campfire to cheer the spirits and keep the children travelling onward. This is an enjoyable read-aloud or keep-to-yourself and will have some children reaching for ink and paper to become wondrous mapmakers, and others out in the wilderness, exploring and making tracks. Charming, exciting and just a little dangerous. |
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The Cemetery in Barnes by Gabriel Josipovici {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Meaning, in literature as in life, is to be found in its form rather than in its content. This subtly disconcerting novella, told almost entirely in the habitual past tense (“he would”, “he used to”), portrays how memory works as an endlessly repeated palimpsest, constantly erasing and overwriting the impress of actual events, at the same time and by the same procedure both providing and preventing access to the past. The tension between what is erased and what cannot be erased intensifies through the novella, which assembles its layers of narration as if gleaned from conversation by a guest in the house in Wales of a translator and his wife, but somehow at the same time providing access to the private thoughts and self-narratives of the translator. Josipovici’s lightness and fluidity moving between speech, reported speech and thought, and his remarkable ability to encompass many versions of a story in one text, is alluded to by the translator as we learn of his fantasies of drowning himself in the Seine after he moved to Paris following the death of his first wife: “He knew such feelings were neurotic, dangerous even, but he was not unduly worried, sensing that it was better to indulge them than to try and eliminate them altogether. After all, everyone has fantasies. In the one life there are many lives. Alternative lives. Some are lived and others imagined. That is the absurdity of biographies, he would say, of novels. They never take account of the alternative lives casting their shadows over us as we move slowly, as though in a dream, from birth to maturity to death.” It is the death of the translator’s first wife that the text constantly attempts to avoid but toward which it is constantly pulled. The translator takes refuge in the stories of others to provide relief from his own. “It was only when the meaning of what he was translating began to seep through to him, he said, that he found it difficult.” After her death he moves from London to Paris, experiences detachment and detachment from detachment: “Sometimes, as he was walking through the Parisian streets, he would suddenly be seized with the feeling that he was not there, that all this was still in the future or else in the distant past. He would examine this feeling with detachment, as if it belonged to someone else, and then walk on.” Some experiences leave a wound, however, that is not easily erased, or to which one is too attached to erase, such as the wound on the thigh the narrator receives during an encounter with a young woman in a beret about whom little else has been retained. “We’ve all got something like that somewhere on our bodies. Maybe if we got rid of it we wouldn’t be ourselves any more.” Moments of the past sit with specific sharpness in the generalisation of the habitual past tense narration which seeks but fails to erase them, to keep the narrator functioning at the cost of the events makes him himself. “Listen to him, [his second wife] would say. He never sticks to the subject but always manages to generalise. It’s another way of avoiding life.” But the unspeakable pulls so hard upon the narrative that does not speak of it that that narrative becomes patterned entirely by that which it does not represent. “There are times when the order you have so carefully established seems suddenly unable to protect you from the darkness.” The unassimilable specifics of the circumstances of his first wife’s death start to show through, and our suspicions are both intensified and undermined by the means by which we form them. We are left, as is the translator, in the words of a poem by du Bellay that he translates, “at the mercy of the winds, / Sitting at the tiller in a ship full of holes.” |
Four children temporarily lose their parents just as they are about to begin the race that offers their last chance of escaping poverty. Their task is to map a rail route through an uncharted wilderness. They overcome the many obstacles posed by nature—bears, bees, bats, river crossings, cliff-falls, impossible weather—but can they survive the treachery of their competitors?
>> Read Stella's review.
>> Read the first chapter.
>> Read another extract.
>> Meet Eirlys Hunter.
>> Meet the illustrator, Kirsten Slade.
NEW RELEASES
Some of them are very new.
"Love, death, Bruce Willis, public urination, being a woman, love, The Nanny, love. This pamphlet of poetry by Hera Lindsay Bird is a startling departure from her bestselling debut Hera Lindsay Bird by defying convention and remaining exactly the same, only worse. This collection, which focuses on love, childish behaviours, 90’s celebrity references and 'being a woman', is sure to confirm all your worst suspicions and prejudices."
Selected by Carol Ann Duffy: "Without doubt the most arresting and original new young poet - on page and in performance - to arrive."
On a dark and stormy night, an unnamed narrator is visited by two women: one a former lover, the other a stranger. They ruthlessly question their host and claim to know his greatest secret: that he is, in fact, a woman. In increasingly desperate attempts to defend his masculinity, perplexed by the stranger's dubious claims to be the writer Amparo Davila, he finds himself spiralling deeper into a haunted past that may or may not be his own.
