 | Tales from the Inner City by Shaun Tan {Reviewed by STELLA} Imagine seeing horses running wild across a city landscape - along the freeways, across the rooftops, through the alleys and over the inner city parks. Imagine that these are the horses of all the time of the city: horses that pulled carts, horses who plodded in the same circle driving the millstone, horses that worked to build a city, that carried people, were connected to carts and when they were old were still mechanisms for making money - were sold for their meat, their bones - were glue. Imagine that you are two years old in the back seat of a car travelling along the highway at night, the horses running beside, free and wild, until they come to the edge of the city landscape where they stop, unsure of this foreign place of which they know nothing. This is just one of the stories in Shaun Tan’s mesmerising collection Tales from the Inner City. Looking at the relationship between animals and humans across the ever-changing urban landscape, Tan brings us a mysterious yet familiar world, a lament as well a beautiful observation. The tales, 25 in total, take us to the brink of our humanity in their strangeness, yet also have echoes of our ability to care, to relate to the beasts in our lives that we yearn for, fear, conquer and embrace. He describes the changing relationship between human and dog - one of the earliest domesticated animals - in verse and breathtaking illustrations that explore the chasm between the two, the worlds that each inhabits and the desire to close this gap. There is a charming story about the death of a cat - a cat that a young girl and her mother discover belongs to all, not just them - that has numerous names and humans that miss it just as much - it is the cat of all cats - nicknamed by the child ‘The greatest cat in the world’, which brings a whole neighbourhood together, freeing them from their isolation and sadness. The sea and rivers no longer exist in any form for fish to live in. People fish from the rooftops of buildings, their lines stretching into the sky, the fish mostly beyond reach aside from a few tiddlers - but oh, to catch a Moonfish, the rarest delicacy! When Pim, the brother who never jerks the line, whose bait is eaten and never catches anything, does, the family are overwhelmed by excitement and surprise. Yet their pleasure doesn’t come from the expected quarters (selling the fish to the wily Mr Hiro for his famous restaurant in the subterranean city), but from something much simpler and more beautiful. Each of these stories asks us to confront our behaviour towards our mammal cousins and our fellow creatures, to imagine the world from an animal's perspective, to take responsibility for the harm we do and, conversely, for the friendship we offer, to take pleasure in reaching our own beast within, and the care with which we should protect the environs that sustain the animals we have an unfathomable yearning for. The inner city belonged to them first, and we are yet another element in the mix, entwined by history, politics and emotion. Shaun Tan’s books are exquisite, and this is no exception. Metaphysical and philosophical, the text and illustrations are stunning. Endlessly thoughtful and thought-provoking for children and adults alike. |
 | People in the Room by Norah Lange (translated by Charlotte Whittle) {Reviewed by THOMAS} “I only believed in hopeless lives,” states the seventeen-year-old narrator in Norah Lange’s beautifully written and disconcerting novel, first published in Argentina in 1950 and now, at last, translated exquisitely into English by Charlotte Whittle. Introverted and pathologically understimulated, the narrator becomes obsessed with three young women she can see, indistinctly, each evening, sitting in the drawing room of the house facing that of her family’s. Imagination cannot help but fill in the voids in knowledge, and, in this case, as the narrator has no knowledge at all of the three women, if they indeed exist, her imagination cannot rest in applying to them every possible permutation of the sorts of stories the narrator thinks may apply to them, stories principally, it seems, drawn from her reading of Romantic novels (apparently, Lange was prompted to write this book by Branwell Brontë’s painting of his sisters Charlotte, Anne and Emily (a painting from which Branwell had erased the image of himself)). At times the narrator achieves a vividness that thrills or horrifies her: “It rained so close to their faces, and on mine, on the carriage, on the patient horse, and it seemed as long as I was still young nothing so complete or perfect could ever happen again.” The three women in the room are no more animated than dolls upon which the young narrator projects her fears and desires. Their features and characters and histories slowly accrete through speculation, but the details are impermanent, attaching and detaching from their objects with equal ease. It is as if the narrator is obsessively inflating them into three dimensions, whereas it is natural for them to revert to two dimensions, into silhouettes. In this way, the novel is about the way in which the novel is written, the way in which all novels are written. “It was as if I was slowly composing a silent film that might go on forever: a film without action or scenery.” The three women suck up, take possession of, transmit, both embody and nullify, all tragedies and stories that exist in the narrator’s mind. We are told that the narrator sees them at the post office, sending a telegram, that she observes a visit to their house by a man who touches off some rivalry of feelings between them, and that the narrator thereafter visits the three women in their drawing room almost every evening, but we cannot be any more certain that any of this *actually* happens than we can of the recurring motifs of the dead horse in the street or the fire that claimed three infants’ lives. To spy, to observe, is to be disempowered, to be outside. The spy, the voyeur, has no identity but the object of their obsession, but the object of any obsession is always primarily indicative of suppressed impulses in the one who is obsessed. When the narrator states of the three women that “I know that they alone had the right to speak of death, of ill-timed affairs, of suicides, of bitter loneliness,” she is projecting upon them, among other things, her own suicidal impulses. The three women could be seen as future versions, ten or fifteen years older, of the narrator herself, future versions she both yearns for and wishes dead with desperate ambivalence. Several times she notes a similarity of voice or demeanour between her and them: “My face, which must express - it was impossible that it shouldn’t express - their three faces behind my own, expressionless.” “I only believed in hopeless lives.” At what point would tragedy or suicide relieve her from her future? Are the three women the future selves she will never become, unachieved futures, or are they each future possible exit points from an unfulfilling life? “That is what you get for not dying,” she tells them. She senses the fragility and unsustainability of her obsessive ‘watching’, of being “alone with my gaze”. What is achieved immediately starts to slip away: “Everything changed, it was my fault, and anything could come between them and my watching them, and destroy what had begun, what had scarcely begun.” Lange keeps the melancholy and the tension perfectly balanced as the book charts the disintegration of the narrator’s (and the reader’s) ability to distinguish internal and external realities as the novel moves towards its jaw-dropping paragraph-length final exquisite sentence. |
NEW RELEASES
New books for a new year
A darkly comic fable from the 2017 Man Booker winner. Fox 8 has learned 'Yuman' by listening under the windows of children's rooms to their bedtime stories. In language falling somewhere between that of The BFG and Riddley Walker, Fox 8 tells of his quest to save his fellow foxes when their habitat is threatened by development. Charming.
When a friend dies, a woman inherits his Great Dane. As she gets to know this dog, so large, so inconvenient, so representative of her grief, she comes to understand the dog's grief, too, and their lives begin to change in subtle ways.
"Nunez's prose itself comforts us. Her confident and direct style uplifts--the music in her sentences, her deep and varied intelligence." - The New York Times
2018 (US) National Book Award winner.
In 1814, Hokusai's sketches were published in a handbook of some 4000 images. It surpassed expectations as a student reference book, and became a bestseller. Here, in a three-volume package, an expansive selection of these works is revealed, presenting all of the themes, motifs and drawing techniques found in Hokusai's art. The caricatures, satirical drawings, multi-panel illustrations and narrative depictions found in the book can clearly be seen as the basis for manga as it is understood today.
Structured to impede the progress of the middle-aged love affair that it describes, this novel charts the steps two people take towards each other and asks what it means if the two people have taken those steps before.
