 | Brecht at Night by Mati Unt {Reviewed by THOMAS} “We all know that famous people do not have the right to an authentic biography,” states Unt in one of the ironic asides that make up much of this playful account of the time Bertolt Brecht spent in Finland in 1940, awaiting a visa for America, certain he was pursued by ‘What’s-His-Name’. Playful, that is, as playing with barbed wire can be playful. The asides, largely concerning the Finnish ‘Winter War’ with the USSR and the Soviet subsumption of Unt’s native Estonia, increasingly overwhelm Unt’s affectionately irreverent portrayal of Brecht, his entourage, and the dialectical thinking with which he attempts to grasp the realities that lie between omnipresent contradictions: his socialist ideals and his bourgeois tendencies; nationalism and internationalism; the pulls (on Brecht as on this book) of fact and fiction; and the polarising influences of Stalin and Hitler, whose 1939 non-aggression pact decided the fate of the Baltic states. Brecht is pushed into the background by a new narrator, M. Unt [no relation - an actual historical figure!], who describes the disintegration of independent Estonia ("With good luck, you have the choice between life and death, and it is not sure which is better.") and who is in turn silenced and replaced by a series of documents concerning banal yet chilling details such as lists of deposed officials and their fates, books to be destroyed, and phrase-book extracts from 1940 (“Yesli budesh shumet’, ubyu! = If you don’t shut up, I’ll kill you!”); interspersed with poems written by Brecht during this period. The author briefly intrudes, and then Brecht himself reappears from between the depersonalising and dehumanising facts of history like something from Baltic folklore: a creative force, a figure of hope. |
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{Reviews by STELLA}
Poetry comes in a myriad of forms and each appeals (or not) in its own way. It is sometimes difficult to say why you like a poem - why it appeals or resonates. It's more than the rhythm of the language on the page: sometimes it is the visual appeal of the words or phrases sparsely arranged on a page making talking or thinking space; sometimes it's a turn of phrase which you read aloud just to hear the audacity of the text - of the poet’s thoughts; sometimes it is the quietness of the language that picks at you until it leaves a satisfying scab. Or, in the case of Tayi Tibble’s first collection, a fierce and evocative scar. From the moment I openedPoūkahangatus, on a random page, and started reading the poem 'Shame', I knew this collection of poems would be coming home with me.the winz lady who smiles has a sign in her office that says he aha te mea nui o te ao he tangata, he tangata, he tangata but she says the most important thing in the world Is getting back into the workforce Tayi Tibble writes about being young, about being Maori, about being beautiful and conversely about ‘ugliness’ and difference. She delves deep into our colonial culture and pushes against the edges of our comfort on race and gender without blinking. Her poems are sharp, ironic and tragic, and you will want to keep returning to them to examine your own responses to these concepts as well as to hear her honest and striking voice. To understand, to accept and to hear a voice, a viewpoint that may not be your own cultural experience yet resonates as it is part of the experience of living in a country, in a world, that has a colonial history - a history which impacts the present and needs new voices to ignite us. This is also a collection of poems that explores gender and difference - about what frames our identity and about exploding those concepts of identity into a whirlwind of a storm. It delves back into time: into school days, meeting the mean aunty, about nanny who isn’t a ‘blood relative’, about funerals and births, and the lines that anchor us to our past as well as the things that release us. With a title that is a play on the word Pocahontas and a cover illustration showing a glamorous Tayi in the bath with snakes and vodka, the reader is pitched straight into the audacity of Tibble and the obvious glee that runs parallel to the deeper, more serious, concerns of this collection of poems. |
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Having cast his consideration back over human history in Sapiens, and forward into the human future in Homo Deus, Harari turns his attention to what he considers the most pressing issues facing humans at present, the moment at which the future is being made into the past. Why is liberal democracy in crisis? Is God back? Is a new world war coming? What does the rise of Donald Trump signify? What can we do about the epidemic of fake news? Which civilisation dominates the world – the West, China, Islam? Should Europe keep its doors open to immigrants? Can nationalism solve the problems of inequality and climate change? What should we do about terrorism? What should we teach our kids? What should we teach our children? Intelligent, passionate, thought-provoking, discussable.
>>What is the book about?
>>What is the most important question we face today?
>> There's no such thing as a civilisation.
>> What will the world be like in 2050?
>>Is democracy doomed?
>> Humans are "a post-truth species."
>> Read the book!
NEW RELEASES
New books for a new month
In this remarkable feminist version of The Iliad, Barker gives a voice to Briseis, the queen enslaved by Achilles after he killed her husband during the Trojan war. Trapped in a world defined by men and traumatised by war, can she become the author of her own story?
