 | Extinction by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS} “When I take Wolfsegg and my family apart, when I dissect, annihilate and extinguish them, I am actually taking myself apart, dissecting, annihilating and extinguishing myself. I have to admit that this idea of self-dissection and self-annihilation appeals to me, I told Gambetti. I’ll spend my life dissecting and extinguishing myself, Gambetti, and if I’m not mistaken I’ll succeed in this self-dissection and self-extinction. I actually do nothing but dissect and extinguish myself.” In the first of the two relentless paragraphs that comprise this wonderfully claustrophobic novel, the narrator, Murau, has received a telegram informing him that his parents and brother have been killed in a car accident. While looking at some photographs of them at his desk in Rome, he unleashes a 150-page stream of invective directed personally at the members of his family, both dead and living. Murau is alone, but he addresses his rant to his student Gambetti in Gambetti’s absence or recounts, however accurately or inaccurately, addressing Gambetti in person at some earlier time. Gambetti, in either case, is completely passive and non-contributive, and this passivity and non-contribution acts - along with Murau’s over-identification with his ‘black sheep’ Uncle Georg, an over-identification that sometimes confuses their identities - as a catalyst for Murau’s invective, as an anchor for the over-inflation of Murau’s hatred for, and difference from, his family. Without external contributions that might mitigate Murau’s opinions, his family appear as horrendous grotesques, exaggerations that here cannot be contradicted due to absence or death. Being dead puts an end to your contributions to the ideas people have of you: stories concerning you are henceforth the domain entirely of others and soon become largely expressions of their failings, impulses and inclinations.We can have no definite idea of ourselves, though: we exist only to others, unavoidably as misrepresentations, as caricatures. Murau states that he intends to write a book, to be titled Extinction: “The sole purpose of my account will be to extinguish what it describes, to extinguish anything that Wolfsegg means to me, everything that Wolfsegg is, everything. My work will be nothing other than an act of extinction.” Murau has not been able to even begin to write this account because his hatred gets in the way of beginning, or, rather, what we soon suspect to be the inauthenticity of his hatred gets in the way of beginning. There is no loathing without self-loathing. As Murau’s invective demonstrates, there can be no statement that is not an overstatement: every statement tends towards exaggeration as soon as it is expressed or thought. By exaggeration a statement exhausts its veracity and immediately begins to incline towards its opposite, just as every impulse, as soon as it is expressed, inclines towards its opposite. Only a passive witness, a witness who does not contradict but, by witnessing, in effect affirms, Gambetti in Murau’s case, allows an otherwise unsustainable idea to be sustained. In the second half of the book, Murau returns to Wolfsegg in Austria for the funeral of his parents and brother. Until this point, Murau’s ‘character’ has been defined entirely by his exaggerated opposition to, or identification with, his ideas of others, but when he is brought into situations in which others have a contributing role, Murau’s portrayal of others and of himself in the first section is undermined at every turn. Without the ‘Gambetti’ prop, he is responded to, and, in response to these responses, he overturns many of his opinions - about his parents, his brothers, his sisters, his mother’s lover, the nauseatingly perfectly false Spadolini that Murau had hitherto admired, and about himself - and reveals his fundamental ambivalence, an ambivalence that is fundamental to all existence but which is usually, for most of us, almost entirely suppressed by praxis, by the passive anchors, the Gambettis to which we affix our desperate attempts at character. We resist, through exaggeration, indifference and self-nullification. “We’re often led to exaggerate, I said later, to such an extent that we take our exaggeration to be the only logical fact, with the result that we don’t perceive the real facts at all, only the monstrous exaggeration. I’ve always found gratification in my fanatical faith in exaggeration, I told Gambetti. On occasion I transform this fanatical faith in exaggeration into an art, when it offers the only way out of my mental misery, my spiritual malaise. Exaggeration is the secret of great art, I said, and of great philosophy. The art of exaggeration is in fact the secret of all mental endeavour.” In this second part, Murau reveals his connection with Wolfsegg and his suppressed feelings of culpability in what it represents. “I had not in fact freed myself from Wolfsegg and made myself independent but maimed myself quite alarmingly.” Separation, or, rather, the illusion of separation, is only achieved by ‘art’, that is to say, by exaggeration, by the denial of ambivalence, by the denial of complicity, by suppression: a desperate negative act of self-invention. Once his hatred of his sisters, and of his parents and brothers, has been undermined by his presence and contact with others at Wolfsegg, and without a Gambetti or Georg in his mind to sustain this hatred, the underlying reason for his hatred, a fact that he has suppressed since his childhood as too uncomfortable, the fact that has made “a gaping void” of his childhood, of his whole past, the fact to which he was a passive witness, a complicit witness, namely that Wolfsegg hid and sheltered Nazi war criminals after the war (Gauleiters and members of the Blood Order, who now attend the funeral of Murau’s father) in the so-called ‘Children’s Villa’ (which “affords the most brutal evidence that childhood is no longer possible. All you see when you look back is this gaping void. You actually believed that your childhood could be repainted and redecorated, as it were, that it could be refurbished and reroofed like the Children’s Villa, and this in spite of hundreds of failed attempts at restoring your childhood.”), can now be faced, and, on the final page of the book, at last in some way addressed. Murau also attains the necessary degree of remove to write Extinction before his own death, either from illness or, more likely, suicide. This, his last, is the only Bernhard novel I can think of in which the protagonist makes anything that resembles an effective resolution. |
>> Read Stella's review.
