 | The Anger of Angels by Sherryl Jordan {Reviewed by STELLA} A jester’s daughter, Giovanna, is thrown into a world of deception, danger and passion, of passionate revenge and passionate love. What will one do to uncover the truth? When should one speak out and when is it absolutely necessary to remain silent? Giovanna and her father live in the Italian Renaissance walled city of Valencia under the protection of a benevolent duke. Their lives, or so it seems to this young woman, are carefree and charmed, despite hardships that have come before. Although Giovanna misses their life with the travelling circus and the freedoms that entailed, life in the palace, where her father is the adored Duke’s jester, is good. When returning on the road from burying her grandfather they are threatened by a snide nobleman, Capello - henchman to Savernola, a tyrannical ruler in a neighbouring city. Giovanna’s allure and her knife skills (injuring the nobleman’s pride rather than his bodily self) make a quick enemy of Capello. Yet it is not daggers that will undo their world, but words. Ennio, the jester, is a talented actor and writer. When a new play is performed at court ridiculing Savernola, the walls of their world begin to tumble. Savernola, angered by the play which has been seen by members of his guard, seeks revenge and begins a series of attacks on the hamlets of Valencia. Innocents are slaughtered as the tyrant demands the jester and his book. Add to this the arrival at court of two brothers: Santo, a fresco painter, and Raffaele, his assistant. Both are mysterious and talented in their own ways. Giovanna is drawn to Raffaele - charming, good-looking yet ostracised by others because of his twisted back - and distrustful of Santo, who she finds brash and over-confident. The tale builds slowly, along with Giovanna’s eroding innocence, and she finds herself facing an uncertain future. Yet this angel does not fear to tread. Always craving adventure, she finds herself on a journey, one more dangerous than she could ever imagine yet also filled with love and passion. How far will she go to protect those she loves? What secrets will she reveal to unmask the lies? The story starts gently and builds in a crescendo, compelling the reader to abandon himself or herself to a breathtaking finale. This is an excellently paced YA novel with glorious descriptions of Renaissance lives, colours and smells; young love - romantic and brave; and the desire for power - the worthy and despicable. |
   | Outline by Rachel Cusk {Reviewed by THOMAS} It was entirely appropriate, he told me, and when he said those two words, entirely appropriate, he said them in such a way that if they had appeared in written form instead of spoken form they would certainly have been written in italics, if not, perhaps, underlined, it was entirely appropriate to the book her was reading, Outline by Rachel Cusk, that he had begun reading it while flying on an aeroplane to Auckland, as the first of the ten conversations that comprise the book takes place between the narrator, so to call her, and the man in the neighbouring seat in an aeroplane flying to Athens. It was entirely appropriate, he said, because the content of the novel and the context in which it was being read were so similar and so particular that, for much of the flight, the so-called fictional world and the so-called actual world merged seamlessly into one experience, an experience he considered to be appropriately termed ‘reading’, perhaps due to the passivity that is a incumbent upon being a passenger, a role that demands an almost complete withdrawal of personal presence, so to call it, except to the extent that one is required, out of politeness, to speak, or at least to smile and make a slight fluttering gesture with a hand, in order to refuse the biscuits, tea, magazines and lollies proffered by the cabin attendant. “Tell me about it! I used to eat ten of these a day, maybe twelve,” he told me the cabin attendant had said when the woman across the aisle from him had refused a biscuit because she was “trying to lose weight.” “I was really packing on the kilos,” the cabin attendant had said, “And then I thought, something has to change, this isn’t doing me any good, and so I stopped. I took up smoking again and I stopped the biscuits, I was eating up to thirty of the things a day, between flights. I took up smoking and the kilos just dropped off.” The cabin attendant was looking pretty trim, it was true, he said, in his pin-striped uniform, the pin-striped trousers and the waistcoat made of pin-striped fabric on the front and baby fabric on the back, a uniform that is serious but not too serious, a uniform in which the wearer could never be mistaken for a pilot, even though he wore a little brass name-badge in the form of a wing, the uniform of someone perhaps pretending to be a pilot, a uniform almost unbearably camp on an adult, a ‘dress-ups’ uniform, a uniform that constantly condescends to its wearer. Cusk, he told me, would undoubtedly notice a detail like that, the lenses of her noticing, of her reading of the world, bitterly acute. The novels of what he called Cusk’s ‘Faye project’, Outline, *Transit*, and, most recently, *Kudos* - in all of which the narrator is named Faye, though she could just have easily been named Rachel Cusk, or any other name, the name of the reader perhaps - were all concerned with the withdrawal, so far as it is possible, of the narrator from her context, in order, perhaps, for her to be able to see her context and the persons that it serially contains, more clearly. When reading the books of what he called Cusk’s ‘Faye project’, he felt that he was learning to read, to read both literature and, maybe, even, life, under Cusk’s tutelage. This last he said under his breath, as if embarrassed, lest, he said, it be mistaken for some sort of