BOOKS @ VOLUME #120 (23.3.19)
Read our latest NEWSLETTER and find out what we've been reading and recommending, about upcoming events, new releases and other amusements.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #120 (23.3.19)
>> Mary-Kay Wilmers talks with Kim Hill.
>> The Big Interview.
>> The London Review of Books (we recommend a subscription!).
>> It takes 1 minute and 55 seconds for the LRB to get from the editors' floor to your front door.
>> Some reviews by Wilmers from the LRB archive.
>> What is Mary-Kay Wilmers getting so right?
>> Wilmers has written a collective biography of her mother's fascinating Russian relations, The Eitingons.
>> Nina Stibbe's book Love, Nina was written about her time working as a nanny in Mary-Kay Wilmers's house. >> The book was adapted for television.
Review by STELLA | Steve Sem-Sandberg’s The Tempest is a dark and atmospheric novel. On a small Norwegian Island we meet Andreas, who is returning to the place of his childhood, unwillingly drawn by his foster father’s death and his search for answers: answers about who his parents were, about his sister’s decline into rebellion and later oblivion. Andreas, in confronting his past, is digging up the bones of the island - its landscape and its people. Its disturbing history of secrets has been papered over with mythology, making the task of untangling the relationships within the small community difficult, and the only person who might shed light on Andreas’s queries is the least trustworthy, but, unlike many of the other protagonists in his life story, Carsten is still alive - bitterly so. Drawing on his own childhood remembrances (some of which are, not surprisingly, inaccurate and the view of a child), snippets of written material (letters, newspaper clippings and diary entries), and enduring confronting conversations with Carsten, he is able to piece together a truth of sorts. Johannes, the foster father to Andreas and his sister Minna, was a parent who cared for both children but was incapable of moving beyond his guilt, sinking his life into a bottle. While Minna departed from their lives, Andreas would periodically visit the island, attempting to make Johannes's life more palatable, to little effect. In his final return, Andreas’s desire for the truth about his parents and what happened to them on the island during the war years, and the repercussions this had on future generations, burns at him. Throughout the book there are real and metaphoric fires that engulf the island, create distractions, and possibly free those who wish to depart. The island had been in the Kaufmann family for generations. During the war years, the younger Kaufmann, with the farm manager Carsten at his side, took on the rule of the island. An ‘intellectual’ with a keen interest in botany and biological science, he was intrigued with creating a communal society where workers would contribute to the island in return for small land plots - yet this concept in practice made the people virtual servants to the master and his whims. During the war years, Kaufmann was able to gain an audience in Berlin, making the island a complicit player in the Nazi regime. As Andreas digs down into the depths of the past, the revelations are disturbing, yet as the truth is revealed the behaviour of those in his childhood begins to make sense. Minna and Andreas’s histories have been overwritten by lies, mythologies and multiple stories - “your parents had to leave suddenly”, “they promised to return”, “they died in a fiery plane crash”. The island’s story has been buried, but the impact of collaborating with the Nazi regime is written on the faces and bodies of the inhabitants and pushes up through the landscape. Sem-Sandberg’s writing (and the brilliant translation) is compelling - his prose is alive on the page, rich and wild. He breaks all the rules, swiftly moving from one voice to the next with little breath, between past and present without hesitation, his empathy and anger rising off the page. Add to this his drawing on Shakespeare’s The Tempest in a covert rather than overt manner: the play vibrates under the surface of the novel, contributing layers of meaning and complexities that enhance this very astute and confronting piece of writing. |
 | Concrete by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS} In a single brilliant book-length hysterical paragraph, Rudolph, Bernhard’s narrator, a middle-aged invalid both incapacitated and sustained by his neuroses, obsessed with writing his great work on the composerMendelssohn Bartholdy but of course incapable of even beginning to write, neurasthenically procrastinating and irritated, riven by every possible ambivalence, unable to write whilst his sister is visiting and unable to write unless she is present, hating his sister but dependent upon her, needing his home but stifled by it, rants about everything from making too many notes to the idiocy of keeping dogs. Bernhard’s delineation of an individual whose interiority and isolation has attained the highest degree is flawless, devastating and very funny. No sooner has Rudolph made a categorical assertion than he begins to move towards its opposite: after describing the cruelty of his sister towards him, we become increasingly aware of her concern for him and his mental state; no sooner does he attain the solitude of his grand Austrian country home (soon after the book opens he makes the categorical assertion, “We must be alone and free from all human contact if we wish to embark upon an intellectual task!”, a common fallacious predicate that one commonly inclines towards but which subverts one’s ends (he follows this swiftly with another self-defeating assertion: “I still don’t know how to word the first sentence, and before I know the wording of the first sentence I can’t begin any work.”)) than he is absolutely certain that he must travel to Palma if he is to write his book on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Towards the end of the book, we learn that Rudolph did indeed go to Palma, where he is writing this account (instead of his work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy) after learning of the recent suicide of a young woman he had met there on a previous occasion following the death of her husband (who was discovered fallen onto concrete beneath their hotel balcony). Such was the isolation of Rudolph’s interiority that he was incapable of taking timely action to help the unfortunate young woman, though it was easily within his means to do so, incapable of making authentic human contact, stifled by his own ambivalences and self-obsession (the undeclared ironic tragedy being that he may possibly have returned to Palma in order to help the young woman but that he is of course too late, her suicide triggering the self-excoriation that comprises the book). |
NEW RELEASES
Paula is lazy young woman mired in a rut. In the shallows of the internet she is pushed to a moment of profound realisation: she, too, is but a lonely Asian woman looking for fun. The debut novel of Wellington author Sharon Lam (currently living in Hong Kong) is a wildly sentimental book about a life populated by doubles and transient friends, whirrs of off-kilter bathroom fans and divinatory whiffs of chlorine. Lonely Asian Woman is not the story of a young woman coming to her responsibilities in the world. Funny from the first sentence on.
>> Interview with Sharon Lam.
>> Lam on the radio.
>> Read an excerpt.
>> Listen to Lam reading 'Potluck'.