>> Odd is the new normal.
>> An interview with the author.
>> A love story between a misfit and a store.
>> Rescuing us from mundane existence by looking at mundane existence.
>> Loitering.
>> A clean marriage.
NEW RELEASES
A remarkable fictional autobiography of Louise Bourgeois, in the form of a self-addressing interior monologue.
"A truly wonderful book. Jean Frémon knew Louise Bourgeois, and in his words that are also her words I discovered her ahain in all her bitter, tender, heroic, violent creativity. There is something uncanmny at play in this small book, something I don't fully grasp. but I suspect that elusive, haunted excess may be exactly why I love it. " - Siri Hustvedt
>>Louise Bourgeois as I knew her.
>>Something like a portrait of Louise Bourgeois.
The first graphic novel ever to have been long-listed for the Booker Prize. "A profoundly American nightmare. The fictional killing in Sabrina is disturbing, but Drnaso doesn't fixate on the gore or the culprit; he's more concerned with how the public claims and consumes it, spinning out morbid fantasies with impunity. It's a shattering work of art." - Ed Park, New York Times
>> Some pages.
>> Very mild spoilers.
A novel of slavery and freedom, fulfillment and restriction, love and anger, in which a young slave survives a Barbados plantation, reveals an astounding artistic talent, and, with his new master, eludes capture and enters a world of fantastic possibility. From the author of Half Blood Blues.
Short-listed for the 2018 Man Booker Prize.
>> I've never regretted a lost sentence.
>> Edugyan in conversation with Attica Locke.
"If you open your mouth to start to complain I will fill it with whipped cream." A remarkable sequence of lines, beamed at us straight from the frontiers of poetry: surprising, disorienting, stimulating, even overstimulating, to great effect, "like waking up drunk in a lemon yellow room."
Quite how the celebrated Austrian cartoonist Nicolas Mahler managed to make such an enjoyable graphic novel out of a novel told entirely in interior monologue and remembered dialogue by the celebrated Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, a book in which nothing happens, in which the narrator, Atzbacher is entirely obscured by his subject, Reger, is uncertain, but the results are a hugely satire of mores and pretensions, in the arts and in society.
>> Read Thomas's review of Bernhard's original novel.
>> Some sample pages.
Fed up with the superficial pleasure-seeking of her sun-and-surf, pleasure-and-leisure life in Los Angeles, Jacaranda heads for New York and a new life as a writer. Babitz's dreamy-yet-sharp 1979 novel has been reissued to new acclaim.
"This novel is studded with sharp observations. Babitz's talent for the brilliant line, honed to a point, never interferes with her feel for languid pleasures." - The New York Times Book Review
"Babitz's style is cool, conversational, loose, yet weighed with a seemingly effortless poetry." - Guardian
>> Pleasure for pleasure's sake.
Brutalist hotels, avant-garde monuments and futurist TV towers: rare and previously unpublished vintage postcards from the Eastern Bloc.
Benevento, a town in southern Italy, is famous for its witches, who are not broomstick-riding hags but a variety of supernatural beings. Among them are the Janara, who fly about on stormy nights performing mischief; the Clopper, an old witch who chases children through the streets of town; and the Manalonga, who hide in wells and under bridges and try to drag children down. Benevento is an ancient town; a Roman theatre is at the centre, a castle fortress overlooks the town and the river, and farmland surrounds it. The stories in the 'Witches of Benevento' series take place in the 1820s and feature five children, two of whom are twins. Book #2 is The All-Powerful Ring.
>> Website (fun).