"This is a guide for instructing posthumans in living a Dada life. It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life." Codrescu uses an imagined chess game in 1916 between Tristan Tzara and V.I. Lenin to discuss the sometimes-shared and sometimes-opposed approaches of the the arts and politics to assail the status quo and enact a new way of being.
"No other book has treated the relationship between the artistic and revolutionary avant-gardes as originally and provocatively as Codrescu's. This is both an immensely illuminating essay of intellectual history and a disturbing meditation on absolute ideals turned into alibis for tyranny." - Vladimir Tismaneanu
"Highly original, beautifully written, and charming." - Marjory Perloff
A lovesick kraken slowly drags the object of its desire - a ship of sailors - into the sea; a group of cantankerous saints materialise in a well-appointed parlour, and must unravel the mystery of how they got there; ageing fathers are sunk to the bottom of the ocean in pressure-sealed crates in a time-honoured ritual. Andreasen romps through the lunatic and surreal with a tender generous ease; there is a joyous absurdity to each premise. Just because a sister is born without a head doesn't mean her brother won't love and protect her; just because an adulterous tryst ends in alien abduction doesn't mean the man doesn't miss his wife.
For centuries, art has documented the atrocities of wars, participated in propaganda campaigns, and served as an advocate for peace and social justice around the world. How can art assist in creating dialogue and bridges across cultures? 100 leading and emerging architects, artists, curators, choreographers, composers, and directors of art institutions around the globe explore the potentially constructive role of the arts in resolving conflicts or building bridges among opposing groups. Interesting, and beautifully presented.
A tale of two philosophical journeys: one made by John Kaag as an introspective young man of nineteen; the other seventeen years later, in radically different circumstances: he is now a husband and father, and his wife and small child are in tow. Kaag sets off for the Swiss peaks above Sils Maria where Nietzsche wrote his landmark work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Both of Kaag's journeys are made in search of the wisdom at the core of Nietzsche's philosophy, yet they deliver him to radically different interpretations and, more crucially, revelations about the human condition.
Unanticipated reading pleasures (with great maps).
A fascinating exploration of Chinese bapo paintings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which messages, often politically or socially critical, were encoded in seemingly realistic depictions of historical documents and fragments.
A gripping and perceptive account of the 1819 St Peter’s Field massacre, in which an assembly of 60000 campaigners for parliamentary and suffrage reform were charged by the 15th regiment of hussars and the Manchester and Salford and Cheshire yeomanries, leaving fifteen dead and 650 injured, is a reminder of the role of class conflict in political change.
"Quite simply magnificent: splendidly researched, thoroughly well written, and very difficult to put down." - The Guardian
>> Of course, Mike Leigh made a film of it.
Quietly unassuming and full of subtle ways in which a few simple ingredients can be transformed into classic Italian dishes (and some of his own creation). One of The Guardian's 'Best Food Books of 2018'.
Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in art, architecture and film by Giuliana Bruno $65
How is our understanding or art, film and architecture predicated on the experience of the body? What is the connection between sight and site? Between motion and emotion? A fascinating history of the spacio-visual arts.
"One of those critical works packed with learning and insights that at the same time takes you on an exhilarating ride through its author's imagination." - Marina Warner, Guardian
The narrator recounts her progress to motherhood, while remembering the death of her own mother ten years before, and the childhood summers she spent with her psychoanalyst grandmother. Woven among these personal recollections are significant events in medical history: Wilhelm Rontgen's discovery of the X-ray; Sigmund Freud's development of psychoanalysis and the work that he did with his daughter, Anna; and the origins of modern surgery and the anatomy of pregnant bodies. Sight is a novel about being a parent and a child: what it is like to bring a person in to the world, and what it is to let one go.
"Unusual and absorbing. The novel as a whole exudes a strange consoling power." - The New Yorker
Restaurants in Wanaka, Dunedin, Christchurch and Timaru.
Identifies collaborative arts practices emerging in response to planetary challenges including energy and financial crises, climate change, and hunger.
A beautifully presented menu notebook, evoking the ways in which mood and place can be reflected in cuisine.
"This is an extraordinary piece of food writing, pitch perfect in every way." - Nigella Lawson
Visit the studios of Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Gauguin, Keith Haring, and many other artists. Find the magnifying glass that got left behind on Claude Monet's desk. Spot the owls in Pablo Picasso's paintings. Play with Andy Warhol's flowers. Find the apples in Paul Cézanne's studio. Colour in Jeff Koons's Balloon Dog. Identify the silhouette of a sculpture by Brancusi. An enjoyable introduction to a range of interesting artists, ideal for 6-to-12-year-olds.
As a girl climbs the stairs top her apartment she imagines who might live behind each of the other doors in the building - and what an imagination she has!
>> Book trailer (in Dutch).
Wealth is just as capable of ravaging cities as is poverty.
The first articulation of democracy in Britain was made in 1747 in a series of debates between the Levellers and Oliver Cromwell. Human rights Lawyer Geoffrey Robinson shows the importance of this argument to political situations today.
In this classic work, Rodney argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the west and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today. Introduction by Angela Davis.
Lindqvist set out across Central Africa, obsessed with a single line from Conrad's Heart of Darkness - Kurtz's injunction to "Exterminate all the brutes". His account of his experiences moves in parallel with a historical investigation, revealing what Europe's imperial powers had exacted on Africa's people over the course of the preceding two centuries. A new edition of this classic, jaw-dropping work.
Anne Lister was a Yorkshire heiress, a traveller and a lesbian during a time when it was difficult simply to be female. She chose to remain unmarried, dressed all in black and spoke openly of her lack of interest in men. The first woman to climb Vignemale in the treacherous Pyrenees, she journeyed as far as Azerbaijan and slept with a pistol under her pillow. She also kept a diary, written in a code that has now been cracked.
Once the centre of Palestinian modernity, Jaffa was the country's cultural and political capital. There Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived, worked, and celebrated together. Even after 1948, Jews and Arabs gathered at the Jewish-owned spice shop Tiv and the Arab Abulafia family's twenty-four-hour bakery. Through intimate personal interviews and memoirs, letters, and diaries, LeBor gives a crucial insight into the human lives behind the apparently intractable story of national conflict and a vivid narrative of cataclysmic change. LeBor weaves the personal stories of six families, three Jewish and three Arab, into a rich and complex history of Israel and Palestine in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
"Bleakly and outrageously comic. Reading Thom Jones's fiction is like speeding in an open car: the landscape blurs, the momentum becomes intoxicating - and then the brakes are applied, with no warning." - Joyce Carol Oates
"Jones was a master of the short story. Night Train will be an amazing discovery for anyone who cares about literature." - Philipp Meyer
Omrani follows the routes of the invading Romans and tells the story of the Gallic Wars and how the Celtic culture was first destroyed and then transformed by the invaders.
Authoritarian governments, elite populists, and 'freextremists' are exploiting our digital information infrastructure and the vulnerabilities in the democratic system to distort and undermine politics and elections.
A posthumous collection of poems, excerpts from his notebooks, lyrics, hand-drawn self-portraits.
>> 1967
>> 1968
>> 1972
>> 1979
>> 1993
>> 2013
BOOKS @ VOLUME #109 (5.1.19)
Read our first NEWSLETTER of the year and find out (among other things) what we've been reading.
>> Whet you appetite with some spreads.