"Brilliant. This is an important, powerful, memorable book that invites us to look differently not only at The Iliad but at our own ways of telling stories about the past and the present, and at how anger and hatred play out in our societies." - Emily Wilson, The Guardian
Having cast his consideration back over human history in Sapiens, and forward into the human future in Homo Deus, Harari turns his attention to what he considers the most pressing issues facing humans at present, the moment at which the future is being made into the past. Why is liberal democracy in crisis? Is God back? Is a new world war coming? What does the rise of Donald Trump signify? What can we do about the epidemic of fake news? Which civilisation dominates the world – the West, China, Islam? Should Europe keep its doors open to immigrants? Can nationalism solve the problems of inequality and climate change? What should we do about terrorism? What should we teach our kids? What should we teach our children? Intelligent, passionate, thought-provoking, discussable.
>> Listen to Harari talk about the book.
The long-awaited new novel from the author of Where the Rekohu Bone Sings follows the experiences of the orphaned son of a Maori chief who, while being exhibited as a curiosity in Victorian London, turns his own gaze upon the multilayered deceptions and pretensions of an alien society.
"Call me Bathsheba." A remarkable inversion of and futuristic riff on Moby-Dick for older children and young teens, told from the point of view of the whale and no less a portrayal of the damaging effects of obsession and brutality. Beautifully illustrated and produced.
>> Ness talks about the book.
“Faces are drawn in water, and names written in dust. Even persons are ephemeral—in the end, there’s only pattern.” A stunning modern spin on Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which the characters have interior lives, doubts and previously unexplored motives.
>> Read an extract.
A woman becomes obsessed with the women who live across the street. The stories she projects upon them become more and more extreme, creating a fascinating portrait of desire, voyeurism and isolation. The first novel of this significant Argentine author (and associate of Borges) to be translated into English. Why has it taken so long?.
"A deathly scene from a wax museum come to life." - Cesar Aira
>> "Not a novel to be read for pleasure."
>> Read an extract.
This first history of Samoan tatau explores the people, encounters, events and external forces that have defined Samoan tattooing over many centuries. The Samoan Islands are unusual in that tattooing has been continuously practised for 3000 years with indigenous techniques. Beautifully produced and illustrated.
An insider's meditation on the hidden wonders of Japan's most enigmatic city. Drawing on decades living in Kyoto, and on lore gleaned from artists, Zen monks and Shinto priests, Alex Kerr illuminates the simplest things - a temple gate, a wall, a sliding door - in a new way.
"A rich book of intimate proportions. In Kyoto, facts and meaning are often hidden in plain sight. Kerr's gift is to make us stop and cast our eyes upward to a temple plaque, or to squint into the gloom of an abbot's chamber." - Japan Times
Leningrad, 1939. When Shura and Tanya's parents and baby brother suddenly disappear, it's rumoured that they have been kidnapped by the mysterious Black Raven - and that their parents were spies. Determined to find his family, Shura decides to hand himself in to the Raven. Flagging down a KGB car, he is taken to the Grey House, where everyone is given a new name and a set of grey clothes, and everyone seems to forget their families and who they really are. Now Shura must do everything he can to cling to his memories, and to escape...
A compulsively readable 'tragedy of manners' from the author of the hopelessly funny The Sisters Brothers and Undermajordomo Minor. When a wealth widow and her son flee scandal in New York and move to Paris, they encounter a sequence of singular characters and situations for which they are totally unprepared.
Drawing on Gale's own experience as a young person coming to terms with a strictured world and finding a sense of belonging in musical performance, his 16th novel is a sensitive portrayal of self-discovery.
"Elegiac and contemplative." - The Guardian
Two graphic-novel coming-of-age narratives: that of Lucia, the daughter of James Joyce, and that of author Mary Talbot, daughter of the eminent Joycean scholar James S. Atherton. Intelligent, funny and sad.
"Lucia Joyce's tragic descent from creativity into fragmentation is brilliantly brought home by the writing and art of the Talbot team." - Irish Times
>> See also the excellent Lucia by Alex Pheby
>> The lost story of Lucia Joyce as a Parisian avant-garde dancer.
"Darragh Martin’s bulging, big-hearted novel charts the hugely altered landscape of Ireland from Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1979 up to the Icelandic volcano eruption of 2010. Epic in scale and a pleasure to read, the Dublin author’s ability to write with heart, humour and recognition make for an engrossing novel that tackles everything from religion to abortion, contraception to gay rights, the Fianna Fáil tent to the recession. That Martin manages to do this without ever sounding preachy shows his immense skill as a storyteller." - Irish Times
The ultimate assuager of pain, the ultimate underminer of predetermined concepts of reality, the ultimate commodity, opium has affected our history and culture in surprising ways.
Considers every room and detail. Includes floor plans and endless ideas.
That F Word: Growing up feminist in Aotearoa by Lizzie Marvelly $35
A wake-up call. A battle cry. A history. A stock take. A plan of action.
Speeches spanning Clark's career, from entering parliament, through her Prime Ministership and into her developmental role at the United Nations, articulating a consistent and precise vision for the bettering of the lives of all in society, particularly those disadvantaged by the status quo.
Good food, gardening and nourishing traditions to feed your village (however small).