In a single brilliant book-length hysterical paragraph, Rudolph, Bernhard’s narrator, a middle-aged invalid both incapacitated and sustained by his neuroses, obsessed with writing his great work on the composer Mendelssohn Bartholdy but of course incapable of even beginning to write, neurasthenically procrastinating and irritated, riven by every possible ambivalence, unable to write whilst his sister is visiting and unable to write unless she is present, hating his sister but dependent upon her, needing his home but stifled by it, rants about everything from making too many notes to the idiocy of keeping dogs. Bernhard’s delineation of an individual whose interiority and isolation has attained the highest degree is flawless, devastating and very funny, and shows how this interiority prevents the narrator from taking timely action, with disastrous consequences. Bernhard is one of the best writers of the twentieth century, and this is the first of a series to be reissued in jackets by Leanne Shapton.
>> Read Thomas's review.
Schweblin manages to bury deep into the darkest recesses of her characters' and her readers' minds and find some small detail that inverts their reading of their situations. These superb stories demonstrate how unexpected events and situations bring to the fore aspects of their characters that the characters had hitherto been unaware.
>> Read Thomas's review of Schweblin's Fever Dream.
An excellent, wide and thoughtful selection, beautifully presented. More than half the stories appear here in English for the first time.
In the first of the two relentless paragraphs that comprise this wonderfully claustrophobic novel, the narrator, Murau, has received a telegram informing him that his parents and brother have been killed in a car accident. He addresses a rant to his absent student Gambetti, full of vitriol against his family and their home Wolfsegg. In the second part, Murau has returned to Wolfsegg for the funeral and the picture we have built is undermined in every way, eventually showing us the extent to which Murau's hatred springs from his family's complicity with the Nazis, some of whom found refuge there after the war (sorry: spoiler). This novel, Bernhard's last, is the only one in which the narrator can move, at the end, towards some sort of resolution for his predicament.
>> Read Thomas's review.
Sea Monsters by Chloe Aridjis $37
17-year-old Luisa leaves Mexico City in the 1980s and runs away to the seaside town of Zipolite ('The Beach of the Dead') with Tomas, a young man she hardly knows (and doesn't want to). The two soon lose interest in each other, and Luisa wanders the beach, observing the various groups and becoming increasingly separated from what she had thought of as herself.
"A mesmerising, revelatory novel, smart and funny and laced with a strangeness that is never facile but serves as a profound and poetic tool for navigating our shared world. Chloe Aridjis is one of the most brilliant novelists working in English today." - Garth Greenwell
Kitch: A fictional biography of a calypso icon by Anthony Joseph $34
Combining factual biography with the imaginative structure of the novel, Anthony Joseph gets to the heart of the man behind the music and the myth, to present a holistic portrait of the calypso icon Lord Kitchener. Born into colonial Trinidad in 1922 as Aldwyn Roberts, 'Kitch' emerged in the 1950s, at the forefront of multicultural Britain, acting as an intermediary between the growing Caribbean community, the islands they had left behind, and the often hostile conditions of life in post-war Britain. Short-listed for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
The effects of climate change are only beginning to be felt. Soon they will be impossible to ignore, and they will change the way we do everything. Why have we done next to nothing to avoid this?
>>"Inaction will turn the Earth into a hell." (Radio NZ interview)
Andreas Lehman returns to the island off the coast of Norway on which he grew up, and starts to unravel the secrets of his past. What was the island's owner's connection with the Nazis via the wartime Quisling government? What horrendous experiments were made upon the island's inhabitants? Well and tightly written, disconcerting and complex.
>> Hear Stella's review on Radio NZ.
What happens when a young American woman disguises herself as a man and goes to Pakistan to join the Taliban? A novel exploring issues of gender, faith and politics. Subtle and empathetic.
French Marist priest Father Antoine Garin was sent to run the remote Mangakahia mission station on the banks of the Wairoa River. His diary records his experiences from 1844 to 1846 as he got to know the Maori in the region. It provides accounts of contemporary events, as Garin came dangerously close to the action of the Northern War, and wrote of such prominent figures as Hone Heke and Kawiti as they opposed the new colonial authorities. Above all, the diary is an intimate record of life in a Maori community. Garin moved to Nelson in 1850 and died here 40 years later. Nelson's Garin College is named after him.
Scientific information about brain plasticity shows that there is no such thing as a 'male' or 'female' brain other than what society makes them to be - there are only brains. We need to move beyond our binary thinking to fully understand the wondrous organ in our craniums.
As a teenager, Harriet Shawcross stopped speaking for almost a year, retreating into herself and communicating only when absolutely necessary. As an adult, she became fascinated by the limits of language and in Unspeakable she asks what makes us silent. From the inexpressible trauma of trench warfare and the aftermath of natural disaster to the taboo of coming out, Shawcross explores how and why words fail us.
Written through a series of encounters with ingredients, producers, cooks, shopkeepers and chefs, exploring everything from the brief period in which sugar caramelises, the days required in the crucial process of fermentation in so many foods we love, to the months of slow ripening and close attention that make a great cheddar, or the years needed for certain wines to reach their peak, Jenny Linford shows how, time and again, time itself is the invisible ingredient.
From the day she is discovered unconscious in a New England cemetery at the beginning of the twentieth century - nothing but a bowling ball, a candlepin and fifteen pounds of gold on her person - Bertha Truitt is an enigma to everyone in Salford, Massachusetts. An epic family saga set against the backdrop of twentieth century America from one of America's sharpest pens.
Mao's ideas became a driver for political change throughout the world and their continued influence today is often underappreciated.
Two women on a journey travel to the land of their fathers and mothers. They had no idea, when they arrived in Morocco, that their usual freedoms as young European women would not be available. So, when the spry Saleh presents himself as their guide and saviour, they embrace his offer. He extracts them from a tight space, only to lead them inexorably into an even tighter one: and from this far darker space there is no exit. Their tale of confinement and escape is as old as the landscapes and cultures so vividly depicted in this story of where Europe and Africa come closest to meeting, even if they never quite touch.
A record of the seminal discussion that launched 'new atheism' as a cultural phenomenon.