>> Some fun facts about coffee.
>> This infographic is not in the book and we do not understand it (but we like it).
>> Information is Beautiful!
 | A Winter's Promise by Christelle Dabos {Reviewed by STELLA} Step through the mirror into a world of Animists, Dragons, Mirages and Nihilists. These are just some of the clans in the world of Arks. The Arks are celestial states floating above the old earth. On Anima, Ophelia is happily ‘reading’ objects in her museum, unaware of the plans the Doyennes have made for her. A grand alliance is in the making and Ophelia is the central pawn in the game. She has been betrothed to a stranger from another clan from an Ark at the Pole. Ophelia is bookish and clumsy - a misfit and a genius - her special gifts are exceptional - while Thorn, powerful and taciturn, has hidden powers of his own and is as icy and cold as the Pole itself. At the Pole, Ophelia (along with her chaperone Aunt Rosaline) must decide who can be trusted in this place of deception and illusion. Why has Thorn sneaked them into his homeland? Why are they holed up at his Aunt Berenilde’s house, in effect prisoners, unable to go beyond the bounds of the manor? And why is Thorn always at work at the Treasury, barely noticing Ophelia’s presence? When Ophelia manages to sneak out into the back streets of the city, she is intrigued and confused by the inhabitants’ behaviour. Yet this is just the beginning of the adventures and dangers. When Berenilde, a favourite of Farouk, the Great Spirit, is taken into the supposed safety of The Ambassador’s realm, the city of Citaceleste, Ophelia’s life becomes further complicated and she finds herself in a world of subterfuge, deception and illusion that will test her strength as well as her skills. Here is a city of such extreme delusion and abhorrent behaviour that one could easily lose one's mind or life. Making the wrong overture or displeasing an influential person can spell certain dishonour or disaster. When no one can be trusted all that is left is one’s self - the person you see in the mirror (as long as it tells the truth). A Winter’s Promise is the first in 'The Mirror Visitor' Quartet. This translation of the award-winning French bestseller is a welcome treat and will become a firm favourite for both teens and adults, especially for fans ofPhilip Pullman, Frances Hardinge and Cornelia Funke. This is an excellent fantasy epic with compelling characters. Ophelia and Thorn are both intriguingly complex, the clans and their gifts fascinating, and the interpersonal relationships between the main characters complex and ever revealing. There is amazing world-building and the plot is tight and tense, with plenty of twists and turns, political games, and machinations of seduction, threat and trickery as the story and its characters feed on the desire for power and status. You will be craving the next instalment. |
 | Resistance by Julián Fuks (translated by Daniel Hahn) {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Sometimes all that fits inside a pain is silence. Not a silence made from the absence of words: a silence that it absence itself,” writes Sebastián, the narrator of Julián Fuks’s subtle and quietly disconcerting seemingly autofictional novel, in the memoir he is writing as an attempt to gain understanding of, or some connection with, his adoptive older brother. Fuks’s prose is precise, crystalline, superbly translated by Daniel Hahn. Fuks is rigorous in his examination of the relationships within Sebastián’s family, and, more particularly, of the consequences of any attempt to put anything actual into words. “My brother is adopted, but I can’t say and don’t want to say that my brother is adopted. If I say this, if I speak these words that I have long taken care to silence, I reduce my brother to a single categorical condition, a single essential attribute: my brother is something, and this something is the set of marks we insist on looking for, despite ourselves, in his features, in his gestures, in his acts.” Fuks is aware that words, terms, labels subjugate the people and the actualities to which they are applied, pulling them towards consequences and interpretations that may not be inherent but are forced upon them by extrinsic narratives. The ways in which stories and histories are told inevitably affect the patterns and outcomes of those stories. Language is dictatorial over its objects, and Fuks/Sebastián is very aware that, in his “desire to forge the meanings life refuses to give us … I know that I am writing my failure,” unable to avoid “a constant oscillation between silence and error.” The brother’s unknown origins are irresolvable. He cannot be assimilated into the family. He resists nourishment and nurturing. But what is the source of this alienation? The brother was adopted just before the parents fled Argentina’s dictatorship in the 1970s for Brazil, where Sebastián and his sister were born. During the period of state terrorism that lasted from 1974 to 1983, Argentina’s so-called ‘Dirty War’, over 30,000 people were murdered by military and security forces in collaboration with right-wing death squads. Hundreds of babies were stolen at birth from political prisoners and given to supporters of the regime for adoption. For Sebastián, his brother somehow represents these children, even though he can hardly be one of them, given their parents’ dissident status. Why does the Sebastián cling so tightly to this possibility? Why does he feel the need to include himself, via his brother, in this national trauma? To resolve his brother’s lack of identity by overwriting it with a trauma that makes that lack of identity a necessity further depersonalises the brother, as Sebastián recognises. “This wouldn’t give his life meaning. It’s me, not him, who wants to find a meaning, it’s me who wants to redeem my own immobility, it’s me who wants to go back to belonging to the place where I’ve never actually belonged.” Sebastián wants to undo the brother’s exile within the family by writing the book but intuits that this cannot be achieved. The irresolvable persistence of the unknown, the lacunae, the gap, the missing information that is replaced by narrative prevents this, and prevents the supposed healing that this might provide. But does Sebastián really want to undo his brother’s exile, or is he, along with his parents, responsible for it? The brother becomes the expression of the political and personal traumas visited on the whole exiled family, and his alienation is integral to their identities. The brother, who remains unnamed, cannot bear the narrative weight of an entire family (or an entire nation), but his inability to bear this weight is necessary to this narrative. The brother’s voice is suppressed by Sebastián: “How can I let him speak, attribute even the smallest phrase to him in this fiction?” But the brother is also a sort of catalyst for everything Sebastián does or writes, unreached and unchanged, but enabling some reach or change. Although Sebastián necessarily fails in his memoir to rescue his brother from his status as a cypher, his ostensible objective, or to say anything definitive about the family’s history, Fuks succeeds in this novel, via his character’s failure, in providing insight into the brother’s functional role as the dysfunctional cypher in a ‘happy’ family’s dynamic, and into the way that collective trauma creates a narrative, a single story, that obliterates the individual stories of those affected by that trauma.Resistance is remarkable for its textual reticence, for Julián Fuks’s reluctance to fill in gaps, to create ‘fictional’ replacements for what is lost, for his uncertainty about the absent’s place in the process of resistance, a process which necessarily continues even in memory (or lack thereof), for his portrayal of the quiet, ‘undramatic’ persistence of trauma and its ongoing centrality to the dynamic of survival of that trauma, as well as for the wonderful clarity of the prose. |
>> Read Stella's review.
>> Stella also reviewed the book on the radio.
>> Read an extract.
>> Read another extract.
>> Drive Your Plow was made into a film, Spoor.
>> The book's title comes from the 'Proverbs of Hell' section of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. There are references to Blake throughout the book.
>> Yes, Blake did prefer 'plow' to 'plough'.
>> On Poland.
>> Tokarczuk won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for Flights.