what he termed, involuntarily turning down the corners of his mouth, corners that were in any case quite naturally rather turned down, spiritual improvement, when in fact the books would in fact relieve the reader of even the undeclared presumptions inherent in the ghastly term spiritual improvement, the books’ equation of bitterness and clarity, he said, would soon disabuse anyone who might have begun to think that what he was describing was a spiritual improvement. He took out a piece of paper and read to me something he had copied from Cusk's book, Outline, and he read it rather haltingly as his handwriting was small and cramped and barely legible even to himself. “I began to feel for the first time that I was seeing what was really there, without asking myself whether or not I was expecting to see it. It seems as though we looked out of the world through a long lens of preconception, by which we held ourselves at some unbreachable distance from what was around us, a distance that constituted a kind of safety but also created a space for illusion. We never, I think, discerned the true nature of the things we saw, any more than we were ever in danger of being affected by them,” he read. “Life is a series of punishments for moments of unawareness.” When I remarked that what he had read resembled what I thought of as spiritual improvement, he grimaced, and perhaps would have spat if he had been a person who spat, and said that what he was describing was merely what he termed, and what surely anyone would term, learning to read. If context “is a kind of imprisonment”, and here he quoted, presumably, Cusk, from his notes, then the only useful response is to withdraw oneself, if not physically then at least in terms of what he called mental positioning - and here I had to assert that the term held no meaning, but my assertion went I think unnoticed by him - for, he said, this withdrawal in terms of mental positioning, exemplified in the novels of Cusk’s ‘Faye project’, placed a writer in a new position with regard to the text she produces, places a narrator in a new position with regard to the text in which she appears, places a reader in a new position with regard to the text which he is reading, and, he contested, could place a reader in a new position with regard to the context in which he finds himself in, so to call it, real life. It is the height of foolishness, he contested, to think that we can have any idea of who we are, ideas of who we are can be formed only by other people, and are always, in any case, inevitably wrong, or, rather always of, at best, only limited truth, revealing, as they do, more about those who have the ideas than about the subject to whom those ideas refer. Only by removing, as far as if possible, everything that we imagine to lie within the outline of ourselves can we truly begin to read that part of the world that is not not-us, and here he not only said the term not not-us in the way that I have previously compared to text in italics but made an incomprehensible and rather silly gesture with both hands as well, as if this would incline me to take his theory any more seriously than the look on my face perhaps was conveying that I currently did. He read again aloud from his notes, explaining that the passage he was quoting was quoted by the narrator from the story of another woman telling her, the narrator, about her conversation with the man in the neighbouring seat to her during a flight on an aeroplane to Athens, where, obviously, the two women have met. “In everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative. This antidescription had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while she herself remained blank. Yes this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time a sense of who she now was.” It was quite possible, he said, that, as well as providing a method of what he called learning to read, the novels of Cusk’s 'Faye project' could also constitute a method of learning to write, in other words, they demonstrated a way of generating texts from ordinary life, not perhaps of making writing easier so much as of making it easier to reach the level of writing that is difficult, the level of writing at which - and here the compounding of his italic talk was becoming preposterous - subject and object wrestle openly with each other for control. I smirked at the thought of this wrestling, and asked him if he would be likely to be generating any texts himself by this Faye method. No, he said, he was far too busy to do anything like that. All he wrote these days were brief weekly reviews of the books he had been reading, written in urgency before their deadlines. He never had a chance to do what he termedconsidered writing, not that he saw any point, really, for him, in doing what he termed considered writing, even if he had had the time in which to do it. His point was, he said, that each week he had a constrained slot of time on a Saturday in which to write his review for the weekly newsletter of the bookshop to which he was attached, an exercise of writing that he had to perform regardless of inclination or mood or headaches, and without what he termed the self-indulgence of waiting for the muse - an avoidance of labour, he said, which was in fact implied, now that he thought about it, in the very term considered writing - and certainly without the luxury of any protracted review of his text. This was writing, he said, as a performance art, writing in real time, whatever that meant, writing, he stressed, thankfully without romance. At this point he looked at the clock and I knew from the expression on his face, an expression of both horror and relief, that, on account of the length of our conversation, this week he would not have time to produce the review of which he spoke. |
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.