>> Visit Grown & Gathered.
Hockney and Gayford turn the conversational approach so successful in A History of Pictures to this thoughtful and companionable book introducing children to interesting art.
Continues Attenborough's memoirs on from where he left off in the late 1950s in Adventures of a Young Naturalist.
Who is Hiding? in te Reo.
He Raiona i Roto o nga Otaota by Margaret Mahy and Jenny Williams $20
A Lion in the Meadow in te Reo.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #89 (24.8.18)
Read our latest NEWSLETTER to find out what we've been reading, what new books have arrived (well, some of the new books), and the results of our poetry competition.
 | A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne {Review by STELLA} Maurice Swift - good-looking, charming, both sharp and silver-tongued, is looking for success. Success at any cost - that’s the cost to others rather than himself. In John Boyne’s most recent novel, A Ladder to the Sky, he has created a ruthless and ambitious young writer who will stop at nothing to get what he wants. However, he has a problem: he’s not very imaginative. Yes, he can write, can turn a good phrase and spice up another’s work, but he struggles with ‘the story’. While waiting tables in Berlin, he meets critically acclaimed and recent winner of ‘The Prize’, author Erich Ackermann. Erich, who long has forsaken any hope of a romantic relationship, is entranced by the young Swift and quickly falls under his spell, despite realising he is behaving foolishly. Maurice, making the most of the obsession, working his charm, flatters the older man and finds himself invited (employed, in fact) to be Erich’s assistant on an international publicity tour - all this to Maurice’s advantage and Erich’s eventual dismissal. What Maurice wants is a story, and in Erich he finds one of Berlin on the brink of war, of young love (an unrequited love) and passionate anger. An anger that leads to a terrible outcome and a guilt that Erich has buried until now as he confides in Maurice. Erich is the first of several victims of the ‘crimes’ of Maurice Swift. As the novel follows the highs and lows of Swift’s writing career over several decades, we meet the people central to his life, all in some way unwitting players in his game and none more so than his wife of six years, fellow writer Edith Camberley. In all but the last section of the book, Maurice’s life is told through the voices of others, starting with Erich Ackermann until Maurice departs his life (dumps him cold). From here there is a sweet crisp interlude with Gore Vidal at his Amalfi residence, when Maurice arrives with his new mentor Hardy Dash - a middling American writer of some commercial success, a longtime friend of the Gore & Howard circle. This is sharp, witty writing - cleverly Goresque - and it will have you laughing out loud and cheering for at least one who does not fall under Maurice’s spell, being a dab hand at manipulation and subterfuge himself, yet less vicious than our antihero. Part 2 is told by Edith and follows the writer couple (yes, Edith has recently found success with her debut and a promising writing future seems assured) to Norwich where Edith has taken up a teaching position at the university. While Edith teaches and works on her second novel, she tries to support Maurice who is struggling on his third book and becoming increasingly testy. In this section of the novel, through Edith’s eyes, you begin to see the truly callous lows Maurice will stoop to get the story. He’s a parasite and you find yourself wanting to scream to Edith, "Get out of the room!” before it’s too late. Several years later we find ourselves in New York with Maurice and his son. Now we are squarely in Maurice’s head, which is slightly unpleasant to say the least. Yet we are intrigued, drawn in and seduced by his story. He’s working, ironically, on his new novel, tentatively entitled ‘Other People’s Stories’. A Ladder to the Sky is a viciously witty portrayal of writers and writing and to what lengths one man will go to achieve his ambition. Boyne will make you laugh, cry and cringe all in equal measures. Excellent and highly enjoyable, a novel of sharp observations and spoonfuls of unease. |
 | The Years by Annie Ernaux {Reviewed by THOMAS} “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. |
The crimes of tyrants against their people have been well documented, but what of their crimes against literature? Theoretical works, spiritual manifestos, poetry collections, memoirs and even romance novels - what relationship do these books have to their despotic authors' other spheres of action?
>> How did Kalder come to write this book?
>> Tradition and the individual tyrant.
>> Why dictators write.
>> Can Saddam Hussein be considered a novelist?
>> Is The Rukhnama Turkmenistan's holy book?
>> Not every book gets its own statue.
>> On translating Stalin, the poet.
>> Moving closer to the dictators.
NEW RELEASES
Words are important to Gretel, always have been. As a child, she lived on a canal boat with her mother, and together they invented a language that was just their own. She hasn't seen her mother since the age of sixteen, and those memories have faded. Now Gretel works as a lexicographer, updating dictionary entries, which suits her solitary nature. A phone call from the hospital interrupts Gretel's isolation and throws up questions from long ago. She begins to remember the private vocabulary of her childhood. She remembers other things, too: the wild years spent on the river; the strange, lonely boy who came to stay on the boat one winter; and the creature in the water, swimming upstream, getting ever closer. In the end there will be nothing for Gretel to do but go back.