>> Read Thomas's review of Flights.
 | Crimson by Niviaq Korneliussen {Reviewed by STELLA} Greenland is a small country, and the town of Nuuk, where Crimson is set, even smaller. Especially so for the characters in Niviaq Korneluissen’s novel about being a Greenlander and being young and queer. There are five distinct voices in the novel: Fia, who has just broken up with her long-term boyfriend; Inuk, Fia’s reporter brother who has just landed himself in a sticky situation; the wild and unreliable Arnaq, Inuk’s best friend who Fia is staying with while she finds her feet; Sara, a young woman who Fia is extremely attracted to; and Ivik, Sara’s girlfriend. As these characters dance a complex and messy polka around each other, the reader is hooked into the world of the young and confused. Korneluissen lays open prejudice, boredom and anger with humour (albeit black) and sympathy towards her fellow Greenlanders. The novel moves along at a clip as the young people go to parties, suffer hangovers, wheedle money and alcohol out of others, have personal crises, and find love. Crimson is enjoyable and believable and doesn’t shy away from painting a realistic picture. Fia’s despair and revulsion at her predictable relationship wakes her up - her complete annoyance finally drives her out of the mundane towards at first a crazy few weeks with party-girl Arnaq and then something more curious (a discovery about herself and her desires), to something ultimately more satisfying. Arnaq, for all her bluster, is a vulnerable young woman with a complex past - trauma rooted in alcohol and neglect. Inuk escapes to Denmark after finding himself in a tricky situation, yet this flight just pulls him back tighter to his homeland despite the homophobic attitudes that are ironically ingrained in him as well as in society. Crimsonisn’t all doom and gloom - in fact, the lively writing gives it a lightness that keeps you engaged. The different viewpoints are the exceptional part of this slice-of-life novel - each voice is distinct even while their problems and joys are shared. Each story adds to and builds on the former, with the change in perspective creating those full circle moments. Korneluissen became a sensation in Greenland, especially among the young and LGBT communities, when she published her book in Greenlandic (rare for contemporary works) in 2014. She translated it into Danish, and in 2018 the English translation was produced. Like Sally Rooney’s Normal People, this is a book that will appeal for its candid approach to relationships, for its portrayal of imperfect yet endearing human behaviour, and for its reflections on claustrophobic situations. And you might find yourself humming along to Joan Jett's 'Crimson and Clover' as you read. |
 | Walking by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS} It is thought that makes life intolerable, suggests Bernhard in this 1971 novella that both anticipates and provides a key to reading his subsequent novels of ineluctable self-erasure (notably 1975’s Correction). Bernhard is constantly in mind of the widespread complicity of his fellow Austrians in Nazism, both a symptom and a cause of many of the societal ills he is most perplexed and disgusted by. “I ask myself, says Oehler, how can so much helplessness and so much misfortune and so much misery be possible? That nature can create so much misfortune and so much palpable horror. That nature can be so ruthless toward its most helpless and pitiable creatures. This limitless capacity for suffering, says Oehler. This limitless capricious will to procreate and then to survive misfortune.” But there is no real difference, suggests Bernhard, between objective and subjective suffering. “When we imagine ourselves to be in a state of mind, no matter what, we are in that state of mind, and thus in that state of illness which we imagine ourselves to be in.” We are unavoidably perplexed by our existence and cannot help thinking about it, but thought will not do us any good, as we are always carried towards the conclusion we strive most to avoid, drawn to it by this striving. “If we see something, we check what we see until we are forced to say that what we are looking at is horrible. If we do something, we think about what we are doing until we are forced to say that it is something nasty, something low, something outrageous.” In Bernhard’s works, thought is a kind of a chute leading towards madness and suicide, a chute down which all characters slide, faster or slower, obsessed, losing perspective. “Circumstances are everything, we are nothing.” How, then, are we to carry on existing? “There is little doubt that the art lies in bearing what is unbearable and in not feeling that what is horrible is something horrible. Of course we have to label this art the most difficult of all. The art of existing against the facts. If we do not constantly exist against, but only constantly with the facts, says Oehler, we shall go under in the shortest possible time.” “The art of thinking about things consists in the art, says Oehler, of stopping thinking before the fatal moment.” In common with many of Bernhard’s novels, the unnamed narrator of Walking is effectively passive, effectively annihilated by his role of *merely* reporting what his friend Oehler tells him during their walk or walks together. Oehler’s observations chiefly concern another one-time walking companion, Karrer, who has recently gone “irrevocably mad” and been confined to the Steinhof lunatic asylum. Karrer’s madness followed the suicide of his friend, the chemist Hollensteiner, and you can feel the pull of this annihilation reaching through the layers of narration as far as the narrator himself, each character being effaced by their narration. “I am struck by how often Oehler quotes Karrer without expressly drawing attention to the fact that he is quoting Karrer. Oehler frequently makes several statements that stem from Karrer and frequently thinks a thought that Karrer thought, I think, without expressly saying, what I am now saying comes from Karrer.” The second of the three paragraphs that constitute the novella describes Karrer’s breakdown in Rustenschacher’s clothing shop, irrevocably losing perspective, ranting about what he perceives as the inferior cloth from which the trousers are sewn, repeatedly banging his walking stick upon the counter. At times the layers of narration are wonderfully deep, such as when the narrator tells us what Oehler tells the narrator that Oehler told the psychiatric doctor Scherrer about what Karrer said and did in Rustenschacher’s shop, and the novella becomes as much about the migration of narrative burden as it is about what the narrative is about. Habit, character, tendency, circumstance comprise a trap, a trap we find ourselves in when we begin to think but into which thinking can only drive us deeper. “When we walk, we walk from one helplessness to another. It is suddenly clear you can do what you like but you cannot walk away. No longer being able to alter this problem of no longer being able to walk away occupies your whole life. From then on it is all that occupies your life. You then grow more and more helpless and weaker and weaker.” All Bernhard’s subsequent novelsaddress this problem of the obliterative nature of thought. “We may not think about why we are walking, says Oehler, for then it would soon be impossible to walk.” |
The last new releases bulletin of 2018.
l'Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (workshop for potential literature) was founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais in 1960 as a sort of laboratory in which members can perform experiments - chiefly experiments of constraint - in order to use the mechanisms inherent language to express new literary forms. This wonderful anthology presents the results of experiments various members through the decades, and provides a primer for you to run the experiments yourself.
>> N+7
>> Lille
>> Other extracts.
A young couple, involved in the struggle against the military dictatorship in 1970s Argentina, must flee the country. The brutality and terror of the regime is closing in around them. Friends are being ‘disappeared’. Their names are on a list. Time is running out. When they leave, they take with them their infant son, adopted after years of trying for a child without success. They build a new life in Brazil and things change radically. The book unfolds as an intimate portrayal of the formation of a family under extraordinary circumstances, told from the point of view of the youngest child. It’s an examination of identity, of family bonds, of the different forms that exile can take, of what it means to belong to a place, to a family, and to your own past.
"A brilliant achievement." - Le Monde
Essays, book reviews, short articles and obituaries handling subjects from mistresses to marketing, and seduction to psychoanalysts, from the immensely opinionated, witty and acute editor of the London Review of Books.
A remarkable novel from one of American fiction's outstanding stylists and observers, author of The Visiting Privilege and 99 Stories of God. First published in 1978, this novel blends myth with alcohol, time with desperation, motherhood with extinction, and is as fresh and urgent today as it was when first published.
"Like no book I have read, The Changeling is illumined by the spark of life, the life that wears a thousand skins. Its wisdom is unparaphrasable." - Karen Russell
>> 'Uncanny the Singing that Comes from Certain Husks.'