"An intelligent, beautiful story about bodies disguised as a story about language disguised as a story about night terrors. Cristina Rivera Garza does not respect what is expected of a writer, of a novel, of language. She is an agitator." - Yuri Herrera
For nearly twenty years Keiko (like the author of this book) has been working in a convenience store, a role that both gives her purpose in life and, after initially allowing her to pass as a 'normal' person in a very conformist society, gives her a place from which to defy conformist expectations, especially concerning personal relationships, and to isolate herself from the pressures of social life.
“The novel borrows from Gothic romance, in its pairing of the human and the alluringly, dangerously not. It is a love story, in other words, about a misfit and a store. Keiko’s self-renunciations reveal the book to be a kind of grim post-capitalist reverie: she is an anti-Bartleby, abandoning any shred of identity outside of her work. It may make readers anxious, but the book itself is tranquil—dreamy, even—rooting for its employee-store romance from the bottom of its synthetic heart.” —Katy Waldman, New Yorker
>> Odd is the new normal.
>> An interview with the author.
Over the past twenty years European cities have become the envy of the world: a Kraftwerk Utopia of historic centres, supermodernist concert halls, imaginative public spaces and futuristic egalitarian housing estates which, interconnected by high-speed trains traversing open borders, have a combination of order and pleasure which is exceptionally unusual elsewhere. How and why do European cities differ so markedly from the cities of the developer-oriented, car-centred Anglo-Saxon norm?
"The latest heir to Ruskin." - Boyd Tonkin, Independent
"Hatherley is the most informed, opinionated and acerbic guide you could wish for." - Hugh Pearman
"When I walked through the large iron gate of the hospital, I must have still been alive." In this novel based on Bouanani’s own experiences as a tuberculosis patient, the hospital begins to feel increasingly like a prison or a strange nightmare: the living resemble the dead; bureaucratic angels of death descend to direct traffic, claiming the lives of a motley cast of inmates one by one; childhood memories and fantasies of resurrection flash in and out of the narrator’s consciousness as the hospital transforms before his eyes into an eerie, metaphorical space. Somewhere along the way, the hospital’s iron gate disappears. The Hospital is a nosedive into the realms of the imagination, in which a journey to nowhere in particular leads to the most shocking places.
>> Read an excerpt.
For clarity and efficiency and resonance of prose, few contemporary writers can outdo Norway's Jon Fosse.
"Fosse’s prose builds out of an ambiguity and sparseness and moves with a slow poetic intensity. The collection has all the hallmarks of Fosse’s signature brooding manner where lyrical precision is used to paint unmoored psyches. Scenes from a Childhood is a welcome – if overdue – introduction to a singular literary voice." — Tank
"Fosse has been compared to Ibsen and to Beckett, and it is easy to see his work as Ibsen stripped down to its emotional essentials. But it is much more. For one thing, it has a fierce poetic simplicity." — New York Times
>> Read an excerpt.
Against the backdrop of White Plains hospital, Lish skewers together memories of long-past infidelities and betrayals, on-going friendships, the death of his wife and the relative comfort of household chairs, to forge a series of interlinked hypnotic and hilarious narratives to pick away at what we thought was our idea of memory. Lish was the editor who 'made' Raymond Carver.
"Closer to a snarling rant than a work of fiction. Reads like the freewheeling wordplay of a mad person." – TLS
"These are stories for the neurotic state of our times, stories for insomnia, stories for those who wake in discontent. There will never be another like Gordon Lish." – Berfrois
Known for her intricate and dynamic wire sculptures, the American sculptor, educator and arts activist Ruth Asawa challenged conventional notions of material and form through her emphasis on lightness and transparency. Asawa began her now iconic looped-wire works in the late 1940s while still a student at Black Mountain College.
>> The Ruth Asawa website (recommended).
>> Of forms and growth.
>> Objects and apparitions.
A woman completing a thesis on Sappho finds herself deeply attracted to a merman.
"Through the eyes of our merman-obsessed anti-heroine, we become attuned to both the poignancy and pointlessness of the human experience-from illusory ambition to unruly erotic fantasy." - Molly Prentiss
>> Meet the author.
A series of exquisite, compactly written pieces exploring the the wonder and sadness of children's toys and their capacity to stir both unsettling and comforting memories in adults.