“A hypnotic, mythic, unexpected story from a beguiling new voice. Everything Under is an exploration of family, gender, the ways we understand each other and the hands we hold out to each other – a story that’s like the waterways at its heart: you have to take the trip to understand what’s underneath.” - The judges' comment, on long-listing the book for the 2018 Man Booker Prize
A young Swedish immigrant finds himself penniless and alone in California. The boy travels east in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great current of emigrants pushing west. Driven back again and again, he meets naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, swindlers, Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend. Diaz defies the conventions of historical fiction and genre, offering a probing look at the stereotypes that populate our past and offers a portrait of radical foreignness.
"Diaz sends a shotgun blast through standard received notions of the Old West and who was causing trouble in it." - Laird Hunt
Poems assailed by blankness, by ice, by erasure, by exhaustion, by the dissolution of form.
"The work takes full advantage of the white pages on which the words appear. In particular it plays with ideas of erasure, as if all our words, like any evidence of human presence, can be extinguished by a fresh fall of snow." - Bill Manhire
Recipient of the 2017 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award.
Devorah Baum reads Grace Paley to find out what women want, Stella Duffy looks for LGBT voices in the #MeToo debate, Fernanda Eberstadt remembers the 70s drag scene in New York, Debra Gwartney breaks her silence, Ottessa Moshfegh gets what she wants, TaraShea Nesbit revisits her lost childhood, Brittany Newell deconstructs Paris Hilton's sex tape, Lisa Wells on the process of revisiting trauma. Also: new fiction from: Tara Isabella Burton, Paul Dalla Rosa, Tommi Parrish, Sally Rooney, Miriam Toews, Zoe Whittall and Leni Zumas. Plus: poetry by Momtaza Mehri and Fiona Benson. And: photoessays by Sébastien Lifshitz and Tomoko Sawada, introduced by Andrew McMillan and Sayaka Murata.
200 gems of flash fiction and associated forms, none exceeding 300 words, all exemplars of concision.
Grand hotels are a world unto themselves, with their own customs and mores, their own restrictions and liberations. Salvador Dalí once asked room service at Le Meurice in Paris to send him up a flock of sheep. When they were brought to his room he pulled out a gun and fired blanks at them. George Bernard Shaw tried to learn the tango at Reid's Palace in Madeira, and the details of India's independence were worked out in the ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Delhi. Mourby, who wrote the wonderfully personable Rooms of One's Own, here visits fifty of the world's grandest, including the Adlon in Berlin, the Hotel de Russie in Rome, the Continental in Saigon, Raffles in Singapore, the Dorchester in London, Pera Palace in Istanbul and New York's Plaza, as well as some lesser known grand hotels like the Bristol in Warsaw, the Londra Palace in Venice and the Midland in Morecambe Bay.
>> Visit the Grand Budapest Hotel.
A partisan fighting with the Red Army in Germany comes across a grand, abandoned house, seemingly untouched by the devastation sweeping the country. Exhausted, he falls asleep in the living room, but wakes to find a German patrol marching up the garden path. His only hope is to pose as the house’s owner, but how will he keep up the pretence when the real owner returns? A novel of the dehumanisation of war, consistent with Hermans's credo of “creative nihilism, aggressive pity, total misanthropy.” Introduction by Cees Nooteboom.
"Layering comedy over insight over rue and pathos over comedy, mixing its flexible couplets with beautifully spiky free verse, Erik Kennedy's first collection should climb up all the right charts: his phrases can go anywhere, then come back, and he has figured out how to sound both trustworthy and nonplussed, both giddy and humble, in the same breath. Sometimes he impersonates spiny lobsters; sometimes he's a socialist chambered nautilus. Sometimes he's our best guide to the globe-trotting ridiculous. And sometimes (start with 'Mailing in a Form Because There's No Online Form') hes the un-flick-off-able, so-wrong-he's-just-right guide to the way we live now." - Stephanie Burt
An ecological disaster has contaminated the soil of Japan. Children are born frail but wise, and the elderly are new creatures, full of vitality. Yoshiro frets about the declining health of his grandson Mumei, but Mumei is a beacon of hope, guiding his grandfather towards "the beauty of the time that is yet to come" (but which way does time run?).
"Both unsettling and enchanting, gentle and sharp-edged. Tawada writes beautifully about unbearable things" - Sara Baume
>>Also published as The Emissary.
70 illustrators were given the brief to illustrated their "dream studios" - with such wonderful results. These are the centres of creative vortices, places where dreams cross between an illustrator's internal and external worlds by means of paper.
A group of undocumented children with letters for names are stuck living in a refugee camp, with stories to tell but no papers to prove them. As they try to forge a new family among themselves, they also long to keep memories of their old identities alive. Will they be heard and believed? And what will happen to them if they aren't? Excellent for 9+.
When a girl in a paisley dress tells the whale in a fishbowl, "You belong in the sea," the whale starts to wonder. What is the sea?
A selection from 14 volumes spanning five decades, with new work and drawings.
