 | Call Them By Their True Names: American crises (and essays) by Rebecca Solnit {Reviewed by STELLA} In a time of political, social and environmental crises, it’s easy to dismiss the issues and be subsumed by your own ideology - and be enraged by another’s viewpoint. We all will find ourselves both challenged and heartened by journalist, critic and activist Rebecca Solnit’s latest series of essays, Call Them by Their True Names. These essays are focused on the country she lives in, its politics and history, and the stories that paint a portrait of a country in crisis and the response to these crises, yet her language and her arguments are universal: her themes are issues that should concern us all - injustice, inequality, violence and hope. The introductory essay lays the groundwork for the reader’s approach to the subject matter. As the title suggests, she is urging us to consider the ways in which society (politicians, media, lobbyists, spin doctors) and we, as individuals, describe situations and issues, often hiding the true meaning behind false language. What we call things, and how we call it out, matters - language is crucial to understanding and hence to communication. Solnit argues that it is only when we call things by their true names that we can counter them or converse in meaningful (and change-provoking) dialogue. From the 2016 American elections, where she pinpoints the disenfranchisement of millions of voters ( in 'Twenty Million Missing Storytellers') as a pivotal tool to a conservative victory, to the ‘loneliness’ of Donald Trump - an individual isolated from the real mechanisms of the political system and ultimately, you get the impression from Solnit's analysis, doomed to failure of his own making - to the reasons why Hilary Clinton was demonised even by the left-leaning media and critics, Solnit calls out the lazy thinking and the ease with which certain catch-phrases and language are used to explain away the results. She then goes on to think and articulate the emotional structures that underpin some of this thinking. In the essay 'Preaching to the Choir' she considers the wisdom of talking with or to those who hold the same or similar political beliefs. She draws on psychological research - it is easier to move people closer to your viewpoint than to change someone’s mind from an opposing position - and with this in mind, wonders why the focus of political elections has been on the ‘swing voter’ or the undecided. In 'Naive Cynicism', Solnit critiques those who fall back on rhetoric on all sides of the political spectrum, and is particularly damning of those on the left who have found it easier to be cynical and use language as a tool to undermine the actions or small achievements of their colleagues. 'Facing the Furies' deals with anger and violence as political tools and whether they are useful or even advisable. The third part of the collection looks at specific and pivotal happenings that illustrate Solnit’s ideas. There are thought-provoking and important essays about climate change and resistance: 'Climate Change is Violence', 'The Light from Standing Rock'; the annexation of California and what borders mean: 'Blood on the Foundation'; and inequality and its repercussions: 'Death by Gentrification'. The final three essays lay out a way of thinking about the future by engaging in the present: the importance of community, communication and the indirect consequences of action, and why utilising language that embraces facts and history rather than spin or empty phrases is vitally important. Solnit is biting and savage in her analysis, yet also hopeful and admiring of the power of activism. |
 | An Untouched House by Willem Frederik Hermans {Reviewed by THOMAS} [Warning: This review contains spoilers (in fact, it is one big spoiler)] “If people stopped feeling altogether, the world would be greatly improved. They could lose an arm or a leg without noticing; it wouldn’t feel any different from cutting your nails. They could bleed to death without noticing. People should be numb. Then they would never have reached such numbers. This many would have never survived.” Traumatised and exhausted by years of fighting the Nazis as one of a multinational group of partisans now attached to the Red Army, the narrator of this nihilistic novella (first published in Dutch in 1950) leaves his unit on the orders of a commander whose language he cannot understand and enters the streets of spa town (possibly in Hungary?) that has been abandoned by its population. He walks straight up to a large intact house, and, finding its door ajar, he wipes his feet and enters. There is nobody in the house, but, as when a hero enters a fairy tale castle, he finds that the house contains every comfort and provision, with even soup still warm on the stove. "For the first time in a very long time I had entered a real house, a genuine home,” he states, and it is not long before it becomes clear to him that he will not be returning to his unit but remaining in this house for the duration of the war. “Stay here forever, I thought, where nothing can happen. If the whole world disappeared, I wouldn’t even notice, as long as this house, this grass, and all the things I can see around me stay the same.” The person that the narrator may once have been is a casualty of the war; he is now nothing more than a symptom of his circumstances. “Those who only think are only half in touch with themselves,” he says. “I only did things that didn’t require any thought.” Rationality is no virtue in war. The head is, in fact, he points out, the source of the war: “This bowl of bone covered with its lid and moveable hole, this was where it all came from: the other people, the world, the war, the dreams, the words, the deeds that seemed to happen automatically.” The narrator is about to force the door of the one room that the house keys will not unlock (another fairy tale trope), when there is a knock on the street door: the Nazis have retaken the town and are requisitioning the house to billet officers. The narrator finds it expedient to pretend to be the owner of the house - even though the trousers he has requisitioned are ludicrously short - and to remain in the upper rooms of the house. All identities are dissolved by war and become fluid. “The owner of the house had never existed, that was the truth! He had been the intruder, not me.” For a time, uneasily but not particularly uneasily, the narrator shares the house with the Nazi officers. One day, when the officers are away, he climbs a ladder in an attempt to enter the locked room through one of the blacked-out windows, but he is surprised by the return of the house’s actual owner, and, as the novella gains momentum towards it awful end, the narrator shoots him from the window and strangles his wife. As he passes the door of the locked room on his way to hiding the bodies, he notices it is ajar, and, in a passage that would make your jaw drop if I hadn’t here told you about it, he finds that the room is filled with aquariums containing rare fish attended by an immensely old man, the owner’s father, who, existing in quite some other narrative, states that his son and daughter-in-law have been hit and killed by a shell. Circumstances allow no space for initiative, merely for reaction. The, as the town is recaptured by the Red Army, the Germans flee. When the commandant advises the narrator to escape, the narrator locks him in the cellar and returns to the house with his partisan unit who enact a shocking carnival of destruction, finally relieving the house of the qualities that had attracted the narrator. “It was like the house had been putting on an act the whole time and was only now showing itself as it, in reality, had always been.” Hermans’s stark, condensed style is very effective in showing how fragile our so-called virtues are in the face of crisis, and how violence ultimately relieves us of whatever qualities we thought had defined us. |
>> Read Stella's review.
>> Patrick Ness introduces us to the book.
>> Ness reads to us from the book.
>> The illustrations are wonderful. Visit Rovina Cai's website.
>> Books by Patrick Ness at VOLUME.
>> Hmmm.
NEW RELEASES
Like Borscht Belt meets Leonora Carrington; like Donald Barthelme meets Pony Head; like the Brothers Grimm meet Beckett in his swim trunks at the beach, the stories in Wild Milk make the reader lose their footing is unexpectedly pleasurable ways.
>> Read the title story.