Actually, it's a short story. "You will have heard of my friend the once celebrated novelist Jocelyn Tarbet, but I suspect his memory is beginning to fade. You'd never heard of me, the once obscure novelist Parker Sparrow, until my name was publicly connected with his. To a knowing few, our names remain rigidly attached, like the two ends of a seesaw. His rise coincided with, though did not cause, my decline. I don't deny there was wrongdoing. I stole a life, and I don't intend to give it back. You may treat these few pages as a confession."
Tolstoy claimed: 'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way'. But what if the happy families are actually the most unusual of all? What does it mean to be a family? To be an individual? And how do we deal with the responsibilities these roles impose upon us? A Weekend In New York intertwines the politics of the household and the state to forge a luminous national portrait on a deceptively local scale.
Four children temporarily lose their parents just as they are about to begin the race that offers their last chance of escaping poverty. Their task is to map a rail route through an uncharted wilderness. They overcome the many obstacles posed by nature—bears, bees, bats, river crossings, cliff-falls, impossible weather—but can they survive the treachery of their competitors?
A stunning graphic novel. After suffering violence and betrayal at home, a young boy flees into an uncompromising landscape ravaged by drought. Without food or water, exposed to the heat of the sun and the violence of his pursuers, the boy sets out across the Spanish plains. An encounter with an elderly goatherd offers hope of survival. The old man can help him stay ahead of the dangers that lie outside - but he can't fix the internal drama that plays out in the boy's mind. Nightmares are a constant reminder of a traumatic past and an unstable present.
Shows the alignment between the Treaty of Waitangi and the Declaration, and examines how the Declaration assists the interpretation and application of Treaty principles of partnership, protection and participation.
Bird's poems hold their subjects in an unflinching grip, addressing faces behind the veneer, asking what it is that keeps us alive.
"Her poems burst with linguistic energy." - TLS
>>Some poems by Caroline Bird.
Poems of happiness - as it comes, when it’s missing and when it is hoped for.
In search of a freer place where every child can go to school, a family moves from Fascist Portugal to Communist Czechoslovakia. Different as this new country is, however, it is far from ideal. In this new, grey world, the lack of freedom is felt in the simplest things, such as the colours one can and cannot wear.
This beautifully illustrated book uses plant science to illuminate how trees play a role in every part of human life, from the romantic to the regrettable. Includes the New Zealand kauri.
Democracy has died hundreds of times, all over the world. We think we know what that looks like: chaos descends and the military arrives to restore order, until the people can be trusted to look after their own affairs again. However, there is a danger that this picture is out of date. Until very recently, most citizens of Western democracies would have imagined that the end was a long way off, and very few would have thought it might be happening before their eyes as Trump, Brexit and paranoid populism have become a reality.
A.M. Homes exposes the heart of an uneasy America in her new collection - exploring people's attachments to each other through characters who aren't quite who they hoped to become, though there is no one else they can be.
"Furiously good." - Zadie Smith
A posthumous collection from one of the subtlest short-story stylists.
"We only want to live a peaceful life. We want to play like other children. My dream is to become a football player." The story of the 16-year-old girl imprisoned by the Israeli army for slapping a soldier in defiance of the Zionist occupation in her village in the West Bank. "She should have gotten a bullet." - Deputy Knesset Speaker Bezalel Smotrich. The book helps the Palestine Legal Defence Fund.
>> Living resistance.
This book will give you the best possible handle on quantum theory - enough to fully grasp the concepts but nothing extraneous to occlude them.
When Edward M. Hallowell was eleven, a voice out of nowhere told him he should become a psychiatrist.
Is a 1968 vision for a socialist future a useful tool today?
BOOKS @ VOLUME #81 (30.6.18)
Our latest newsletter, containing our reviews, recommendations, news and new releases.