Webster's research into the 1918 influenza epidemic, which included exhuming the frozen corpses of flu victims in the Arctic, enabled him to build a model of genesis and spread of influenza viruses, and their potential for epidemics. Confirming his hypothesis that the natural ecology of these viruses, and the origins of new strains, was among waterbirds, New Zealander Webster gained world-wide recognition for his contributions to the understanding of the disease, ad for his modelling of its spread.
Indo-Persian food conveying the flavours and culinary approaches of the Mughal Empire.
A good survey of photography and its relationship to abstraction since 1910.
"Told in a clear, powerful prose that grabs the reader from the off, the novel is an unflinching look at a life of a young woman recovering from trauma. The offbeat story of mid-20s narrator Mona, who makes her living as a cleaner first in Massachusetts and later in New Mexico, is by turns laugh-out-loud funny and deeply affecting as past abuses are revealed." - Irish Times
"This book is Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine on acid." - Sara Wingfield
In sorting through how patients, insurance companies, advertising agencies, filmmakers, and comedians misconstrue a doctor 's role, Andrew Bomback (M.D.) realises that even doctors struggle to define their profession. As the author attempts to unravel how much of doctoring is role-playing, artifice, and bluffing, he examines the career of his father, a legendary pediatrician on the verge of retirement, and the health of his infant son, who is suffering from a vague assortment of gastrointestinal symptoms.
A remarkable and often overlooked traditional cuisine, along with innovations and extemporisations using fresh ingredients and Iberian approaches.
The 'second wave' feminist awakening of the early 1970s was distilled in the rage and passion of individuals, many of the more prominent of whom (Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, Flo Kennedy, and Andrea Dworkin) were close associates of Chesler, which makes her profiles of them particularly interesting and unfiltered.
Drawn to fashion despite his family's opposition, Cunningham moved to New York and made a name for himself as a photographer, personality and designer. He remained, however, a secretive man, and this memoir was not available for publication until after his death.
>>Have you seen the film about Cunningham?
We are born into blankets. They keep us alive and they cover us in death. We pull and tug on blankets to see us through the night or an illness. They shield us in mourning and witness our most intimate pleasures. Curious, fearless, vulnerable, and critical, this book interweaves cultural critique with memoir to cast new light on a ubiquitous object.
Do we still need philosophy to help us think about knowledge, meaning and value? (Yes.)
Knowing what Shakespeare read would provide new levels of insight into his works, but which books did he read and where are they now?
What distinguishes the authentic from the imitation? How does our relationship with, and attitude towards, a copy or a stand-in differ from the relationships and attitudes we develop with and towards the authentic and the original (if at all)? Can we know the difference? Can we ever escape the ersatz?
Although 'magic realism' is a term today more commonly associated with the 20th-century literature of Latin America, it was first coined in 1925 by the German art historian and critic Franz Roh to describe an emerging style of modern realist paintings with fantasy or dreamlike subjects. This interesting and often surprising survey of art in Weimar Germany and Austria includes work by Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad, and Jeanne Mammen.
The characters in this book know that they're characters in a book, and they know that they are therefore entitled to a story - but where is it? Perhaps waiting for the story is the story.
>> c.f. Waiting for Elmo.
In subzero temperatures, mother Billie Jean Fontaine walks out of her bungalow barefoot, takes her husband's truck and drives off into the wilderness alone. She never returns. But no one ever leaves The Territory, a community cut off from the rest of the world, a place warped by its own strange ways where the people believe the year is 1985. Here they live by their own rules - until this woman breaks them.
"A dark star of a book." - Lauren Groff
"I loved its every page." - Sheila Heti
A woman becomes obsessed with a couple she meets at a country house. What is the secret trauma that lies behind the attachment?
"Rich and compelling." - Guardian
Was there a fight? A murder? An accident? As Donovan lies in a hospital bed, his girlfriend, Beatrice, tries to piece together what has happened to him. "The Ruinous Sweep is a story with parallel narratives that converge in the middle. The author’s descriptions of the state in which Donovan is trapped – unconscious but experiencing terrifying, realistic visions, and unable to wake up – evoke a sense of fear and frustration in the reader. Beatrice’s narrative is more straightforward – and her tense interactions with adults, particularly the condescension she experiences from a police officer assigned to Donovan’s case, as well as the disdain for teenage relationships from a cold hospital nurse, are remarkably true to life." - Quill & Quire
So many cuisines (all of them good).
