What have we been reading? What will you read next?
Our reviews and recommendations, as well as numerous events and competitions, can be discovered in our latest NEWSLETTER:
BOOKS @ VOLUME #86 (4.8.18)
What have we been reading? What will you read next?
Our reviews and recommendations, as well as numerous events and competitions, can be discovered in our latest NEWSLETTER:
BOOKS @ VOLUME #86 (4.8.18)
 | The Rending and the Nest by Kaethe Schwehn {Review by STELLA} Scenario: You’re standing in the Mall of America looking at the bling. Next thing you know you come to on the floor with a necklace in your hand and the world altered. There is no one around: no checkout operators, no other customers in what only a moment ago was a crowded and bustling hive of commercial activity. What has happened? - a fire alarm, a natural disaster? No: the disappearance of 95% of the world, human and object. Not only are people missing, so are things. Eerily, shelves are bare save for the odd things. No rhyme. No reason. More like a fire sale after the rush, a few items remaining dotted here and there. Meet Mira. The Rending and the Nest is a post-apocalyptic novel with a young woman at its centre. Mira is seventeen when the Rending takes place. Five years on, she is living in a rudimentary community called Zion with a handful of other survivors, plucking an existence out of the ‘piles’, growing basic root vegetables and hunting the odd mammal still in existence. Life is now known as the After and most try not to think about the Before and all that they have loved and lost. Like many other novels of this genre, there is a lack of resources, non-existent infrastructure (this seems to collapse fairly instantly), communication reverting to physical meetings between groups or individuals (in Zion ‘visitors’ are allowed to stay only for a maximum of seven days), and new social structures - usually based on a mash-up of previous social norms, survivalist instincts and piecemeal religious rituals. And as with several recent fictions, the issue of fertility is a key element in this novel. Several novels, perhaps echoing our falling fertility rate in Western nations (due to social or environmental factors) have been concerned with reproduction, lack of fertile women and control of those that can birth - The Handmaid’s Tale was a forerunner. In Schwehn’s novel, she has taken this concept to another level. There are few children left in the After, and no babies have been born for several years. When Mira’s best friend Lana (the community’s prostitute - there are more men than women in Zion) falls pregnant there is curiosity and caution. Lana has a normal pregnancy but gives birth to an object - a plastic doll. As Lana descends into a malaise, the community carries on but is increasingly unsettled by this and subsequent object births from the other mothers. Lana’s depression is broken by the arrival of the charismatic Michael who has come from the Zoo, a place avoided by the Zionists for the rumours they have heard. Michael is recording stories, stories which he will use to lure inhabitants to the Zoo. And here the story really heats up, as Kaethe Schwehn delves into the psyche of survival and power. If you find dystopia intriguing add this one to your reading pile, alongside The Power, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, The Book of Joan and Station Eleven. |
 | Água Viva by Clarice Lispector {Review by THOMAS} A jellyfish is an entity that exists only as a skin suspended in a continuum, dependent upon and at the mercy of that continuum. Clarice Lispector’s novel Água Viva (‘living water’ or ‘jellyfish’ in Portuguese) takes the form of a fragmented interior monologue addressed by an ‘I’ to a ‘you’ from whom the ‘I’ has recently been separated and liberated. Other than being a constraining force, we learn nothing of this ‘you’, so it could be an element of the same person as the ‘I’ as much as it could be another person (of course, the same could be said of the characters of all novels so this is a bit of an idle speculation). The liberation experienced by the ‘I’ is a dissolution of form (is ‘you’ form per se?), a surrender to the forces which, to her, underlie and animate the medium of fiction. As with a jellyfish, the novel reveals more of the currents and fertility of its medium than it is concerned with any of the more solid containers (plot, character, development) into which the medium is, by convention, constrained. “This is not a book because this isn’t how anyone writes.” The novel, so to call it, is a conscious membrane given held up and animated by, and bourn by the storms and currents of, the vast unconscious tohubohu of its medium. “I’m after whatever is lurking behind thought.” The work seeks only to give access to the instant, or, “more than the instant, I want its flow,” wrested from the imposed concept of time upon which linear narratives depend. “The next moment, do I make it? Or does it make itself?” In some ways the novel is an interrogation of the tension between the ecstatic hyperawareness of a single moment, relieved of illusions of past and present but transforming itself by its innate momentum, and the configuration of that eternal moment in written form. “What I say is pure present and this book is a straight line in space. Even if I say ‘I lived’ or ‘I shall live’ it’s present because I’m saying them now.” Lispector’s attempts to write a novel totally free of the dependence upon being ‘about’ anything, to “write with my whole body, loosing an arrow that will sink into the tender and neuralgic centre of the word” in an attempt to use words as an attempt to touch a reality beyond words: “Writing is the method of using the word as bait: the word fishing for whatever is not word. Once whatever is between the lines is caught, the word can be tossed away in relief.” All writing is fundamentally about writing, but Lispector is exploring the possibility that writing, properly examined, may give access to something beyond it that it also obscures. “Reality has no synonyms. I want to feel in my probing hands the living and quivering nerve of today.” She wants to access the “lucid darkness, luminous stupidity” which can only be found somewhere beyond meaning: “I renounce having a meaning. … I may not have meaning but it is the same lack of meaning that a pulsing vein has.” Attaining liberation is simultaneously an extinction, the ends of the circle meet, meaning resembles inanity, individuality is indistinguishable from cliché, the inspired segues into the unreadable. “I, anonymous work of anonymous reality only justifiable as long as my life lasts. And then? Then all that I lived will be a poor superfluity. When I die, I’ll never have been born and lived.” Fertile mud is, after all, still mud. But, there, despite it all, is the ‘I’, still pulsing, still irresolvable, still clamouring for an existence that neither be contained or expressed. “They wanted me to be an object. I’m an object. An object dirty with blood. That creates other objects and the typewriter creates all of us. It demands. The mechanism demands and demands my life. But I don’t totally obey: If I must be an object let me be an object that screams. What saves me is the scream.” |
>> The book earned designer Aaron Beehre a raft of prizes at the 2018 PANZ Book Design Awards.
>> How did Canterbury Museum come to acquire the largest collection of Chinese antiquities in New Zealand?
>> The entire stunning collection can be viewed on-line.
>> Rewi Alley, the most famous New Zealander in China.
>> The New Zealand China Friendship Society was founded in 1952 to further the work of Rewi Alley and to help New Zealanders learn about China.
GIVEAWAY. We have a copy of New China Eye Witness to give away, courtesy of Canterbury University Press. To go in the draw, tell us (books[at]volume[dot]nz) who donated the collection of Chinese antiquities described in the book to the Canterbury Museum. The winner will be drawn on 17.8.18.
NEW RELEASES
(They're new.)
A novel that challenges our ideas about the future, about organ-trafficking, about identity, clones, and the place of the individual in a surveillance state. In the near future, a woman writes from the depths of a forest. Her body, like the world around her, is falling apart - she's down to one eye, one kidney, one lung. Before she was a psychotherapist, treating patients who had suffered trauma. Every two weeks she visited her 'half' ' a comatose double, whose body parts were available whenever needed. As a form of resistance the woman flees, along with other fugitives and their halves. But life in the forest is disturbing too - the reanimated halves behave like uninhibited adolescents, and when she sees a shocking image of herself on video, are her worst fears confirmed?
"‘Once again, Darrieusecq gives us a passionate investigation into the deficiencies, transformations and lapses in our humanity. A little like Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451, she shows how literature is our best means to disrupt functionality." - Focus Vif
>> Read an extract.
>> A dream of the forest.
Identical twins Sonja and Charlotte are musical prodigies with extraordinary powers. Born on All-Hallows-Eve, the girls could play music before they could walk. They were found one night by Tatty, the Tattooed Lady of the circus, in a pail on her doorstep with only a note and a heart-shaped locket. They've been with Tatty ever since, roaming the Outskirts in the circus caravans, moving from place to place.But lately, curious things have started to happen when they play their instruments. During one of their performances, the girls accidentally levitate their entire audience, drawing too much unwanted attention. Soon, ominous Enforcers come after them, and Charlotte and Sonja must embark on a perilous journey through enchanted lands in hopes of unlocking the secrets of their mysterious past. A wonderful illustrated story.