>> Mark on Bruno Schulz, fairy tales and the Holocaust.
What is the topography of anxiety in Godzone? This excellent collection of essays, personal accounts and stories, from Ashleigh Young, Sarah Lin Wilson, Kirsten McDougall, Anthony Birt, Hinemoana Baker, Bonny Etherington, Kate Kennedy, Holly Walker, Kerry Sunderland, Eamonn Marra, Tusiata Avia, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Rebecca Priestly, Donna McLeod and others, reveals both the breadth and the depth of New Zealand's anxiety epidemic - and suggests that there are veins of light to be found in that darkness.
>>Naomi talks on Radio NZ.
The much-anticipated novel from the author of The Essex Serpent. Twenty years ago Helen Franklin did something she cannot forgive herself for, and she has spent every day since barricading herself against its memory. But her sheltered life is about to change. A strange manuscript has come into her possession. It is filled with testimonies from the darkest chapters of human history, which all record sightings of a tall, silent woman in black, with unblinking eyes and bleeding feet: Melmoth, the loneliest being in the world.
>>Draws on legends of eternal wanderers, epitomised in Charles Maturin's 1820 Gothic masterpiece Melmoth the Wanderer.
>>Perry on writing under the influence of drugs.
>>What toll does an atrocity exact upon its witnesses?
Who's the fridge? Is there no end to acknowledgements? Are acknowledgements a form of revenge? Is love a non-renewable resource? Is global warming a form of defrosting? Do relationships start to go off as soon as they start to warm up? Read The Ice Shelf and laugh your way past no end of serious issues.
>> Is this the only novel ever published to have a fridge as one of its main characters?
An unnamed Ex-Detective searches for a couple who has fled to the far reaches of the earth. A betrayed husband is convinced by a brief telegram that his second ex-wife wants him to track her down. He hires the Ex-Detective, who sets out with a translator into a snowy, hostile forest where strange things happen and translation betrays both sense and one's senses. Tales of Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood haunt the Ex-Detective's quest, though the lessons of her journey are more experiential than moral: that just as love can fly away, sometimes unloving flies away as well.
>> Failures weigh people down.
>> The Unusual: A manifesto.
Participants in Weiwei's installation sent 92,829 postcards to prisoners of conscience around the world. The well-documented book includes statements from five recipients of postcards, and an encouragement to readers to send the postcards included in the book.
A remarkable set of portraits of Lithuanian Jewish survivors of the Nazi occupation, during which over 200,000 Lithuanian Jews were murdered.
>> A few images from the book.
Four times named the world's best restaurant, Noma has its own fermentation laboratory (headed by Zilber). Here world fermentation traditions are tested, understood and enhanced. This is an astounding book.
Macy's subtle and angry investigation reveals how the active encouragement by the Perdue corporation for small-town doctors in Appalachia to over-prescribe OxyContin, a highly addictive opioid painkiller, has led to a ballooning of heroin addiction and attendant social ills. An expose of the part cynically played by corporations in the undermining of the public good.
Specially trained Egyptian photographers were an integral part of the pioneering Harvard-MFA expedition during the first half of the twentieth century. Their photographs documented the excavations with thousands of images, as the riches of a great ancient civilization in northern Sudan were uncovered. These photographs bring to life the dramatic landscapes of the Nile Valley and the excitement of archaeological discovery.
What would have happened if the Nazis had invaded Britain? How would the British people have responded: with resistance or collaboration? Though rarely remembered today, the Nazis occupied the British Channel Islands for much of World War II. In piecing together the fragments left behind - from the love affairs between island women and German soldiers, the betrayals and black marketeering, to the individual acts of resistance - Madeleine Bunting has brought this uncomfortable episode of British history back into view.
"The war taking place in America is a war with so many casualties that we should call it by its true name, this war with so many dead by police, by violent ex-husbands and partners and lovers, by people pursuing power and profit at the point of a gun or just shooting first and figuring out who they hit later."
When Jonathan Gornall decided to build a wooden boat for his newborn daughter, he had no experience and no practical skills. This is an account of what he learned about himself and about the world, emotionally as well as practically.
>> Gornall on Radio NZ.
Williams uses the story of fossil enthusiast Eric Prokopi to illuminate the murky world of modern fossil hunting in this fascinating account. The story begins with Prokopi’s discovery, around age five, of a fossilized shark tooth off the coast of Florida, which sparked a lifelong fascination with prehistoric life. Prokopi’s passion led him to take a cataloguing position with the Florida Museum of Natural History, and later to teach himself how to prepare fossils for exhibition. Williams carries this tale through Prokopi’s starting a business to sell his acquisitions, to his prosecution in 2012 by the federal government for smuggling into the U.S. and auctioning off Tarbosaurus bones deemed the rightful property of Mongolia, where they were found.
What can finding out more about the places in which books are set help us to appreciate those books more deeply? Well illustrated and documented.
A work of stupendous detail, scale and research.
Sally Jones is not only a loyal friend, she's an extraordinary individual. In overalls or in a maharaja's turban, this unique gorilla moves among humans without speaking but understands everything. She and the Chief are devoted comrades who operate a cargo boat. A job they are offered pays big bucks, but the deal ends badly, and the Chief is falsely convicted of murder. For Sally Jones this is the start of a harrowing quest for survival and to clear the Chief's name. Powerful forces are working against her, and they will do anything to protect their secrets. Now in paperback.
>> Watch this.
In 1945, Akiyuki Nosaka watched the Allied firebombing of Kobe kill his adoptive parents, and then witnessed his sister starving to death. The shocking and memorable stories of The Cake Tree in the Ruins are based on his own experiences as a child in Japan during the Second World War.
Miyazawa's whimsical, sly and enchanting stories have earned him comparison with Robert Walser.
This book analyses research into how social mobility has changed in Britain over the years, the shifting role of schools and universities in creating a fairer future, and the key to what makes some countries and regions richer in opportunities, bringing a clearer understanding of what works and how we can better shape our future.
Bogdan Bogdanovic (1922-2010) was a Yugoslav architect, theorist, professor and a one-time mayor of Belgrade. His idiosyncratic memorials to the victims and heroes of World War II, scattered around the former Yugoslavia, continue to attract attention today, more than 25 years after the country's collapse. The monuments, cemeteries, mausoleums, memorial parks, necropolises, cenotaphs and other sites of memory Bogdanovic designed between the early 1950s and late 1970s occupy a unique place in the history of modern architecture, redrawing the boundaries between architecture, landscape and sculpture in varied and unexpected ways.
>> See also the Spomenik Monument Database.
>>Take a quick tour.