A fascinating and thoroughly documented historical survey of the named student flats and the equally shambolic student culture that festered in them.
>>Springing from the ongoing Flat Names Project.
CULTURE SALE
Wonderful books at reduced prices: art, literature, music, design, architecture, cooking, photography, fashion, gardening, writing, &c. Come and browse or choose on-line.
Wonderful books at reduced prices: art, literature, music, design, architecture, cooking, photography, fashion, gardening, writing, &c. Come and browse or choose on-line.
 | Hazel and the Snails by Nan Blanchard, illustrated by Giselle Clarkson {Reviewed by STELLA} The first book off the press for Annual Ink under the umbrella of Massey University Press is a gentle and thoughtful story about a young girl, her love of her snails, and mortality. Hazel is collecting snails, ten of them to be precise. They are friends who aren’t sulking like her older brother, who don’t always wear pink like her friend Meg, and are not telling her to be quiet while Dad is having a lie-down. Told in the voice of a young child, the author Nan Blanchard gets the tone just right. Descriptions of people and happenings, the imaginary wanderings of a child and the silliness of children’s games and wordplay make the setting familiar and comfortable for a young reader. Hazel hassles her brother; describes her two grandmas to perfection (down to their turning up in wet togs with their coats on top because it’s just too hot = damp hugs); has a funny time at the supermarket with Mum when a the woman in purple runs into a stack of post-Christmas shortbread biscuits, sending the tins rolling down the aisle; and hides in the woodshed when the going gets tough. The snails live in the shoe-box and go most places with her - to school, to Meg’s house, to the beach. She cares for them and worries about whether they are happy or not. Do they like the rain? Are they lonely? In this quiet and simple story, there are funny and sad moments. It is a story about being a child and seeing the world from this - sometimes quirky - perspective. It is about illness and mortality and would be useful for any child that has the need for a story that they can relate to, and for any child who has questions. Gentle, thoughtful and undeniably charming, Blanchard has created a compassionate tale, with Hazel, a young child, at its centre - a child who is full of life and questions. It reminds us that children understand more than maybe they let on. Reminiscent of Rose Lagercrantz’s 'Dani' series, it has the same lightness of touch without avoiding life’s rollercoaster of experiences and the impact that this has on all, especially the youngest in our lives. Playful language, delightful descriptions (with a few words much is conveyed) and illustrations (note the snail on the foot of each page) provide the icing on the cake. A debut author to watch. |
>> Read Stella's review.
>> Read an excerpt.
>> The book is beautifully illustrated by Giselle Clarkson.
>> Meet Nan Blanchard.
>> "A gorgeous book, full of life and humour and sad bits."
>> This is the first title from Kate De Goldi's and Susan Paris's Annual Ink as the New Zealand children's imprint of Massey University Press.
 | The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg {Reviewed by THOMAS} Natalia Ginzburg writes the eleven essays in this collection with such clarity, precision and directness that they slip easily back and forth across the line between the particular and the general. Written between 1944 and 1960, the pieces are arranged in two strands. The first strand takes a very particular approach, and are, in my opinion, the most effective. Ginzburg’s evocative account of a damp winter living in Italy’s rural Abruzzi region is full of details of rain and people and mud and walks that shelve perfectly as memories. The reason for their heightened effect becomes apparent when we reach the end of the essay and learn that this winter was the last she spent with her first husband: when they returned to Rome from their exile he was imprisoned and murdered by the fascist wartime government. The four-page essay on her worn-out shoes, written in Rome in 1945 when she was sharing a room with a friend and waiting out the war, says so much about hardship, mental focus and the longing she felt for her children, but is written with such lightness that it conveys much more than it tells. Two essays in this section tell of Ginzburg’s experiences as a foreigner living in England, and maintain an equilibrium between gentle satire and razor-sharp perception: “The English seem somehow aware of their sadness and of the sadness which their country inspires in foreigners. When they are with foreigners they have an apologetic air and appear always anxious to get away,” or, in the very funny essay concerning English food: “As far as the eye can see the countryside stretches - beautiful, green, rustling and damp, wild and at the same time gentle like no other in the world, silent, inedible and odourless.” The character study of her friend, the writer Cesare Pavese (unnamed in the essay), following his suicide in 1950 is full of subtle and succinct observations that evoke the complexities of his existence, and the essay contrasting her personal habits with those of her second husband is revealing without providing any biographical details. Through Ginzburg’s autobiographical writings the reader feels quickly that they know her, even though, even by the end, they still don’t really know anything about her. This ability to compound resonance through detail without resorting to exposition is subtly effective, making the essays independent of their contexts and thereby as fresh to read today and they were when they were written. The second section, or DNA strand, of the collection moves in the other direction across the line between the general and the particular. More theoretical, occasionally approaching being didactic, Ginzburg approaches subjects like ‘My Vocation’, ‘Silence’ or ‘Human Relationships’ and develops her arguments with such a light touch and clarity that the personal is called forth by the general rather than annulled by it. ‘Human Relationships’, describing a lifetime being altered by relationships with friends, lovers, and, most drastically, children, is written in first-person plural throughout. At first this seems like a universal bildungsroman but soon the specificity of the experiences make them clearly the experiences of a single person. Through this specificity, however, the narrative reaches back to the universal, but at a deeper level. The effect reminded me a little of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, which simultaneously tells the author’s own story and the history of twentieth century France in a flat third-person account. Both works clip the tether between experience and its subject and allow experience to fit itself to others. |
NEW RELEASES
"The things that are really big and really close are too big and too close to be seen. If the mind were a place, what might it look like?"
A superb new collection from the immensely talented Kan in the form of a dialogue between a series of prose poems tracking a progression through mysteriously affecting landscapes, and a series of verse poems compulsively trying to make sense of this experience, the whole forming a kind of zone where inner and outer worlds contest for definition.
Six-year-old Hazel tends her colony of shoebox snails while observing, with varying degrees of understanding, her father's illness and final decline. A nicely written New Zealand junior chapter book.
