BOOKS @ VOLUME #99 (27.10.18)
Read our latest newsletter and find out what we're reading and doing at VOLUME.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #99 (27.10.18)
Read our latest newsletter and find out what we're reading and doing at VOLUME.
>>Visit the Lucia Berlin website.
>>Lydia Davis likes Lucia Berlin.
>>"I was always on the outside."
>> Lucia Berlin writes home.
>>An 'Unmanageable' alcoholic.
>> A litany of failed homes.
>>Home movies.
>>A Lucia Berlin mug, anyone?
 | In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne Girls, football and music are the distractions and saving graces in three young men’s lives in the gritty, violent and tension-filled shadows of the towers of Stones Estate in North London. Selvon, Ardan and Yusuf just want to get together to play football and find a way out. Selvon trains -runs, boxes, presses the bench in a bid to make a university on the sports team. Arden has a secret dream to make his beats a musical career, and Yusuf wants to be invisible to the eyes of his Muslim community. In Guy Gunaratne’s debut novel, long-listed for the Man Booker, short-listed for the Goldsmith’s Prize, three voices meld, declaring their friendship against the growing tensions of race riots, poverty, extremism and raw edges. “Our friendships we called our bloods and our homes our Ends….Our combs cut lines in our hair and we scarred our eyebrows with blades….Close without touch…. In our caustic speech we threw out platitudes, in our guts our feisty wit. It was like we lived upon jagged teeth in the dark, in this bone-cold London city.” The language, with its slang and dialect which draws on grime (music) and sassy vibes, hums along, spits and hollers with the voices of the three young men, giving the text authenticity as well as an edgy structure, building to a crescendo over the two days of the book. Alongside the voices of these three compelling young men are two from the generation of their parents: Nelson, father to Selvon, from Montserrat, and Caroline, single alcoholic mother of Ardan, from Belfast. Each has their own story of oppression and resistance - of violence and pain - creating layers of history that parallel contemporary issues as well as digging deep into constructs of prejudice that have never resolved. In this post-9/11 world where the economy bites and prejudice is rife, the melting pot of London is under pressure. When white supremacists fuel race hatred, and the radicalisation of the local Mosque forces out moderate voices, tensions mount and the three friends find themselves in the middle of a dangerous world - a world that was a safe haven, that was their home. This is a provocative novel that doesn’t shy away from the attitudes of young men, their desperate desires and self-absorption, and shows their world as it is - tough and vicious. Yet there is hope in this seemingly dangerous situation: each of the friends care, and care deeply, about each other and about their families. They are determined to survive and be true to themselves, to remain untouched by rhetoric even in the face of extreme pressure and confusion. Gunaratne explores these complex themes with agility and sensitivity. The strength of the novel lies not so much in its telling but in the way in which this author writes - his words riff off the page, with the rhythm of the dialogue and the lively, and at times beautiful, descriptions of a place that represents oppression, fear and desperation, to let us open a window into a world which may be foreign to us - to enable us to understand the choices people make and the repercussions that follow them. |
 | The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza {Reviewed by THOMAS} “I dedicated my time to writing about the cases I had worked on, but I wrote them differently. My new method was to recount a series of events without disregarding insanity or doubt. This form of writing wasn’t about telling things how they were or how they could be, or could have been; it was about how they still vibrate, right now, in the imagination.” An ‘ex-detective’ takes a commission from a man she meets at a party to follow and bring back the man’s second wife, who danced with a man she met at a party and fled with him deep into the Taiga, leaving a trail of telegrams and other “forms of writing no longer in use” which have given the man the impression that she wants to be found. The ex-detective looks out through a window and sets off. What she embarks on is a literary undertaking rather than an actual one, but one with exactly similar detective work. The journey into the Taiga is a journey into the forest of possible ways a story could be told. “Whether I was obeying or taming language is not important.” It is not difficult to find the traces of the woman who left, but the detective’s quest is not so much a search for her as a search for the mechanisms of passion that motivated her to leave and to enter the Taiga: the quest is one of becoming aware of the experiences of the woman, or, rather, of becoming aware of the words that might be used to express or access the experiences of the woman. The detective is seeking not so much to capture what happened or to capture the story that might be written about what happened, as to capture the mechanism by which what happened might give rise to the story about that happened. What is the relationship between the mechanisms of passion that caused a woman to leave her husband and follow another into the Taiga, and the mechanisms of passion that caused another woman to follow and to write about it? The detective seeks to understand “the desire of bodies and, at the same time, the desire to narrate bodies.” She asks, “What is between imagining a forest and living in a forest? What brings together the writing of a forest with the lived experience of a forest?” The Taiga is emotional rather than physical terrain. The detective travels with a translator, a man who is able