>> Read Stella's review.
>> Stella also reviews the book on Radio NZ National.
>> Does having a good reputation matter?
>> Visit 'the ego room' (and other rooms).
>> "One of those long nights of the soul."
>> How to make an audio book.
>> Listen to an excerpt.
NEW RELEASES
As the neoliberal experiment of subjecting the public sector to market-driven reforms has failed to deliver either functional outcomes or significant savings, it is timely to reconsider government as an agency of the people's will and to examine hard data on the potentials of 'deep democracy' to fulfill both collective and individual interests. Important.
Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in rural Ireland. The similarities end there; they are from very different worlds. When they both earn places at Trinity College in Dublin, a connection that has grown between them lasts long into the following years.
Long-listed for the 2018 Man Book Prize.
"A tremendous read, full of insight and sweetness. Rooney’s mastery of tone is complete: Normal People takes themes of passivity and hurt and makes them radical and amazing. But the truth is that this novel is about human connection and I found it difficult to disconnect. It is a long time since I cared so much about two characters on a page." - Anne Enright
>> An extract.
>> An extract.
“Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages,” states Manguso in one of the 300 aphorisms and ‘arguments’ (as in ‘the argument of the story’ rather than a disputation) that comprise this enjoyable little book. Indeed the whole does feel as if it bears some relation to another considerably longer but nonexistent text, either as a reader’s quotings or marginalia, or as a writer’s folder of sentences-to-use-sometime or jottings towards a novel she has not yet written (“To call a piece of writing a fragment, or to say that it’s composed of fragments, is to say that it or its components were once whole but are no longer”). Many of the aphorisms are pithy and self-contained, often dealing with awkwardness and degrees of experiential dysphoria (so to call it), and other passages, none of which are more than a few sentences long, are distillates or subsubsections of stories that are not further recorded but which can be felt to pivot on these few sentences. Some of the ‘arguments’ reveal unexpected aspects of universal experiences (“When the worst comes to pass, the first feeling is relief” or “Hating is an act of respect” or “Vocation and ambition are different but ambition doesn’t know the difference”) and others are lighter, more particular (and, I'm afraid, a few do belong on calendars on the walls of dentists’ waiting rooms). Some of the arguments are just singular observations: “The boy realises that if he can feed a toy dog a cracker, he can just as easily feed a toy train a cracker” or “Many bird names are onomatopoeic - they name themselves. Fish, on the other hand, have to float there and take what they get.” To read the whole book is to feel the spaces and stories that form the invisible backdrop for these scattered points of light, and the reader is left with a residue similar to that with which you are left having read a whole novel.
>> Interview.
In 1881, colonial troops invaded the village of Parihaka on the Taranaki coast. In an attempt to quell the non-violent direct action taken by the community against land confiscations, the government sent over 1500 troops into the village. Many people were expelled, buildings destroyed, and chiefs Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi were jailed. Buchanan tells her own, deeply personal story of Parihaka. Beginning with the death of her father, a man with affiliations to many of Taranakis eight iwi, she describes her connection to Taranaki, the land and mountain, and the impact of confiscation. Buchanan discusses the apologies and settlements that have taken place since te pahuatanga, the invasion of Parihaka. She considers what history and historical time might look like from a Taranaki Maori perspective, and analyses the unfolding negotiations for the return of Mt Taranaki.