A beautifully produced volume of film stills and quotes from Radax's stunning minimalist 1970 film of Bernhard sitting on a park bench and (not) giving an account of his life, ideas and writing methods.
>> An excerpt from the film.
Featuring 25 buildings by this outstanding yet hitherto underdocumented architect, with essays from Douglas Lloyd Jenkins, Hana Scott, Bill McKay and Gregory O'Brien.
"A reading treasure trove that shifts form and musical key; there are letters, confessions, flights of fancy, time shifts, bright images, surprising arrivals and compelling gaps. Lines stand out, other lines lure you in to hunt for the missing pieces. There is grief, resolve, reflection and terrific movement." - Paula Green
>> An interview with SMW.
A boundlessly imagined novel using fairy tale tropes, talking dolls, immigrants from forgotten countries and brushes with death to create a compelling and deeply satisfying story.
"A writer of sentences so elegant that they gleam." - Ali Smith
"Exhilarating. A wildly imagined, head-spinning, deeply intelligent novel." - The New York Times Book Review
"Is there an author working today who is comparable to Helen Oyeyemi? She might be the only contemporary author for whom it’s not hyperbole to claim she’s sui generis, and I don’t think it’s a stretch either to say she’s a genius, as opposed to talented or newsworthy or relevant or accomplished, each of her novels daring more in storytelling than the one before. After reading any of her novels or her short story collection, you emerge as if from a dream, your sense of how things work pleasurably put out of order. If we read procedurals to enjoy a sense of order restored, everything put it in its place, we read Oyeyemi for the opposite reason, yet she is no less suspenseful." - Los Angeles Review of Books
>> A twist on 'Hansel and Gretel'.
Remarkable and often surprising images of both people and places.
Starting from an archive of letters that were intercepted and opened during and just after World War 1, this book provides fascinating insight into the types of persons considered a 'threat' to the country in this period: a feisty German-born socialist, a Norwegian watersider, an affectionate Irish nationalist, a love-struck miner, an aspiring Maxim Gorky, a cross-dressing doctor, a nameless rural labourer, an avid letter writer with a hatred of war, and two mystical dairy farmers with a poetic bent. What is remarkable is the extent of state surveillance in this period, a time when the rights to privacy and freedom of expression were seldom considered.
"Often we need distance and time, both to see things better and to feel closer to them. This is certainly true of the food of my home country, Russia - or Siberia, to be exact. When I think of Siberia, I hear the sound of fresh snow crunching beneath my feet. Today, whenever I crush sea salt flakes between my fingers as I cook, I think of that sound. In this book I feature recipes that are authentic to Siberia, classic Russian flavour combinations and my modern interpretations. You will find dishes from the pre-revolutionary era and the Soviet days, as well as contemporary approaches - revealing a cuisine that is vibrant, nourishing, exciting and above all relevant no matter the time or the place." Nicely done.
"Europe where the sun dares scarce appear For freezing meteors and congealed cold." - Christopher Marlowe
From the end of the sixteenth century and through the seventeenth, Europe was profoundly altered by a drop in temperatures that affected the ways in which societies sustained and maintained themselves. Blom's excellent history of the impacts of that period of climate change shows how apocalyptic weather patterns not only destroyed entire harvests and incited mass migrations but also gave rise to the growth of European cities and the appearance of capitalism.
Moller traces the journey taken by the ideas of Euclid, Galen and Ptolemy through seven cities and over a thousand years. In it, we follow them from sixth-century Alexandria to ninth-century Baghdad, from Muslim Cordoba to Catholic Toledo, from Salerno's medieval medical school to Palermo, capital of Sicily's vibrant mix of cultures, and - finally - to Venice, where that great merchant city's printing presses would enable Euclid's geometry, Ptolemy's system of the stars and Galen's vast body of writings on medicine to spread even more widely.
Cochrane built his house on the literary margins and has stayed there, lobbing his witty, irreverent, compact poems against all comers.
>> Shuker on Cochrane.
Abdel Latif, an old man from the Aleppo region, dies peacefully in a hospital bed in Damascus. His final wish, conveyed to his youngest son, Bolbol, is to be buried in the family plot in their ancestral village of Anabiya. Though Abdel was hardly an ideal father, and though Bolbol is estranged from his siblings, this conscientious son persuades his older brother Hussein and his sister Fatima to accompany him and the body to Anabiya, which is only a two-hour drive from Damascus.There’s only one problem: Their country is a war zone.With the landscape of their childhood now a labyrinth of competing armies whose actions are at once arbitrary and lethal, the siblings’ decision to set aside their differences and honor their father’s request quickly balloons from a minor commitment into an epic and life-threatening quest. Syria, however, is no longer a place for heroes, and the decisions the family must make along the way—as they find themselves captured and recaptured, interrogated, imprisoned, and bombed—will prove to have enormous consequences for all of them.
“Refusing to look away from its characters’ challenges, the novel is clear-eyed in its presentation of living in a war zone. Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, Syrian author Khalifa reaches readers with a style that is straightforward, true, and profound.” —Booklist
Can In Search of Lost Time be read as a self-help manual (perhaps the world's longest and best-written)? De Botton certainly conveys something of the sheer enjoyment that can be had in this book that was written in a cork-lined room.
"Curious, humorous, didactic and dazzling." - New Yorker
The remarkable story of the English mathematician and surveyor (1737 – 1823), a child labourer in the coal mines who became professor of mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich and is remembered for his calculation of the density of the earth.
"Mathematics remains a bedrock of our society. This wonderful book goes a long way in highlighting why." - New Scientist
In 843 AD, the three surviving grandsons of the great emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. After years of bitter squabbles over who would inherit the family land, they finally decided to divide the territory and go their separate ways. In a moment of staggering significance, one grandson inherited the area we now know as France, another Germany and the third received the piece in between: Lotharingia. What happened to this country?
This memoir of bohemian life chronicles Peppiatt's relationship with Paris in a series of vignettes structured around the half-dozen addresses he called home as a young art critic. Following the social and political upheavals of 1968, Peppiatt traces his precarious progress from junior editor to magazine publisher, recalling encounters with a host of figures at the heart of Parisian artistic life - from Sartre, Beckett and Cartier-Bresson to Serge Gainsbourg and Catherine Deneuve. All sharply observed. From the author of the revelatory Francis Bacon in Your Blood.