"Full of wonders. Vivid and attractive." - Philip Pullman
>> Watch the trailer, meet the characters and read the sample.
An autobiographical novel of Segal's experience of leaving Austria for Britain on the Kindertransports, and of living as a refugee and finally getting visas for her parents to join her.
"Moving and newly relevant. if you translate Segal's beautiful, elliptical prose into today’s terms, her story becomes both radical and unsettling." - Guardian
A stunning large-format book of stunning large-format photographs of stunning large-format landscapes devoid of even the slightest human impact. You will want this.
World War One. A small village in Poland. After the Germans bomb the schoolhouse and the long-residing Russian soldiers prepare to leave the area, Patryk’s small, isolated village is suddenly a whirlwind of activity. Inspired by the frequent comings and goings of military men, Jurek, the cruel, conniving leader of Patryk’s group of classmates, declares a daring challenge: whoever procures the best button from a soldier’s uniform gets to be king. Patryk is determined to beat Jurek at his own game, but he is no match for Jurek’s determination to win at all costs, even as the game turns deadly.
In this personal and lyrical exploration of what it means to ride a bicycle, Maunder explores how our memories have a dialogue with landscape and how cycling and creativity are connected.
>> Flann O'Brien's atomic theory.
What happens when Critchley's pointy head is focused on the inflated sphere of a football? How can the 'beautiful game' be a way of thinking about philosophy, society, identity and poetics?
39 authors under 40 years old, from 15 countries, some known; many to discover. Exciting. Gabriela Jauregui, Juan Pablo Roncone, Diego Zúñiga, Martin Felipe Castagnet, Lolita Copacabana, Diego Erlan, Mauro Libertella, Samanta Schweblin; Luciana Sousa, Carlos Manuel Álvarez, Frank Báez, Laia Jufresa, Jesús Miguel Soto, Mauro Javier Cardenas, Mónica Ojeda, Natalia Borges Polesso, Mariana Torres, Liliana Colanzi, Damián González Bertolino, Valentin Trujillo, María José Caro, Juan Manuel Robles, Brenda Lozano, Claudia Ulloa Donoso, Giuseppe Caputo, Juan Cárdenas, Juan Esteban Constaín, Daniel Ferreira, Felipe Restrepo Pombo, Cristian Romero, Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón, Carlos Fonseca, Alan Mills, Valeria Luiselli, Emiliano Monge, Eduardo Rabasa, Daniel Saldaña Paris, Gonzalo Eltesh, Eduardo Plaza.
A search for belonging turns into a riotous satire of identity politics in this wildly irreverent coming-of-age story.
"Lexi Freiman is a savage writer, hilarious and brilliant, and in Inappropriation, she has reframed the traditional coming-of-age story, tackling it with irreverence and acid wit. This is a daring book, thrillingly of our moment." - Emma Cline, author of The Girls
"Inappropriation is sly and risky, but also sweet, a wickedly funny machine built to make us laugh and think. The comic novel has a bold new voice in Lexi Freiman, and she could not have come along at a better time." - Sam Lipsyte, author of The Fun Parts
An outstanding graphic novel. On a tiny lighthouse island far from the rest of the world, a hermit lives out his existence. Every week a supply boat leaves provisions, yet the fishermen never leave their boat, and never meet him.Years spent on this deserted rock, with imagination his sole companion, has made the lighthouse keeper something more than alone, something else entirely. For him, there is nothing beyond the horizon. But, one day, a new boatman steps onto the island...
Remco knows he is special. He was chosen. He thinks that God took a shine to him, when a bright light in a clear northern sky brought him to the incredible Cloud Hotel. It’s a palace of wonders, an escape from the world, and a place to be alone. Well, almost alone. But now it’s time to check out, and the hotel’s last two guests must race against time to find what’s been lost, before they overstay their welcome. Graphic novel.
"Crisp of line and hypnotically peculiar, Hanshaw deftly suspends us between dream and reality, as good comics do. As in life, the harder we look the more we see, and the stranger things invariably become." — Shaun Tan
>> From Julian's brain.
>> Not to be confused with this "luxury budget" hotel.
Build a repertoire of enjoyable vegetarian food loved by families of varying backgrounds. The family stories and then-and-now photographs are delightful, too.
A sharp group biography of writers who demonstrated and importance and benefits of not holding their tongues. Includes Dorothy Parker, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion.
"This is such a great idea for a book, and Michelle Dean carries it off, showing us the complexities of her fascinating, extraordinary subjects, in print and out in the world. Dean writes with vigor, depth, knowledge and absorption, and as a result Sharp is a real achievement." - Meg Wolitzer, New York Times
First published in 1847, Byrne's book of coloured illustrations of Euclid's Elements remains a design exemplar (and preceded Mondrian's investigations into colour geometry by almost a century.
38 floral designers.
As an ageing, tenacious Elizabeth I clung to power, a talented playwright probed the social and psychological roots and the twisted consequences of tyranny. What Shakespeare discovered in his characters remains remarkably relevant today. He shone a spotlight on the infantile psychology and narcissistic appetites of demagogues and imagined how they might be stopped.
"Scholarly and highly entertaining." - The Guardian
Jane's father disappears during an earthquake and Jane must enter a dangerous place between worlds, a place with shifting rooms and magical traps, to search for him. But she is not the only one tracking her father, whose secrets have drawn the attention of sinister powers. Can Jane and her new friends prevail? The start of an exciting new series.
Apart from the marriage of Tsarevich Nicholas to Victoria's favourite granddaughter Alix, the royal families met three times: in Balmoral, in Revel and on the Isle of Wight before Revolution removed the Russians from the equation. King George denied his Romanov cousins refuge in Britain in 1917.
Lots of insect information illustrated in an appealing retro style.
>> Others in the same series.
Moomins! Sculpture! Painting! Design! Relationships! Fiction! An island!
The Andromeda Galaxy is rushing towards us at 400,000 kilometres an hour. This book is a guide to the night sky and its wonders (black holes, pulsars, red stars, blue stars) with a fresh urgency - when the Andromeda Galaxy collides with ours in 5.86 billion years, will we be prepared?
The societies we live in are increasingly making our minds ill, making it feel as though the way we live is engineered to make us unhappy. What can we do about this?
Naeem is a Bangledeshi teenager living in Queens, New York, who thinks he can charm his way through anything. But then mistakes catch up with him. So do the cops, who offer him an impossible choice - spy on his Muslim neighbours and report back to them on shady goings-on, or face a police record.
“Watched will pull you into its world with magnetic, graceful power, and deeply touching scenes of immigrant life and relationships. A hauntingly perfect, potent story for this moment.”—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Habibi
Set in an unnamed city but with an astonishing, breath-shorteningly palpable sense of time and place, Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. The story of inaction with enormous consequences and decisions that are never made, but for which people are judged and punished.
Long-listed for the 2018 Man Booker Prize.
Ten year-old Mia Tang moved from Hong Kong to the US for a better life, a freer life, but so far, it's a life where she runs the front desk of a motel while her parents clean rooms. And she's not even allowed to use the swimming pool. Based on the author's experience as an immigrant.
Since 2013, Kurdish jounralist Boochani has been held by the Australian government of Manus island in contravention of international law. While there he has managed to surreptitiously write this book about his experiences.
>> Boochani has also been involved in the making of this film.
A workbook of approachable prompts and exercises for life writing.