Felix Knutsson is nearly thirteen, lives with his mother and pet gerbil Horatio, and is brilliant at memorising facts and trivia. So far, pretty normal. But Felix and his mom Astrid have a secret- they are living in a van. Astrid promises it's only for a while until she finds a new job, and begs Felix not to breathe a word about it. So when Felix starts at a new school, he does his very best to hide the fact that most of his clothes are in storage, he only showers weekly at the community centre, and that he doesn't have enough to eat. When his friends Dylan and Winnie ask to visit, Felix always has an excuse.But Felix has a plan to turn his and Astrid's lives around- he's going to go on his favourite game show Who, What, Where, When and win the cash prize. All he needs is a little luck and a lot of brain power. From the author of We Are All Made of Molecules.
Most of the building blocks of the universe can be found around the house.
How did it all begin? Can we predict the future? What is inside a black hole? Is there other intelligent life in the universe? Will artificial intelligence outsmart us? How do we shape the future? Will we survive on Earth? Should we colonise space? Is time travel possible? Can we receive instruction from beyond the grave?
In an alternative England of the 1930s where the laws of mechanics govern even the most talented engineers, a mismatched group of mechanicals want nothing more than to feel human. Under the guardianship of the devious and unlicensed Gregory Absalom, an engineer who creates mechanical children, they have no choice but to help him in his unlawful practice. But through his unethical work, Absalom winds up creating a loyal and lively group of friends who will go to the ends of the Earth for one another.
When the Revelayshun kills his father, Wil discovers through savage inquisition that he’s marked as a Heater, one of the old-time heretics who burned up the world. But Wil holds the key to a secret: Sekkerland’s Shame, the Atrocity, is a great lie — and the Revelayshun will use fire, blood and death to hide the truth.
Until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided. This book exposes the antagonists who sought to protect and promote Hitler, leave Europeans (and especially European Jews) to fend for themselves, and elevate the Nazi regime.
Fresh, authentic dishes from the Wellington restaurant.
The first day of starting school is hard for everyone, even for a crocodile. And on top of this, there are just so many sounds and noises to be heard! How does a little Crocodile deal with it all?
>> Someone turns the pages.
BIBLIOPHILIA!
A selection of books about books for people who love books.
Choose a book to celebrate New Zealand Bookshop Day (27 October).
A book is different things to different people. This is a lovely and whimsical set of thoughts of what books can be and do, with entirely appealing illustrations. You will love this book.
In attempting to define what constitutes a 'book' in an age when technology is helping us to re-examine the definitions of many cultural entities, Borsuk covers much interesting ground, both historical and speculative, approaching books as physical objects, as content, as ideas and as interface.
>> 'The Hand and the Page in the Digital Age.'
The main difference between The Bookshop in Scotland's Book Town of Wigtown and Black Books is that business at The Bookshop proceeds without a script and the odd customers are all (or mostly) actual members of the public rather than actors. As Bythell shows, running a booklover's paradise may not always feel like you're in paradise yourself, but booksellers wouldn't have it any other way (that is to say, they are of no use for any other occupation).
>> A shop with books in.
>> Shaun shows us how to reconfigure with a broken Kindle.
Franklin loves books and he loves reading to children, but people tend to be scared of him because he is a dragon. Fortunately, Luna knows all about dragons from reading many books about them, and the two spend many hours together discussing the books they have read. To share their love of books with others, they decide to open a flying bookshop (good idea).
What is a book? This book lavishly illustrates the developing relationship between people and their books as recorded in paintings from the last 500 years.
Personally, we're for them. An extended consideration of the importance of a bookshops as cultural and intellectual spaces.
A good selection of influential Anglophone and translated books, well illustrated with covers, portraits, &c.
A new way of thinking of familiar literary worlds is shown in the quirkily drawn maps of this enjoyable book.
“Dear Reader is an enjoyable novel on several levels, from straightforward publishing-industry story, to a more personal story of time going by and loss, to the sheer technical virtuosity on display — both Fournel’s and translator Bellos'. Dear Reader is a good example of why the Oulipian method isn’t merely a game, but rather a surprisingly fertile approach to writing.” – The Complete Review
14-year-old Dita is confined in the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The several thousand residents of camp BIIb are inexplicably allowed to keep their own clothing, their hair, and, most importantly, their children. Fredy Hirsch maintains a school in BIIb. In the classroom, Dita discovers something wonderful: a dangerous collection of eight smuggled books. She becomes the books' librarian. Based on a true story.
How did the period of Soviet cultural outreach affect the production of children's books in other countries? Apart from the interesting text, which shifts the focus of international children's book production, the book is packed with delightful examples of illustration and book design.
Visit 45 towns around the world (including Featherston in New Zealand) that celebrate the printed word.
Kells runs his finger along the shelves and wanders the aisles of libraries around the world and through time, both real and imagined, with books and without, and ponders the importance of the library as a representation of the human mind.
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 role does a book jacket play in the relationship between a writer and a reader? What is the contribution of a designer to a work of literature? Elegantly written.
A beautifully presented celebration of literary maps, with contributions from Robert Macfarlane, Frances Hardinge, DAvid Mitchell, Coralie Bickford-Smith, Philip Pullman. Irresistible.
When Manguel 'downsized' his home, he had to pack his library of 30000 volumes, knowing that he might never see many of them again. As he did so, his mind was filled with thoughts about literature and about our attachment to books. Fortunately, he has written this book of these thoughts.
Peter Mendelsund has designed some of the best book covers of recent years, and one of the reasons that they are so successful is that they arise from his careful reading of the texts. In this book, which reminds me of Ways of Seeing and The Medium is the Massage in its interplay of image and text giving an appealingly light touch to a heavy subject, he is particularly interested in the visual effects of reading. These visual effects are non-optical and comprise mental images fished into awareness by the ‘unseen’ black hooks of text; they are the fictional correlative of the visual effects fished into awareness by ‘actual’ optical stimulation. I suppose a difference between reading text and reading actuality is that when reading text the scope of our awareness has been set for us by the authority of the author (our surrogate self), whereas actuality is undifferentiated and incomprehensibly overstimulative and the necessary repression of stimuli in the reading of it is dependent on personality, conditioning, socialisation and practicality. Emphasising that he is interested in the experience of reading rather than the memory of reading (if such a distinction can be sensibly made), Mendelsund treats in depth an aspect of what I would call ‘the problem of detail’: what is the role of the reader in ‘completing’ the text? Whereas the reader’s ‘actual’ experiences of course inform and colour their reading of detail, I’m not sure I entirely agree with Mendelsund’s opinion that when reading we ‘flesh out’ characters in our imagining of them or place them in ‘familiar’ contexts – while we are reading we may well also indulge in such extra-textual self-massage, but I don’t think that this is the reading itself.
500 images, 32 varied and outstanding contemporary artists whose practice includes making books. Impressive, and full of interesting ideas.
>> Sample pages on our website!