A new edition of À Rebours, the epitome of the decadent novel, written in 1884 and describing its antihero's rejection of bourgeois values and his radical aestheticism and inertia. Oscar Wilde and the wider Symbolist movement were very influenced by the book, both in their private lives (so to call them) and their artistic production (so to call it).
Corporate models and government cuts have led to the commodification of education and a loss of purpose in the tertiary sector. Connell argues for the reacknowledgement of education as a primary social good, and for a reorganisation and refunding of universities as an expression of this.
"This adaptation is fabulous for presenting a fresh vision to those familiar with the original, but it's so true to the story's soul that even those who've never read it will come away with a genuine understanding of l'Engle's ideas and heart." - Booklist
Bring the experience of eating in the little bars of Barcelona to your own kitchen.
A man wakes up in a hospital bed, with no idea who he is or how he came to be there. The only information the doctor shares with his patient is his name: Innokenty Petrovich Platonov. As memories slowly resurface, Innokenty begins to build a vivid picture of his former life as a young man in Russia in the early twentieth century, living through the turbulence of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. But soon, only one question remains: how can he remember the start of the twentieth century, when the pills by his bedside were made in 1999? Now in paperback.
>> What history cannot teach us.
In the late 1970s, in the forgotten outer suburbs, a girl has her hands in the engine of a Holden. A sinister new man has joined the family. He works as a mechanic and operates an unlicensed repair shop at the back of their block. The family is under threat. The girl reads the Holden workshop manual for guidance. She resists the man with silence, then with sabotage. She fights him at the place where she believes his heart lives – in the engine of the car.
Traces 400 years of art through scientific discoveries, pigment development and exemplary works.
It's 1940, and nine-year-old Anna Bauman and her parents are among the 300,000 Polish Jews struggling to survive the wretched conditions in the Warsaw ghetto. Anna draws the attention of a woman called Jolanta - a code name of the real-life resistance spy Irena Sendler, who smuggled hundreds of children out of the ghetto. Jolanta wants to help Anna escape, but first Anna must assume a new identity, that of Roman Catholic orphan Anna Karwolska. Whisked out of the ghetto to a Christian orphanage, Anna struggles to hide her true identity... until she slowly realizes that the most difficult part of this charade is not remembering the details of her new life, but trying not to forget the old one entirely.
Fifteen-year-old Pearl lives a marginal life in a dilapidated boathouse with her father and two other adult men in the US South. Pearl, socially isolated among the scavenging adults and feeling stunted, meets Mason Boyd, son of the wealthy family who recently bought up the land she is squatting on.
"An inventive and powerful coming of age story about the search for community and all the ways our ties to one another come undone. Jon Pineda has a poet's eye for the details of this vivid, haunting landscape, and he brings it blazingly to life." - Jenny Offill
A beautifully written and compelling account of the author's quest to discover the extent to which members of her family were submerged by the upheavals of 20th century European history. Her great-uncle, who shot a German diplomat in Moscow in 1932, was sentenced to death. Her Ukrainian grandfather disappeared during World War II and reappeared forty years later. Her great-grandmother - whose name may or may not have been Esther was too old and frail to leave Kiev when the Jews there were rounded up, and was killed by a Nazi outside her house. Now in paperback.
A nicely presented series of outstanding short stories from Kazuo Ishiguro, Djuna Barnes, Sally Rooney, Samuel Beckett, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Aickman, Edna O'Brien, P.D. James, Akhil Sharma, Sylvia Plath, and others.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #118 (9.3.19)
Find out what we've been reading and about some of the new releases that arrived this week. Find out which books are short-listed for the Ockhams. Choose yourself something from our culture sale.
CULTURE SALE. Wonderful books at reduced prices: art, literature, music, design, architecture, cooking, photography, fashion, gardening, writing, dance, &c. Come in and choose, or >browse and select on-line<
 | Lunch Witch Knee-Deep in Niceness by Deb Lucke {Reviewed by STELLA} What could possibly go wrong for Grunhilda the Black Heart? Grunhilda, the lunch lady extraordinaire, sets out for a usual day at the school canteen: for a day of horridness, grouchiness and mean little plans. After all, she has to live up to her reputation as a wicked witch, and keep the ancestors satisfied that all is gloom and doom in the little town of Salem. Yet back at home, her dog (who used to be a tax accountant) Mr Archibald Williams smells a rat: Grunhilda has been hiding something from Mr Williams, the bats and Louise the spider. She’s been hiding a spot of niceness! Mr Williams, in an attempt to keep this news from the Ancestors, makes a terrible mistake. He retrieves the book, The-Book-That-Is-Not-To-Be-Used-For-Good, from the recesses of the room (from well under the bed), and sets out to rectify the situation. Despite dire warnings from Louise the Spider, Mr Williams is determined, and unfortunately accidentally casts a spell. A spell of shocking results - Vince’s Potion of Positivity! While Grunhilda is doing her best to make special ‘ham’ and bean slop (strangely, all the erasers have gone missing) a scent is wafting across the town of Salem, filling everyone with good thoughts, confidence and a 'can-do' attitude. The dullard School Principal is suddenly full of vim and enthusiasm, the children are asking for second helpings of lunch, and poor Scout (a helpful lad) can’t find anyone to help (and so can’t earn his scout badges for good deeds) as everyone is ever-so-confident and super-positive. Dancing in the streets and way too much good fun, not to mention the smell of ‘positivity’, rouses the Ancestors from their coffins and they are not happy! What will Grunhilda do to rectify the situation and get back into their good (bad) books? Deb Lucke’s graphic novel for children Lunch Witch Knee-Deep in Niceness is hilarious fun and wonderfully illustrated complete with splats of spell ingredients. |