The most important case ever investigated in Detective Gordon's forest: Where is Buffy's mother? If you haven't read the other 'Detective Gordon' books, now is the time to start.
A collection of new and established graphic designers at the forefront of hand lettering.
What distinguishes a mandarin orange from a clementine, an iris from a pupil, a tornado from a cyclone, and a bee from a wasp? The difference is in the details. Beautifully illustrated throughout.
Why is such a lot of socialising done with a drink in the hand? Why is alcohol seen as a social and cultural lubricant? Why were coffee houses the birthplace of so many of our institutions? A thoroughly illustrated and thoroughly browsable survey.
What is happiness? What is poetry? How do happiness and poetry sustain themselves in the face of melancholy and mundanity? Can poetry be reached from the mundane, and happiness from a state of melancholy?
"An unconventional talent." - The Guardian
>> Why should anyone care?
A fourth collection of Sharpe's urgent and engaged poems.
Eclectic, peripatetic and sumptuously illustrated, this is a very enjoyable, browsable book on the history of food and its place in society.
The most representative collection, in a nice hardback edition.
New technology has made it possible to track the movements and migrations of animals as never before - and the results are often surprising.
In 2003, Russian physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov found a way to produce graphene - the thinnest substance in the world - by using sticky tape to separate an atom-thick layer from a block of graphite. Their efforts would win the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics, and now the applications of graphene and other 'two-dimensional' substances form a worldwide industry. Graphene is far stronger than steel, a far better conductor than any metal, and able to act as a molecular sieve to purify water. Electronic components made from graphene are a fraction the size of silicon microchips and can be both flexible and transparent, making it possible to build electronics into clothing, produce solar cells to fit any surface, or even create invisible temporary tattoos that monitor your health.
Illustrator Thibaud Herem is nurturing a homegrown arboretum in his flat. With over 30 species of tree ranging from oak to Japanese maple to giant redwood, this is a documentation of his obsession as well as a visual exploration of the beautiful shapes and forms found in nature. Within a personal narrative, this little book includes fascinating information about the trees, the process of planting and cultivating them, and musings on society's relationship to the architecture of trees.
McNamara became obsessed with finding the 'Golden State Killer', a serial rapist and muderer who terrorised California in the 1970s and 1980s. He was eventually caught this year (after McNamara's death). Compelling.
At last: the beloved Herbert the Brave Sea Dog in te Reo.
And at last: the wonderful Poo Bum in te Reo.
The NELSON POETRY MAP records and shares connections between poetry and places.
Contribute poems to our open-
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.
We were over whelmed by a large number of inventive, interesting and often beautiful entries (we have put a few of these into a gallery >here<) from around the country (and even from overseas!), and from everyone from children to established poets. Many thanks, everyone, for your interest and support.
BOOKS @ VOLUME # 88 (18.8.18)
Read our NEWSLETTER for our reviews, recommendations, National Poetry Day programme, &c.
 | The Trilogy of Two by Juman Malouf {Reviewed by STELLA} Normally I refrain from saying, ‘I loved it,’ but in this case it’s an apt exclamation! Trilogy of Two is a fascinating whirlwind story for 12+. Sonja and Charlotte are identical twins (distinguishable only by a single mole on Charlotte’s cheek) with wondrous musical talents. They live with Tatty, the tattooed woman, and her monkey at a circus on the Outskirts. The cities are drear and forbidden places - great mechanised monstrosities that serve the Richers, enslave layers of workers and create an underclass of Scrummagers who rifle through the heaps of rubbish and abandoned things to seek treasure or useful items. When the twins’ musical talents outwit them and cause mayhem in the big top, the unwanted attention of the Enforcers is drawn to the circus, making the girls increasingly unpopular with their fellow outsiders and throwing their adoptive mother, Tatty, and their guardian Uncle Tell into a perilous situation, as well as forcing the circus to move on. But why are the girls special and who is behind the attacks on the circus? When a sinister white cat visits the girls one night, they awake to find their ‘talents’ stolen and their world turned upside down, but the final blow comes when Tatty is kidnapped and the twins have to leave the circus. And then the reader is pulled into a mysterious tale of magical creatures; the fantastic lands of the Seven Edens, places which they once thought were only fairy tales; and dangerous enemies. Not only will their sisterhood be tested, but familial bonds will be shattered and strengthened as Sonja's and Charlotte’s secrets are revealed. Who are they, and why were they abandoned by their parents? Along the way, their will be friends and foes, along with tears and laughter, as they meet otherworldly creatures and learn about trust, loyalty, love and betrayal. Not only will they have to step up and be brave, they will learn much about themselves, their emotional strengths and the importance of forgiveness. The Trilogy of Two is vivid, exciting and beautifully illustrated. The talented Juman Malouf creates a world that you will want to delve back into immediately. Let’s hope there is a sequel! |