Drawing from the Victoria and Albert Museum's unparalleled collections of wallpapers and fabrics, this useful book analyses colour palettes from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. The exemplars are arranged chronologically with their own double-page spreads that explain the significance of the palette. A colour grid is shown beside each pattern, in which the colors in the original piece are shown in proportion to their use, and with their CMYK references to enable designers to replicate these colors in their own work. Useful, beautiful, interesting.
Every morning, in a quiet corner of the kitchen, the puzzle page from the newspaper mysteriously appears beneath Munro the cat's food bowl. Munro and Mouse ponder the clues. A delightful, whimsical, witty collection from the New Zealand Cartoonist of the Year for the last three years.
"Munro is a recognisable cat who does things familiar to cat owners: the fastidious washing between his toes, the determined sleeping in a tight ball, the turned-back and ears set at an irritable horizontal, upside down paper-shredding, and bristling displeasure. The fact the cat reads, takes mice for rides, goes ice-skating, and that birds have bicycles, is the buoyant part of the art. The peculiar joy of it all!" - Elizabeth Knox
Use a marker pen to delete the words you don't want on this anthology of source pages. What you are left with is poetry, but whose? Especially fun if done in parallel with another text-deleting poet.
>> A few similarly crafted examples from our 2018 poetry competition, The Great New Zealand Prose Deletion.
A retrospective kaleidoscope view of the seven-and-a-half week campaign that changed the landscape of New Zealand politics. Perspectives from party leaders, campaign leaders, media commentators and other experts and observers. *Includes a DVD!* Let's read this.
A PURPLE DOZEN
A selection of books for Suffrage Day 125 (19 September 2018)
Clear and detailed.
"A thrilling and inspiring read! For too long these extraordinary women have been hidden from history. Rise Up, Women! should be a standard text in all schools. And it will be a treasured handbook for today's feminists." - Harriet Harman (British MP and QC)
In 1893 New Zealand became the first country in the world with universal suffrage. This achievement owed much to an extraordinary document: the 1893 Women’s Suffrage Petition. Over 270 metres long, with the signatures of some 24,000 women (and at least twenty men), the Suffrage Petition represents the culmination of many years of campaigning by suffragists, led by Kate Sheppard, and women throughout the country. The women who signed the petition came from many walks of life. The names of university graduates appear on the petition sheets, together with some who could mark their name only with a cross. Teachers, domestic servants, shopkeepers and nurses signed; public benefactors appear, and a few women with criminal convictions. Maori women shared many of the suffragists’ concerns for social justice and temperance as well as political representation, and their signatures appear on the Suffrage Petition. Other women who signed had immigrated – many from Britain, some from Europe or Asia. The story of the Women’s Suffrage Petition is told here through the lives of over 150 women who signed; alongside is the narrative of the campaign for women’s suffrage. The first page of the petition is included, with twenty-one sheets representing different parts of the country.
Professor Barbara Brookes' achievement is phenomenal, spanning two centuries from 1814-2015. Looking at our society through the stories of women, the book tells the political and social history of New Zealand from a female perspective. In the early chapters Brookes covers Maori women’s place within Maoridom and early Paheka contact, early settler roles as missionary wives and traders, the colonial era where roles for both Maori and Pakeha women were altered by the circumstances of a new country, the tensions that arose and the changes to female roles either by design or necessity. The tone is perfectly set - readable, interesting history with enough analytical depth and a wealth of knowledge that places this work among our best histories. The overarching themes are dotted with specific examples of women and their lives in early New Zealand, giving both a depth of analysis and fascinating insights on a personal level, bringing history alive. These vivid accounts are well-illustrated with photographs, sketches, paintings, and maps on most pages. The book is laid out chronologically and moves through periods in a rational progression from colonial settlement to new government to the turn of the century, the world wars and the times between, the moral liberations of the 1960s and 70s and into the more contemporary histories from the 1980s onwards. Brookes explores a multitude of themes, focusing on the ever-changing roles and expectations of the female population, including the impact of the land wars, the challenges and opportunities for migrant women, the political role of women, the changing nature of the family and the place of women in the workforce. There will be women you know of in this book; you will be introduced to many more who have made a contribution to our history, whether this is at an international level or on the ground, fighting for equality or as successful cultural contributors or as stalwarts of fair and frank discussion or as representatives of the everyday. A History of New Zealand Women is an important and fascinating account of the lives of women and a valuable to contribution to herstory. {S}
New Zealand's answer to Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls! Inspiring stories and wonderful illustrations. Includes Whina Cooper, Janet Frame, Beatrice Tinsley, Frances Hodgkins, Georgina Beyer, Huria Matenga, Jane Campion, Joan Wiffen, Karen Walker, Kate Edger, Katherine Mansfield, Mai Chen, Merata Mita, Mojo Mathers, Patricia Grace, Suzie Moncrieff, Farah Palmer, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Lucy Lawless, Kate Sheppard, Nancy Wake, Sophie Pascoe, Margaret Mahy, Lydia Ko, Merata Mita, Lorde, Rita Angus and Te Puea Herangi. Illustrations by Sarah Laing, Sarah Wilkins, Fifi Coulston, Ali Teo, Helen Taylor, Phoebe Morris, Sophie Watkins, Rebecca ter Borg and Vasanti Unka.