 | Proleterka by Fleur Jaeggy {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Children lose interest in their parents when they are left. They are not sentimental. They are passionate and cold. In a certain sense some people abandon affections, sentiments, as if they were things. With determination, without sorrow. They become strangers. They are no longer creatures that have been abandoned, but those who mentally beat a retreat. Parents are not necessary. Few things are necessary. The heart, incorruptible crystal.” Fleur Jaeggy’s unforgettable short novel, named after the ship upon which the narrator, aged fifteen, and her estranged father (unreachable, “aloof from himself”) spend an unprecedented and unrepeated fourteen day cruise in the Greek Islands with members of the Swiss guild to which the father belongs, is a catalogue of mental retreat, relinquishment, estrangement, loss, and turning away: enervations towards a non-existence either hurried or postponed but inevitable to all. Jaeggy’s short sentences each have the precision of a stiletto: each stabs and surprises, making tiny wounds, each with a drop of glistening blood. When the narrator looks at her father Johannes’s diary, “written by a man precise in his absence,” her description of it could be of her own narration: “It is proof. It is the confirmation of an existence. Brief phrases. Without comment. Like answers to a questionnaire. There are no impressions, feelings. Life is simplified, almost as if it were not there.” Jaeggy writes with absolute, clinical precision but narrow focus, as if viewing the world down a tube, to great effect. Johannes, for example, is described as having “Pale, gelid eyes. Unnatural. Like a fairy tale about ice. Wintry eyes. With a glimmer of romantic caprice. The irises of such a clear, faded green that they made you feel uneasy. It is almost as if they lack the consistency of a gaze. As if they were an anomaly, generations old.” The account of the Greek cruise forms the core of the novel, but it is preceded, intercut and followed by memories of childhood and of subsequent events (mostly the deaths of almost everyone mentioned), all related closely in the present tense, but non-sequential, resulting in a sense of time not dissimilar to that experienced when repeatedly tripping over an unseen obstacle. Most of the book is narrated in the first person but the narrator achieves a degree of detachment from incidents that threaten “the exceedingly fine line between equilibrium and desperation” by relating them in the third person, referring to herself as “Johannes’s daughter”: the death of Orsola (the maternal grandmother with whom she lived after her parents’ divorce, her mother’s effective disappearance, her father’s sudden poverty and his effective exile from her life) and the violent sexual experiences to which she opens herself with two of the sailors: “I don’t like it, I don’t like it, she thinks. But she does it all the same. The Proleterka is the locus of experience. By the time the voyage is over, she must know everything. At the end of the voyage, Johannes’s daughter will be able to say: never again, not ever. No experience ever again.” The narrator writes her memories not so much to remember as to forget, to relinquish. Words turn experience into story, which interposes itself between experience and whoever is oppressed by it. As Jaeggy writes, “people imagine words in order to narrate the world and to substitute it.” |
Our Book of the Week recently won a premier prize in Australia, despite its author being interned on Manus Island by the Australian government. In No Friend But the Mountains, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani tells his story, from his childhood in the chestnut forests of Kurdistan to his 2013 flight from the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards to avoid arrest for his advocacy of Kurdish autonomy, to his attempt to seek asylum in Australia, only to be intercepted by the Australian navy and illegally held the Manus Island detention camp, where he still remains. He has drawn the world's attention to human rights abuses and effective torture of his fellow inmates. No Friend But the Mountains was written by text message, and translated from Farsi by Omid Tofighian. >> Boochani's speech on being awarded the Victorian Premier's Prize for Non-Fiction.
>> Boochani also shot the film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time on his phone within the camp.
>> Articles by Boochani.
>> Living in limbo in no-man's land.
>> 'Manus Island Poem.'
>> Some poems by Boochani.
>> The Australian government undermines human rights.
>> "The shame will outlive us all." - Richard Flanagan
>> The detention centre is officially closed, but the detention effectively remains.
NEW RELEASES
What happens when a surgeon makes a mistake? The consequences and the contributing factors of and to misadventure reach deeply into the personal and professional lives of those involved. Elizabeth Taylor's life has been defined by her perfectionism but now it is dominated by her mistake.
Uses the 2016 Havelock North campylobacter outbreak, which contaminated the water supply and affected 40% of the population, to identify shortcomings in the country's health infrastructure. These shortcomings, largely stemming from poor investment and leadership, result in sub-optimal provision for everything from child nutrition to cancer management. Skegg shows that, while personal health care is important, we neglect public health at our peril. Important.
A wonderful set of autobiographical essays, recounting facets of Ginzburg's life in Italy and London, facets in which so much else is reflected. Also recently released: Family Lexicon.
"Ginzburg’s magic is the utter simplicity of her prose, suddenly illuminated by one word that makes a lightning streak of a plain phrase." —The New York Times Book Review
"A punch-you-in-the-stomach-with-grief-and-beauty masterpiece." - Maggie Nelson
>> "If Ferrante is a friend, Ginzburg is a mentor."
A new poetry collection, sharing with the recent novel In the City of Love's Sleep Greenlaw's fine eye for the usually unnoticed nuances of human interaction and the metaphysics of memory and loss.
>> The Vast Extent.
An interesting volume comprising the narratorial script for the film The Innocence of Memories, which explores the actual museum Pamuk assembled as a sort of illustration for his novel The Museum of Innocence. Also included is a transcript of a conversation between Pamuk and director Grant Gee, and film stills.
>> Official trailer.
>> The complete film (unofficial; low quality).
Katharine Smyth was a student at Oxford when she first read Virginia Woolf's modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse in the comfort of an English sitting room, and in the companionable silence she shared with her father. After his death she returned to that novel as a way of wrestling with his memory and understanding her own grief.
“The call of the sea is the call to the absolute strength of women.”
"This hybrid of nature journal and motherhood memoir is a delightfully idiosyncratic prose debut that mixes memoir with history and cultural criticism to explore some of the ways in which the sea inspires and connects women in art and life. Runcie's prose is defined by cool confidence and unshowy clarity, allowing its more poetic observations, of which there are plenty, to glimmer like glass pebbles." - Guardian
Stories exploring sex and sexuality, parenthood, relationships, the connections between generations, death, ambition, and loss.