'Spomenik' the Serbo-Croat/Slovenian word for 'monument' - refers to a series of memorials built in Tito's Republic of Yugoslavia from the 1960s-1990s, marking the horror of the occupation and the defeat of Axis forces during World War II. Hundreds were built across the country, from coastal resorts to remote mountains. Through these imaginative forms of concrete and steel, a classless, forward-looking, socialist society, free of ethnic tensions, was envisaged. Instead of looking to the ideologically aligned Soviet Union for artistic inspiration, Tito turned to the west and works of abstract expressionism and minimalism. As a result, Yugoslavia was able to develop its own distinct identity through these brutal monuments, which were used as political tools to articulate Tito's personal vision of a new tomorrow.
An unparalleled resource of fashion detailing from throughout the last century: elaborate embroidery, intricate pleats, daring cuts, innovative approaches and solutions. Beautifully presented and containing only the very best examples.
The plates reproduced here were drawn and printed to accompany the published account of Humboldt's explorations in the Americas at the turn of the nineteenth century and mark a high point in both descriptive accuracy and beauty in botanical illustration. A pleasing volume.
How did a 72-year-old from a family with (albeit odd) superpowers come to be desperately trying to find loot stashed all over Florida before the mob terminate him? An enjoyable novel about race, class and politics in an America still trying to come to terms with the civil rights movement.
"For sheer reading pleasure Ladee Hubbard's original and wildly inventive novel is in a class by itself." - Toni Morrison
"The Talented Ribkins is a charming and delightful debut novel with a profound heart, and Ladee Hubbard's voice is a welcome original." - Mary Gaitskill
>> Comes with reading group guide.
>> "Does that mean class is cancelled?"
The traumas of Kristallnacht in 1938 continue to echo through the generations, making life difficult for Christel, the daughter of a holocaust survivor and refugee to New Zealand. When her protest sculpture made of plastic milk containers comes to life like a golem from Jewish folklore, characters from the past begin to clamour for attention and secrets are uncovered.
>> Author sings.
>> Author speaks.
Te Moana Nui a Kiwa is the great ocean continent. While it is common to understand ocean and seas as something that divides land, for those Indigenous to the Pacific or the Moana, it was traditionally a connector and an ancestor. Imperialism in the Moana, however, created false divides between islands and separated their peoples. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, these connections are becoming visible again, partly through the use of globalising technologies. Lopesi argues that while colonisation created divisions across Te Moana Nui a Kiwa, the adaptability of Moana peoples is now turning the ocean back into the unifying continent that it once was.
Insights into the art of narration from one of the English language's foremost biographers. How can lives be written and told?
>> Informally yours.
Explores the roles that photography and video play in the crafting of identity, and the reconfiguration of social conventions that define our public and private selves. Consciously framed by our present era, this collection of essays, interviews, and reflections assesses how our image-making and consumption patterns are embedded and implicated in a wider matrix of online behaviour and social codes, which in turn give images a life of their own. Within this context, our visual creations and online activities blur and remove conventional delineations between public and private (and sometimes secret) expression; in fact, they multiply and expand the number of potential selves in the contemporary image-centric world. The writings address the various disruptions, resistances, and subversions that artists propose to the limited versions of race, gender, sexuality, and autonomy that populate mainstream popular culture. In so doing, they anticipate a future for our image-world rich with diversity and alterity, one that can be shaped and influenced by the agency of self- representation.