A FEW BOOKS ABOUT MEMORY
{Reviews by Thomas}
“Who knows? Maybe something valuable in these notes.” Does a series of notes on how a work might come to be written itself constitute a work? The day after his mother’s death in 1977, Barthes began writing observations on his mourning for her on small slips of paper. The fact that he isolated this accumulation from his other work (Camera Lucida, also addressing loss and memory, but via consideration of photography, specifically a photograph of his mother, was also written in this period) as well as intimations that making these notes into a book would bring the process of mourning to a close, rather than writing a book for posterity, as, he admits, has been the case for his previous books, suggests that had Barthes not had an unfortunate encounter with a laundry van in 1980, he might have used these notes to write a book. These notes are not that book, but it could be the case that these notes, for all their inconsistencies, vaguenesses and banalities, make a rawer and more compelling book than if they had been made into the book that Barthes had perhaps intended (this might also not be the case, of course), for the notes sketch nebulae from which diamonds might be compressed (if that was Barthes’s creative process) and demonstrate that his more rigorously intellectual works have emotional bases that they are perhaps constructed to conceal. Of his mother’s recent death (he had shared an apartment with her for 60 years), Barthes writes, “I don’t want to talk about it, for fear of making literature out of it, although as a matter of fact literature originates within these truths.” Instead, he observes himself and his mourning: “In taking these notes, I’m trusting myself to the banality that is in me.” His loss alters the way he sees both life and literature, emphasising the significance of the seemingly banal and diminishing the importance of the seemingly profound. “Everywhere, I see each individual under the aspect of ineluctably having-to-die. And no less obviously, I see them as not knowing this to be so.” “My suffering is inexpressible but all the same utterable,” he notes. It is the very shortcomings of language, the necessity of labelling his suffering as intolerable, that makes his suffering tolerable. “The indescribableness of my mourning results from my failure to hystericise it. Maman’s death is perhaps the one thing in my life that I have not responded to neurotically. My grief has not been hysterical; doubtless, more hysterically parading my depression, I would have been less unhappy. I see that the non-neurotic is not good.” “Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering,” writes Barthes, and, despite his assurances that this will not happen (“my mourning does not wear away, because it is not continuous” (“I waver between the observation that I’m unhappy only by moments, and the conviction that in actual fact I am continually, all the time, unhappy.”)), his mourning does in fact wear away, “gradually narcissism gives way to a sad egoism.” Narcissism being a literary mode; egoism not, the diary becomes sporadic and less focused as this process advances. Early on, Barthes states, “I live in my suffering, and that makes me happy,” but eventually he has trouble maintaining his identification with his mother (“henceforth and forever I am my own mother,” he had said), and his unhappiness changes its texture: “I left a place where I was unhappy and it did not make me happy to leave it.” Eventually, observing the exhaustion of grief in the maintenance of its referents, he concludes, “we don’t forget, but something vacant settles in.”
Unless we are wrested by a pervasive trauma from the entire set of circumstances which constitute our identities, which are always contextual rather than intrinsic, our memories are never kept solely within the urns of our minds, so to call them, but are frequently prodded, stimulated and remade by elements beyond ourselves, or, indeed, are outsourced to these elements. Brian Dillon’s In the Dark Room is thoughtful examination of the way in which his memories of his parents, who both died as he was making the transition into adulthood, are enacted through the interplay of interior and exterior elements (the book is divided into sections: ‘House’, ‘Things’, ‘Photographs’, ‘Bodies’, ‘Places’). It is the physical world, rather than time, that is the armature of memory: time, or at least our experience of it, is contained in space, is, for us, an aspect of space, of physical extension, of objects. It is through objects that the past reaches forward and grasps at the present. And it is through the dialogue with objects that we call memory that these objects lose their autonomy and become mementoes, bearers of knowledge on our behalf or in our stead. Memory both provides access to and enacts our exclusion from the spaces of the past to which it is bound. In many ways, when the relationship between the object and the memory seem closest, this relationship is most fraught. Photographs, which Dillon describes as “a membrane between ourselves and the world,” are not so much representations as obscurations of their subjects. The subjects of photographs both inhabit an immediate moment and are secured by them in the “debilitating distance” of an uninhabitable past. When Dillon is looking at a photograph of his mother, “the feeling that she was manifestly present but just out of reach was distinctly painful. … Photography and the proximity of death tear the face from its home and memory and set it adrift in time.” All photographs (and, indeed, all associative objects) are moments removed from time and so are equivalents, contesting with interior memories to be definitive. Photographs, even more than other objects, but other objects also, are mechanisms of avoidance and substitution as much as they are mechanisms of preservation. Memory, illness, death all distort our experience of time, but so does actual experience, and it is this distortion that generates memory, that imprints the physical with experience “spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina” (in the words of George Eliot). Intense experience, especially traumatic experience, death, illness, loss, violence, occlude the normal functions of memory and push us towards the edges of consciousness, touching oblivion as they also imprison us in the actual. As Dillon found, if experience cannot be experienced all at once, the context of the experience can bear us through, but it must be revisited in memory, repeatedly, until the experience is complete, if this is ever possible. Memory will often co-opt elements of surroundings to complete itself, and, especially if associative objects are not present, it will magnify its trauma upon unfamiliar contexts, increasing the separation and isolation it also seeks to overcome. Must the past be faced as directly as possible so that we may at last turn away from it?
In 1953, maverick neurosurgeon William Beecher Scoville performed a groundbreaking operation on a 27-year-old epileptic patient named Henry Molaison. The operation failed to eliminate Molaison's intractable seizures, but it did have an unintended effect: Henry was left profoundly amnesic, unable to create long-term memories. In a time when all neurological knowledge was based upon aberration and dysfunction, what was learned from this misadventure about both the neurological and the functional aspects of memory?
>> More about Moliason.
A child exposed to experiences of a kind and scale that cannot be assimilated will create their own mythology to make life liveable. Otto Dov Kulka was a child in Auschwitz, and went on to become a prominent historian of the Holocaust. This book is remarkable as it deals specifically with the internal aspects of surviving in an intolerable situation, young Otto’s ‘Metropolis of Death’. One of the tragedies of the Holocaust was the way in which millions of people, each with their own personal narrative, were subsumed by a single narrative (one which led to the gas chambers and crematoria). It is unfortunate that even many of the most sympathetic portrayals and histories tend to reinforce the single narrative, the erasure, and it is interesting to read Kulka express his feelings of alienation when reading or watching accounts of concentration camp experiences. One of Kulka’s achievements in this deeply thoughtful book is to show how an individual can retain that individuality, and even find a sort of beauty and meaning, even under the irresistible weight of a subsuming narrative such as the ‘immutable law of the Great Death’.
“She will go within herself only to retrieve the world,” writes Annie Ernaux in this astounding work of what she terms “impersonal autobiography”. Conspicuously not a memoir, unless it is a memoir of time itself, the book takes the form of a ‘flat’, rigorous and unsentimental serial accumulation of moments that would otherwise be lost from human experience, moments shorn of interpretation or context, impressions that the author has resisted the expectation to turn into a narrative. Thus preserved in the nearest possible state to experience, the memories retain the power of memories without being condensed into fact, they retain the power to resonate in the reader in the way in which the reader's own memories resonate. Although the memories are often very personal and specific, covering every detail of Ernaux’s life from childhood to old age, Ernaux never presents them as belonging to an ‘I’, always to a ‘she’ or a ‘we’. She does not presume a continuity of self other than the self that exists in the moment of experience, a moment that will continue until that memory is extinguished. The distancing of the memory from the ‘I’, the clipping free of the experience from its subject, the creation of a text that is at once impersonal and personal, becomes a machine for the conversion of the particular into the universal, or, rather, for erasing the distinction between the two. “By retrieving the collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History.” At the moment that Ernaux severs her attachment from the memories that she records, she saves them from plausible extinction, she makes them the memories of others. When such responses are awakened in the reader, the reader becomes the rememberer (the rememberer in this case of living in France between 1941 and 2006). Any emotional response comes from the reader’s experience, not the author’s, or, rather, from the collective human experience that includes both reader and author. There are separate narratives, or separate modes, for what one remembers and what one knows to have happened. What is the relationship between these two kinds of memory? “Between what happens in the world and what happens to her, there is no point of convergence. They are two parallel series: one abstract, all information no sooner received than forgotten, the other all static shots,” she writes. As Ernaux reaches old age, witnessing a series of “burials that foreshadow her own,” she casts back from an imperative somewhere beyond her death, recording the rush of memory towards its ultimate forgetting. “All the images will disappear. They will vanish all at the same time, like the images that lay hidden behind the foreheads of the grandparents, dead for half a century, and of the parents, also dead. Thousands of words will suddenly be deleted the ones that were used to name things, faces, acts and feelings, to put the world in order. Everything will be erased in a second, the dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated.” But it is not only death that can extinguish memory: “The future is replaced by a sense of urgency that torments her. She is afraid that her memory will become cloudy and silent. Maybe one day all things and their names will slip out of alignment and she’ll no longer be able to put names to reality. All that will remain is the reality that cannot be spoken. Now’s the time to give form to her future absence through writing.” Her book is an attempt to “save something from the time where we will never be again.” By her method of conjuring and recording the raw material of her life, Ernaux “finds something that the image from her personal memory doesn’t give her on its own: a kind of vast collective sensation that takes her consciousness, her entire being, into itself.” The passage of time is made tangible, subjects are dissolved in their experiences, the intimate is revealed as the universal, moments are, in the act of writing, both held and relinquished.