"Exquisite." - Guardian
"Beautifully pressed into print." - The Times
"A short-story collection to savour." - Irish Times
A deeply considered survey of the representation of women in nineteenth and twentieth century art.
A set of remarkable absurdist short stories springing from the uncertainty and fluidity of a war zone.
"Maarouf’s stories are deeply peculiar, occasionally touching and often very funny. They are also beautifully translated by Jonathan Wright, who renders Maarouf’s language in sprightly, elegant prose." - Guardian
In 1966 Vollie Frade, almost on a whim, enlists in the United States Marine Corps to fight in Vietnam. Breaking definitively from his rural Iowan parents, Vollie puts in motion a chain of events that sees him go to work for people with intentions he cannot yet grasp. From the Cambodian jungle, to a flophouse in Queens, to a commune in New Mexico, Vollie's path traces a secret history of life on the margins of America.
"Salvatore Scibona is gravely, terminally, a born writer - a high artist and exquisite craftsman. Yes his sentences are perfect but not merely; a surplus of dark and tender wisdom, who knows the source, makes his language - and the world - glow with meaning." - Rachel Kushner
Sky bears witness to the demands of young people for dignity and justice during the Arab Spring; the inability of sclerotic regimes to reform; the descent of Syria into civil war; the rise of the Islamic State; and the flight of refugees to Europe. With deep empathy for its people and an extensive understanding of the Middle East, Sky makes a complex region more comprehensible. From the author of The Unravelling.
A novel tracing the trajectories of two Prague schoolfriends and one-time lovers, Jana and Zorka, as they move to the west and shape lives for themselves there. From the author of The Natashas.
"A fine, fraught, strange novel. Nonchalantly cool, heedlessly independent and puzzlingly askew. It’s also hard to resist." - Guardian
"Astonishing. A definitive study." - Financial Times
"Goodman’s scholarship is formidable." - Guardian
“David Macey’s endeavour was to break down the various elements of Michel Foucault’s life into their many different facets. And he did so with great success. The author delightfully weaves together the key moments in Foucault’s life and writing with his activist interventions and his engagement in the struggles around homosexuality, mental illness and prison. He thus brings out a fascinating, enigmatic character of extraordinary intelligence, who succeeded in composing a polyphonic oeuvre that was sadly cut short by his untimely death." – Elisabeth Roudinesco
>> Meet Michel.
>> The Disappearance of Man.
What do all these statements have in common? "We do not cover one square inch of any other nation." "American has never been an empire." "The United States wants no territory." " We are not imperialistic." The US is the only great power without a history of imperialistic claims." " America covets no one else's land. We seek no one else's treasures." Two things: They were all said by US presidents. And they are all false.
"I wish I wasn't the weirdest sixteen-year-old guy in the universe." Felix would love to have been a number. Numbers have superpowers and they're safe - any problem they might throw up can be solved. People are so much harder to cope with. At least that's how it seems until Bailey Hunter arrives at school. Bailey has a stutter, but he can make friends and he's good at judo. And Bailey seems to have noticed Felix. Both boys find they're living in a world where they can't trust anyone, but might they be able to trust each other, with their secrets, their differences, themselves? Another novel from the excellent New Zealand YA author of Catch Me When You Fall and Pieces of You.
Keep your eyes open. Populism and nationalism don't march fully-formed into government; they creep.
Unlike the Heart: A memoir of brain and mind by Nicola Redhouse $37
What role do genetics play in postnatal anxiety? Do the biological changes of motherhood offer a complete explanation? Is the Freudian idea of the mind outdated? Can more recent combined theories from neuroscientists and psychoanalysts provide the answers? How might we be able to know ourselves both through our genes, our biology, our family stories and our own ever-unfolding narratives?
Questions I am Asked about the Holocaust by Heidi Fried $35
"There are no stupid questions, nor any forbidden ones, but there are some questions that have no answer." Hedi Fried was nineteen when the Nazis snatched her family from their home in Eastern Europe and transported them to Auschwitz, where her parents were murdered and she and her sister were forced into hard labour until the end of the war. Now ninety-four, she has spent her life educating young people about the Holocaust and answering their questions about one of the darkest periods in human history.
We are Okay by Nina LaCour $24
Marin hasn't spoken to anyone from her old life since the day she left everything behind. No one knows the truth about those final weeks. Not even her best friend Mabel.
“A meditation on surviving grief, We Are Okay is short, poetic and gorgeously written. The power in this little book is in seeing Marin come out on the other side of loss, able to appreciate a beautiful yellow-glazed pottery bowl and other people’s kindnesses, and to understand that she might one day have a girlfriend and a future. The world LaCour creates is fragile but profoundly humane.” —The New York Times Book Review
Peach by Emma Glass $23
Peach has an ordinary teenage life until something awful happens. Suddenly her world is thrown out of joint, and she is uncertain what she will find in her own depths. New edition.
"A strange and original work of art." - George Saunders
"Ferocious, startling, all-consuming." - Daisy Johnson
Simple and Classic: 123 step-by-step recipes by Jane Hornby $70
A selection of the favourite and most useful recipes from What to Cook and How to Cook It, Fresh and Easy, and What to Bake and How to Bake It.
What role do genetics play in postnatal anxiety? Do the biological changes of motherhood offer a complete explanation? Is the Freudian idea of the mind outdated? Can more recent combined theories from neuroscientists and psychoanalysts provide the answers? How might we be able to know ourselves both through our genes, our biology, our family stories and our own ever-unfolding narratives?
"There are no stupid questions, nor any forbidden ones, but there are some questions that have no answer." Hedi Fried was nineteen when the Nazis snatched her family from their home in Eastern Europe and transported them to Auschwitz, where her parents were murdered and she and her sister were forced into hard labour until the end of the war. Now ninety-four, she has spent her life educating young people about the Holocaust and answering their questions about one of the darkest periods in human history.
Marin hasn't spoken to anyone from her old life since the day she left everything behind. No one knows the truth about those final weeks. Not even her best friend Mabel.