"How often it pains me not to be some other banal individual, whose life, because it is not mine, fills me with longing. I envy in everyone the fact that they are not me," wrote Fernando Pessoa as Vicente Guedes in what is now considered the ‘first phase’ of The Book of Disquiet, a vast assortment of passages found unedited on variously sized pieces of paper in a trunk after Pessoa’s death in 1935 and variously selected, assembled and translated and made into books by various persons presuming the intentions of Pessoa (though what his intentions were for this material is far from clear). This new and first complete edition assembles the fragments in chronological order for the first time (so far as this can be determined), allowing us to take a cast of Pessoa’s thinking in the two ‘phases’ of the book (or, rather, ‘book’). The first phase contains material written by Pessoa as Vicente Guedes from 1913 to 1920, and the second phase contains material written as Bernardo Soares in the early 1930s, possibly intended to subsume the material previously written as Guedes (the Soares material being more descriptive, lighter in tone than the first section, almost glibber, Pessoa-as-Soares writing almost as someone who has read Pessoa-as-Guedes and seeking to make Guedes’s ideas his own). Pessoa contributed to Portuguese literature under 81 identified heteronyms, pseudonyms and personae (see the list here), each with a distinct style and intellectual life. New in paperback.
>> Read Thomas's review.
Why is it that some people experience dissonance between their biological sex and their personal identity? Is gender something we are, or something we do? Is our expression of gender a product of biology, or does it develop based on our environment? Are the traditional binary male and female gender roles relevant in an increasingly fluid and flexible world?
Warner uses anthropology, psychology and mythology to dig deeply into the inner lives of artists, particularly women, and through the levels of meaning in work. Includes considerations of animals in the work of Louise Bourgeois, the Catholicism of Damien Hirst, and performance as a medium of memory in the installations of Joan Jonas.
The manifestos written by Tzara between 1916 and 1921 epitomised an assault on all traditional norms-and-forms, in art and in the art of living. Primarily works of liberating destruction, the manifestos pointed the way towards Surrealism and towards the new ways of seeing, living and making that were experimented with in the following decades.
>> "I am against manifestos."
“There is a buoyant energy and hilarity to this account of an Indian student seeking the wide world through the women he meets, but one laughs with growing unease as a darker undercurrent is slowly revealed. An unusual, brave twist on the migrant’s tale.” —Kiran Desai
“A beguiling meditation on memory and migration, sex and politics, ideas and art, and race and ambiguity. Part novel, part memoir, this book is as sly, charming, and deceptive as its passionate protagonist, a writer writing himself into being.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen
Explores the homes of 18 global creatives who take an eccentric, whimsical, curated and clever approach to their living space. An interiors book both for people who love interiors books and for people who ordinarily don't love interiors books.
The future has arrived and it is not what anyone had imagined.
"As the UK trembles endlessly on the long drawn-out brink of Brexit, Sam Byers imagines what might come after. His furiously smart near-future satire is set partly in the fictional everytown of Edmundsbury, and partly in the digital world, from the shallows of Twitter to the murky depths of multinational tech companies. It’s both a rollicking farce of political exhaustion and social collapse, and a subtle investigation into the slippery, ever-evolving relationship between words and deeds." - The Guardian
A beautifully presented collection of over 60 real and imagined mazes from around the world, each with a bird's eye diagrammatic view and description.
A Hugo Award-winning author and music journalist explores the weird and wild story of when the sci-fi world met the rock 'n' roll world of the 1970s. As the 1960s drew to a close, and mankind trained its telescopes on other worlds, old conventions gave way to a new kind of hedonistic freedom that celebrated sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Derided as nerdy or dismissed as fluff, science fiction rarely gets credit for its catalyzing effect on this revolution.
>> The Man Who Fell to Earth.
>> 'Space Oddity'.
>> 'Starman'.
Where does power lie in the digital age?
Well, yes.
Daniel Linnehan is an indentured servant no more. He has his papers, his beloved horse, Ivy, and a new direction in life. But in 1840s Massachusetts, a scruffy-looking Irish teenager wearing fine clothes and riding an even finer horse is asking for trouble.
What is the relationship between folk traditions and scientific fact? To what extent may they be two ways of expressing the same reality?
Profiles and portraits of over 100 chili varieties.