Frank Bidart, for several decades, has waged a collision between language and the human body which has resulted in some of the most original and surprising poetry produced in America.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 2018
Bread and butter are first recorded as being eaten together in 1492. This book looks at a long association, and provides 40 outstanding and varied recipes that celebrate the marriage of bread and butter.
The island has run out of oxygen. The island is swollen. The island is rotten. The island has taken my beloved from me. The island is a Greenlander. It's the fault of the Greenlander. In Nuuk, Greenland, Fia breaks up with her long-term boyfriend and falls for Sara. Sara is in love with Ivik who holds a deep secret and is about to break promises. Ivik struggles with gender dysphoria as their friends become addicted to social media, listen to American pop music and get blind drunk in downtown bars and uptown house parties. Then there is Inuk, who also has something to hide - it will take him beyond his limits to madness, and question what it means to be a Greenlander, while Arnaq, the party queen, pulls the strings of manipulation, bringing a web of relationships to a shocking crescendo. Translated from Greenlandic.
"Ferocious, inventive and unlike anything I've read in a long time." - Sophie Mackintosh (author of The Water Cure)
A strange and strangely wrought novel (first published in 1914) in which, in the words of John Ashbery, "A prominent scientist and inventor, Martial Canterel, has invited a group of colleagues to visit the park of his country estate, Locus Solus. As the group tours the estate, Canterel shows them inventions of ever-increasing complexity and strangeness. Again, exposition is invariably followed by explanation, the cold hysteria of the former giving way to the innumerable ramifications of the latter. After an aerial pile driver which is constructing a mosaic of teeth and a huge glass diamond filled with water in which float a dancing girl, a hairless cat named Khóng-dek-lèn, and the preserved head of Danton, we come to the central and longest passage: a description of eight curious tableaux vivants taking place inside an enormous glass cage. We learn that the actors are actually dead people whom Canterel has revived with 'resurrectine', a fluid of his invention which if injected into a fresh corpse causes it continually to act out the most important incident of its life."
>> A brief biography of Roussel.
>> Interiors in the Void.
The author of The Queen of the Night delivers a series of superb essays investigating his development as a person and as a writer and activist, intimating how we form our identities both in life and in art.
"Alexander Chee is the very best kind of essayist, a boon companion in good times and bad, whose confiding voice you'd follow anywhere, just for the wonderful feeling of being understood like never before." - Charles D'Ambrosio
"Masterful." - Roxanne Gay
Brings together recent scholarship by experts in the field and featuring a wide array of objects from the region, including many that have never been published before. Included are many works that have historically been overlooked, such as painted and woven textiles, elaborate wicker assemblages and expressively sculpted vessels, alongside works by artists working in Oceania today. These objects reveal a complex web of social, mythological and historical influences.
Two novellas from the author of The Evenings. Young Elmer longs to make friends and tries to control the world around him by forming secret clubs, of which he is always the president, but when he invites Werther to become a member, a game of attraction and repulsion begins. During the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, a boy watches as the family of one of his friends slowly loses everything and is then taken away.
Just moments after Duchamp died, his closest friend Man Ray took a photograph of him. His face is wan, his eyes are closed, he appears calm. Taking this image as a point of departure, Donald Shambroom begins to examine the surrounding context: the dinner with Man Ray and another friend, Robert Lebel, the night Duchamp died, the conversations about his own death at that dinner and elsewhere, and the larger question of whether this radical artist's death can be read as an extension of his work.
Useful.
What constitutes 'the people', and what constitutes 'the people's' assumed 'right' to exercise it's will, democratically or otherwise?
What does the sea mean? Humankind has a profound and complex relationship with the sea, a relationship that is extensively reflected in biology, psychology, religion, literature and poetry. Krell engages the work of an array of thinkers and writers including, but not limited to, Homer, Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, many Greek gods, Holderlin, Melville, Woolf, Whitman, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schelling, Ferenczi, Rank and Freud.
Can Western nations preserve the liberal world order against rising authoritarian powers without the United States, or with Washington working against them?
An idiosyncratic, devastating graphic novel. Cassandra Darke is an art dealer, mean, selfish, solitary by nature, living in Chelsea in a house worth £7 million. She has become a social pariah, but doesn't much care. Between one Christmas and the next she has sullied the reputation of a West End gallery and has acquired a conviction for fraud, a suspended sentence and a bank balance drained by lawsuits. On the scale of villainy, fraud seems to Cassandra a rather paltry offence - her own crime involving 'no violence, no weapon, no dead body'. But in Cassandra's basement, her young ex-lodger, Nicki, has left a surprise, something which implies at least violence and probably a body, something which forces Cassandra out of her rich enclave and onto the streets. Not those local streets paved with gold and lit with festive glitter, but grimmer, darker places, where she must make the choice between self-sacrifice and running for her life.
"The thing to do is just begin. The question, of course, is where?"
So opens Thom Eagle’s description of the creation of a singular early spring meal. A cookbook without recipes, this is an invitation to journey through the mind of a chef as he works. Eagle muses on the very best way to coax flavour out of an onion (slowly, and with more care than you might expect), and considers the crucial role of salt in the creation of the perfect assembly for early green shoots and leaves.
Science is really beautiful. Artist and lay scientist Iris Gottlieb explains among other things: neap tides, naked mole rats, whale falls, the human heart, the Uncertainty Principle, the ten dimensions of string theory, and how glaciers are like Snickers bars.
With knowledge passed down from centuries ago, the presence of traditional crafts such as spoon carving, leather working, and knife making is becoming more and more pronounced in contemporary culture and on platforms such as social media and ecommerce. As the pressures of a fast-paced, modern-day life weigh on people, many seek solace in more manual, artful practices that take us out of our selves and produce something beautiful and useful. Forge & Carve looks at twenty crafters and how and why they create the items they do. Includes Takaka trugmaker Tony Hitchcock.
This is a book about a man's relationship with hawks, and his self-education as a falconer, and about his discovery that despite his Asperger's Syndrome, which hampers his normal social interactions, he can forge a loving bond with the young son he thought he had lost.
What does the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies and deception do to a black body, a black family and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse?
"Unflinchingly honest." - Reni Eddo-Lodge
The opioid epidemic has been called one of the greatest mistakes of modern medicine but calling it a mistake is a generous rewriting of history. Driven by greed, incompetence, and indifference, it was an utterly avoidable tragedy.
The Bard of Salford's first poetry collection for over thirty years, proof he is still alive at least.
>> 'I Don't Want to Be Nice' (1978)
How Chinese characters triumphed over the QWERTY keyboard and laid the foundation for China's information technology successes today. Chinese writing is character based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Through the years, the Chinese written language encountered presumed alphabetic universalism in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, and other systems developed with the Latin alphabet in mind. This book is about those encounters, in particular thousands of Chinese characters versus the typewriter and its QWERTY keyboard. Thomas Mullaney describes a fascinating series of experiments, prototypes, failures, and successes in the century-long quest for a workable Chinese typewriter.
An essay on bridging the gap between writing and the visual arts.
>> An extract: 'Why Contemporary Art (and Literature) Needs More Sarcastic Critics'
The Life and Times of a Very British Man makes the case for a new conversation about race in Britain through personal stories and political analysis. Kamal recounts the extraordinary circumstances that led to his father, a Sudanese scientist, marrying his mother, a grammar-school educated woman from Yorkshire and the first white person he had ever met. It was a time when Enoch Powell's infamous 'Rivers of Blood' speech cast a shadow over the childhood of a schoolboy in Ealing.