'S' was a failure in most ways. He could never hold down a job and he found it difficult to communicate and understand although he could learn vast tables of figures and recall them accurately seventeen years later. The strange processes of memory he evolved and his inability to forget the pains of childhood, made the simplest prose or poetry an impossible frustration, yet he could memorise whole pages of text in a language he didn't know. An almost magical use of his own imaginative powers enabled him to control his pulse and body temperature, but these same powers blurred the line that divides reality from fantasy. Luria's important study shows that a great gift is just as much a great defect, and that forgetting is essential to functioning sanity, something that a person incapable of forgetting can never achieve. Someone incapable of forgetting is perhaps as remote from having a personality as someone incapable of forming memories or someone whose memories are lost.
“Even before my body was an instrument for language it was an instrument for memory,” writes Sarah Manguso in this little book of musings on her relationship with time. With language, though, came the ability to record memory, to further the work of memory in replacing experience with a story about experience, with an ersatz 'experience' that relieves us from experience, a replacement that is, in effect, a form of forgetting, the substitution of experience with something more manageable, more assimilable. For much of her life, Manguso kept a diary, amounting eventually to more than 800 000 words, obsessively recording “what [she] could bear to remember and to convince [her]self that that was all there was.” In her diary she “files away the time that passes so I no longer need to think about it. The experience is no longer experience. It is writing.” Life as it was lived was influenced by the writing that might be done about it. Description, or the potential for description, began to cause that which was described. Time was pulled forward by the representation of its contents. Every detail recorded is an editing-out of all other possible details, each story is a deletion of all other possible stories, each path taken is a turning-away from all other possible paths. “I’d study photographs and gradually forget everything that happened between the shutter openings.” But how else may we be relieved of all those details, all those stories, all those paths, that burden us, threaten us, even, with their possibility? Manguso’s diary-keeping also arose from her desperate conception of time, from her addiction to beginnings and endings, from her inability to experience life as ongoing. “Something will happen,” she repeated to herself at a structural level. Manguso’s relationship with time changed following the birth of her son. As a new parent, and while nursing, she experienced “a new nothing, an absence of subjective experience.” Her grip, or stranglehold, on her experiences was loosened, softened, reformulated by her new role in the experiences of another. “I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby’s continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against.” A reconfiguration of her attachments entailed a reconfiguration of Manguso’s world-view as well: “The experiences that demanded I yield control to a force greater than my will weren’t the beginnings or the ends of anything. They were the moments when I was forced to admit that beginnings and ends are illusory,” she writes.“I no longer believe in anything other than the middle.” No longer needing her diary to formulate experience (“Forgotten moments are the price of continued participation in life, a force indifferent to time.”), Manguso has become more aware of the ongoingness of time, the inchoate onward rush of all things for which linear time can never be more than “a summary”. Participation in life requires an acceptance of (even an enthusiasm for) mortality: “The best thing about time is the privilege of running out of it, of watching the wave of mortality break over me and over everyone I know. No more time, no more potential. The privilege of ruling things out. Finishing. Knowing I’m finished. And knowing that time will go on without me. A flash - and I’m gone, but look, the churn of bodies through the world of light.”
Memory and personality are interdependent and could be seen to be aspects of each other. Both are constructs that enable us to function practically and socially, but both are tentative, fragile and vulnerable to erosion. When Erwin Mortier’s mother developed Alzheimer’s Disease at the age of 65, her loss of memory was also a profound loss of personality and Mortier began to find it difficult to associate the memories he had of his once-vivacious mother with the person whose rapid mental and physical diminishment made her more of a lingering absence than a presence. Mortier’s book is beautifully written, intensely sad, unsentimental, unflinching and tender. His ability to use a tiny detail or turn of phrase to evoke a memory of his mother or his childhood or a step in his mother’s loss of memory and language and personality is remarkable. Written while his mother is still alive in an attempt to fix his memories of her lest they get sucked away in the slipstream of her departure, the book expresses the hope that, following her death, these memories will be freed from the mental decline which currently overwhelms them and that, through words, they may come together again to form an idea of the particular person his mother was. Perhaps our individuality, dependent as it is on language and memory, is what is gradually (or rapidly) eroded in Alzheimer’s, and what is left, the whimpering animal full of fear but occasionally responsive to small immediate comforts, is what we all have in common, what is always at our core, but which we obscure with layers of language, personality, belief and knowledge (all relatively recent evolutionary innovations) in order to function, to survive, to bear existence, to comfort ourselves and others.
“I write: I write because we lived together, because I was once amongst them, a shadow amongst their shadows, a body close to their bodies. I write because they left in me their indelible mark, whose trace is writing. Their memory is dead in writing; writing is the memory of their death and the assertion of my life.” Both of Perec’s parents were killed in the 1939-1945 war, his father early on as a French soldier, and, soon after, his mother sent to a death camp. Their young son was smuggled out of Paris and spent the war years in a series of children’s homes and safe villages. “My childhood belongs to those things which I know I don’t know much about,” he writes. W alternates two narratives, the first an attempt by Perec to set down the memories of his childhood and to examine these not only for their accuracy but in order to learn the way in which memory works. Often factual footnotes work in counterpoint to the ‘remembered’ narrative, underscoring the limitations of the experiences that formed it. Right from birth the pull of the Holocaust is felt upon Perec’s personal biography, and his story is being shaped by this force, sucking at it, sucking his family and all stability away. Sometimes he attaches to himself experiences of which he was merely a witness, the memories transformed by remembering and by remembering the remembering, and so forth, and by the infection of memories by extraneous imaginative details. “Excess detail is all that is needed to ruin a memory.” The absences around which these memories circulate fill the narrative with suppressed emotion. The other narrative begins as a sort of mystery novel in Part One, telling how one Gaspard Winckler is engaged by a mysterious stranger to track down the fate of the boy whose name he had unknowingly assumed and who had gone missing with his parents in the vicinity of Terra del Fuego where they had gone in search of an experience that would relieve the boy’s mutism. In Part 2, the tone changes to that of an encyclopedia and we begin to learn of the customs, laws and practices of the land of W, isolated in the vicinity of Terra del Fuego, a society organised exclusively around the principles of sport, “a nation of athletes where Sport and life unite in a single magnificent effort.” Perec tells us that ‘W’ was invented by him as a child as a focus for his imagination and mathematical abilities during a time when his actual world and his imaginative world were far apart, his mind filled with “human figures unrelated to the ground which was supposed to support them, disengaged wheels rotating in the void” as he longed for an ordinary life “like in the storybooks”. Life and sport on W are governed by a very complex system of competition, ‘villages’ and Games, “the sole aim to heighten competitiveness or, to put it another way, to glorify victory.” It is not long before we begin to be uncomfortable with some of the laws and customs of W, for instance, just as winners are lauded, so are losers punished, and all individual proper names are banned on W, with athletes being nameless (apart from an alphanumeric serial number) unless their winnings entitle them to bear, for a time, the name of one of the first champions of their event, for “an athlete is no more and no less than his victories.” Perec intimates that there is no dividing line between a rationally organised society valuing competition and fascism, the first eliding into the second as a necessary result of its own values brought to their logical conclusions. “The more the winners are lauded, the more the losers are punished.” The athletes are motivated to peak performance by systematic injustice: “The Law is implacable but the Law is unpredictable.” Mating makes a sport of rape, and aging Veterans who can no longer compete and do not find positions as menial ‘officials’ are cast out and forced to “tear at corpses with their teeth” to stay alive. Perec’s childhood fantasy reveals the horrors his memoir is unable to face directly. We learn that the athletes wear striped uniforms, that some compete tarred and feathered or are forced to jump into manure by “judges with whips and cudgels.” We learn that the athletes are little more than skin and bone, and that their performances are consequently less than impressive. As the two strands of the book come together at the end, Perec tells of reading of the Nazi punishment camps where the torture of the inmates was termed ‘sport’ by their tormentors. The account of W ends with the speculation that at some time in the future someone will come through the walls that isolate the sporting nation and find nothing but “piles of gold teeth, rings and spectacles, thousands and thousands of clothes in heaps, dusty card indexes, and stocks of poor-quality soap.”