The skills that we learn bind our lives together. Do you want to know how to grow your own food? Or how to keep bees? How to forage for edible seaweed along the shoreline, or wild greens down by the stream? Maybe you're curious about growing mushrooms or how to grow the perfect tomato. You're invited to make these skills your own. Uses permaculture as a basis for a practical, sustainable and ethical antipodean lifestyle.
>> Visit Milkwood.
>> Living like it matters.
The concept of self-annihilation appeared in humans as a corollary to the concept of the individual self, but what is it that draws some people to end their own lives, and why is this remarkably prevalent inclination such a taboo subject in most societies? Bering combines cutting-edge science, investigative journalism and personal interviews to draw a clear picture of suicide in the 21st century.
As his monumental struggle to erase the distinctions between the profound and the trivial, the personal and the public, the sensitive and the insensitive, the insightful and the asinine draws to a close, Knausgaard begins to count the cost of the project and of the fame it has brought him, both to himself and to those around him. There is, it seems, no easy accommodation between a writer, their writing, and the world in which it is both written and read.
"Both strikingly bold and utterly bizarre." - The Guardian
>> "I think contemporary fiction is extremely overrated."
>> Read them all.
This is for you
VOLUME was named 2018 Nielsen NEW ZEALAND BOOKSHOP OF THE YEAR at the annual Book Trade Industry Awards on Saturday.
When selecting the winning shop from a field full of excellence and innovation, the judges said: "We chose the one that is proud of its minimalist décor, because this makes the shop its own display. We chose the one with the big front window that lets the natural light in. We chose the one whose owners have over 30 years’ experience in the book trade, who are highly engaged with their customer community in both the physical and the online world. Where there’s a table for book clubs and writing courses and even space for the odd photo shoot for local clothing designers. Where they’re not trying to compete with the digital giants for book business. Where they’re comfortable and focussed on being small. As our Nielsen New Zealand Bookshop of the Year for 2018, we chose - from Nelson… VOLUME."
A bookshop can never be more than the expression of its community, so this award is entirely due to your unquenchable enthusiasm for books and for the communities they can build. Many thanks, everyone, for your support.
Every time a bookshop succeeds, it does so on behalf of all bookshops. It succeeds on behalf of a vast, diverse, evolving and adaptable organism that connects readers and writers, an organism that includes publishers, distributors, reps, reviewers, and the writers and the readers themselves. Every time a bookshop succeeds it does so on behalf of organisms over algorithms.
A selection of
ARGENTINE FICTION
A first fifteen of the mind.
A collection of many of his most interesting stories, bursting every conceptual boundary, including 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', 'The Garden of Forking Paths', and 'The Library of Babel'.
>> Also in stock: Borges in Sicily.
Slum Virgin by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara $32
A Buenos Aires slum is transformed into a tiny utopia when a transvestite is led by a divine revelation to steer the community. The lively separatism of the shantytown attracts and then subsumes a journalist at first intent only on a story.
>> Read an extract.
Southerly by Jorge Consiglio $32
On the eve of an important battle, a colonel is visited in his tent by an indigenous woman with a message to pass on. A man sets about renovating the house of his childhood, and starts to feel that he might be rebuilding his own life in the process. At a private clinic to treat the morbidly obese, a caregiver has issues of her own. Stories of immigration, marginality, history, intimacy and obsession from an acclaimed Argentinian author.
Cortázar's 'counter-novel' Hopscotch assails normative preconceptions of the novel, providing 155 short chapters, which the reader is advised to read in a random order. How does this affect our reading of the 'adventures' of an Argentinian writer in Paris? Blow-Up collects much of the author's best short fiction, where improbable events continually undermine our concepts of reality.
>> Other Cortazar titles in stock.