It's 125 years since New Zealand women won the right to vote. But the battle for the right to so much else is ongoing. Essays by 12 leading New Zealand writers and thinkers, based around objects from Te Papa's collection: Sandra Coney, Holly Walker, Barbara Brookes, Tina Makereti, Sue Bradford, Morgan Godfery, Golriz Ghahraman, Dame Fiona Kidman, Ben Schrader, Charlotte MacDonald, Grace Taylor, Megan Whelan.
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. Includes discussions of suffrage in a contemporary context.
Extracts from her autobiography telling of the tireless campaigning, the betrayals by men in power, the relentless arrests and hunger strikes, the horror of force-feeding, and the constant personal and collective danger of the struggle for suffrage.
Coleman argues that Colclough was just as important as Kate Sheppard for the New Zealand women's movement in New Zealand.
It's Dunedin 1892, and the women's suffrage movement is gaining momentum. Left to fend for herself when her husband's committed to the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, 23-year-old Eva meets Grace, an outspoken suffragist with an exotic and mysterious past. As the friendship between the two women grows through a shared love of music, Eva begins questioning the meaning of her marriage and her role as a woman. But Grace has a bullying husband and secrets she's been keeping from Eva, which could threaten the freedom both women find themselves fighting for.
2018 marks 125 years of suffrage in New Zealand and 100 years in Britain. This beautifully illustrated book gives a blow-by-blow account of the British struggle, and potted biographies of suffragists worldwide, including Meri Te Tai Mangakāhia.
Each of the 68 women featured in this book, produced to mark 125 years of women's suffrage, heard a crack as they passed through the glass ceiling and became the 'first' woman to claim prominence in her field in New Zealand. A biography and a photograph per page.
Twelve years before Emily Pankhurst wore a purple feather in her hat when storming Parliament, Etta Lemon - anti-fashion, anti-feminist - and anti-suffrage - led a very different campaign against the use of feathers in millinery. Interesting social history.
Short stories from ten leading children's and young adults' authors.
 | Normal People by Sally Rooney {Reviewed by STELLA} Connell and Marianne go to school together in Carricklea. Connell’s mother Lorraine cleans house for Marianne’s family. Connell and Marianne affect stranger-hood and spend their school hours ignoring each other while after hours they explore each other’s minds and bodies. While Connell, accepted and seemingly aligned with a ‘group’ at school, navigates his final year, Marianne, ‘weird’ and isolated, continues on her trajectory of bullied-yet-disengaged. Both, despite outward appearances, are dealing with feelings of otherness, and in each other they find a connection that will take them both to Trinity College in Dublin and a heady on-again/off-again relationship - one which neither will quite articulate as a relationship despite the obvious depth of their feelings and understanding of each other. Alongside their regard for each other lie more sinister and manipulative practices: some purposeful, others accidental - often a product of circumstances (class and social difference, family dynamics) outside their control and affected by the actions of others. While denying their feelings to each other they will talk past each other, suffer misunderstandings and hurts that could be avoided, yet they are all too real - ‘normal’. Marianne, a victim of an unloving family, thinks that no one will truly love her and heads towards several disastrous sexual relationships with men who take advantage of this vulnerability. Connell, once at university, feels at sea - no longer part of the familial clan - and finds himself on the outside looking in, now tagging along beside Marianne who, due to her social status, is easily part of the group. Confused by Marianne and the new world he finds himself in, Connell becomes increasingly isolated, despite a steady relationship with a medical student which ends with a sigh rather than any startling rupture. His ongoing communication, sometimes through emails when they are living in different countries, with Marianne remains the centre of his emotional life. Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People is a well-observed and honest account of a young love, of what it means to try to explore the idea of love and to connect with another being. It’s pithy, sad and beautiful in equal measure. Can one truly be loved and, if so, does this come with the price of submission? Can you really know another person or are we only projections of what we want others to see? As Connell and Marianne navigate this perilous path, we cheer them on and at the same time wish them a freedom from the damning aspects of romantic entanglements. This novel reminded me in part of One Day by David Nicholls, which sets two unsuitable people on a course of love that will never work, but Normal People has a far more cynical (and never nostalgic) view of relationships, and one that is ultimately deeply hopeful championing the power of the individual to change another’s life for the better in surprising and rewarding ways. It's a remarkable depiction of a young man at sea emotionally and of a young woman dealing with victimhood. It's also cleverly arranged over four years, with each chapter being a fundamental moment in either Connell's or Marianne's lives: the first chapter (January 2011) is followed by Chapter 2: Three Weeks Later (February 2011) and so on until the final chapter, Seven Months Later (September 2015). Sometimes it's months, at other times weeks, once five minutes, between defining moments. This structure adds to the intensity of the relationship as it plays out, moving between hometown, Europe and university. Long-listed for the Man Booker, Rooney is an author to watch. |