 | Suicide by Édouard Levé {Reviewed by THOMAS} In Suicide, Levé ostensibly addresses a childhood friend, or, rather, the memory of a childhood friend, who committed suicide twenty years ago, at the age of twenty-five. Levé says he has felt closer to his friend after his suicide than he ever did in the days of their friendship, and speculates about how death has rewritten his friend’s life: "I've never heard a single person, since your death, tell your life story starting at the beginning. Your suicide has become the foundational act," the single detail that retrospectively subsumes all other possible narratives. The text of the novel (so to call it) takes the form of memories and observations structured in a seemingly casual way, all in a second person register, which seems at times projected onto the reader, or a possible reader, but which, as the book proceeds and Levé provides more and more intimations that he could not have had access to, the reader disconcertingly begins to realise is referring to Levé himself, the author addressing himself in the second person register and in the past tense (even when referring to the present), denying his own agency, opening himself up to his own scrutiny (which can hardly be though of as self-scrutiny), distancing himself from himself, denying his identity at every opportunity and thus excusing himself from responsibility for the arc of his own narrative. The text is full of ironies, self-obsession and slippery logic ("You don't make me sad, but solemn. I take advantage on your behalf of things you can no longer experience. Dead, you make me more alive.") and is stubbornly opaque about the specific motivations (if any) for the suicide (other than simultaneously authentic/inauthentic statements such as “The desire to live could not be dictated to you. The moments of happiness you knew came unbidden. You could understand their sources, but you could not reproduce them.”). Levé is under no illusions about the effects of suicide on the bereaved, but is himself numbed to these effects: “Your regrets would disappear along with you: your survivors would be alone in carrying the pain of your death. The selfishness of your death displeased you. But, all things considered, the lull of death won out over life’s commotion.” A statement such as this is riven: it is at once both undeniable and intolerably wrong. “Everything I write is true, but so what?” wrote Levé of himself in Autoportrait (read my reviews of his books here). Ten days after delivering the manuscript of this book to his publisher, Levé committed suicide (this was also the last day that he and I were exactly the same age). Was Levé's suicide implied by the various strands of his literary and photographic work, all of which seeks to undermine the stability of 'identity' and 'authenticity', or did he make his suicide the "foundational act" of his life, the detail that retrospectively subsumes and rewrites all other possible narratives? In what ways did he take control (from us) of our reading of his work by his act of self-erasure? |
NATIONAL POETRY DAY will be celebrated throughout the country this 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. We will be posting poetry reviews and links on our FaceBook page all week. Our 2018 poetry competition: 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 this Monday 20 August.
The winner will be announced at VOLUME at 2 PM on 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! See you on Friday.
Other National Poetry Day events in Nelson:
Poetry Fridge Door: Share poems all week on the 'fridge' at the Nelson Public Library.
Poetry Brick: An installation of poems by David Merritt at The Hollow and other places.
Open Mic Poetry: Nelson Public Library, Halifax Street. Friday 24 August, 12 noon - 1 PM.
See what else is happening around the country.
The Trilogy of Two by Juman Malouf (published by Pushkin Press) is packed full of eccentric and mysterious characters, strange happenings, ominous Enforcers, secret pasts, exciting plot-twists and marvellous illustrations - everything you could want from a children's book.
>> Read Stella's review.>> Watch the trailer!
>> Read an extract.
>> Meet the characters.
>> Meet the author (and here she is with her husband, Wes).
>> Get your copy and start reading.
NEW RELEASES
A young British woman in post-war London is tasked with recommending acquisitions for New Zealand's National Art Gallery. When she ventures into the basement of a charismatic Russian painter three decades her senior, she discovers a solution that reconciles her idea of that far-away country and her own modernist sensibilities. Women in the Field, One and Two explores two women’s creativity and freedom against the backdrop of art history's patriarchal biases. From the author of Ad Lib.
What kind of story can be told from a careful description of a house and all its contents? This is the way to give the most rounded and exhaustive possible account of a still elusive life. Full of verbal tricks and unexpected references, Clerc's clever piece of sociology-posing-as-pseudo-sociology is an experiment with the potentials of the novel. Shelve with Life, A User's Manual by Georges Perec and A Journey Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre.
Walker is a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can’t return home to rural Nova Scotia, and looks instead to the city for freedom, anonymity and repair. As he moves from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco we witness a crucial period of fracture in history, one in which America is beginning to come apart: deeply paranoid, doubting its own certainties, riven by social and racial division, spiralling corruption and the collapse of the inner cities.
“The Long Take is like a film noir on the page. A book about a man and a city in shock, it’s an extraordinary evocation of the debris and the ongoing destruction of war even in times of peace. In taking a scenario we think we know from the movies but offering a completely different perspective, Robin Robertson shows the flexibility a poet can bring to form and style.” - the judges' comment, on long-listing this book for the 2018 Man Booker Prize
Is authenticity personal property? Writer Maurice Swift takes his stories from wherever he finds them, regardless of whose they are. Swift makes his literary name by appropriating the life story of Erich Ackermann, a celebrated novelist he meets by chance in a Berlin hotel. Thereafter he stops at nothing to live upon the stories of others. How far will he be prepared to go? A taut and thoughtful literary psychological thriller from the author of, most recently, The Heart's Invisible Furies.