Mariana Enriquez’s short story collection Things we Lost in the Fire is as beguiling as it is haunting. Described as ‘Argentine Gothic’, the macabre tales encircle the supernatural, with depictions of demons and ghosts, but it is far from a traditional horror scenario. Enriquez’s characters are fascinating, sometimes eccentric, and you walk alongside them as their curiosity is piqued by the unusual, as they try to make sense of eerie happenings or become disengaged with reality in a bid to push danger away from themselves. In many of the stories the protagonists are young or searching for meaning, trying to grasp what underpins their existence. A woman goes back to live in the now run-down suburb of her childhood and has a fraught interaction with the ‘dirty kid’ who lives on the street with his junkie mother. In another story three young women live a hedonistic lifestyle, vowing allegiance to each other - blood sisters - only to increasingly see that their options in life are limited. They become obsessed with the fable of a ghost girl, a girl who walked off the bus and into the woods. They long to escape. A man, who works on a tourist bus and tells the stories of famous and nasty crimes, starts to see the ghost of a murderer - who then joins in on the antics of the retellings. But only he can see the murderer - the tourists are oblivious. Three children become fascinated with a bricked up house. One of them - the girl with one arm - is absorbed by the house, never to reappear. In all the stories there is a sense of threat and strangeness. Revenge, love, betrayal play their roles, along with superstition and jealousy, but this collection is also about poverty, corruption, political disappearances, and the violent history of Argentina. In a city seething with life, there is an undercurrent that unsettles people living on the edge of the unknown. {S}
First published in 1977 and only now translated into English, this book introduces us to a 'new' Latin American master. Gallardo's stories are surreal and philosophical, fascinating and unsettling, melancholy and funny.
>>Read a sample story.
If a thought is thought it must be thought through to its end. This formula is productive both of great misery and of great literature, but, for most people, either consequence is fairly easily avoided through a simple lack of tenacity or focus, or through fear. Unfortunately, we are not all so easily saved from ourselves by such shortcomings. The narrator of Ariana Harwicz’s razor-fine novel Die, My Love finds herself living in the French countryside with a husband and young child, incapable of feeling anything other than displaced in every aspect of her life, both trapped by and excluded from the circumstances that have come to define her. She both longs for and is revolted by family life with her husband and child, the violence of her ambivalences make her incapable of either accepting or changing a situation about which there is nothing ostensibly wrong, she withdraws into herself, and, as the gap separating herself from the rest of existence widens, her attempts to bridge it become both more desperate and more doomed, further widening the gap. Every detail of everything around her causes her pain and harms her ability to feel anything other than the opposite of the way she feels she should feel. This negative electrostatic charge, so to call it, builds and builds but she is unable to discharge it, to return her situation to ‘normal’, to relieve the torment. In some ways, the support and love of her husband make it harder to regain a grip on ‘reality’ - if her husband had been a monster, her battles could have been played out in their home rather than inside her (it is for this reason, perhaps, that people subconsciously choose partners who will justify the negative feelings towards which they are inclined). The narrator feels more affinity with animals than with humans, she behaves erratically or not at all, she becomes obsessed with a neighbour but the encounters with him that she describes, and the moments of self-obliterative release they provide, are, I would say, entirely fantasised. Between these fantasies and ‘objective reality’, however, falls a wide area about which we and she must remain uncertain whether her perceptions, understandings and reactions are accurate or appropriate. At times the narrator’s love for her child creates small oases of anxiety in her depression, but these become rarer. Harwicz’s writing is exquisite, both sensitive and brutal, both lucid and claustrophobic, her observations both subtle and overwhelming. As the narrator loses her footing, the writer ensures that we are borne with her on through the novel, an experience not dissimilar to gathering speed downhill in a runaway pram*. {T} * Not a spoiler.
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 piecewhich 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. {S}
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.
"I don't know another writer who better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don't show us." - Italo CValvino
Rosa Ostreech, a pseudonym for the novel's beautiful but self-conscious narrator, carries around a trilingual edition of Aristotle's Metaphysics, struggles with her thesis on violence and culture, sleeps with a bourgeois former guerrilla, and pursues her elderly professor with a highly charged blend of eroticism and desperation. Elsewhere on campus, Pabst and Kamtchowsky tour the underground scene of Buenos Aires, dabbling in ketamine, group sex, video games, and hacking. And in Africa in 1917, a Dutch anthropologist named Johan van Vliet begins work on a theory that explains human consciousness and civilization by reference to our early primate ancestors-animals, who, in the process of becoming human, spent thousands of years as prey.