The night flower blooms at night in the desert. Who notices it?
Well, of course.
Use the selector to choose your seasonal gifts and summer reading.
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If you don't find what you're looking for here, come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.
List #1: FICTION
List #3: SCIENCE
List #4: FOOD & DRINK
List #5: BIOGRAPHY
List #6: CHILDREN'S NON-FICTION
List #7: NEW ZEALAND POETRY
List #8: BIBLIOPHILIA!
List #9: VISUAL CULTURE
List #6: CHILDREN'S NON-FICTION
List #7: NEW ZEALAND POETRY
List #8: BIBLIOPHILIA!
List #9: VISUAL CULTURE
BOOKS @ VOLUME #107 (22.12.18)
Click through to read our latest NEWSLETTER, use our gift selector, and find out which novels have been our favourites for 2018.
Have a look through this selection of books we are recommending for summer reading and as seasonal gifts. Click through to read our reviews. Use the 'click and collect' function on our website to reserve your copies.
If you don't find what you're looking for here, come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.
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.
Explores the story behind the promotion of New Zealand's mountains through posters, advertisements, hand-coloured photographs and more.
"I am the supercommunity, and you are only starting to recognize me. I grew out of something that used to be humanity. Some have compared me to angry crowds in public squares; others compare me to wind and atmosphere, or to software." A project by e-flux for the Venice Biennale, identifying the naked power that is revealed when the complex of art, the internet and globalisation shed their utopian guises.
An excellent selection of works demonstrating the scope, characteristics and quirks of this printmaking process.
>> Risography explained and demonstrated.
Known for her intricate and dynamic wire sculptures, the American sculptor, educator and arts activist Ruth Asawa challenged conventional notions of material and form through her emphasis on lightness and transparency. Asawa began her now iconic looped-wire works in the late 1940s while still a student at Black Mountain College.
>> The Ruth Asawa website (recommended).
>> Of forms and growth.
>> Objects and apparitions.
The first-ever collection of Ashbery's collage work (interesting!), with a selection of related poetry.
>> All the kitsch.
Flora Magnifica: The art of flowers in four seasons by Makoto Azuma and Shunsuke Shiinoki $70
A stunning, luscious book of unusual flower arrangements, a collaboration between a flower artist and a botanical photographer. Come and see this book.
A good survey of photography and its relationship to abstraction since 1910.
The 350 images in this book, many of them published here for the first time, not only chronicle the introduction of photography in Japan, but are also useful in helping to understand the dramatic changes that occurred in mid-nineteenth century Japan. Taken between 1853 and 1912 by the most important local and foreign photographers working in Japan, the photographic images, whether sensational or everyday, intimate or panoramic, document a nation about to abandon its traditional ways and enter the modern age.
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.
Storms are seen quite differently from the air from on the ground. Borja has captured a range of them in these stunning images.
>> Some storms.
A stunning comprehensive survey of the revolutionary aesthetic, in all media and from a vast range of practitioners.
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.
A beautifully presented and thoughtfully selected survey of the persistence of myths in visual culture.
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.
Representation of defining events in New Zealand's history have changed in parallel with other cultural and political developments.
The first retrospective collection of this savagely interesting artist sprung from Christchurch's itching cultural underbelly.
>> The "low-brow high art world of Tony de Lautour".
>> From earthquakes to fatherhood.
>> The thought part of the act.
This survey of Soviet design from 1950 to 1989 features more than 350 items from the Moscow Design Museum's collection. From children's toys, homewares, and fashion to posters, electronics, and space-race ephemera, each object reveals something of life in a planned economy during a fascinating time in Russia's history.
>> Visit the Moscow Design Museum.
38 floral designers.
An interesting and well illustrated survey of ways in which fashion design has been influenced by the natural world.
Brings the legacy of architects, artists and designers that have influenced the creative discourse over the last fifty years into critical dialogue with a young generation of upcoming influencers in the respective fields. The publication doesn't regard the legacy of an individual architect, artist or predecessor as an end point but as a simple moment in an infinite chain of contributions and inspirations that naturally extends and transforms through its successors. The creative conversations illustrated in this title reflect the inspirational vision of personalities such as Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Yona Friedman, Charlie Koolhaas and Rem Koolhaas, Rachel Libeskind and Daniel Libeskind, Gianfranco Bombaci, Matteo Costanzo and Gian Piero Frassinelli, Aric Chen and Arata Isozaki, Liz Diller and ElizabethLeCompte, Sophie Lovell, Dieter Rams and Olafur Eliasson.
A well selected survey, featuring the work of 55 photographers.
You couldn't hope for a more stimulating and surprising collection of architectural forms from around the world.
Human's fascination with animals as recorded in art from all ages. Stunning. Beautiful.
>> See some spreads.
Dripping with blood and gold, fetishised and tortured, gateway to earthly delights and point of contact with the divine, forcibly divided and powerful even beyond death, there was no territory more contested than the body in the medieval world. Hartnell investigates the complex and fascinating ways in which the people of the Middle Ages thought about, explored and experienced their physical selves, and the ways in which they left evidence of this. Beautifully illustrated.
Browse the workbooks of leading contemporary typographer and hand-letterers. Plenty of inspiration here.
A beautifully presented collection of over 60 real and imagined mazes from around the world, each with a bird's eye diagrammatic view and description.
Using over 200 circus-related artworks from the French National Library's collections, Pascal Jacob tells the story of travelling entertainers and their art and trade. From nomadic animal tamers of the Dark Ages to European jugglers and acrobats of the 1800s, from the use of the circus as Soviet propaganda to the 20th-century Chinese performance art renaissance, this is a fascinating and attractive book.
>> The horrific and the entertaining are never far apart.
Kiefer wrestles with the darkness of German history, unearthing the taboos that underlie the collective past and interweaving them with Teutonic mythology, cosmology, and meditations on the nature of belief. His works have a disconcerting tactility, at once emerging from the picture plane and decaying into it.
A beautifully presented selections of Expressionist art and of the more-seldom-seen Expressionist literature, all claiming the value of a subjective response to the world.
When Norwegian photographer Peter Lukas visited Nelson, he was so impressed with the photographic collections at the Nelson Provincial Museum that he set out to photograph the same street views as they appear today. The result is this wonderful book: historical photographs paired with their modern equivalents.
Explores the homes of 18 global creatives who take an eccentric, whimsical, curated and clever approach to their living space. An interiors book both for people who love interiors books and for people who ordinarily don't love interiors books.
Forty years of superb journalistic photography. The most comprehensive volume of McCurry's work yet.
This first history of Samoan tatau explores the people, encounters, events and external forces that have defined Samoan tattooing over many centuries. The Samoan Islands are unusual in that tattooing has been continuously practised for 3000 years with indigenous techniques. Beautifully produced and illustrated.
Bookbinder Olga Hirsch (1889–1968) left her collection of 3,500 papers dating from the 16th to the 20th centuries to the British Library - one of the largest and most diverse collections of decorated papers in the world. This book contains reproductions of papers used as wrappers and endpapers for books, as the backing for playing cards, as linings for chests and cases, as pictures for display in churches and homes, as souvenirs for pilgrims, and as wrappings for foodstuffs such as gingerbread and chocolate.