Influential art writers consider the work of influential art writers, including Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of the Modern Movement, Alfred Barr's monograph on Matisse, E.H. Gombrich'sArt and Illusion, Clement Greenberg's Art and Culture, and Rosalind Krauss's The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Required reading.
Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie's philanthropic trust established 2,509 library buildings throughout the English-speaking world between 1886 and 1917. This book of well-observed photographs and documentary images records the 23 libraries established in the South Pacific (18 of them in New Zealand). A few have been demolished, others have been repurposed, some are still used as libraries.
The destruction of the 'I'.
Read this with a pencil at the ready: not only will you be making yourself a reading list, you'll be wanting to start writing love letters and break-up notes to the books that you love or that have disappointed you.
Just because these books have been lost from history for one reason or another hasn't prevented them from being culturally important and the foci of intense speculation. What are we to make of the memoirs of Lord Byron, the magnum opus of Bruno Schulz, the Hemingway novel mislaid at the Gare de Lyon, the second part of Gogol's Dead Souls or the contents of Walter Benjamin's suitcase?
Over 250 works of art from all periods depicting people reading books.
Offers concise introductions - each of them accompanied by generous quotation (in English) from the book in question - to sixty-six works in the canon of Chinese literature. The books chosen reflect the chronological and thematic breadth of Chinese literary tradition, ranging from such classics as The Book of Songs and the Confucian Analects, through popular dramas and novels (The Romance of the Western Chamber; The Water Margin), twentieth-century political and biographical works (Quotations from Chairman Mao, the autobiography of the last emperor) and modern novels that are little known in the West (Memories of South Peking, Six Chapters from a Cadre School Life).
100 recipes for dishes mentioned in favourite books. Includes Marmalade (A Bear Called Paddington), Tunna Pannkakor (Pippi Longstocking), Crab & Avocado Salad (The Bell Jar), Stuffed Eggplant (Love in the Time of Cholera), Coconut Shortbread (The Essex Serpent), Madeleines (In Search of Lost Time), Figs & Custard (Dubliners), Chocolatl (Northern Lights) and Smoking Bishop (A Christmas Carol).
"A work of rare joy, and one as wholly irresistible as the food it so delightfully describes. It is a glorious work that nourishes the mind and spirit as much as the body, and I could not love it more." - Sarah Perry (author of The Essex Serpent)
>> Crytallised ginger to please Agatha Christie
What can finding out more about the places in which books are set help us to appreciate those books more deeply? Well illustrated and documented.
A love letter to all things bookish, quirkily illustrated with hand-drawn stacks of books, bopokshops (including Unity Auckland!), bookshop cats, &c.
Also available:
Bibliophile diary 2019 $40
Bibliophile notecards $30
BOOKS @ VOLUME #97 (13.10.18)
Read our latest newsletter and find out what we've been reading and recommending, and about the latest new releases, forthcoming events and other news.
 | Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk {Reviewed by STELLA} Janina ("don’t like my first name, so please don’t address me by it") Duszejko is in her sixties and lives in a remote Polish village. An ex-engineer, she teaches children English at the local school on a very part-time basis and is the caretaker of the holiday homes closed up for the winter. It’s mid-winter and Duszejko is busy with her horoscopes, translating William Blake with her friend Dizzy, clearing snow, fixing leaks, and keeping an eye on the forest animals. She has names for her neighbours, names which reflect their character: Big Foot for the weasel of a man with big feet who traps animals cruelly, Oddball for her large-statured yet very particular closest neighbour, Black Coat for his son - the local detective, Good News for the woman who runs the charity shop, and so on. She has a close affinity with nature and with the animals that live around her - she calls the deer the Young Ladies, and her dogs (who have recently disappeared) are referred to as her Little Girls. Drawing on Blake’s philosophy of nature, voicing her beliefs in the ideal equitable relationship between human and animal (a philosophy that many of her hunting neighbours have no time for), and using astrology - the alignments and ascendencies of planets and stars and birth dates to predict outcomes for her community, Duszejko has firm opinions, which she has no qualms about sharing, on how people should behave, on traditional Polish culture, and on the importance of nature to the health (intellectual and emotional) of human psyche. Overlay this with a series of murders and you have a very compelling novel. Mrs Duszejko starts investigating, drawing together facts and suppositions based upon birth dates and star signs. The first to tumble is Big Foot, choking on a deer bone. As more hunters fall, Duszejko is convinced that this is the revenge of the animals, that they have risen up against the human hunters who pursue them mercilessly. As the net tightens, the villagers become increasingly paranoid, and rumours of corruption and bribery are rife. This is a blackly comic novel which investigates pressing ideas about the nature of traditions, cultural stereotypes and the role of the outsider, the hypocrisy of the church and other institutions of authority, and the impact of development on ecological structures. As Duszejko gets closer to the truth, her Ailments (never fully explained) become increasingly severe and her accusations extreme. Ostracised by her community she is considered a 'mad' woman. Yet it is her insistence that will lead to a revelation that will shock everyone, including her few loyal friends. Throughout the novel there are references to Blake’s writings: each chapter starts with a quoted verse, and the title of the book comes directly from the ‘Proverbs of Hell’. Olga Tokarczuk’s second book to appear in translation is an intriguing and feisty exploration of fate and free will, of cultural politics and personal endeavours, of injustice and ultimate revenge. Her first novel to be translated into English, Flights, won the Man Booker International Prize earlier this year. With more works planned for translation, Tokarczuk is an author to discover, enjoy and be challenged by. |
 | Census by Jesse Ball {Reviewed by THOMAS} “It isn’t terrible to die. It is simply terrible to be observed, and therefore to be somehow in hopeless peril. There is no distance a fish can go that will save it. From the moment at which it is observed, the fish is permitted a sort of grace that will be concluded with the bayonet of the cormorant’s beak.” Following a terminal diagnosis for his illness, a doctor who has been caring for his Down Syndrome son alone since his wife’s death takes a position as a census taker and sets off with his son to collect data from places increasingly distant from the circle on the map that contains the fully known zone of their lives. In what kind of world will he leave his son? What would the world be like without the presence of the one who wonders what the world would be like without him? As the census taker and his son travel through the various zones, from A towards Z, they visit the homes of a number of people (the census does not aspire to being exhaustive) and, without the presupposition of any types of answers, the census taker rigorously observes the particularities of the people they meet (the census does not presume either from or to generalities), carefully noting their stories without imposing himself in any way other than as catalyst-observer, enabling the respondent to look within and to reveal something unguarded, something often at once indicative both of damage and of what for want of a better word we could call goodness (the census is alert not so much to the ways in which people are harmed by the society of which they are a part but rather to the ways in which they display kindness despite these harms). The rigour of the census taker is a relinquishment of his participation in the world, the rigour of anyone who is going to die (all of us, in other words) and who wishes to see what kind of world they are both completely immersed in and leaving. “We as humans are so full of longing, what is blank eludes us. A census taker must above all attempt, even long for, blankness.” Through the practice of the census the census taker is perhaps also learning to see the world in a way similar to that of his son, who he regards as unburdened with a sense of self, and who appears to conceive of life spatially rather than temporally. It is the purpose of the census to lead us to perceive the world with immediacy and without projecting expectations or presuppositions upon it. “The wondrousness of experience resides in the discrimination, not in the name. So I would be speaking for a world without names - wherein we see what is, and are impressed by it - the impressions push into us and change us forever. This is the world I believe my son lives in.” The love of the father for his son is depicted with immense tenderness (Ball wrote the book for his brother Abram, who had Down Syndrome and died at age 24), and the account of their travels together towards Z, where the dying father will complete his withdrawal from existence and the son will take a train back towards the world at which this journey, this relinquishment, began, is deeply beautiful and sad. The prose achieves a peculiar intensity and a particularity of cadence that leaves a lasting impression upon the reader. “You are travelling towards your death. You have always been a census taker. But now your efforts are joined in the community of work.” |
The book is comprised of three memoir portions: `Double Unit' tells the story of Maurice Gee's parents - Lyndahl Chapple Gee, a talented writer who for reasons that become clear never went on with a writing career, and Len Gee, a boxer, builder, and 'man's man'. `Blind Road' is Gee's story up to the age of eighteen, when his apprenticeship as a writer began. `Running on the Stairs' tells the story of Margaretha Garden, beginning in 1940, the year of her birth, when she travelled with her mother Greta from Nazi-sympathising Sweden to New Zealand, through to her meeting Maurice Gee when they were working together in the Alexander Turnbull Library in 1967.