 | Ongoingness: The end of a diary by Sarah Manguso {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Even before my body was an instrument for language it was an instrument for memory,” writes Sarah Manguso in this little book of musings on her relationship with time. With language, though, came the ability to record memory, to further the work of memory in replacing experience with a story about experience, with an ersatz 'experience' that relieves us from experience, a replacement that is, in effect, a form of forgetting, the substitution of experience with something more manageable, more assimilable. For much of her life, Manguso kept a diary, amounting eventually to more than 800 000 words, obsessively recording “what [she] could bear to remember and to convince [her]self that that was all there was.” In her diary she “files away the time that passes so I no longer need to think about it. The experience is no longer experience. It is writing.” Life as it was lived was influenced by the writing that might be done about it. Description, or the potential for description, began to cause that which was described. Time was pulled forward by the representation of its contents. Every detail recorded is an editing-out of all other possible details, each story is a deletion of all other possible stories, each path taken is a turning-away from all other possible paths. “I’d study photographs and gradually forget everything that happened between the shutter openings.” But how else may we be relieved of all those details, all those stories, all those paths, that burden us, threaten us, even, with their possibility? Manguso’s diary-keeping also arose from her desperate conception of time, from her addiction to beginnings and endings, from her inability to experience life as ongoing. “Something will happen,” she repeated to herself at a structural level. Manguso’s relationship with time changed following the birth of her son. As a new parent, and while nursing, she experienced “a new nothing, an absence of subjective experience.” Her grip, or stranglehold, on her experiences was loosened, softened, reformulated by her new role in the experiences of another. “I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby’s continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against.” A reconfiguration of her attachments entailed a reconfiguration of Manguso’s world-view as well: “The experiences that demanded I yield control to a force greater than my will weren’t the beginnings or the ends of anything. They were the moments when I was forced to admit that beginnings and ends are illusory,” she writes.“I no longer believe in anything other than the middle.” No longer needing her diary to formulate experience (“Forgotten moments are the price of continued participation in life, a force indifferent to time.”), Manguso has become more aware of the ongoingness of time, the inchoate onward rush of all things for which linear time can never be more than “a summary”. Participation in life requires an acceptance of (even an enthusiasm for) mortality: “The best thing about time is the privilege of running out of it, of watching the wave of mortality break over me and over everyone I know. No more time, no more potential. The privilege of ruling things out. Finishing. Knowing I’m finished. And knowing that time will go on without me. A flash - and I’m gone, but look, the churn of bodies through the world of light.” |
>> And with even more enthusiasm!
>> Visit Clotilde Perrin's website.
>> The artist at work.
>> At the Same Moment All Around the World.
>> What is in the red parcel?
NEW RELEASES
This is a large-format, gorgeous, beautifully produced interactive picture book featuring the best villains of fairy tales - the giant, the witch and the wolf - all complete with both a story and exceptional lift-the-flaps revealing the inner workings and hidden goings-on of these most compelling characters. Pull the string and find out what is in the wolf’s intestines! Find the mouse – and the knife! - in the giant’s boot! Change the witch’s expression – and find the bon-bon in her pocket! A complete delight for all ages.
A selection of poems from his ninth decade: sharp, learned, playful, poignant, looking back on a long life and forward to the mortality that has claimed so many of his literary fellows and now waits for him. If anything, Stead continues to improve as a poet, his lines scattering resonance across the page from a central point of intensely intelligent watchfulness.