 | The Terranauts by T.C. Boyle {Reviewed by STELLA} Welcome to E2 - Ecosphere II, a contained world: a shell of steel and glass sealed from E1 (Earth) in the Arizona desert. Meet Linda Ryu and Dawn Chapman, best friends and competitors for a place in the sphere. Meet cocky Ramsey Roothoorp, guaranteed a place in the team, a competent and logical Terranaut. The novel is told through these three voices - their viewpoints rotating to give us the worldview (in this case, the microscopic view of E2 and Mission Control). The Ecosphere is an experiment to develop a human self-supporting environment, one that will be able to support humankind when the world goes to custard and the earth is uninhabitable. The biodome has been carefully made, with species that will not destroy each other or the environment, with both wild and domestic animals - food sources and nurturers of a balanced ecology, and man-made water and air systems (which ironically need a ton of electrical power from the 'outside' to keep it going). It has all the ecosystems - including rain forest, plains, marine - on a mini scale, cared for a team of eight terranauts - most of whom are leading scientists. Mission Control consists of four power players - the visionary Jeremiah Reed, referred to as G.C. (God the Creator), assisted by chief aide Judy (Judas) and operations manager Dennis (Little Jesus), with the project backed by billionaire Darren Iverson, G.F (God the Financier). If it’s starting to sound a little cult-like, you’re on the right track. There are minions and hopeful wannabes awaiting their turn in the dome. The plan is a closed ecosystem experiment of 100 years - 50 missions of two years duration. We meet our three protagonists when they are in a team of sixteen, bonding and showing their best selves, scientifically, physically and emotionally, in an attempt to win a place in the second team to go under the dome. The first mission came a cropper so the pressure is on to make mission two a success. their mantra “Nothing out, nothing in,” no matter what, and total team dedication. When Dawn is chosen and Linda is left outside, a chasm is opened. How will the friendship survive and what are the true motivations of both? Was Linda sidelined because she’s not the right cultural mix, not a ‘natural beauty’ - because she wouldn’t make such great press? Because this is a world of PR spin (Ramsey’s role: Communications Officer/ Water Systems Manager), all media eyes are on E2, hoping for success but delighting in failure, tourists gawping from the outside. It’s one big fishbowl, and Mission Control is absolutely fixated on power and celebrity. But when you can’t get in except through telecommunications, how much control can be kept? As the first year goes by there are the expected highs and lows, petty jealousies, lack of freedom, absolute physical tiredness (it’s hard work being on constant rations and producing enough food for eight), yet there are euphoric moments when all goes well and even better than expected, when the team bonds, and even moments of relaxation and celebration. When Dawn becomes a catalyst for a division, the risk of whole mission blowing up is heightened, and the cracks begin to show. The second year rolls around and the team draws its lines in the sand with each other as well as with Mission Control. Who can be trusted and how far will they go to keep the faith? Ramsey is compromised by his close relationship with the Mission Control quartet, especially Judy - who will fight tooth and claw to keep the upper hand. As food becomes a constant issue, the Terranauts are pushed to their physical limits, but it’s their psychological health that may undo them, and their individual desires to be top dog and for glory. The humans become the greatest risk to the big experiment. T.C.Boyle creates a soap opera of an ecological experiment - this is satire at its best - tense, funny and often too close to the bone. |
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The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards,” observed Søren Kierkegaard, quoted by Deborah Levy in this account of her struggle for the re-establishment of intellectual freedom and literary momentum in the period following her "escape from the shipwreck” of her marriage and death of her mother. What seems like blundering is only blundering because one is out of the rut to which one had been assigned, because moving forwards while facing backwards is necessarily tentative, because “a new way of living” comes at a cost that cannot be prepaid. Levy quotes Heidegger: “Everyone is the other and no one is himself,” but her aim, in her life and in her writing, is to get “as close to human subjectivity as it is possible to get.” Moving towards the “vague destination of a freer life,” Levy, author of, among other things, the Booker-shortlisted novels Swimming Home and Hot Milk, and of a preceding volume of memoir, Things I Don't Want to Know, moves with her daughters to a tower block where the heating and the water function sporadically, where her neighbour berates her for parking her electric bicycle in front of the building to unload her shopping and where the practical details of life become more problematic, more graspable, more contestable, more real. The Cost of Living is full of details that eschew meaning other than their function as points upon which the whole mechanism of “living” can pivot and flex and find new forms. Levy’s near neighbour offers her a garden shed in which to write, and, as she furnishes it around herself, “it was there that I began to write in the first person, using an *I* that is close to myself but is not myself.” The non-writing life of a writer provides perspective for the writer exactly to the extent that it limits the writer’s production. There can never be an easy (and thereby