to provide her with parallel representations of the stories told by the people who live in the Taiga, a man who both both provides access to experience and keeps this experience at a remove and uncertain. The narrative is full of parallels, removes, repetitions, circularities, and circularities-within-circularities. Is the person the detective is tracking in fact herself? Does she seek to know why she herself left and ran off into 'the Taiga', or desired to leave and run off into 'the Taiga'? Is the constant emphasis on fleeing and on one who flees evidence of an unstated situation in which it is impossible or not yet possible to flee? To see through a window is to project oneself through that window into what the window frames: the distance, the Taiga, the place where one is absent from the situation in which one currently exists. In fairy tales one enters a forest both to escape and to confront the cannibalistic desires to which one is exposed in one’s ‘ordinary’ life and situation. In the Taiga the detective discerns terror, especially the terror experienced by the so-called lost woman, but the terror is primarily a terror of consequence, any consequence, a terror of a development towards which we are propelled through the impulse to escape. Where does the trail lead? “To seek something out is to expose it,” but “it is difficult to describe what can’t be imagined.” The quest is a literary rather than a physical endeavour, a struggle for what we might call narrative to overcome what we might call description. The story is frequently overwhelmed and lost by noticing, by the ‘evidence’ of the senses. Noticing is static. “Seeing is just confirmation of a fact.” It is the natural tendency of details to disperse the impulse and obscure meaning, although impulse and meaning have no way in which to come to our attention without details. “When nothing else seemed to make sense, sense was hidden in irrefutable words.” Will the detective ‘find’ the woman (even if that woman is herself)? Will she ask, “Is this the end of falling out of love?” Will she bring the woman back (whatever that means)? “Failures weigh people down,” the detective states, but she also provides a quote from Einstein that likens gravity to fiction: “Said force is an illusion, an effect of the geometry of space-time. The Earth deforms space-time in such a way that space itself pushes us toward the ground.” |
NEW RELEASES
Oh no, Francis Plug is back! In the devastatingly funny How To Be A Public Author, Plug (a.k.a. New Zealander Paul Ewen) gave an account of visiting book festivals and events and getting Booker winners to inscribe books to him (>>read Thomas's review of that book here). Now Plug has landed a position as a writer-in-residence. What could be worse (or funnier)?
"Outstandingly funny, this book is pure delight. Plug’s observations on authors, academics and architects are hilarious and absurd but always compassionate." - The Guardian
Comprised of aphorisms, fragments, and observations both philosophical and personal, Infinite Resignation traces the contours of pessimism, caught as it often is between a philosophical position and a bad attitude. By turns melancholic, misanthropic, and tinged with gallows humour, Thacker's writing hovers between the thought of futility and the futility of thought. The final section of the book contains pessimistic biographies of the so-called 'patron saints of pessimism' (>>meet some of these here).
Nora Krug grew up as a second-generation German after the end of the Second World War, struggling with a profound ambivalence towards her country's recent past. Travelling as a teenager, her accent alone evoked raw emotions in the people she met, an anger she understood, and shared. Seventeen years after leaving Germany for the US, Nora Krug decided she couldn't know who she was without confronting where she'd come from. In this outstanding graphic novel, she documents her journey investigating the lives of her family members under the Nazi regime, charting her way deep into a country still tainted by war.
>> A German in New York.
>> Watch Krug drawing the book.
>> What is left to say about Germany's Nazi past?
>> Krug's website.
Compendious, authoritative, clear, well illustrated, desirable.
Galleries of Maoriland introduces the many ways in which Pakeha discovered, created, propagated and romanticised the 'Maori world' at the turn of the century: in the paintings of Lindauer and Goldie, among artists, patrons, collectors and audiences; inside the Polynesian Society and the Dominion Museum; among stolen artefacts and fantastical accounts of the Maori past. The culture of Maoriland was a Pakeha creation. The book shows also that Maori were not merely passive victims: they too had a stake in this process of romanticisation.
>> Blackley on the radio (and an image gallery to look at while you're listening!).
The absolutely definitive guide to every possible sort of pastry, biscuit, cake and bread originating in Scandinavia (with regional variations). Highly recommended.
A beautifully presented and illustrated cultural history of the importance, use, study, depiction and description of New Zealand's unique avifauna to Maori and Pakeha through history.
Parallel stories in 1871, when the discoveries of Darwin and others challenged established world views, and 2016, when Trump's election indicated a world-changing challenge of a different sort, Kingsolver's eagerly anticipated new novel is alert to the personal nuances of social change.
Profiles, photographs and recipes from the eateries on Wellington's favourite street.
When Michael and Hilary Gustafson and his wife opened Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, they put out a typewriter for anyone to use. They had no idea what to expect. Would people ask metaphysical questions? Write mean things? Pour their souls onto the page?
>> Literati, the story of a community bookshop (recommended viewing).
>> The typing!