A Surrealist artist himself but better known as a zoologist and ethnologist, Morris is an excellent guide to the people who, rebelling against the strictures of modern life, devised modes of access to the workings of the unconsciousness, which they allowed expression in literature and art.
The unprecedented surge in popularity of ceramics in the last five years has helped forge a new type of potter: the ceramic designer. Part-craftsman, part designer, they bridge ceramic craft, collectable design, and fine art. These ceramicists include product designers who use clay as a means of creative expression, and classically trained potters who create design-led pieces, in addition to interior decorators, illustrators, and graphic designers.
An explorer's guide to the chasm between art and politics, and to the cultural forces that lurk there. Can art catalyse historical moments into philosophical truth?
>> What makes contemporary art contemporary?
The best survey of New Zealand art available, thoughtfully selected and presented, drawn from the national collection.
A stunning large-format book of stunning large-format photographs of stunning large-format landscapes devoid of even the slightest human impact. You will want this.
How can modes of visual and performance art be used effectively in protest and other political action? This is a good survey of art on the front lines of activism.
A blush is a gulp, a glitch, a stammer, a flutter, a flinch. A blush is hot. A blush is an index of confusion. A blush, according to Darwin, is "the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions". This essay by Jack Robinson, exploring the cultural and social history of the blush from the 18th century to the present, is illustrated with witty and often unsettling images by Natalia Zagórska-Thomas.
>> See some of Zagórska-Thomas's work.
>> Read Thomas's review.
Brings together recent scholarship by experts in the field and featuring a wide array of objects from the region, including many that have never been published before. Included are many works that have historically been overlooked, such as painted and woven textiles, elaborate wicker assemblages and expressively sculpted vessels, alongside works by artists working in Oceania today. These objects reveal a complex web of social, mythological and historical influences.
Remarkably good analysis of the evolution and design considerations of fonts.
A good selection, well illustrated, from Eileen Gray, Lora Lamm and Lella Vignelli, to Kazuyo Sejima, Hella Jongerius and Neri Oxman.
Drawing from the Victoria and Albert Museum's unparalleled collections of wallpapers and fabrics, this useful book analyses colour palettes from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. The exemplars are arranged chronologically with their own double-page spreads that explain the significance of the palette. A colour grid is shown beside each pattern, in which the colors in the original piece are shown in proportion to their use, and with their CMYK references to enable designers to replicate these colors in their own work. Useful, beautiful, interesting.
We shape ourselves, and are shaped in return, by the walls that contain us. Buildings affect how we sleep, work, socialise and even breathe. They can isolate and endanger us but they can also heal us. We project our hopes and fears onto buildings, while they absorb our histories. Iain Sinclair embarks on a series of expeditions - through London, Marseille, Mexico and the Outer Hebrides. He explores the relationship between sickness and structure, and between art, architecture, social planning and health, taking plenty of detours along the way.
"A remarkable book; surprisingly gripping and often very moving. Stories weave and unweave over the book's course, patterning thought into a complex built environment, at once disorientating and illuminating." - Robert Macfarlane
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.
70 illustrators were given the brief to illustrated their "dream studios" - with such wonderful results. These are the centres of creative vortices, places where dreams cross between an illustrator's internal and external worlds by means of paper.
In 1585 four young Japanese men from the nascent Christian community in Japan appeared before Pope Gregory XIII. Renowned photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto traces their steps, capturing the architectural wonders of Rome, Florence, and Venice as the Eastern visitors might have seen them. His photographs are presented in context with reproductions of Japanese art of the same period. Interesting and impressive.
New Zealand artist E. Mervyn Taylor was not only an internationally influential wood engraver. During the burgeoning of New Zealand nationalist-cultural focus in the 1960s he produced a dozen murals for government and civic buildings. Some were later destroyed or covered over. This book records the search for a distinctive artistic legacy.
New applications and developments in robotics are transforming architectural practice (and theory too, for that matter). This book takes us to the forefront of design.
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.
The machinery of cultural production has been co-opted by institutions, corporations and governments in order to further their interests, maximise profits and suppress dissent. A perceptive account of how advertising, media and politics work today.
The tribes of Whanganui take their name, their spirit and their strength from the Whanganui River. In Te Ahi Kā, photographer Martin Toft explores the deep physical and metaphysical relationships between the river and the Māori. In 1996 Toft spent six months in the middle and upper reaches of the Whanganui River in the King Country. Here he met Māori who were in the process of reversing the colonisation of their people and returning to their ancestral land, Mangapapapa, which is on the steep banks of the river inside Whanganui National Park. Returning twenty years later, Toft began to work on this book. Its narrative is situated within the context of the current Whanganui River Deed of Settlement, Ruruku Whakatupua and the projects led by local Māori to settle historical grievances with the government dating back to the 1870s. At the heart of it is the Whanganui tribes’ claim to the river, which is seen by them as both as an ancestor and as a source of both material and spiritual sustenance.
>> Look inside the book.
War has always provided the opportunity for crimes either against art or against its established ownership structures. A well illustrated survey, from Classical antiquity to the present. New Zealand author.
>> Tompkins talks with Kim Hill.
Examines the work and work processes of two dozen leading weavers from around the world. Very nicely presented.
>> Find out more.
More than thirty young and passionate ceramicists in New York, London, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Sydney and Sao Paulo introduce us to their work, their studios and their inspiration. Beautifully photographed and presented.
A striking set of index cards surveying the history of type design.
The manifestos written by Tzara between 1916 and 1921 epitomised an assault on all traditional norms-and-forms, in art and in the art of living. Primarily works of liberating destruction, the manifestos pointed the way towards Surrealism and towards the new ways of seeing, living and making that were experimented with in the following decades.
>> "I am against manifestos."
This excellent book covers every aspect of paper: its history, composition, production, application, and trade. Beginning with the anatomy of paper and its earliest forms, this book looks at paper as a symbol of political and economic importance and as a carrier of ideas, from literature to art, design, and music. It looks at the different surfaces, opacities, weights and volumes of paper and how it is used for printing, typography, graphics, and maps as well as a vehicle for origami, architecture, and fashion.
Lissaman designed, threw, decorated, fired and sold her first significant collection of pots in 1927 and potted continuously until 1990, spanning New Zealand’s studio pottery movements. Her life, work and importance is explored in this superb new book.
The absolutely new edition of Vitamin D is packed with recent examples of artists pushing at the edges of the medium.
How can art be made following a cultural trauma such as that experienced by Europe during World War 2? This important new book includes some 400 works by 150 artists, bringing together for the first time post-war art from both Western and Eastern Europe. The book studies how Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Ossip Zadkine, Henry Moore, Renato Guttuso, Fernand Leger, Yves Klein, Gerhard Richter, Lucian Freud and many others worked through the trauma of 1940-1945 and the Cold War.
An unparalleled resource of fashion detailing from throughout the last century: elaborate embroidery, intricate pleats, daring cuts, innovative approaches and solutions. Beautifully presented and containing only the very best examples.
Considers every room and detail. Includes floor plans and endless ideas.
Mr Kinfolk introduces us to the unseen shapers of visual culture: Dries van Noten, Kris Van Assche, Spike Jonze, Melina Matsoukas, Grace Coddington, Linda Rodin and many more. Excellent photography and production inside.