>> Gee talks about the contents of the book.
>> Read an extract.
>> The cover was designed by Keely O'Shannessey.
>> Read Rachel Barrowman's superb biography Maurice Gee: Life and work.
>> Watch an interview with this Honoured New Zealand Writer.
>> Plumb was this year named The Great New Zealand Novel of the last fifty years.
>> Several of Gee's books have been made into films.
>> And a TV series!
>> The man in the grey cardy.
>> Books by Maurice Gee at VOLUME.
>> Next time you're on the banks of the Maitai River, sit in the chair dedicated to Gee by the Top of the South branch of the NZSA.
NEW RELEASES
A memoir in three parts. `Double Unit' tells the story of Maurice Gee's parents - Lyndahl Chapple Gee, a talented writer who for reasons that become clear never went on with a writing career, and Len Gee, a boxer, builder, and man's man. `Blind Road' is Gee's story up to the age of eighteen, when his apprenticeship as a writer began. `Running on the Stairs' tells the story of Margaretha Garden, beginning in 1940, the year of her birth, when she travelled with her mother Greta from Nazi-sympathising Sweden to New Zealand, through to her meeting Maurice Gee when they were working together in the Alexander Turnbull Library in 1967.
A portrait painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When he discovers a previously unseen painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious thirteen-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna, a pit in the woods behind the artist's home, and an underworld haunted by Double Metaphors. Beautifully presented.
A new way of telling the story of the famous explorer: through the eyes of his cook on the Endeavour, the one-handed John Thompson. As the ship travels the Pacific we get nuanced observations on class, power and race, as well as actual recipes from the ship's galley, all done the graphic style that won Gavin Bishop the 2018 Margaret Mahy Book of the Year award for Aotearoa.
Franz Kafka's executor disobeyed his instructions and failed to destroy Kafka's papers after his death. Instead, he took them with him to Israel where, after Brod's death, they fell into the hands of Brod's housekeeper, who put them up for sale. They immediately became the subject of an intense international legal battle: should the manuscripts be housed in Germany (by virtue of language), Israel (by virtue of "cultural inheritance") or the Czech republic (by virtue of birth)? As the case was heard by an Israeli judge, the outcome was fairly predictable. This is a fascinating account.
A beautifully presented celebration of literary maps, with contributions from Robert Macfarlane, Frances Hardinge, DAvid Mitchell, Coralie Bickford-Smith, Philip Pullman. Irresistible.
When Manguel 'downsized' his home, he had to pack his library of 30000 volumes, knowing that he might never see many of them again. As he did so, his mind was filled with thoughts about literature and about our attachment to books. Fortunately, he has written this book of these thoughts.
A novella of five sections, each separated by years and kilometres, in which we follow sisters Hillary and Bridgid as they manage abandonment, motherhood, illness and the ineffable connections of the families that we are born into and those that we create.
Winner of the 2018 Viva La Novella Prize.
A modern take on Beowulf, set in American suburbia as two mothers fight to protect those they love.
"Spot on." - Kirkus
The first graphic novel adaptation.
Tracks her career from her early years at the Bauhaus, through teaching at the Black Mountain College, and is packed with examples of this most accomplished and influential weaver, artist and designer.
Maurice Shadbolt believed that New Zealanders should tell their own stories, cherish their own myths and believe in their own big lies before they could stand upright in a post-colonial world. Through his fiction, non-fiction and international journalism, he played an important role in projecting New Zealand to the world throughout the second half of the 20th century. He was also involved in the anti-Vietnam War and antinuclear movements.
A large-format, strikingly designed alphabet book full of twists of thought.
Short stories from the author of Nobody is Ever Missing and The Answers. A woman leaves her dead husband's clothing on the street, only for it to reappear on the body of a stranger; a man reads his ex-wife's short story and neurotically contemplates whether it is about him; a young woman whose Texan mother insists on moving to New York City with her has her daily attempts to get over a family tragedy interrupted by a mute stranger showing her incoherent messages on his phone.
>> Read a sample story.
>> "The word America is pretty ugly."
With the automation of work, the virtualisation of money, the dissipation of class communities and the rise of immaterial, intellectual labour, the global capitalist edifice is beginning to crumble, more quickly than ever before-and it is now on the verge of vanishing entirely. But what will come next? Against a backdrop of constant socio-technological upheaval, how could any kind of authentic change take place?
A shed is the structure most amenable to self-expression. This beautifully presented book if full of ideas, practical advice and useful illustrations.
A couple's marriage comes under increasing pressure from the husband's life of deception in the secret service in the 1960s.
An excellent introduction to Islamic culture through objects from the collections of the British Museum.
A selection from several decades' worth of Jamie's poetry, all of it filled with space and clarity, and assertions seemingly from nature itself, as if the world was being viewed in the absence of humans.
Long ago, following a cataclysm called 'The Rupture', the world was shattered into floating celestial islands, known now as Arks. Ophelia lives on Anima, an Ark where objects have souls. Beneath her worn scarf and thick glasses, Ophelia hides two powers: the ability to read the past of objects and their human owners, and the ability to travel through mirrors. When she is promised in marriage to Thorn, Ophelia must leave her family and follow her fiancé to Citaceleste, the floating capital of a distant Ark. Why has she been chosen? Why must she hide her true identity?