The most revered and feared literary critic of The New York Times turns her sharp eye upon the cultural forces that have combined to devalue truth in modern society and provide the world with a worrying set of leaders who have advanced authoritarianism in the absence of truth. A retreat from reason is a retreat from democracy.
"Destined to become the defining treatise of our age." - David Grann
Karl Marx's daughter was a remarkable figure in her own right: public intellectual, 'new woman', union organiser, aspirant to the stage. Kapp's exemplary biography draws all the strands of Eleanor Marx's life into a portrait not only of herself but of her family, associates and milieu.
>> Eleanor Marx, pioneer of Marxist feminism (or feminist Marxism).
James Joyce was obsessed with the legal system, and both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are full of references to trials and proceedings. This is the first book to give full and fascinating treatment to a neglected facet of Joyce's oeuvre, recreating a legal climate in which injustice loomed over every trial.
"This tremendously well-researched and marvellously insightful book is a delight for lawyers and lovers of literature alike." - Irish Independent
For Selvon, Ardan and Yusuf, growing up under the towers of Stones Estate, summer means what it does anywhere: football, music, freedom. But now, after the killing of a British soldier, riots are spreading across the city, and nowhere is safe. While the fury swirls around them, Selvon and Ardan remain focused on their own obsessions, girls and grime. Their friend Yusuf is caught up in a different tide, a wave of radicalism surging through his local mosque, threatening to carry his troubled brother, Irfan, with it.
“An ambitious mosaic of virtuosic ventriloquism, Guy Gunaratne’s book is an inner city novel for our times, exploring the endurance of social trauma across generations, and conveying the agony and energy of the marginalised, the outsider, and the oppressed. Both a social panorama and a thriller, it contains a vibrant energy and some extraordinary plot twists that go against what might be our cultural expectations. Gunaratne gracefully moves the large and small ambitions of his characters on an expressionist chessboard of a council estate.”- Judges' comment, on long-listing the book for the 2018 Man Booker Prize
Farouk's country has been torn apart by war. Lampy's heart has been laid waste by Chloe. John's past torments him as he nears his end. The refugee. The dreamer. The penitent. From war-torn Syria to small-town Ireland, three men, scarred by all they have loved and lost, are searching for some version of home. Each is drawn towards a reckoning that will bring them together in an unexpected way.
Long-listed for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Judges' comment: “A portrait of three men in one landscape, From A Low and Quiet Sea holds its narratives in perfectly sustained equilibrium, then brings them together without cliché. A deft, unshowy novel about manhood and momentous contingency, it evokes the way in which real lives unfold and wrap around each other.”
While reeling from one of the most creative - but at times self-destructive - outpourings of his life, Tao Lin discovered the work of Terence McKenna. McKenna, the leading advocate of psychedelic drugs since Timothy Leary, became for Lin both an obsession and a revitalizing force. In Trip, Lin's first book-length work of nonfiction, he charts his recovery from pharmaceutical drugs, his surprising and positive change in worldview, and his four-year engagement with some of the hardest questions: Why do we make art? Is the world made of language? What happens when we die? And is the imagination more real than the universe?
When Michael Pollan set out to research how LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) are being used to provide relief to people suffering from difficult-to-treat conditions such as depression, addiction and anxiety, he did not intend to write what is undoubtedly his most personal book. But upon discovering how these remarkable substances are improving the lives not only of the mentally ill but also of healthy people coming to grips with the challenges of everyday life, he decided to explore the landscape of the mind in the first person as well as the third. Thus began a singular adventure into various altered states of consciousness, along with a dive deep into both the latest brain science and the thriving underground community of psychedelic therapists. Pollan sifts the historical record to separate the truth about these mysterious drugs from the myths that have surrounded them since the 1960s, when a handful of psychedelic evangelists inadvertently catalysed a powerful backlash against what was then a promising field of research.
But who is Enric Marco? A veteran of the Spanish Civil War, a fighter against fascism, an impassioned campaigner for justice, and a survivor of the Nazi death camps? Or, is he simply an old man with delusions of grandeur, a charlatan who fabricated his heroic war record, who was never a prisoner in the Third Reich and never opposed Franco; a charming, beguiling and compulsive liar who refashioned himself as a defender of liberty and who was unmasked in 2005 at the height of his influence and renown?
Winner of the European Book Prize.
An often hilarious pointillist time-travel trip to the Greenwich Village of Shopsin's bohemian 1970s childhood, a funky, tight-knit small town in the big city. Shopsin's father, Kenny, operated a dining cafe, with a notorious range of eccentric dishes, including 'Slutty Cakes' (pancakes with peanut butter in the middle), and Tamara's charming memoir is packed with her idiosyncratic drawings and anecdotal vignettes.