"More than the game it's meant for, a plaything is usually remembered for its personal, incidental uses." This beautifully written and evocative alphabetical collection of short pieces about various toys, from abacus to baby doll to yo-yo to model zoo demonstrates how intimate objects become repositories of memory: experiences long forgotten gush forth in the most surprising fashion when we make contact with (or even consider) the objects we had unknowingly so loaded with that experience at some time in the past. Toys are remarkable in this regard: often accorded agency and specificity by children, they reward this dedication by delivering through time something of our lost selves. Although toys are often remembered for their "personal, incidental uses" rather than for their ostensible purposes, Petrignani's book is remarkable for showing how these "personal, incidental uses" are in fact common to all children, everywhere: who has not interacted with an abacus or a kaleidoscope in just the way that Petrignani describes? and who would have realised that these ways of interacting were not only personal?
“Writing is a way not to remember but to forget,” suggests Kate Zembrano in this book concerning both her grieving for her mother and her struggle to be free of her mother, who in some ways became more dominating after her death than she was when alive. “Or if not to forget, to attempt to leave behind,” continues Zembrano. The past dominates the present, not so much in the way in which the present is disposed as in the disposition of our minds towards it: that which we are foolish enough to think of as ourself is dependent utterly upon memory, upon the power of what is not us in the past. This dominance by the lost and unreachable (we cannot assail its moment of power for it lies against the flow of time) is most oppressive when we are unaware of it. Paradoxically, we need to remember in order to escape the past and exist more freely (if existing freely is our predilection). But merely to open ourselves to the past through memory is insufficient to free ourselves of it. To gain control it is necessary to assume authorship, not to change what we cannot reach against time, but to create a simulacrum that is experienced in the place of the experience of the past, a replacement that alters the grammar of our servitude, simultaneously a remembering and a forgetting. “In order to liberate myself from the past I have to reconstruct it. I have been a prisoner of my memories and my aim is to get rid of them,” said Louise Bourgeois. Since her mother’s death, Zembrano’s thoughts have been increasingly focussed on her loving but dominating mother, to the extent that her mother is taking over her life (“Sometimes my mouth opens up and my mother’s laugh jumps out. A parlour trick”). Very possibly, this influence was operative when her mother was alive, but it was at least concentrated in a person who could be interacted with and reacted against. Now “she is everywhere by being unable to be located.” Zambreno’s perceptive book is a study, through self-scrutiny, of the ambivalences of grief and of memory, and also of a path beyond grief: “If writing is a way of hoarding memories - what does it also mean to write to disown?” Not that either remembering or forgetting does any favours to the departed. Without an actual person upon whom an identity, a history, a character may be postulated, and without the generation of new information, however minor, that is possible only by living, the definition of that person belongs to anyone and no-one. Identity becomes contested in the absence of the arbiter. What remains but the impress, somewhere in the past, the shape of which must henceforth suffice as a stand-in for the departed? For better or for worse the pull is to the past, towards the unalterable occurrences that have what could almost be considered as a will to persist through whatever has received their impress. And the struggle for authorship is complicated by the persistence of objects. Death instantaneously transforms the everyday into an archive. Zembrano’s visits to her parents’ house in the years after the death of her mother brings her into contact with objects that have lost their ordinariness, the possessions of her mother’s that her father wishes to enshrine, objects that have stultified, that have not been permitted to either lose or accrete meaning. Both comfort and trap, the archive preserves the dominance of the past per se, preserves the fact of loss more than that which has been lost. Advances in medical science have meant that more of our lives, and more of the end period of our lives, has come to be defined by illness. Increasingly few of us reach our end without being overwritten by the story of its approach. Zembrano captures well her mother’s struggle with the disease that killed her, not so much over the her survival or otherwise as over how she would be remembered, over whether the idea others had of her would be replaced by the story of a disease. All memory proceeds as a scuffle between selection and denial, between nostalgia and resentment, between freedom and attachment, between the conflicting needs of actuality and representation. Memory is the first requirement of forgetting.
 | A Weekend in New York by Benjamin Markovits {Reviewed by STELLA} The Essingers are landing en masse in New York. First to arrive are the parents, Bill and Liesel, end-career academics, flying in from Arizona. Paul, their New York son is insistent that his wife Dana collects them from the airport despite the inconvenience to their child’s routine and her discomfort at being the first to greet his parents. Next, Jean, the youngest, flipping from understanding to irritable, arrives from London carrying a secret that she wishes to offload. Then Nathan, the eldest and successful law academic, arrives with his two girls in tow. And finally there's the emotional middle child, Susie, with her eldest son Ben, waiting to be judged and sidelined. The siblings arrive over the weekend, as they have for a least a decade, to watch Paul play tennis in the US Open. He’s a professional, semi-successful, top-100 player but he’s peaked (lower than expected) and is on his way down. He wants out and is planning his retirement at 33, much to the disappoint of Bill, and his plans to move to Texas are a surprise to his wife. Benjamin Markovits takes the Essinger family, Jewish and German, with their migrant, working-class backgrounds (Bill’s uncle founded a grocery chain, which started with humble beginnings in lower New York), their successes - academic, sporting and financial - and exposes them down to the core. In doing so he exposes the granular details of contemporary American society, with its prejudices, intolerances, politics, passions, expectations and hypocrisies. Markovits is never polemic or obvious. He keeps the palette small: a family with all its quibbles and care, stuck together, without space to breathe (just as family gatherings can be), over a short period of time - a weekend in New York. The novel moves from Friday night through to Monday morning in an unrelenting and sometimes affectingly repetitive pattern, culminating in all sitting court-side at the first match. Cleverly written, the detailed scenarios dig deep into minutiae as the family traipse around New York and sit around the table eating, arguing, reliving their childhoods and catching up. The viewpoint segues with ease from one character to the next, giving equal weighting and sympathy to all the family members. All the petty emotions are there, alongside the meaningful ones. Liesel wants to retire and move to New York - they are even looking at apartments (Nathan has organised these) - Bill has no intention of leaving Texas - a place where he feels free of his family past. Nathan is considering a move into political bureaucracy and his usually self-assured confidence is being buffeted by doubt and by Jean’s righteousness - or is she right? Jean is at a loss - unhappy but fooling herself that her life is finally on a grown-up trajectory. Susie, the child who gave up her career for children, is constantly looking for approval. Paul, focused on the match ahead, is increasingly remote. This is a story about family, what holds it together, the common threads and experiences that bind each to the other, the shared histories and the past that defines the generations that follow. Markovits uses the Essingers to explore and expose pre-Trump upper-middle-class America and reveal the cracks that can spread through a ‘happy’ family (or a contented society). A Weekend in New York will make you engage with the finest detail but leave you thinking widely. |
 | Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett {Reviewed by THOMAS} “English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way. I haven’t yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things.” Always hinting at experience just beyond the reach of language, Bennett's book is impelled by the rigours of noticing. Encounters with persons and with the infraordinary are treated with equivalence: acute, highly acute, overly acute, observations immediately plunge the narrator’s awareness into the depths of her response (“My head is turned by imagined elsewheres and hardly at all by present circumstances.”), far from the surface at which outward contact may be made, or may be being made, a process that is both deeply isolating, terrifying and protective. Bennett’s unsparingly acute observations of the usually unacknowledged or unacknowledgeable motivations, urges and responses that underlie human interaction and quotidian existence seem here induced by an acceptance or a resignation that is enabled by despair, or is indistinguishable from despair, both a resignation and a panic, perhaps, a panic on the edge of self-dissolution which is perhaps our last resistance to self-dissolution and therefore fundamental to individual existence: the anxiety which all human activity is designed to conceal. Bennett’s is a very individual voice (click here to hear her read a sample), resonating at times with other works of irredeemably isolated interiority, such David Markson’s superb Wittgenstein’s Mistress or the suppressed hysteria of Thomas Bernhard’s narrators, but tracking entirely her own patterns of thought (I have perhaps made an error here of conflating the author with the narrator, but, if this is an error, it is one hard to avoid in the book in which style and content are inseparable) with an immediacy that precludes the artificially patterning, pseudo-assimilable explanation of a ‘story’. In one excellent section, ‘Control Knobs’, the narrator describes the gradual disintegration of the three knobs that control her cooker and speculates a coming time when the last interchangeable knob breaks and the cooker will become unusable. This reminds her of the counted matches in Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall (another novel of irredeemably isolated interiority), which mark the time to the point at which that narrator will no longer be able to light a fire to cook and warm herself. Following a discussion of Bennett’s narrator’s reading and misreading of that book, she returns to an account of the ultimate hopelessness of her attempts to procure new knobs for her cooker. “I feel at a loss for about ten minutes and it’s a sensation, I realise, not dissimilar to indifference. So, naturally, I handle it rather well.” |
Is love possible in a world in the throes of political and environmental crises? The protagonist of Crudo very much resembles the book's author, Olivia Laing (with some notable intrusions from Kathy Acker), whose 2017 summer and marriage is related in this enjoyable roman-à-clef in ‘real time’ (whatever that means).
