BOOKS @ VOLUME #123 (13.4.19)
Read our reviews, find out about new and short-listed books and about our Book of the Week, use the Ockhameter (find out what it is), enter competitions, find out about upcoming events and book launches, save the date for the 2019 VOLUME Mapua Literary Festival. Just for starters.
 | Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza When Maria Gainza was a child, she suffered from diplopia, or double vision, and, to correct this, used an optical apparatus which required her to concentrate on the images and “use [her] eye muscles to bring them together, pulling them both into the middle so that one lay on top of the other.” Each chapter in Gainza’s book Optic Nerve operates similarly: a thematic strand from her own life, generally an aspect of it that troubles her, is presented in parallel with an account of aspects of the life of a painter, the two strands brought into alignment through Gainza’s viewing of a work of art which acts as an apparatus that enables her to achieve an emotional depth of field that had hitherto eluded her. The lives of the writer and the artists whose works she considers are ordinary lives, but this art-viewing, so to call it, correlates experience and enables something that could be called meaning. Effective art “reformulates the questionwhat is it about? to what am I about?” Looking at something is always more about the looking than the thing, is always more about the relation between the viewer and the thing than about the thing, the object whose passivity acts as a mirror for the active (or, ideally, activated) viewer. Gainza says, of viewing Courbet’s ‘Stormy Sea’, “When you stand before it, art disappears and something else rushes in: life, in all its tempestuousness,” the life of the viewer herself. Each chapter deals with an unsettled aspect of Gainza’s (or “Gainza”’s) life: her relationships with her parents, her brother, her daughter, her friends and not-so-friends, her health, her husband’s health. In two chapters she addresses herself in the second person, in the chapter about her fraught relationship with her mother and in the chapter in which she describes the occasion on which her anxiety about flying reached the point at which she was no longer able to fly, instances in which a first person narration would still be too uncomfortable for her. Finding herself limited to viewing art that can be found in Buenos Aires, where she lives, she realises that she is not in any case addicted to art-sensation. But “maybe,” she tells herself, “you’ve just convinced yourself, in line with your progressive and alarming tendency to limit your own means, that big planes and great art are unnecessary.” Change and understanding can only be achieved by indirect means, insight can only be gained by an indirect gaze, a gaze directed in Gainza’s case at a work of art. On viewing a work by Toulouse-Lautrec, she says, “There were horses in it. Even now, that is what strikes me first, and the first thing that drops away,” and it is perhaps this dropping away of sensation that allows connections to be made across elements between which sensation was a barrier as much as a means of access. Looking at a reproduction of a work by Rothko in her doctor’s waiting room, once the sensation drops away she finds the work “gives me a feeling of my singularity: a clear sense of the brutal solitude of this slab of sweating flesh that is me.” The final chapter reveals the anxiety that underlies and gives impetus to the whole project of Optic Nerve, the crisis prefigured by concerns and details in earlier sections, or at least resonating with these concerns and details, the crisis for which Gainza’s correlation of her own life with those of others through viewing art somehow provides her with the capacity to face and accept. “I suppose it’s probably always the way,” she writes. “You write one thing in order to talk about something else.” |
>> Read Stella's review.
>>All about the book (in French).
>> My Pictures After the Storm is also a large amount of fun.
>> Le bureau des papas perdus.
>> Les petits kiwis.
>> We have a copy of Encyclopedia of Grannies to give away, courtesy of Gecko Press. To go in the draw, e-mail us and tell us an anecdote about a grandmother.
 | Encyclopedia of Grannies by Éric Veillé Here’s a book for every babushka, yaya, farmor, lola and kuia (respectively Russian, Greek, Danish, Filipino and Maori). Go to page five and you’ll find an assortment of other names for grandmothers. Touted as the first of its kind, Eric Veillé’s Encyclopedia of Grannies is a must for every discerning grandparent and grandchild (hint hint) - this would be a great present for “Grand” Mother’s Day! Quirky and full of great facts about grannies, this is sure to exercise the imagination, be a good talking point, and show the reader that grannies come in all varieties (shapes, sizes, ages, types) from the wildly leaping energetic gran on the cover (hold on kids!) to those who need a ‘throne’ for their weary bones. And their hair - well, its anything they wish it to be. “Most grannies do whatever they like with their hair. And quite right.” And one thing we are told, that they share in common, is time: time to be tempted by a cream bun, time to give cuddles, time to give the table a quick wipe, and time to get names muddled up. Grannies are wise, especially when they eating out in the treetops (Veillé’s text and illustrations create fun and hilarious juxtapositions), and grannies have their own special vocabulary (some of which is rather quaint). My favourite page is ‘Inside’: see a granny and her insides, with illustrations of the girl she was. “Inside every granny, there’s a small house, and in that house is that same granny when she was a little girl.” The book is dotted with questions from children: Why do grannies always tell us to speak up? Do grannies only ever knit cardigans? Do all grannies like nature walks? And where are those busloads of grannies going? All is revealed with the jaunty text and even more in the excellent and funky drawings. It’s not just fun and games, though: there’s also a page dedicated to moods and feelings. “Sometimes a granny feels like a lump of old mashed potato”. On this page, there are some hints about how you can cheer up a granny: draw her a chicken, put her hair in pigtails, give her drops of rain from a country where it doesn’t rain, or tell her a secret. And of course, there is a whole spread dedicated to her travels and to sending her postcards! And there’s a cat on every page to show you the way and to make comment in the way only cats can. Plenty of fun for the young, as well for every granny, nana, nonna, abuela, nainai and jida. Enjoyable. |
NEW RELEASES
"I have come to think of all the metal in my body as artificial stars, glistening beneath the skin, a constellation of old and new metal. A map, a tracing of connections and a guide to looking at things from different angles. How do you tell the story of life that is no one thing? How do you tell the story of a life in a body, as it goes through sickness, health, motherhood? And how do you tell that story when you are not just a woman but a woman in Ireland?"