>> Visit Shopsin's.
>> "A huge event of incompetence." (a clip from the 2004 documentary on Shopsin's, I Like Killing Flies)
>> Tamara Shopsin in The New Yorker.
Mary Berg was 15 in 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland. She kept a diary throughout the four years she survived in the Warsaw Ghetto. It remains an astounding document, and the first such account published.
"We shall not have succeeded in destroying everything unless we destroy even the runs, but the only way I can see of doing this is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well constructed buildings." - Ubu
Wonderful graphic novel presentation of one of the staunchest and smartest of the Greek gods and goddesses.
The prevailing idea that quantitative data will give a useful view of the world has overwhelmed our capacity to make sense of the data we receive. Is the Information Age antagonistic to knowledge?
>> The author speaks.
Is revolution possible in the age of the Anthropocene? Marx has returned, but which Marx? Recent biographies have proclaimed him to be an emphatically nineteenth-century figure, but in this book a thinker comes to light who speaks to the present as much as the past.
As it says.
How can modes of visual and performance art be used effectively in protest and other political action? This is a good survey of art on the front lines of activism.
Fourteen-year-old Ahmed is stuck in a city that wants nothing to do with him. Newly arrived in Brussels, Belgium, Ahmed fled a life of uncertainty and suffering in Syria, only to lose his father on the perilous journey to the shores of Europe. Now Ahmed's struggling to get by on his own, but with no one left to trust and nowhere to go, he's starting to lose hope. Then he meets Max, a thirteen-year-old American boy. Lonely and homesick, Max is struggling at his new school and just can't seem to do anything right. But with one startling discovery, Max and Ahmed's lives collide and a friendship begins to grow.
From honeybees and bumbles to lesser-known diggers, miners, leafcutters, and masons, bees have long been central to our harvests, our mythologies, and our very existence. What would happen if bees became extinct?
In changing times, members of one untouchable family overcame the weight of tradition to become teachers, a poet, a revolutionary.
The uses of feathers, the drama of raptors, the slaughter of pheasants, the infidelities of geese.
What have we been reading and recommending this week?
Read our latest NEWSLETTER.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #87 (11.8.18)
 | Warlight by Michael Ondaatje You come away from Michael Ondaatje’s novel Warlight altered. Closing the cover on the final pages feels somewhat like a betrayal or a bereavement. You do not want to leave, still curious to understand, wanting more. Warlight opens in 1945 with a London family. Rachel and Nathaniel, affectionately referred to by their mother as Wren and Stitch, are to be left at home with a mysterious boarder, whom they name The Moth, while their parents move to Singapore, ostensibly for their father’s career. Little do they know that this will be the last time they see their father and it will be years until Rose, their mother, enters their lives again. Not long into the story, Rachel finds Rose’s trunk, which she had packed with fanfare and care, in the basement, and here the betrayal begins. Where is their mother, and why has she abandoned them? Sent to boarding schools, both youths run away and, intriguingly, The Moth convinces the schools that they will both be day pupils, and creates the setting for an unconventional household. While most days pass without mishap, some evenings bring a cast of unusual and lively characters into the children’s world. For Nathaniel, a keen and quiet observer, his life becomes filled with adventures and contact with those on the fringes of society. The Moth, on realising that he is hardly attending school, gets him a job at the Criterion, where he meets immigrant workers and gains an education of a different sort. His most intimate connection, though, is with an ex-boxer known as The Darter, who takes him (and later also, his girlfriend Agnes) on travels along the Thames, dealing illegal greyhounds and other contraband. The first half of the book focuses on these teen years: Nathaniel’s exploration of his world, a London underworld, and his lack of awareness of what is happening in the shadows. When the monsters come out of the shadows so does Rose, but the explanations remain in the dark. Later, a decade on, we meet Nathaniel in his late twenties working in the Archives of the Foreign Office, covering the tracks and eliminating information from those post-war years, the years when Rose worked as a spy, passing information to a network of allies working undercover in Europe. It is the second part of this novel that the unease and tension that permeates Nathaniel’s life comes to the fore. Rose, having cut her ties with the agency, lives an anonymous existence in Suffolk, waiting for the stranger that she believes will come for her. Although she has contact with her son (Rachel has cast her out completely), she is guarded. Any questions are met with limited information or no responses: she keeps her cards close to her chest, never revealing her past life or the role that the various ‘guardians’ had. Through Nathaniel’s musings we are given a version of Rose’s life: what may have happened to leave her with scars running down her forearms, where she may have been in those disappeared years, and who she may have loved. It is the ‘story’ of his mother, a melded memory of his childhood, the shadowy characters who came in and out of his life, fragments of poetry, drawings and interpretations of recorded interviews and mission accounts, that he pores through to create a picture. Ondaatje leaves us with lives damaged and relationships torn asunder not by bombs but by the battles of secrecy, lies and oblique conversations. Tender and achingly beautiful, Warlight takes you into its pages and transports you to another place and time. |