fatal) accommodation between the literary and quotidian demands upon a writer’s time and energies, but it is exactly this unease, this ambivalence of contesting primacies, that can generate the sort of thought - call it frustration - that can, at best, make life freer and literature more urgent. Meaning, in literature or in life, is always a matter of structure and never of content. The Cost of Living makes no claim to profundity because it excludes profundity from the list of useful things. It is tentative and ambivalent and inconclusive because thought is always unfinished (if it were finished it would cease to be thought). Levy extends de Beauvoir’s observation that gender (among other things) is performative, and wonders how she can move away from what we could call a pre-scripted life to what we could call a de-scripted life. “Everything,” she observes, “is connected in the ecology of language and living.” To write in the first person, whether in fiction or memoir, is to perform a subjectivity that must always sit both uncomfortably close to and uncomfortingly distant from the *I* that writes. A text, regardless of its mode of generation, enters the performance of its reception and is immediately at the mercy, so to call it, of the prevailing modes of that performance. A text will only be effective to the extent that it is neither absorbed nor ejected by that performance. Rachel Cusk, in her superb new novel Kudos has her narrator observe of another writer, Luis (Cusk’s stand-in for Knausgaard): “Unusually perhaps for any man, he has been honest about his own life. … Though of course if he were a woman he would be scorned for this honesty, or at the very least no one would care.” Levy has been, it seems, unvarnishedly honest about her own life and The Cost of Living stands as a memorable challenge to the still-prevailing modes of reception that presume a performance of gender (among other things) that Levy and Cusk both analyse and dismiss. |
It is 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at a women's prison. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth, and her young son. Inside is a world operating on its own mechanisms: thousands of women scrabbling to survive, and a power structure based on violence and absurdity.
>> Read Stella's review.
>> Stella reviews the book on Radio NZ National.
>> Rachel Kushner thinks prisons should exist only in fiction.
>> How Kushner learned about the American prison industry.
>> Standing up for the guilty.
>> Kushner discusses the book.
>> The final sentence.
>> Rachel Kushner at VOLUME.
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Her debut collection of short stories exploring the Haitian diaspora experience.
Our actions have driven Earth into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. For the first time in our home planet's 4.5-billion year history a single species is dictating Earth's future. To some the Anthropocene symbolises a future of superlative control of our environment. To others it is the height of hubris, the illusion of our mastery over nature.
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>>Also available: First Contact / The Cult of Progress by David Olusoga.
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>> Other issues on-line.
Choose from this selection of interesting fiction at reduced prices.
These books have been selected for their excellence but they are beginning to feel jostled on our shelves by more recent arrivals. We have reduced their prices for a short time to help you make your winter more interesting.
>> Click here to choose, reserve and/or purchase your winter reading. We can send the books anywhere.
 | The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner {Reviewed by STELLA} When a novel is set in a prison you might wonder how much mileage an author can get out of a small cell. Meet Rachel Kushner, author, and her protagonist Romy Hall, double-lifer plus six years. The book opens with a group of women being transported by bus from their holding prison to their permanent home at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. Secured to their seats by chains, the women travel through the night and a day, upright and silent. Conversation isn’t encouraged - talking isn’t allowed but this rule doesn’t stop the tiresome Laura Lipp from laying down her story. A woman collapses en route and she is left slumped half out of her seat (declared dead on arrival). Sitting with Romy, we get a glimpse of what her life is going to be like. Kushner tells us more with her descriptions of the bleak view from the window, from the jokes, traded insults and swagger of Romy’s fellow travellers, and Romy’s observations from her place removed from society. Arriving at Stanville the women are processed - a lengthy and humiliating process - during which the youngest of them, eight-months pregnant, goes into labour. Romy and two of her fellow inmates, Fernandez and Conan, earn themselves several weeks in Ad Seg (Administrative Segregation) for helping her give birth. “My first day in prison, and I had already blown my parole board hearing, which was in thirty-seven years.” The Mars Room is a sassy and uncompromising exploration of incarceration in America. Kushner's acerbic tone gives the novel a sharp register devoid of sentiment, her characters are real and raw, and, surprisingly, you will find yourself rooting for your favourites in spite of their crimes and violent pasts. As Romy reveals her story, we are taken to the streets of San Francisco and learn of life with a mother who is hooked on drugs, of an eleven-year-old Romy's first interaction of many with arsehole men, of her friendship with the wild and beautiful Eva, who will be swallowed up by drugs, and we are given a window to the world of women on the fringes of society. Romy’s not an addict, and