"Sinéad Gleeson has changed the Irish literary landscape, through her advocacy for the female voice. In Constellations, we finally hear her own voice, and it comes from the blood and bones of her body’s history. Sinéad Gleeson is an absolute force: if you want to know where passion and tenacity are born, read this book." - Anne Enright
”Constellations is a glitteringly brilliant book; daring in its voice, beautiful in its forms, challenging in its subjects. It dazzled me with its adventure and ambition. These essays stand as radiant single entities but also, over the book’s course, constellate into a larger structure of thought about what Gleeson calls ‘the story of a life in a body’. Political, poetic, tender and angry, this is a remarkable book." - Robert MacFarlane
"Utterly magnificent. Raw, thought-provoking and galvanising; this is a book every woman should read." - Eimear McBride
>>"I have a mortality complex."
As the nineteenth century draws towards a close, Mary Ann Sate, an elderly maidservant, sets out to write her truth. She writes of the Valleys that she loves, of the poisonous rivalry between her employer's two sons and of a terrible choice which tore her world apart. Her story brings to life a period of strife and rapid social change, and evokes the struggles of those who lived in poverty and have been forgotten by history. In this fictional found memoir, novelist Alice Jolly uses the astonishing voice of Mary Ann to recreate history as seen from a woman's perspective and to give joyful, poetic voice to the silenced women of the past.
Long-listed for the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize.
>> Excerpt.
Presented here in a new edition with expanded notes, this genre-defying meditation on the semiotics of late-1920s Weimar culture offers a fresh opportunity to encounter Walter Benjamin at his most virtuosic and experimental, writing in a vein that anticipates later masterpieces such as 'On the Concept of History' and The Arcades Project. Composed of sixty short prose pieces that vary wildly in style and theme, One-Way Street evokes a dense cityscape of shops, cafes, and apartments, alive with the hubbub of social interactions and papered over with public inscriptions of all kinds: advertisements, signs, posters, slogans. Benjamin avoids all semblance of linear narrative, enticing readers with a seemingly random sequence of aphorisms, reminiscences, jokes, off-the-cuff observations, dreamlike fantasias, serious philosophical inquiries, apparently unserious philosophical parodies, and trenchant political commentaries. Providing remarkable insight into the occluded meanings of everyday things, Benjamin time and again proves himself the unrivalled interpreter of what he called "the soul of the commodity."
In March 2015, Naja Marie Aidt's 25-year-old son, Carl, died in an accident. This poetic and affecting book is about losing a child. It is about formulating a vocabulary to express the deepest kind of pain, and it's about finding a way to write about a reality invaded by grief, lessened by loss. Faced with the sudden emptiness of language, Aidt finds solace in the anguish of Joan Didion, Nick Cave, C.S. Lewis, Mallarmé, Plato, and other writers who have suffered the deadening impact of loss. Their torment suffuses with her own. This palimpsest of mourning enables Aidt to turn over the pathetic, precious transience of existence and articulates her greatest fear: to forget.
"Extraordinary. It is about death, but I can think of few books which have such life. It shows us what love is." - Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing With Feathers and Lanny
5000 years ago, Britain was part of mainland Europe, connected from its east coast by an area of land referred to as Doggerland. Blackburn's remarkable book picks at threads leading back to prehistory, both via archaeology and deep cultural memory, and also at threads leading back through her own life and that of her deceased husband, a Dutch painter.
Why is Munch's work as powerful (if not more powerful) today as it was when it was painted? Knausgård prises open (or reconstructs (or constructs)) the painter and reflects on what it means to create, to be an artist, to be aware, to respond to place and situation. As co-curator of a major new exhibition of Munch's work in Oslo, Knausgård visits the landscapes that inspired him, and speaks with contemporary artists, including Vanessa Baird and Anselm Kiefer.
>>On spending too much money on an artwork and feeling filled with shame.
>> An interview.
Ranging across history and continents, these poems operate in the spaces in between, their haunting lyrics creating new, hybrid territories. The Perseverance is a book of loss, contested language and praise, where elegies for the poet’s father sit alongside meditations on the d/Deaf experience.
Long-listed for the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize.
>> Antrobus was in New Zealand for last year's LitCrawl.
>> Read a sample.