>>Look inside.
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.
A huge amount of fun (and inadvertent learning) will be had from these madcap activities based around works in the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #106 (15.12.18)
Find out what we've been reading this week.
Use our GIFT SELECTOR to select books as gifts (or for yourself).
We name our favourite fiction of 2018.
Enrol for our 2019 writing classes.
We have been asked to declare our FICTION FAVOURITES of 2018.
Stella:1. The Long Take by Robin Robertson
2. Census by Jesse Ball
3. Women in the Field, One and Two by Thomasin Sleigh
Thomas:1. Kudos by Rachel Cusk
2. Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz
3. Census by Jesse Ball
 | Women in the Field, One and two by Thomasin Sleigh {Reviewed by STELLA} Ruth Bishops is an independent woman in her mid-30s attempting to shape a place for herself in the art world of London in the 1950s. Always interested in drawing, and encouraged by her aunt, she has attended the Slade Art School thanks to a small inheritance. Her time there is disrupted by the war, but she finishes her in the late 40s, her talents being in writing about art and critiquing her fellows’ work. With a small amount of attention garnered from a book she has written on contemporary art, she gains a position at the Fisher Gallery as a keeper: to catalogue the collection, research, and assist with exhibitions. Here, she finds herself in a role she loves, but also in a patriarchal institution where she has to prove herself over and above her male counterparts and is often relegated to overlooked or plainly ignored when it comes to input and meetings. When a retiring director makes her the English advisor* (partly out of spite for his nemesis) to the National Art Gallery of New Zealand, things take an unexpected turn in her rather planned and predictable life. At an exhibition opening she is introduced to an eccentric Russian emigre, Irina Durova, who, on hearing of her role as an advisor, starts to badger Ruth about viewing her work. Eventually, Ruth gives in and arranges to visit Irina’s studio, where she finds a vast array of work spanning several decades. Drawn to two paintings from Irina’s final days in Russia (she migrated to London in 1913), she suggests these to committee at the National Art Gallery, having little hope that they will take her advice. Yet, despite controversy, they do. Irina and Ruth’s relationship develops as they plan the process of getting the works to New Zealand, and surprisingly Irina insists they accompany the works to Wellington. Ruth, who is having difficulties at the Fisher due to petty jealousies and office politics, as well as class and gender prejudices, is happy to have a change of scene, and finds herself on the way to the southern climes. Thomasin Sleigh has written a compelling novel, cleverly blending factual details into this fictional work. The historical references are light-handed, sometimes sharply amusing and fitting, placing this story well in its period. Her prose style is apt: the tone and language feel just right for the time. The two female leads are both convincing: Irina - a hive of conflicting impulses and an off-handedness that points to a deception; and Ruth - a seemingly naive yet highly observant individual who has grit at her core. Yet this is more than a story of two women making their mark on the page, more than a story of two paintings and their meaning: Sleigh is talking about colonisation, immigration, class and gender. As an art writer, she brings insight and knowledge to this interesting period and shows how art can be a catalyst for changing attitudes. Women in the Field, One and Two (a wonderfully playful title) is a novel that is both thoughtful and provocative, a missive about the art world and creative female practice now, as much as it is about the 1950s. Issues of paternalism, prejudice and favouritism still abound. What does it take and what do you give up to be free and creative? As Irina states: “I kept going and I wouldn’t go back. I had to make it work, because...because that was all I could do. I didn’t know that there were special rules, a special game, about whose art gets seen and whose art is remembered.” The most compelling New Zealand novel I have read this year: clever, witty and engaging.
(*the gallery had English advisors until 1972.)
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Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute {Reviewed by THOMAS}
In biology, the directional response of a plant’s growth, either towards or away from an external stimulus that either benefits or harms it, is termed tropism. Nathalie Sarraute, in this subtly astounding book, first published in 1939, applies the term to her brief studies of ways in which humans are affected by other humans beneath the level of cognitive thought. In these twenty-four pieces she is interested in describing “certain inner ‘movements’, which are hidden under the commonplace, harmless appearances of every instant of our lives. These movements, of which we are hardly cognisant, slip through us on the frontiers of consciousness, in the form of undefinable, extremely rapid sensations. They hide behind our gestures, beneath the words we speak. They constitute the secret source of our existence.” We are either attracted or repulsed by the presence of others, though attraction and repulsion are indistinguishable at least in the degree of connection they effect, we are either benefitted or harmed by others, or both at once (which is much more harmful), but we cannot act upon or even acknowledge our impulses without making intolerable the life we have striven so hard to make tolerable in order to survive. Neurosis may be a sub-optimal functional mode, but it is a functional mode all the same. We wish to destroy but we fear, rightly, being also destroyed. We sublimate that which would overwhelm us, preferring inaction to action for fear of the reaction that action would attract, but we cannot be cognisant of the extent to which this process forms the basis of our existence for such awareness would be intolerable. We must deceive ourselves if we are to make the intolerable tolerable, and we must not be aware that we so deceive ourselves. Such devices as character and plot, which we both apply to ‘real life’ and practise in the reading and writing of novels, are “nothing but a conventional code that we apply to life” to make it liveable. Sarraute’s brilliance in this book, which is the key to her other novels, and which constitute an object lesson for any writer, is to observe and convey the impulses “constantly emerging up to the surface of the appearances that both conceal and reveal them.” Subliminal both in its observations and in its effects, the book suggests the urges and responses that form the understructure of relationships, unseen beneath the effectively compulsive conventions, expectations and obligations that comprise our conscious quotidian lives. Many of the pieces suggest how children are subsumed, overwhelmed and harmed by adults: “They had always known how to possess him entirely, without leaving him an inch of breathing space, without a moment’s respite, how to devour him down to the last crumb.” Sarraute is not interested here in character or plot, but in the unacknowledged impulses and responses that underlie our habits, attitudes and actions. Each thing emerges from, or tends towards, its opposite. All that is beautiful moves towards the hideous. Against what is hideous, something inextinguishable moves to rebel, to survive. ‘Tropism’ also suggests the word ‘trop’ in French, in the sense of ‘too much’. The ideas we have of ourselves are flotsam on surging unconscious depths in which there is no individuality, only impulse and response. Sarraute’s tropisms give insight into the patterns, or clustering tendencies, of these impulses and responses, and are written in remarkable, beautiful sentences. “And he sensed, percolating from the kitchen, squalid human thought, shuffling, shuffling in one spot, going round and round, in circles, as if they were dizzy but couldn’t stop, as if they were nauseated but couldn’t stop, the way we bite our nails, the way we tear off dead skin when we’re peeling, the way we scratch ourselves when we have hives, the way we toss in our beds when we can’t sleep, to give ourselves pleasure and to make ourselves suffer, until we are exhausted, until we’ve taken our breath away.”
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>> Read Thomas's review.
>> Read a few of the 300.
>> "Fuelled by ts own accretion."
>> "Required reading for all those experiencing crises of confidence and the otherwise deleterious effects of the human condition."
>> Writing the Self: Sarah Manguso, Maggie Nelson and Heidi Julavits.
>> Read articles by Sarah Manguso.
>> Sarah Manguso and Leslie Jamison.
>> Read Thomas's review of Ongoingness.
>> Manguso @ VOLUME.