not without some knowledge and ability, yet she ends up as a lap dancer at the Mars Room, a seedy downtown joint, a place where she thinks she has some independence and freedom. Romy’s downfall - she’s been slipping to the fringes for a while - is Kurt Kennedy. Her victim. Kushner doesn't pull any punches with The Mars Room - it’s gritty, dirty and appalling - just as you would expect. It’s also wry, and full of outrageous characters and their wild stories of heists, bad cops, deals gone wrong, money and drugs. It’s also a tender story about motherhood: Romy’s son is seven when she last sees him. Humanity, the bonds and loyalty of the inmates alongside their prison protocols, helps them create some kind of structure in their endless and repetitive lives - a telling portrayal of our punitive modern society. The Mars Room, like Kushner’s two earlier novels, Telex from Cuba and The Flamethrowers, has social injustice at its core, and is written with the same keen observation and sharp wit, which will make you a fan of her work if you aren’t already. |
 | Kudos by Rachel Cusk {Reviewed by THOMAS} The man next to me on the plane was so tall he couldn’t fit in his seat. His elbows jutted out over the armrests and his knees were jammed against the seat in front, so that the person in it glanced around in irritation every time he moved. The man twisted, trying to get himself into a comfortable, or at least less uncomfortable, position in which he could hold his book at an acceptable distance from his eyes, a distance about which he was either uncommonly fussy or which was dictated by the possibly narrow focal range of his spectacles. “Sorry,” he said. He explained that he needed to write a review of the book by the end of the week, that he was a bookseller with a small bookshop in a provincial town, and that he and his partner, the joint owners of the bookshop, felt obliged to produce a review each every week for inclusion in their digital newsletter. Some weeks were short on reading time, he explained, what with the demands of the bookshop and of what he termed, somewhat vaguely, family life, so he needed to take every opportunity he could to finish reading his current book, in this case Kudos by Rachel Cusk, reading even in circumstances hardly conducive to reading well, such as in cramped seats aboard what he termed fictional aircraft, a context that not only tended to indelibly dominate whatever activity was performed in it, especially the memory of that activity, even more so than the actual performance in what he called the present tense, using a literary term hardly appropriate to what I would term living in real time, memory being, after all, surely, he remarked, the primary mode of a book review, but also left one vulnerable to conversation with whatever stranger one found oneself sitting next to, quite intimately, for an extended period of time, a period of time which neither party to the conversation has the capacity to shorten. I asked him whether he thought that perhaps the random, or at least seemingly random, encounters with members of what might be politely termed the public might not be in some way enriching, and he visibly recoiled at my choice of word, so I repeated it, to gauge its effect, and I immediately understood his reaction. Well, yes, he thought that such encounters might be a way of not so much generating narrative as of generating whatever might take the place of narrative in a work of fiction from which narrative, the possibility of narrative and even the principle of narrative has been expunged. This was very much, he said, what Rachel Cusk had achieved in Kudos, the taking-away from the novel of those principles, or as many of them as possible, that are generally considered to comprise a novel: plot, narrative, characters, development, interiority, but which are really just a set of conventions by which what we think of as novels expend or release their energy, so to call it, without that energy achieving the potentials of fiction, namely to transfer the experience of awareness between two minds, so to call them, in other words, what we think of as the essentials of a novel are the very things that may well reduce the potency of the novel, and, conversely, he thought, if a writer, such as Cusk, managed, as she has with Kudos, to excise from the novel as many as possible of these, what he termed novelistic antics, the novel could become potentised, “austere and astringent,” he called it, cleansing our faculties and getting them to work properly, not just for the reading of fiction but for the living of life, “whatever that might consist of”. When I suggested that perhaps not writing at all would be the apogee of fiction, he laughed briefly, or snorted, and replied that, yes, he was trying that experiment himself, with some success, even though the results suggested that fiction’s ultimate achievement in destroying itself closely resembled the complete absence of fiction. Cusk in the negativity of her fiction was austere, he said, but not as austere as him, who produced, if anything, less than nothing. “I would like the work to be a non-work,” he said, quoting Eva Hesse without attribution. Of course, he went on - and I realised, looking at my watch, partly in an attempt to estimate the proportion of our flight that remained, partly to implant in him some sort of subliminal message, that it would be hard to stop him talking now that I had succeeded in engaging him in conversation - of course it is thewall between the fictional and the actual, between the so-called subjective and the so-called objective aspects of experience, that it should be fiction’s prerogative to assail, to undermine, to cause to crumble, for it is this wall that is responsible for the maintenance of all manner of errors about identity and reality and, ultimately, responsibility, so