>> Read Thomas's review.
>> Read an extract from the novel.
>> How to write a novel in seven weeks.
>> Which books inspired Crudo?
>> What should we make of Laing's obsession with Kathy Acker?
>> The official Crudo playlist.
>> Why is there a fly on the covers of both the UK (Picador) and US (W.W. Norton) editions of Crudo? What has Laing to say about the UK cover?
>> Other excellent books by Olivia Laing (click through to learn more):
The Lonely City: Adventures in the art of being alone
When Laing moved to New York in her mid-thirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by this most shameful of experiences, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art.
The Trip to Echo Spring: On writers and drinking
What is the link between alcohol and creativity? Is there a link?
To the River: A journey beneath the surface
Over sixty years after Virginia Woolf drowned in the River Ouse, Olivia Laing set out one midsummer morning to walk its banks, from source to sea. Along the way, she explores the roles that rivers play in human lives, tracing their intricate flow through literature, mythology and folklore.
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Just out of the carton...
"Is it possible for something NOT to happen in a novel?" asks Emily, who has been persuaded by her friend Evan to write the story of his love affair with glamorous former horsewoman Caroline Beresford, an account which becomes Caroline's Bikini (i.e. this book). A playful exploration of the responsibilities of fiction from the author of The Big Music, which was named Book of the Year at the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Awards.
>> Read an extract.
>> Read Thomas's review of The Big Music.
>> Kirsty Gunn's top ten books on unrequited love.
A concert pianist whose wrists are damaged in a train accident uses his insurance payout to buy a house identical to Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye overlooking False Bay, in Cape Town. When his wife leaves him after only a few weeks in the house, the ex-pianist, lacking a personality of his own, begins to be inhabited by the house itself in unusual ways. "A perfectly poised and mad book about chronic loneliness; enigmatic, often dream-like and brilliantly funny." - Irish Times
>> Read an excerpt.
Born in Poland just after the First World War and brought up to be a perfect example of her class and generation - tolerant, selfless and brave - Lala is an independent woman who has survived some of the most turbulent events of her times. As she senses the first signs of dementia, she battles to keep her memories alive through her stories, telling her grandson tales of a life filled with love, faithlessness and extraordinary acts of courage. Sweeping from nineteenth-century Kiev to modern-day Poland, Lala is a novel tracking Polish one Polish family through the twentieth century.
"The prehensile magic of Lala lies in the art of retelling. Dehnel’s work is drawn from life and enriched with intent, with a kind of aesthetic cohesion that bare facts lack." - The Quarterly Conversation
Winner of the Paszport Polityka Award.
Whatever concerns face us as a country, the decisions we make now, under urgency, will determine the kind of lives future generations will lead. Anne Salmond, Andrew Becroft, Rod Oram, Jacinta Ruru, Felicity Goodyear-Smith, Tim Watkin, Derek Handley, Jarrod Gilbert, Stuart McNaughton, David Brougham, Jarrod Haar, Yumiko Olliver-Gray, Golriz Ghahraman, Theresa Gattung, Peter O'Connor, and Leonie Freeman.
An encounter between two men turns from attraction to violence, revealing the layers of dispossession, racism, misery, desire and trauma in contemporary French society. Another blistering autobiographical novel from the author of The End of Eddy.
>> "Macron will lead voters to the far right."
>> "There is a political violence toward the poor, which existed under Thatcherism and that is today in the process of returning."
Sigrid is a young literature student trying to find her voice as a writer when she falls in love with an older, established author, whose lifestyle soon overwhelms her values and once-clear vision. Trine has reluctantly become a mother and struggles to create as a performance artist. The aspiring movie director Linnea scouts locations in Copenhagen for a film she will never make. As these characters' stories collide and intersect, they find that dealing with the pressures of their lives also means coming to grips with a world both frightening and joyously ridiculous. From the author of the outstanding story collection Knots.
"Interior psychological monologues play as if a neuroscientist exploring the conscious mind had reset a functional fMRI to fictional. Wait, Blink is a witty and cerebral braid of events both real and fictional, driven by self-talk, undergirded by literary criticism, and sprinkled with factoids." - World Literature Today
A very presentable collection of poems, many tagged to specific locations in the South Island, with photographs by Graeme Sydney.
"Marshall's poems are an exquisite marriage of musicality, observation, elegance and economy. Certain words stand out in his lines like the glint of light on wet ground." - Paula Green
When Fionn Boyle sets foot on Arranmore Island, it begins to stir beneath his feet. Once in a generation, Arranmore Island chooses a new Storm Keeper to wield its power and keep its magic safe from enemies. The time has come for Fionn 's grandfather, a secretive and eccentric old man, to step down. Soon, a new Keeper will rise. But, deep underground, someone has been waiting for Fionn. As the battle to become the island 's next champion rages, a more sinister magic is waking up, intent on rekindling an ancient war.
"So magical and wild that it 's like being swept away by the sea." - Katherine Rundell
Yasmin Khan harvests black olives from the groves of Burquin in the West Bank, hand-rolls maftool - the plump Palestinian couscous - in home kitchens in Jenin and finds time to enjoy a pint with workers at the Taybeh brewery, which is producing the first Palestinian craft beer. As she feasts and cooks with Palestinians of all ages and backgrounds, she learns about the realities of their everyday lives. Zaitoun includes herb-filled salads, quick pickles, fragrant soups, tender roasted meats and rich desserts, and has a special focus on vegetarian versions of Palestinian classics.
"A moving, hugely knowledgeable and utterly delicious book." -Anthony Bourdain
This book gives great insight into the mind of this outstanding journalist, and, through that, further insights into the people and stories he brought to the world's attention, including the Mai Lai massacre and the atrocities at Abu Graib.