The best survey of New Zealand art available, thoughtfully selected and presented, drawn from the national collection.
An estranged father reconnects with his bridge-building son in this story "told inside-out and back-to-front" from the author of The Book Thief.
"Exquisitely written." - Publishers' Weekly
>> Also available in hardback $45
In twenty meals The Hungry Empire tells the story of how the British created a global network of commerce and trade in foodstuffs that moved people and plants from one continent to another, reshaping landscapes and culinary tastes.
Learn the alphabet with this radical board book.
"N is for No.
No! No! No!
Yes to what we want.
No to what must go!
No! No! No!"
BOOKS @ VOLUME #96 (6.10.18)
Our newsletter! Our reviews! Events! Book of the Week! New releases! Competitions! Other news!
 | Rust by Jean-Michel Rabaté {Reviewed by STELLA} From the rusting hulks of the industrial era, from China to America, from the bodily functions of blood to the philosophical musings on the allegories of nature and man, Jean-Michel Rabaté’s Rust in the 'Object Lessons' series is a fascinating exploration of this chemical process. Fittingly introducing us to his subject through the most obvious - and what comes to mind immediately (for me at least) when we consider rust - Rabaté describes industrial wastelands and the slow decay of iron as it oxidises creating layers of rust. In a country where corrugated iron and steel infrastructure is synonymous with growth and decline, construction and patched sheds, placing ourselves in the world of the American Dust Bowl or the industrial decline of China or the agricultural wastelands of Australia is more a matter of scale than of foreign territory. In these discussions of rust, Rabaté draws on cultural references in literature and film: Paul Hertneky’s memoir Rust Belt Boy, Wang Bing’s documentary Rust, and an Australian novel by Paddy O'Reilly, The Fine Colour of Rust. Where the reader starts with the idea of decay and decline, Rabaté's analysis moves us to see rust also as a saviour, a surprising and not always negative keeper of time. Using the same method, the conversation moves towards the metaphoric, and here again texts illustrate the author’s thinking. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K is explored as a metaphor for renewal and the land giving, through its richness in iron, a plentiful supply of vegetables - the one the main character is most enamoured of being the red-orange (rust-coloured) pumpkin. As we are drawn into this examination of the notion of rust, oxidation, iron - the ideas of nature in flux - the text moves into deeper discussions of the works of several philosophers: Hegel and Ruskin each have chapters devoted to them, lovingly entitled 'Hegel and the Restlessness of Rust' and 'Ruskin: Nothing Blushes like Rust'. These are thoughtful, lively and witty explorations worth re-reading. Alongside these more academic musings are anecdotal tales from the author’s childhood - his pet turtle features with her rust coloured shell, as does his anaemia and the prescribed medicine of fresh horse’s blood. Another writer explored in response to the ideas of rust and decay is Kafka, and his story ‘Jackals and Arabs’, which features rusty scissors and is also an allegory for his views on the politics and machinations of Zionism and its effect upon the Arab communities of Palestine. In the final parts of the book Rabaté extends the conversation of rust to imperfection, to the flaw that makes an object exquisite - the mark of time, nature and artist - in the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, in the sculptural works of monuments purposely made to alter over time through oxidisation, and in architecture that allows the metal to record time on its facades. The concluding chapter introduces the hopefulness of rust - the discovery of ‘green rust’, an ecological tool that can clean iron-heavy waters and that may lead to technology that will break down waste. Rust is ‘infinitely restless’ in all its guises - physically, emotionally and intellectually - and Rabaté’s musings are infinitely provocative with their eclectic amalgams. Another excellent addition to the 'Object Lessons' series. |
Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Léger was commissioned to write a short biographical entry on Barbara Loden for a film encyclopaedia but ended up writing an interesting, unusual and very satisfying book. Loden directed just one film, Wanda (1970), about a woman who leaves her husband and who, passively and therefore pretty much by chance, attaches herself to a man who is planning a bank robbery for which, following his death in a police shoot-out and despite her lack of initiative and her not even being present at the robbery (she took a wrong turn in what was supposed to be the getaway car), she will be sent to jail for twenty years. The book operates on many levels simultaneously: it is ‘about’ Léger’s attempts to excavate information about Loden, principally beneath the ways in which she has been recorded by others, notably her husband the Hollywood director Elia Kazan, who also wrote a novel in which Loden features, thinly disguised; it is ‘about’ Loden’s making of the film Wanda; it is ‘about’ the character of Wanda in that film, a character Loden played herself and with whom she strongly identified personally; it is ‘about’ the tension between the “passive and inert” Wanda character with whom Loden identifies and Loden as writer and director, and about the relationship between author and character more generally in both an literary/artistic and a quotidian sense; it is ‘about’ Léger’s search for and discovery of the true story that inspired Loden to make the film, a botched 1960 bank robbery after which the passive and inert Alma Malone politely thanked the judge for handing her a twenty-year sentence; it is ‘about’, therefore, the relationship between inspiration and execution, and between actuality and fiction; it is ‘about’ portrayal and self-portrayal and ‘about’ who gets to define whom (“To sum up. A woman is pretending to be another, in a role she wrote herself, based on another (this, we find out later), playing something other than a straightforward role, playing not herself but a projection of herself onto another, played by her but based on another.”); it is ‘about’, cumulatively, the way in which, as she delved more deeply into the specifics of another whom she sought to understand, Léger come up more and more against the unresolved edges of herself so that the two archaeologies became one (she also ended up learning quite a lot about her mother and the imbalanced mechanics of her parents’ relationship). When Wanda was released in 1970, it was disparaged in many feminist circles for its portrayal of a passive woman. Léger shows the film to be a useful mirror in which to recognise passivity as not only an impulse for self-erasure on a personal level but as part of the wider social mechanisms by which women are erased and colonised by projections, and in which the feminist critique and frontline necessarily become internal and self-reflexive. There is also in this book a strong sense of the inescapability of subjectivity, that in all subject-object relationships the subject perceives only and acts only upon a sort of externalised version of itself (the object being passive and without feature (effectively absent, effectively unassailable)); and also that when attempting to be/conceive of/portray oneself one has no option but to use the template of that with which one identifies but which is not in essence (whatever that means) oneself (except to the extent that one’s ‘self’ perhaps exists only in the mysterious act of identification).
>> Read Thomas's review.
>> Frémon writes about the book.
>> Read an extract.
>> Read another extract.
>> And another extract!
>> Something like a portrait.
>> Published by the tiny and wonderful Les Fugitives.