to call them, errors that are either traps or crutches, he said, traps and crutches being largely indistinguishable from each other unless you know the nature of your affliction, which can only be ascertained by the removal, at least temporarily, of the crutch upon which one has been leaning. I seemed, I thought, to have triggered in him a kind of mania of exposition, which I was beginning to regret, though I had done little more than make what I thought of as small talk with a man whose enthusiasm for literature must surely be an embarrassment to himself. He did not appear to blame me for this, at least, rather, he had become by this stage oblivious to anything but his own train of thought. In many ways, he said,Kudos resembled the work of Thomas Bernhard, a writer for whom he evidently had a great deal of respect, especially in the layering or nesting of narrative within several levels of reportage. In fact, nothingactually happens in the novel until the very last, memorable paragraph, other than the minimum necessary for the interchange of the series of characters - a man who sat beside her on an aeroplane, various writers and interviewers she encounters at a literary festival, a guide, her editor and her translator, her sons who telephone her - whose conversations with her, or, rather narrations to her, the narrator narrates. For instance, at one stage Cusk, one step more invisible even than her invisible narrator, tells us of the narrator telling of a writer named Linda telling of the woman who sat beside Linda on the plane telling Linda of how she came to break her bones. In another passage, during a conversation with an interviewer, the narrator describes to the interviewer what the interviewer had described to the narrator during a previous conversation. The narrator reveals nothing of herself, he explained with a patience that seemed unpredicated on either my understanding of or my interest in what he was explaining, other than that which is revealed by her function as a conduit for the stories, and voices, of others. By reducing herself to so very little, to almost nothing, the narrator is able to enter and own the stories of others, he said, or, rather, Cusk is able to use the narrator as a device to enter and own stories, the layers of narrative, hearsay and reportage rendering the distinction between fiction and actuality entirely extraneous. Also, this authorial or narratorial intrusion frequently breaches the distinctions between the levels of narrative, he said, what he called the narrator’s first person reduced and sharpened to such a pinprick that it enters and appropriates details in quoted speech and reported speech, in second- and third-person narratives of secondary and tertiary narratives in the second person - I must say I couldn’t follow quite what he was telling me, but, I must also say, I wasn’t trying very hard - sometimes ultimately reporting information that the narrator could in fact have no access to through those conversations, information that could not be at less than a step or two's remove. Although I was by this stage hardly encouraging him, the bookseller was unstoppable. “All fiction is inherently a transgression of the sovereignty of persons, although this transgression is by no means limited to fiction but can also be observed in all attempts at the so-called understanding of, or, rather, representation of, actual others.” The trappings of fiction and the conventions of social interaction try their hardest to mask this unconscionable intrusion and appropriation, but this intrusion and appropriation is at the nub of things, fictional and otherwise, he said, and ultimately destabilise any notions we might have of identity, reality and, ultimately, responsibility. I suggested that he might have gone over this ground before, or so it seemed to me, but he continued. “Who owns whose narrative?” he demanded, not, I think, of me. He was quiet a moment, but not longer. “Listen to this,” he said, and proceeded to quote a passage he had marked in the book: “‘I said that while her story suggested that human lives could be governed by the laws of narrative, and all the notions of retribution and justice that narrative lays claim to, it was in fact merely her interpretation of events that created that illusion. … The narrative impulse might spring from the desire to avoid guilt, rather than from the need - as was generally assumed - to connect things together in a meaningful way; that it was a strategy calculated, in other words, to disburden ourselves from responsibility.’ What do you think?” he asked. I hadn’t quite caught it all, he had been reading too fast and we were sitting near the engines, so I hesitated before he went on, seemingly unaware that I had not replied. Cusk’s work was a work of great clarity, which, he said, as well as being very pleasurable to read, was a work of liberating negativity, a reformulation of the purpose and capacities of fiction, no less. The purpose of art is to turn upon and destroy itself, he said, or words to that effect, and at the same time and by this process to change the nature of our relationship with the actual. He turned to another marked passage, in which Cusk’s narrator, Faye, relates to an interviewer what had been said to her by her son during a telephone call, something about “‘passing through the mirror into the state of painful self-awareness where human fictions lose their credibility,’” a process he appeared to ascribe to the fiction, such asKudos, that he valued most. I told them that I was sorry, but he had actually managed, by his overcomplicated enthusiasm for it, to put me off buying a book I would no doubt otherwise have enjoyed, having enjoyed Cusk’s two previous books, Outline and Transit, and he obliged me by keeping quiet for what remained of the flight. |