“A meditation on surviving grief, We Are Okay is short, poetic and gorgeously written. The power in this little book is in seeing Marin come out on the other side of loss, able to appreciate a beautiful yellow-glazed pottery bowl and other people’s kindnesses, and to understand that she might one day have a girlfriend and a future. The world LaCour creates is fragile but profoundly humane.” —The New York Times Book Review
Peach has an ordinary teenage life until something awful happens. Suddenly her world is thrown out of joint, and she is uncertain what she will find in her own depths. New edition.
"A strange and original work of art." - George Saunders
"Ferocious, startling, all-consuming." - Daisy Johnson
A selection of the favourite and most useful recipes from What to Cook and How to Cook It, Fresh and Easy, and What to Bake and How to Bake It.
The Story of Sex: From apes to robots by Philippe Brenot and Laetitia Coryn $38
A graphic novel tracing humans' changing attitudes towards sexual expression.
Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2019 edited by Jack Ross $35
The usual and the unusual suspects, with featured poet Stephanie Christie. 130 new poems, reviews of 30 poetry collections, essays on poetical subjects.
The School of Numbers by Emily Hawkins and Daniel Frost $33
Excellent exploration of mathematical concepts for children.
Madame Sonia Delaunay by Gerard Lo Monaco $33
This colourful pop-up book is a showcase of paper engineering.
Faber Stories series $10 each
A nicely presented series of outstanding short stories from Kazuo Ishiguro, Djuna Barnes, Sally Rooney, Samuel Beckett, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Aickman, Edna O'Brien, P.D. James, Akhil Sharma, Sylvia Plath, and others.
>> Click through to make your selection from the first set.
>> They're moving fast.
The usual and the unusual suspects, with featured poet Stephanie Christie. 130 new poems, reviews of 30 poetry collections, essays on poetical subjects.
Excellent exploration of mathematical concepts for children.
This colourful pop-up book is a showcase of paper engineering.
A nicely presented series of outstanding short stories from Kazuo Ishiguro, Djuna Barnes, Sally Rooney, Samuel Beckett, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Aickman, Edna O'Brien, P.D. James, Akhil Sharma, Sylvia Plath, and others.
>> Click through to make your selection from the first set.
>> They're moving fast.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #117 (2.3.19)
Read our reviews. Find out about this week's new releases, and about our Book of the Week. Choose something from our children's book sale. All in our latest NEWSLETTER.
CHILDREN'S BOOK SALE. Come and see our display of wonderful books at reduced prices, or <click here> to browse the selection on-line.
Rufus Marigold is a primate with a problem. He suffers acutely from anxiety and every social encounter is a harrowing ordeal. A budding artist, Rufus spends his days working in an office. As life become increasingly more of a struggle, Rufus yearns to be defined as something other than a complete nervous wreck. Highly recommended.
>> Rufus started life as a webcomic.
>> Find out why Thomas has not written a review of this book.
>> "Anxiety is a deeply significant thing in my life."
>> Meet Ross Murray.
>> Why is Rufus a chimpanzee?
>> It's OK to be different.
>> Portrait of the artist as a chimp.
>> The episodes.
>> What else does Ross Murray do?
>> Published by the wonderful Earth's End Publishing.
>> Give Rufus a home.
>> Is anxiety making life difficult? Visit the Mental Health Foundation website or Anxiety NZ or SPARX (for young people).
 | Wundersmith: The calling of Morrigan Crow ('Nevermoor' #2) by Jessica Townsend {Reviewed by STELLA} First there was Nevermoor, and now there is Wundersmith: better, wilder, and more magical than ever. Morrigan Crow, the cursed child, is now well ensconced in her patron’s home, the Deucalion Hotel. Accepted into the elite school of the Wunderous Society, Morrigan is now a member of Unit 919 along with her best friend, the irrepressible and adventurous dragon-riding Hawthrone. So why does half her class fear or despise her and why do the Elders at WunSoc keep such a close eye on her, to the extent that she isn't allowed to attend the same classes as the rest of her Unit? She’s a Wundersmith, someone the Society fears and is in awe of. With her patron, the great Jupiter North fighting her corner, they can’t cast her out but they are determined to keep her in the dark and curtail her powers. And her only class, with the dull Professor Onstald, a minor Wunanimal, part-human, part-tortoise, teaching her all the evil ways of the past Wundersmiths from his book the Missteps, Blunders, Fiascos, Monstrosities and Devastations: An Abridged History of the Wunderous Art Spectrum, Morrigan feels like her talent has once again reduced her to a cursed child, shunned by her class-mates and disliked by some of the Elders of the Society. Luckily there is their Conductor, Miss Cherry; the staff at the Deucalion; Hawthorne, ever loyal; Jake (Jupiter’s nephew); and a new friend to counter the disappointment of school. Yet all is not well in Nevermore. Ezra Squall is still working his magic from afar through the Gossamer Line, people and creatures are disappearing (especially those with valuable talents), and Bonesmen (skeletal creatures that assemble themselves from bony debris of animals and humans they find in depths of rivers and the dark recesses of alleys) are rising up to kidnap the unwitting for the Ghastly Market, a ghoulish spectacle of a black market auction where the wealthy and unethical can bid for talented beings, to use them or steal the talents for nefarious means and their own money-making evil purposes. In addition to this, Morrigan is finding out more about the city of Nevermore and its magical wonders; a live map where you can see people walking about, getting caught in the rain, running for the Brolly Rail; the mysteries of trickster alleys, from the strange, yet safe (coded Pink) to the Red (danger ahead) to coded Black (certain death); an angel who sings to crowds of fans - his voice addictive; and the varied talents of her classmates, friends and foes (mesmerist, oracle, witness, wundersmith). This second book in the series will have you entranced. The pace picks up in Wundersmith, as, alongside Morrigan, we are plunged into danger, confusion and the need to be brave. Underlying the forward momentum of the plot are issues of loyalty, prejudice, bullying, resilience, fear, doubt and trust. This is a magical series for those who love Harry Potter, with the darkness of Gaiman’s Coraline, the humour of Percy Jackson, and a heroine who both makes mistakes and takes action in the face of adversity. |