"A stunning vibrant maximalist whirlwind of a novel. Oloixarac's wit and ambition are evident on every page. By comparison, most other contemporary fiction seems a little dull and simple-minded." -Hari Kunzru
The President's Room by Ricardo Romero $29
In a nameless suburb in an equally nameless country, every house has a room reserved for the president. No one knows when or why this came to be. It’s simply how things are, and no one seems to question it except for one young boy. Can anyone - the narrator? even the reader? - be trusted to tell the truth? Overtones of Cortázar and Kafka potentise the sinister mystery surrounding the room that is both many rooms and no room.
Told from four different viewpoints and in four different decades, the story of both the effects of and the contributory factors to a murder does no so much unfold as fold in and in upon itself, becoming increasingly claustrophobic, despite the beautifully spare and open prose and the pampas setting, until it closes in upon the pivotal act itself, which causes all the previously read sections to shift and realign and reveal their significance. The mechanism is so well-oiled and precisely wrought that the great weights of economic change and the political turbulence of the 1950s (including of the León Suarez massacre) swing just out of sight. When the train tracks are torn up in the 1970s, the Glaxo pharmaceutical factory continues to loom above the town and above the novel, out of sight, a shadow across the text. {T}
Fireflies by Luis Sagasti $30
How do we make our histories? Why is it that memory assembles certain illuminated moments into a kind of story? Segasti is fully aware that each moment in life or literature is an amalgam of numerous stories and times, all having bearing on a moment's experience, and concocts this novel with, among other referents, dashes of Joseph Beuys, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Japanese poets and Russian cosmonauts.
How do we make our histories? Why is it that memory assembles certain illuminated moments into a kind of story? Segasti is fully aware that each moment in life or literature is an amalgam of numerous stories and times, all having bearing on a moment's experience, and concocts this novel with, among other referents, dashes of Joseph Beuys, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Japanese poets and Russian cosmonauts.
Fear (as opposed to anxiety, terror, horror, angst and its other cousins) clarifies perception and heightens the significance of details, much as does good writing, building an electrostatic charge which almost craves, yet ultimately resists, the release offered by the revelation of the feared. Schweblin’s short novel is like a Van de Graaff generator, building a textual charge that can be felt up the spine long after the book is finished. The book sustains three narrative levels most of the way through: Amanda, a woman apparently on her deathbed in a clinic, is urged with increasing intensity by David, someone ostensibly a child, to narrate a seemingly recent series of events when Amanda, who was on holiday with her young daughter Nina in the environs of a small Argentinian town, spent some time with Clara, the mother of her interrogator. The third narrative level is provided by Amanda reporting the stories told to her by Clara, largely concerning David’s contact with the environmental poison that contaminates the whole novel and is the cause of the deaths of animals and humans in the area and the cause of deformities, illnesses and eldritch personalities among the children who survive. A fourth narrative layer is occasionally provided by Amanda reporting Clara’s reports of things told to her by her husband. In the surface layer, David’s demeanor, demands and speech are very unchildlike, bringing into question his status as a child, and also the length of time since the events narrated by Amanda occurred. He seems very like the part of an author that drives the narrating part to narrate and we cannot be sure how much of the story has a ‘factual’ basis. In addition, the narrator is apparently suffering a high fever, and the heightened but narrowed perceptions destabilised by hallucination, or by the uncertainty about whether what is perceived is a hallucination or not (which is the most frightening thing about hallucinations), combined with the compelling fear is both typical of fever and a further destabilisation of the narrative. Towards the end of the book, the David character ceases to question Amanda, and Amanda goes on, unguided, to narrate her husband’s visit to Clara’s husband some time after, presumably, both Amanda’s and Clara’s deaths, a visit that she cannot know about, further undermining the veracity of the narrative and deepening doubts about Amanda’s relationship to it. Amanda’s story demonstrates that being within ‘rescue distance’ is not enough to save those we love when the world is saturated in literal and metaphorical poisons, and we lose those we love by letting them slip from their places in our narratives and losing the specificity of their identities. {T}
 | 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! |