Ottolenghi’s cookbooks take us to new levels of appreciation of food. His recipes, mostly with a Mediterranean inflection, are always both reliable and exciting, the food is always a pleasure to make - and even more of a pleasure to eat. This new book, Simple, has everything you love about Ottolenghi - made simple, or quick, or both simple and quick. The letters of the title are a key to the recipes within: S = short on time: less than 30 minutes; I = 10 ingredients or less; M = make ahead; P = pantry; L = lazy [suits me]; E = easier than you think. So, whenever you have the inclination for Squid and Red Pepper Stew, or Roasted Aubergine with Anchovies and Oregano, or Pasta with Pecorino and Pistachios (if you’re feeling alliterative), or No-Churn Raspberry Ice Cream, you’ll be able to whip it up in no time and still have the benefit of Ottolenghi’s subtle mastery of flavours.
Little Bear is lucky to have three bedtime stories. The first story is about the Night Guardian, who lives in the woods and makes sure all animals go to bed. But who tells the Night Guardian when it's bedtime? The second story is about the brave girl Zhara who seeks the forest's most delicious blackberries. In the third we meet Bo, the little man with the big overcoat, who finds it hard to sleep. Finally, Little Bear falls asleep, and there in bed beside her are her new storybook friends. A very lovely book.
It's 125 years since New Zealand women won the right to vote. But the battle for the right to so much else is ongoing. Essays by 12 leading New Zealand writers and thinkers, based around objects from Te Papa's collection: Sandra Coney, Holly Walker, Barbara Brookes, Tina Makereti, Sue Bradford, Morgan Godfery, Golriz Ghahraman, Dame Fiona Kidman, Ben Schrader, Charlotte MacDonald, Grace Taylor, Megan Whelan.
How does memory work? How do we think of the passing of time? Is our experience of time affected by other experiences in our lives (such as parenthood)? What is the relationship between a life lived and a life recorded? Manguso, whose compulsive diary-writing threatened to overwhelm the life about which it was written, asks many fundamental questions in a playful way.
"This small-sized book has immense power. Marvel at the clarity and fire." - Zadie Smith
>>"I don’t even know how to say kohlrabi".
Permanent marker, meet Beowulf. J.M. Farka puts a feminist, revisionist spin on classic literature in the first in a series of erasure projects. Clever and fun.
Originally conceived as a poem of 2000 lines for the year 2000, the first edition (2190 lines) of this work was published in 2002 under the title From the Antipodes: Prologue to a work in progress. A second edition, corrected and revised, was issued in softcover in 2003. Along with the retitling as A song from the Antipodes: Prologue, some further revision has been incorporated in this edition. A continuation, in cantos of varying length, is now 'in progress'.
David Toop's extraordinary work of sonic history travels from the rainforests of Amazonas to the megalopolis of Tokyo via the work of artists as diverse as Brian Eno, Sun Ra, Erik Satie, Kate Bush, Kraftwerk and Brian Wilson. Beginning in 1889 at the Paris exposition when Debussy first heard Javanese music performed, Ocean of Sound channels the competing instincts of 20th century music into an exhilarating, path-breaking account of ambient sound.
>> Gamelan music from Bali.
>> Satie: 'Gymnopédie No.3'.
>> Brian Eno: Textures.
>> John Hassell: Dream Theory in Malaya.
The beautifully written and long-awaited new novel from the author of the acclaimed Beasts of No Nation. Two privileged teenagers from very different backgrounds make a fraught transition into adulthood and the conformism that opposes their difference. Niru's discovery of his conservative and religious Nigerian parents' incapacity to accept his sexuality is particularly well drawn.
"A lovely slender volume that packs in entire worlds with complete mastery. Speak No Evil explains so much about our times and yet is never anything less than a scintillating, page-turning read." - Gary Shteyngart
>> Read an extract.
Considering our insignificant place on the evolutionary tree, why do we consider ourselves to be so special? From the author of A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived.
"Charming, compelling and packed with information. I learned more about biology from this short book than I did from years of science lessons. A weird and wonderful read." - Peter Frankopan
The reconstructive and plastic surgery pioneered by New Zealander Archibald McIndoe in response to the horrendous injuries suffered by airmen in the second world war, and his holistic view of community rehabilitation, put him in the medical forefront of his field.
>>Mayhew on Radio NZ National.
Extracts from her autobiography telling of the tireless campaigning, the betrayals by men in power, the relentless arrests and hunger strikes, the horror of force-feeding, and the constant personal and collective danger of the struggle for suffrage.