When Gopnik and his wife moved to New York in the early 1980s, the city then, much like today, was a pilgrimage site for the young, the arty, and the ambitious. But it was also becoming a city of greed, where both life's consolations and its necessities were increasingly going to the highest bidder.
"Anyone who worries that artificial intelligence might some day outpace the faulty circuitry inside human heads should be cheered by the existence of Adam Gopnik. His brain has nothing to fear from electronic competition. It is an organ housed in a body, kindled by the appetites and affections of the flesh; it operates friskily, risking vast generalities that it clinches with neat, nimble aphorisms. Gopnik can write brilliantly about almost anything." - Guardian
An honest and riveting account of literary agent Clegg's descent to rock bottom through crack addiction, and of his attempt to ascend to normal life.
Books (and much else) either succeed or fail at the level of the sentence. Moran shows us how to appreciate - and how to produce - sentences in which the words combine with effectiveness and elegance.
Dante's Inferno newly translated by a self-described "fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glaswegian pedestrian", author of the unparalleled Lanark.
>> The Gray Matter.
The television chefs who were at the forefront of changing public attitudes towards homosexuality in 1970s and 1980s New Zealand.
>> Cheese grating.
Hilllary and New Zealand were supposed to be a support act to the 1958 British Commonwealth Antarctic crossing party. By heading on to the South Pole and reaching it before the crossing party, Hillary exceeded the brief. His actions created tensions, unleashed a media storm, and denied the British a historic first overland to the South Pole since Scott. This book also details the establishment the restoration of Scott Base, and of New Zealand's presence in the Antarctic generally.
At last! An excellent clear guide for children to New Zealand fauna of land, water and air.
Abducted by slave traders from her home in Ruthenia - modern-day Ukraine - around 1515, Roxelana was brought to Istanbul and trained in the palace harem as a concubine for Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, ruler of the Ottoman Empire. Suleyman became besotted with Roxelana and foreswore all other concubines, freeing and marrying her. Roxelana became a shrewd diplomat and philanthropist, transforming the hearem into an instrument of imperial rule and helping Suleyman keep pace with a changing world in which women - Isabella of Hungary, Catherine de Medici - were increasingly close to power.
The Female Eunuch and beyond.
>>1971.
Darius Kellner speaks better Klingon than Farsi, and he knows more about Hobbit social cues than Persian ones. He's a Fractional Persian - half, his mother's side - and his first ever trip to Iran is about to change his life. Darius has never really fitted in at home, and he's sure things are going to be the same in Iran. His depression doesn't exactly help matters, and trying to explain his medication to his grandparents only makes things harder. Then Darius meets Sohrab, the boy next door, and everything changes. Soon, they're spending their days together, playing soccer, eating faludeh, and talking for hours on a secret rooftop overlooking the city's skyline. Sohrab calls him Darioush - the original Persian version of his name - and Darius has never felt more like himself than he does now that he's Darioush to Sohrab.
Across the West, there is a rising tide of people who feel excluded, alienated from mainstream politics, and increasingly hostile towards minorities, immigrants and neo-liberal economics. What does this mean for the functioning of our societies?
Lenny Spink is the sister of a giant. Her little brother, Davey, suffers from a rare form of gigantism and is taunted by other kids and turned away from school because of his size. To escape their cruel reality, Lenny and Davey obsess over the entries in their monthly installment of Burrell's Build-It-at-Home Encyclopedia set. Lenny vows to become a beetle expert, while Davey decides he will run away to Canada and build a log cabin. But as Davey's disease progresses, the siblings' richly imagined world becomes harder to cling to.
During Sarah Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the forces of cyclical poverty and the country's changing economic policies solidified her family's place among the working poor.
Margaret Atwood posits it's time to update the gender of werewolf narratives. Aminatta Forna shatters the silences which supposedly ensured her safety as a woman of colour walking in public space. The narrator of Lan Samantha Chang's short story assumes control of her family's finances to buy a house. Meanwhile the hero of Tahmima Anam's story achieves freedom by selling bull semen. Josephine Rowe recalls a gallery attendee trying to take what was not on offer when she worked as a life-drawing model. Booker Prize winner Ben Okri watches power stripped from the residents of Grenfell Tower by ferocious neglect.
From his retelling of the Greek myths in Mythos, Fry now turns his attention to the Greek legends, bringing alive the mortal human and demigod heroes as they confront quests and monsters on behalf of the rest of us.
>> Just for one day.
Personal introductions to forty life-preserving texts.
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
>> Have a look through our BIBLIOPHILIA! list.
What things do women usually not tell other people about their bodies? This silly, gross but somehow empowering book outlines a few.
>>Tallulah Pomeroy's website.
Read our newsletter and find out what we've been reading and recommending this week, about some of the week's new releases, and about a great swathe of upcoming events.
 | 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).