"Reporter is just wonderful. Truly a great life, and what shines out of the book, amid the low cunning and tireless legwork, is Hersh's warmth and humanity. This book is essential reading for every journalist and aspiring journalist the world over." - John le Carré
A fascinating account of the social, political and cultural changes in Britain since World War 2, especially for women, as focused on the life of a particularly keen and involved observer.
"Refreshingly unconcerned with self-excavation, the beauty of it is in its flow from the particular to the general. The vast consolation and pleasure of this generous book is its conviction that we are all more than one life allows." - Times Literary Supplement
From the silent assimilation of fascists into society after 1945 to the troubling reign of Silvio Berlusconi, and from the artistic peak of neorealist cinema to the celebration of Italy's 150th birthday in 2011, Foot examines both the corrupt and celebrated sides of the country.
"A lively and meticulously researched account." - Guardian
Who would have thought that account of recovery from addiction could be as fascinating as the account of the train-wreck itself. At the heart of the book is Jamison's ongoing conversation with literary and artistic geniuses whose lives and works were shaped by alcoholism and substance dependence, including John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Billie Holiday, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, and David Foster Wallace. From the author of The Empathy Exams.
"Perceptive and generous-hearted. Uncompromising, Jamison is a writer of exacting grace." - Washington Post
Frank takes on on a tour of the US, a country in the late stages of disintegration, and shows us the results of the mechanisms of inequality, empty status and circumstantial anxiety that have, among other things, delivered Trump to office.
100 authentic and achievable recipes, with hints on how to enjoy your life in a Swedish way.
What is it like to be a fish? Their way of life is radically different from our own, in part because they inhabit a buoyant, sticky fluid in which light, heat, gases and sound behave in odd ways. Fish have evolved many tactics to overcome these challenges, and, in doing so, they have become a way in which we can learn to see the ocean, and life in general, in more profound ways. (Her real name, apparently.)
The inspiring story (first published in 1941) of a group of children who start their own theatre company.
The Immeasurable World: Journeys into desert places by William Atkins $37
One-third of the earth's surface is classified as desert. Restless, and unhappy in love, William Atkins decided to travel in eight of the world's driest, hottest places: the Empty Quarter of Oman, the Gobi Desert and Taklamakan deserts of northwest China, the Great Victoria Desert of Australia, the man-made desert of the Aral Sea in Kazkahstan, the Black Rock and Sonoran Deserts of the American Southwest, and Egypt's Eastern Desert. What draws humans to deserts?
A blueprint for living the good life in the city - how to grow the easiest food plants in small spaces and recipes to make the most of them.
Completely encircling the Earth, the Southern Ocean stretches from Antarctica to the costs of New Zealand, Australia, Africa and South America. It contains a spattering islands, each more remote and wild than the last, and a rich history of explorers, whalers, scientists and settlers, as well as remarkable natural history. The ocean has become an important barometer of climate change and ecological depredation. This book considers this little-known ocean.
When Lindsay meets Elias the signs aren't promising. She's a grungy introvert who doesn't want to talk to anyone. He's a teen fashionista who can't shut up. But since Lindsay tracked down a runaway kid, word has got around that she knows how to find people. And Elias is looking for his birth mother. And he has money. But Lindsay wasn't actually trying to find the runaway. It's just how she looks at the world. That's because someone is missing in Lindsay's life - her identical twin Frankie, who disappeared when they were eight. YA novel.
The groups that created Krautrock (Faust, Popol Vuh, Neu , Cluster, Ash Ra Tempel, Amon Düül II, Can, Kraftwerk) considered in the context of a society attempting to come to terms with the atrocities and legacies of World War 2.
>> Popol Vuh, 1971.
>> Kraftwerk, 1971.
>> Amon Düül II, 1973.
There may be no answers, but there are no end of helpful anecdotes. From the NZ author of Rants in the Dark and the blog Emily Writes.
Without electromagnetism, life on Earth would not be possible. The quest to understand it began with the idea that the magnet was a physical embodiment of the heavens, possessing as it did its own North and South poles. Is the discovery that, every once in a long while, the Earth 's magnetic poles switch places, significantly weakening the field 's protective power, something we should worry about?
An unscrupulous scientist is cloning and manipulating embryos to produce miniature humans for a huge and greedy government-backed corporation that tortures them, drugs them with memory suppressants, and sells them as pets—ostensibly to teach 22nd-century children to care lovingly about something other than themselves. What happens when the 'littlers' start to communicate with the 'biggerers' and to develop human capacities?
Useful.
Celebrate equality with 50 people who changed the world in their own ways.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #84 (21.7.18)
Our latest newsletter, with our own reviews, a selection of new releases, and a large number of events.
 | Florida by Lauren Groff {Reviewed by STELLA} Lauren Groff’s collection of short stories explores the storm within and the storm without. Brooding, edgy and bruised, the landscape (and its people) in Groff’s words is ‘an Eden of dangerous things’. We encounter alligators waiting at the water’s edge, snakes coiled ready to strike and panthers slinking through the suburban landscape - a landscape at the edge of wilderness - nature never far from creating chaos in the domestic worlds of the characters. The protagonists are the voices of women: women alone, with children (alone); with others yet in solitude. The setting is, as the title of the collection suggests, Florida: swamps, heat, moisture and menacing skies announcing coming storms. Physical hurricanes tear through landscapes and homes while, emotional storms bring revelation and discomfort. In 'Eyewall' a woman confronts the ghosts of her cheating husband, her first love suicided and her father eaten by cancer, while drinking wine in the bathtub - the last sanctuary in the storm that leaves her house standing but devastated. In 'The Midnight Zone', the mother of two young boys falls while changing the light bulb at a remote holiday home. Concussed, she lies on the floor while her children gather to her, bring food and water, awaiting the return of their father as a storm rages around them and a panther, real or metaphysical, prowls outside. In 'Salvador', a middle-aged woman, seemingly in control of her life, is having her monthly holiday in Brazil when she is caught out by a storm which leaves her locked in a small space with an unsavoury local grocer. She realises her vulnerability and feels shockingly alone as she reflects on her life as a carer for her ailing mother in Florida. From the first story in this collection, Groff places the reader in the eyes of observers. A mother walks the street at night to find freedom from the domestic bliss/pressure of small children. A grad student gives up her teaching tenure to live in her station wagon, eventually becoming isolated and part of a growing underclass. Two girls are left abandoned in a beach hut to fend for themselves, waiting for the ‘lady’ who will look after them. Groff takes us to the edges of our civilised worlds and throws us to the wolves - or, as this is Florida - the alligators and panthers who lurk in the gloom. Dark and edgy, these stories are Groff yelling at us to wake up and to push back against the society we accept and sleepwalk through, to see the waste, the fallacy, the degradation of our environment and our emotional shallowness. With clever writing, evocative and carefully calibrated, Lauren Groff has verve and these stories, with their connected themes and sense of place, will sharpen your outlook. |
 | Crudo by Olivia Laing {Reviewed by THOMAS} Olivia Laing wants to be Kathy Acker but she knows that she is not Kathy Acker even though wanting to be Kathy Acker does make you Kathy Acker to some extent. As ‘Kathy’, the protagonist in Laing’s ‘uncooked’ novelCrudo ('crudo' meaning 'raw' or 'uncooked' in Italian), relinquishes, just as did Laing, her solitary life in her fortieth year to marry a man rather older than her and assume a life of quotidian comfort in a world speeding towards climactic, humanitarian and political crises, the difficulties she has in sustaining confident positivity about a shared life isolates and invigorates (and assimilates) the nihilistic punk provocateur ‘Kathy Acker’ within her, the part of her most resistant to, or most anxious about, the changes in her life that are also of course changes in herself. Will she be able to live happily with this man? What will she need to relinquish? Can she face what she will learn about herself? “You think you know yourself inside out when you live alone, but you don’t.” Kathy is both Laing and Acker, Acker as a sort of archetype for Laing, Laing imagining what it might be like to be Acker if Acker were in a situation like Laing’s (the unlikelihood of which makes this a good interrogatory tool). “Writing, she can be anyone. On the page the I dissolves, becomes amorphous, proliferates wildly. Kathy takes on increasingly preposterous guises, slips the knot of her own contemptible identity.” It is the disparity between the two poles in herself that makes the narrator so interesting and so believable. If she does not speak with your voice she speaks with the voice of someone you know. The text is peppered with phrases ‘borrowed’ from texts by Acker (these are indexed at the end), and the disjunction between this punk posturing and accounts of buying socks and fossicking for antiques provides much of the humour and spaciousness of the novel: “What’s the novel about if not getting fucked. / That afternoon, she and her husband decided to go for a walk.” The novel is a roman-à-clef related in ‘real time’ over a period of a few weeks straddling Laing’s marriage in 2017, presented as seemingly spontaneous responses to real events on both a political and a personal level. “She wrote fiction, sure, but she populated it with the already extant, the pre-packaged and the ready-made. There was no need to invent, you could make anything from out of the overflowing midden of the already-done. It was economic but also stylish to help yourself to the grab bag of the actual.” The personal is often presented with deadpan irony; the political as an overarching threat: “We are walking backwards into disaster, braying all the way.” Is love possible or relevant in a disintegrating world? “It was happening to someone, it being unspeakable violence, how could she be happy: the real question of existence.” What degree of detachment or attachment is appropriate with regards not only to our collective issues but to our (often microscopic) personal ones as well? “It was all the same thing, it was the world talking. You couldn’t hate it, or you did but that was just more of the same, another opinionated little voice in an indecently augmented chorus.” Form is the only meaning. As the novel progresses the focus narrows, the temporal grain becomes finer, the observations more microscopic, we are told the time as well as the day, the novel, written in the past tense, pushes harder up against the present. “Kathy was writing everything down in her notebook, and had become abruptly anxious that she might exhaust the past and find herself out at the front, alone on the crest of time.” Sometimes Kathy’s ‘she’ almost becomes an ‘I’ and needs to be pushed back into ‘she’. The novel resolves, rather sweetly, perhaps more sweetly than Laing had originally intended, with Kathy’s unreserved declaration to herself of her love for the man who has become her husband, as she is about to board an aeroplane for a flight to America, as Kathy is about to resolve into Laing, as the past is about to resolve into the present: “She was in it now, she was boarding, there was nowhere to hide.” |
>> Read Thomas's review of I Love Dick.