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?
>> Read Stella's review.
Human's fascination with animals as recorded in art from all ages. Stunning. Beautiful.
>> See some spreads.
Told as a graphic novel.
From the experiments of Futurists and others before World War One to Musique concrète to Delia Derbyshire to prog rock, synth pop, electronica, house, techno and beyond.
>> Luigi Russolo: 'Intonarumoris', 1913.
>> Pierre Schaeffer: 'Études de bruits' (1948).
>> Delia Derbyshire: 'Pot au Feu' (1968).
>> Yuri Morozov: The Inexplicable (1978).
>> Kraftwerk: 'Radioactivity'.
Definitive. Authentic. Compendious. 500 exemplary dishes from the various distinct regional cuisines. Not just meat (but plenty of meat). The best showcase of German culinary history.
Two families live in the same house. One of them is human.
"Meller does for contemporary British food what Ottolenghi has done for contemporary Middle Eastern cooking." - Nigella Lawson
A radio producer in the 1950s finds that the alter egos she had assumed when working as a spy during the war have come back to haunt her. If a lie is good enough, can it be left behind?
Reminiscent of the work of Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, an astonishing collection of intimate wartime testimonies and poetic fragments from a cross-section of Syrians whose lives have been transformed by revolution, war, and flight. Against the backdrop of the wave of demonstrations known as the Arab Spring, in 2011 hundreds of thousands of Syrians took to the streets demanding freedom, democracy and human rights. The government's ferocious response, and the refusal of the demonstrators to back down, sparked a brutal civil war that over the past five years has escalated into the worst humanitarian catastrophe of our times.
Paris Echo by Sebastian Faulks $38
A woman visiting Paris to research the lives of women under the Vichy regime in the early 1940s makes a connection with a young Moroccan migrant and each finds themself operating beyond their experience.
"A return to France and a return to form." - John Boyne
“I don’t do excitement.”
>>l'Écho de Paris (1884-1944)
Now that Professor Whale has retired, he writes many letters to "You, Whoever You Are, Who Lives on the Other Side of the Horizon." Seal and Pelican are busy delivering the letters and Penguin is now teaching. Although he is happy his friends are doing so well, Whale wants a special friend, who might call him by a friendly sort of name. Like Whaley, maybe, instead of 'Professor.'
"Gary Shteyngart hears America perfectly: its fatuity, its poignant lament, its boisterous self-loathing. Its heartbeat. Reading him sometimes makes me want to scream - with recognition and with pure hilarity." - Richard Ford
"Stupendous. A novel that seems to have been created in real time, reflecting with perfect comedy and horrible tragedy exactly what America feels like right this minute." - Elizabeth Gilbert
>> Unfortunately, they made a trailer.
The natural world is a web of intricate connections, many of which go unnoticed by humans. But it is these connections that maintain nature's finely balanced equilibrium. From the author of The Hidden Life of Trees.
When a routine scan indicated that their baby's heart was developing outside his body, a rare condition known as ectopia cordis, Gilkison and her partner Roy had to decide whether to end the pregnancy or continue in the knowledge that their baby would die. Their path forward also revealed much of the cultures in which they were raised: Emma in New Zealand and Roy in Peru. Cover design by Holly Dunn.
>>Emma talks.
In a series of formal poems, spoken songs, fragments, vignettes and ballads, Tempest charts the heartbreak at the end of one relationship and the joy at the beginning of a new one.
Personally, we're for them. An extended consideration of the importance of a bookshops as cultural and intellectual spaces.
First published in 1904, this exotic romance about a traveller to the Guyana jungle of southeastern Venezuela and his encounter with a forest dwelling girl named Rima has gone through numerous editions. This one has an introduction by Margaret Atwood and woodcut illustrations by Keith Henderson.
>>> Eeek!
All sorts of designs for all sorts of purposes for all sorts of pets.
In the same series as Mobitecture.
Excellent graphic novel. Adam Whistler has it all, so why does he feel so empty? When he breaks his ankle on a Mediterranean holiday he impulsively ends his relationship, toppling himself into emotional free fall. At a house party he meets Morgan. But when he encounters her a few days later she has no memory of him and introduces herself as Leila. Leila has dissociative identity disorder, or multiple personalities. People are being murdered and Leila fears that Morgan, the personality Adam first met, is the killer.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #92 (8.9.18)
Read our reviews. Find out what's happening. Learn about new books.
Read our latest NEWSLETTER.
 | 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!