>> Now, Now, Louison is our smallest book on Bourgeois. Our largest is also wonderful: Intimate Geometries: The life and art of Louise Bourgeois by Robert Storr is the best available survey of her work.
>> Read Stella's review of the beautiful picture book Cloth Lullaby: The woven life of Louise Bourgeois by Amy Novesky and Isabelle Arsenault, which concentrates on her childhood in her parents' tapestry renovation business.
>> Meet Louise Bourgeois.
>> How to peel an orange.
>> "I transform hate into love."
Read Thomas's reviews of the other excellent books published by Les Fugitives:
>> Blue Self-Portrait by Noémi Lefebvre (translated by Sophie Lewis)
>> Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger (translated by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon)
>> Translation as Transhumance by Mireille Gansel (translated by Ros Schwartz)
>> Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi (translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman)
NEW RELEASES
Old Mrs Badger climbs the hill every Sunday, right to the top. One day she helps Leo, a young cat, to climb with her. When Mr Badger gets too old to climb, who will climb with Leo? A gentle book about friendship from the author/illustrator of the wonderful The Lion and the Bird and the 'Mr Postmouse' books.
>> "I wrote this book for my grandmother."
878 Buildings, 798 Architects, 102 Countries, 9 World Regions, 1 Style. A stunning oversize volume of the best examples of brutalist construction around the world.
>> See some spreads.
How do architects get their ideas down on paper? A beautifully presented collection of 250 outstanding architectural drawings, sketches and concepts, spanning continents and centuries.
>>See some spreads.
A gentle yet urgent novel looking at the price of progress to Korean society, as a prominent architect is forced to re-examine his life after receiving a message from a woman he had loved - and betrayed - many years previously.
"Undoubtedly the most powerful voice in Asia today." - Kenzuburo Oe
"Hwang Sok-yong is one of South Korea's foremost writers, a powerful voice for society's marginalised." - Deborah Smith
"The most committed, politically active writer of all those who have been translated from Korean in recent years." - Liberation
Swallows and Amazons in New Zealand's Bay of Islands! Two generations of children have (actually!) lived aboard an old sugar barge in the Bay of Islands. This exciting adventure story is packed with interesting details and an eco-positive message (as are all of Tucker's 'Ransomy' quartet).
In 1857, after two years of writing The Life of Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell fled England for Rome on the eve of publication. The project had become so fraught with criticism, with different truths and different lies, that Mrs Gaskell couldn't stand it any more. She threw her book out into the world and disappeared to Italy with her two eldest daughters. In Rome she found excitement, inspiration, and love: a group of artists and writers who would become lifelong friends, and a man - Charles Norton - who would become the love of Mrs Gaskell's life, though they would never be together. In 2013, Nell Stevens is embarking on her Ph.D. - about the community of artists and writers living in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century - and falling drastically in love with a man who lives in another city. Very enjoyable.
"A great galloping joy of a book." - Rebecca Stott
The first full biography of this pivotal artist, educator and theorist, from his Bauhaus beginnings through his Black Mountain College years to Yale. Is colour more important than form?
>> Search vs research.
A personal interpretation of France under two occupations, 1914-1918 and 1940-1944. Cobb provides interesting insights into both resistance and collaboration, including the effect of regional populism.
"Marvellous." - Neil Ascherson, London Review of Books
How can journalism respond to the forces of social media, 'fake news' and resurgent populism?
Zenobia was once a great warrior queen of Syria whose reign reached from Egypt to Turkey. She was courageous. No-one gave her orders. Once she even went to war against the emperor of Rome. When things feel overwhelming for Amina, her mother reminds her to think of Zenobia and be strong. Amina is a Syrian girl caught up in a war that reaches her village. To escape the war she boards a small boat crammed with other refugees. The boat is rickety and the turbulent seas send Amina overboard. In the dark water Amina remembers playing hide and seek with her mother and making dolmas and the journey she had to undertake with her uncle to escape. And she thinks of the brave warrior Zenobia.
Gathering his poems from the early, nature-focused work to the later poetry's widening of the scope to take in painting, travel, urban life, and the impositions of technology on the natural world, and stirred throughout by the poet's love of music, The Half-Finished Heaven is an excellent selection of Transtromer's work.
>>Miracle speech.
Known for slipping seamlessly behind the rotating masks of fairy tale characters, centerfold models, historical figures, and clowns, Cindy Sherman tackles popular tropes in her photographs and dismantles the stereotypes surrounding the roles she embodies. An excellent survey. Includes the text of Sherman in conversation with Sophia Coppola.
Moving into Boulder House - a huge, rambling edifice constructed in the Californian desert from giant boulders to withstand a Russian invasion - Hirst, his girlfriend and their dog were hurled into a world that few ever get to experience up close. The weird and wonderful cast of characters they encountered could only have been found in one of the last outposts of America's 'Wild' West.
A stunning comprehensive survey of the revolutionary aesthetic, in all media and from a vast range of practitioners.
Packed full of ideas from around the world, all of them red.
>>And some architecture is black.
Amaral's exquisite colourisation of historical photographs gives a particularly vivid picture of the photographed century from Queen Victoria and the American Civil War to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Space Race.
Hobsbawm was attracted by the potential for social revolution in Latin America. After the triumph of Fidel Castro in Cuba in 1959, and even more after the defeat of the American attempt to overthrow him at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, "there was not an intellectual in Europe or the USA", he wrote, "who was not under the spell of Latin America, a continent apparently bubbling with the lava of social revolutions. The Third World brought the hope of revolution back to the First in the 1960s."
When Louisiana Elefante's granny wakes her up in the middle of the night to tell her that the day of reckoning has arrived and they have to leave home immediately, Louisiana isn't overly worried. After all, Granny has many middle-of-the-night ideas. But this time, things are different. This time, Granny intends for them never to return.
Separated from her best friends, Raymie and Beverly, Louisiana struggles to oppose the winds of fate (and Granny) and find a way home. But as Louisiana's life becomes entwined with the lives of the people of a small town - including a surly motel owner, a walrus-like minister, and a mysterious boy with a crow on his shoulder - she starts to worry that she is destined only for good-byes.
On The Island, just as on many other islands, marriages are unhappy, people fall in love and the seasons pass. The town of Aberdeen is no different, until the earthquakes. These seismic ripples tear down houses, forge bonds, and shake the foundations of society. Wilson wrote this novel in response to the Christchurch earthquakes.
To what extent can Handel's four decades of astounding creative output be attributed to his status as an immigrant?
>>What could be more English?
Photographer Frederic Chaubin reveals 90 buildings sited in fourteen former Soviet Republics which express what could be considered as the fourth age of Soviet architecture. They reveal an unexpected rebirth of imagination, an unknown burgeoning that took place from 1970 until 1990. Contrary to the twenties and thirties, no "school" or main trend emerges here. These buildings represent a chaotic impulse brought about by a decaying system. Their diversity announces the end of Soviet Union. Taking advantage of the collapsing monolithic structure, the holes of the widening net, architects revisited all the chronological periods and styles, going back to the roots or freely innovating.