>> "I'm just a channel for all that shit."
>> What is this 'female consciousness'?
>> Changing lives.
>> I Love Dick 'became' a television series.
>> Kafka's 'A Hunger Artist'.
NEW RELEASES
Out of the carton and waiting for you.
Fed up with her vapid life, despite all her privileges, a young woman decides to spend a year in narcotic hibernation, supervised by a very unsafe psychiatrist. Is alienation a threat to our personal wellbeing or its safeguard? From the author of the Booker-shortlisted Eileen.
"Matter of fact, full of bravado yet always wryly observational. One of the pleasures of reading Moshfegh is her relentless savagery." - Guardian
>> Read an excerpt.
>> Another excerpt (with photos!).
>> "I say too much."
>> What's in Moshfegh's fridge?
The outstanding biographer and literary editor writes an exacting and fascinating book about her own life.
"Moving and beautifully written." - Guardian
In attempting to define what constitutes a 'book' in an age when technology is helping us to re-examine the definitions of many cultural entities, Borsuk covers much interesting ground, both historical and speculative, approaching books as physical objects, as content, as ideas and as interface.
>> 'The Hand and the Page in the Digital Age.'
Meet the people who live on Koki Oguma's street in Tokyo. Each sparks a quirky story and a very quirky drawing. A delightful book.
>> See some of Koki Oguma's drawings.
One of the outstanding members of Christchurch's 'The Group' in the 1940s but realising there was no place for him in New Zealand, MacDiarmid moved to Paris in 1952 and pretty well disappeared from view in this country. He continued (and continues, at the age of 95) to produce and develop, and has had a remarkable career. Only recently has this important expatriate artist been recognised as a missing link in the story of New Zealand art: the 'one that got away'.
>> Visit Douglas MacDiarmid's website.
Selected San Francisco poems and selected New Jersey poems from this poet whose work is "ferociously on the move, between locations, between forms, between registers" (Griffin Prize judges' citation).
>> Read a few of his poems here.
Will the little boy who visits Elise in pursuit of his paper plane help her to overcome her anxieties and make her life less drab? (Yes.)
The unprecedented surge in popularity of ceramics in the last five years has helped forge a new type of potter: the ceramic designer. Part-craftsman, part designer, they bridge ceramic craft, collectable design, and fine art. These ceramicists include product designers who use clay as a means of creative expression, and classically trained potters who create design-led pieces, in addition to interior decorators, illustrators, and graphic designers.
Explore the flora and fauna and other wondrous phenomena of a miraculous garden filled with denizens as small as symbiotic insects, made up of both plant and animal life forms, and as large as a planet, Atanasius Uterinus, that contains a sun within its very core. Beautifully illustrated.
>> Peep into the garden.
A striking set of index cards surveying the history of type design.
How Auschwitz was conceived, how it grew and mutated into an entire dreadful city, how both those who managed it and those who were killed by it came to be in Poland in the 1940s, and how all this was allowed to happen.
In 1990s-small-town Ireland, amid the sweaty school discos and first fumblings of adolescence, fifteen-year-old Lani Devine falls in love with Leon Brady, whose mother is buried in the cemetery next to Lani's house. Lani is haunted by the stories of thirty-five orphaned girls, buried in an unmarked grave near Leon's mother. As the love story unfolds, and then unravels, it becomes clear that Leon too is haunted - by a brutal family tragedy that has left scars much more than skin-deep.
"A tender portrait of cider-drinking adolescence in all its rawness and sensitivity." - Irish Times
Rausing looked on helplessly as her brother and his wife succumbed to drug addiction, leading to the death of her sister-in-law. Rausing delivers a remarkable portrait of a family coping with stress, trauma and grief, and asks searching questions about our society's inability to provide support. Rausing depicts addiction as lying somwhere between culpability and insanity.
A new edition of Acker's 1983 punk riff on Dickens's classic. Fun.
A lean novel intimating the pressures of competition in the Tour de France (and attendant doping) on a young couple's relationship and shared goals.
Ida Nettleship married the painter Augustus John and tolerated his relationship with style icon Dorothy "Dorelia" McNeill. Ida John's letters reveal much of life in the bohemian artistic set of the time.
"A fascist is someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have." Relevant.
"If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive." Lorde's memoir of growing up in 1930s Harlem, her early experiments in self-determination, and the formulation of her fierce yet poetic feminist and civil rights platforms. New edition.
A young man's close-knit family is nearly destitute when his uncle founds a successful spice company, changing their fortunes overnight. As they move from a cramped, ant-infested shack to a larger house on the other side of Bangalore, and try to adjust to a new way of life, the family dynamic begins to shift. Allegiances realign; marriages are arranged and begin to falter; and conflict brews ominously in the background. An unsettling portrait of contemporary India.
Twelve-year-old Karim Aboudi and his family are trapped in their Ramallah home by a strict curfew. Israeli tanks control the city in response to a Palestinian suicide bombing. Karim longs to play football with his friends - being stuck inside with his teenage brother and fearful parents is driving him crazy. When the curfew ends, he and his friend discover an unused patch of ground that's the perfect site for a football pitch. What happens when he stays out too long?
A wander among the trees of the world, their history and mythology, with illustrations from John Evelyn's Sylva.
Disarmed of falsehood, he was left only with the awful truth. John Hodgman is an older white male monster with bad facial hair, wandering like a privileged Sasquatch through three wildernesses - the hills of Western Massachusetts where he spent much of his youth; the painful beaches of Maine that want to kill him (and some day will); and the metaphoric haunted forest of middle age that connects them.
The best and clearest primer for evolutionary biology available as a board book. The Baby University motto: "It only takes a small spark to ignite a child's mind."
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!