A children's visual guide to world cuisine. Fun (and informative).
A graphic memoir of teenage depression that is thoughtful, honest and marked by hope.
>> Tell your secret.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #95 (29.9.18)
Read our latest NEWSLETTER and find out what we think about what we've been reading, and also about the latest new releases, about the short-listed books for the Goldsmith's Prize (and what we think of them), and about our Book of the Week.
 | And the Ocean Was Our Sky by Patrick Ness, illustrated by Rovina Cai {Reviewed by STELLA} “Call me Bathsheba,” are the first lines of this inventive novel mimicking another famous story. Patrick Ness’s And the Ocean Was Our Sky is a stunning wonder of a story. In this inverse Moby-Dick, we are introduced to a pod of whales that hunt man. In this world, the sea is the right way up and our sky is the Abyss. The action takes place in and on the ocean as we travel with the whales. Our narrator Bathsheba is the Third Apprentice under the lead of Captain Alexandra - a fearless giant of a whale, a harpoon embedded in her head, survivor of numerous battles with man. When the pod come across a wrecked human ship, bodies afloat, drowned, it is difficult to tell whether this is the work of man or whale. If whale, it is messy - wasteful - the bodies haven’t been harvested for their teeth nor bone. If man, why? As they approach the ship, a hand clutching a disc protruding from the capsized hull is spied: a hand that belongs to a young man - a prisoner - called Demetrius, and he has a message about (or from) Toby Wick - the nemesis of the whales. Toby Wick, feared and hated by man and whale, is a mysterious and vicious hunter - a legend. None who have seen him live to tell the tale of who he is and the powers he can summon to win every battle. Alexandra, obsessed with overcoming Toby Wick, is determined to fulfill a prophecy - one that has been passed down through generations. The great Toby Wick will be confronted. Demetrius is kept alive under the ocean and Bathsheba is commanded to interrogate him. A relationship builds between man and whale - for centuries prejudice and hatred have reigned supreme between the species, each hunting the other, each having just cause for revenge. Yet Bathsheba is intrigued by this meeting with Demetrius, who is merely a pawn in Toby Wick’s game - not a hunter, not an enemy. As Bathsheba’s loyalty is tested, the pod swim closer to their meeting with the mythic Toby Wick. What awaits them is fearsome and surprising. And the Ocean Was Our Sky is an epic journey for Bathsheba - physically but even more so philosophically and emotionally. Her interactions with Demetrius and the encounter with Toby Wick will change her forever, and the relationship between man and whale will create a new prophecy. This mind-bending story about fear, prejudice, loyalty and legend is brilliantly and beautifully illustrated by Rovina Cai. It’s a tale for any age much like Ness’s excellent A Monster Calls. |
 | Now, Now, Louison by Jean Frémon {Reviewed by THOMAS} Whose is this voice, addressing the artist Louise Bourgeois as ‘you’? It is the voice of Louise Bourgeois as written by Jean Frémon, a gallerist and writer who knew her and has written this insightful, beautifully written little book, which could be classified as a 'second-person autobiographical fiction'. Bourgeois is here, as in her art, both ‘I’ and ‘you’, both present and cast through time, both active and passive, both spectator and actor, both mathematician and instrument of the id, both innocent and knowing, at once both highly connected and aware and utterly separate, both ancient and young; gendered, ungendered, double- and multi-gendered; highly personal and rigorously particular, yet also universal. Bourgeois inhabits a zone that is at once “too complicated and too clear. No need to shed too much light on it,” a zone of vagueness in which the body is the territory of metaphors, though never of signs, the zone from which the formless coalesces into form. Bourgeois’s dreams are as real - and as inscrutable - as actuality: “Let them decipher my dreams - me, I’m fine with the mystery. No need to interpret them. Obscurity has its virtues.” Frémon-Bourgeois captures perfectly the singular intensity and fluidity of awareness that both enables and accesses art like that of Bourgeois, a mode of approach in which the distinction between initiative and surrender is erased. The book explores the key experiences of Bourgeois’s life without converting them into fact - they remain experiences, with all the ambivalences of experiences (though I here list them as facts): her childhood in France, where she would make the representations of leaves and branches with which her mother would replace the genitals cut from old tapestries in her family’s tapestry refurbishment business; her father’s philandering and double standards; her obsessiveness; her sensitivity to trauma, especially childhood trauma; her mother’s death, which prompted Louise to abandon mathematics for art; her departure for New York (“That’s what exile’s like. Apart from here and part from there, apart from everything. … Take an electric adaptor along with you.”); her long obscurity as an artist; her long loneliness following the death of her partner; her immense productivity; her ‘discovery’ in old age; her continued immense productivity; her very old age; her death. Bourgeois strives to understand what Frémon-Bourgeois calls “the survival of the unfit”, the evolutionary counter to the survival of the fittest. Art, perhaps, is a method of survival, as it is for Cyclose and Uloborus spiders, who “sculpt doubles of themselves, and then they place them on the web where they can be easily seen so that predators will attack this bait instead of them.” For Bourgeois only the gauche is beautiful: “Aim for beauty, and you get the vapid, aim for something else - encyclopedic knowledge, systematic inventory, structural analysis, personal obsession, or just a mental itch that responds to scratching - and you end up with beauty. Beauty is only a by-product, unsought, yet available to amateurs and impenitent believers.” And all the time, there is the artist who is indistinguishable from her art yet inaccessible through it (because her art is primarily a point of access to ourselves): “I am what I make and nothing else. I make, I unmake, I remake.”  >>You will also appreciate Intimate Geometries: The art and life of Louise Bourgeois by Robert Storr |
Oh Boy! A storybook of epic New Zealand men by Stuart Lipshaw, illustrated by Ant Sang, Bob Kerr, Daron Parton, Elliot O'Donnell (a.k.a. Askew One), Fraser Williamson, Michel Mulipola, Neil Bond, Patrick McDonald, Toby Morris and Zak Waipara (Penguin Books NZ) $45
The 50 boys featured include Apirana Ngata, Archibald Baxter, Archibald McIndoe, Colin McCahon, David Lange, Ernest Rutherford, Frank Sargeson, Frank Worsley, Fred Hollows, Ian Athfield, Jermain Clement and Brett McKenzie, Jon Trimmer, Kupe, Neil Ieremia, Ralph Hotere, Ray Avery, Richard Pearse, Swee Tan, Taika Waititi, William Hamilton, William Pickering and Witi Ihimaera.
>> The author of the book is a Nayland College alumnus.
>>A companion for the equally wonderful Go Girl!