"The title poem of Islander is an essential definition: not rooted in landlocked blood and soil but connected by sea and distance, and the returning tides of Scotland, the archipelagos of New Zealand and the islands of Oceania. Here is a poet never given to the common gestures of banal defiance but simply slipping away from the traps of rigidity and subscription, attuned to the ancient laws of movement and sensitive to the uncertainties, the vulnerable truths. ‘Interislander’ takes a specific urgency, a man suffering a heart attack on the ferry between the North Island and the South Island: practicalities and actions demanded of the moment are deftly depicted but the human place in our unfinished history is there between the sea beneath and the enveloping sky above. ‘The Desert Road’ crosses the country, mapped by co-ordinate points, listening as the darkness falls and languages come out in constellations, leading through the wilderness to strange, ‘familiar places’. ‘The inbreath’ takes us to Ardbeg and another waterside with slipstreams and shipping lanes, snow in the mouth and Scotland as no more nor less than another harbour of perception. Lynn Davidson is a poet opening such perceptions and sensitivities, singular, sometimes wittily anecdotal, poised upon latent gravity, eluding both flippancy and weight in a collection that slows time and repays patience with tempered inductions to particular, opening perspectives." —Alan Riach, Professor of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow
After their mother Marianne is unwillingly admitted to a mental hospital, teenagers Edie and Mae are forced to move from their childhood home in Louisiana to New York to live with their estranged father, Dennis, a former civil rights activist and literary figure on the other side of success. The girls, grieving and homesick, are at first wary of their father's affection, but soon Mae and Edie's close relationship begins to fall apart - Edie remains fiercely loyal to Marianne, convinced that Dennis is responsible for her mother's downfall, while Mae, suffocated by her striking resemblances to her mother, feels pulled toward their father. The girls move in increasingly opposing and destructive directions as they struggle to cope with outsized pain, and as the history of Dennis and Marianne's romantic past clicks into focus, the family fractures further.
"Dark and unforgettable." - Kirkus
Food is one of life's great joys. So why has eating become such a source of anxiety and confusion? Wilson shows that in two generations the world has undergone a massive shift from traditional, limited diets to more globalised ways of eating. Our diets are getting healthier and less healthy at the same time.
'Thoughtful and intelligently observed. Evans's delicate prose weaves issues of racial identity and politics into the narrative so that they never feel heavy-handed. A deftly observed, elegiac portrayal of modern marriage, and the private – often painful – quest for identity and fulfilment in all its various guises." – Observer
"A novel that lays bare the normality of black family life in suburban London, while revealing its deepest psyche, its tragedies, its hopes and its magic. A wondrous book." - Afua Hirsch
Now in paperback. Listed for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction.
>> The author on losing her twin.
Collingwood Ingram, known as 'Cherry' for his defining obsession, was born in 1880 and lived until he was a hundred, witnessing a fraught century of conflict and change. After visiting Japan in 1902 and 1907 and discovering two magnificent cherry trees in the garden of his family home in Kent in 1919, Ingram fell in love with cherry blossoms, or sakura, and dedicated much of his life to their cultivation and preservation. On a 1926 trip to Japan to search for new specimens, Ingram was shocked to see the loss of local cherry diversity, driven by modernisation, neglect and a dangerous and creeping ideology. A cloned cherry, the Somei-yoshino, was taking over the landscape and becoming the symbol of Japan's expansionist ambitions. The most striking absence from the Japanese cherry scene, for Ingram, was that of Taihaku, a brilliant 'great white' cherry tree. A proud example of this tree grew in his English garden and he swore to return it to its native home. Multiple attempts to send Taihaku scions back to Japan ended in failure, but Ingram persisted. Over decades, Ingram became one of the world's leading cherry experts and shared the joy of sakura internationally.
Poems balancing artistic experimentation with frank expression and describing a New Zealand that is overlapped by the United States and the challenges and almost-joys of navigating between these places, identities and homecomings.
>>Interview with NLB.
For more than fifty years, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld have hunted, confronted, and exposed Nazi war criminals, tracking them down in places as far-flung as South America and the Middle East. They uncovered the notorious Klaus Barbie, "the Butcher of Lyon," in Bolivia. They outed Kurt Lischka as chief of the Gestapo in Paris, the man responsible for the largest deportation of French Jews. And, with the help of their son, Arno, they brought the Vichy police chief Maurice Papon to justice. They were born on opposite sides of the Second World War. Beate's father was in the Wehrmacht, while Serge's father was deported to Auschwitz because he was a Jew.
In a hard-boiled city of crooks, grifts and rackets lurk a pair of toughs: Box and _____. They're the kind of men capable of extracting apologies and reparations, of teaching you a chilling lesson. They seldom think twice, and ask very few questions. Until one night over the poker table, they encounter a pulp writer with wild ideas and an unscrupulous private detective, leading them into what is either a classic mystery, a senseless maze of corpses, or an inextricable fever dream.
"Muscle unfolds like a series of Russian dolls, each more Beckettian, winding and wonderful than the one before. Compelling enough to read in one gulping go." - Daisy Johnson
"Rare and accomplished - it teases out classic noir riffs and set-ups but in a language sinuous enough, and with invention ripe enough, to make them feel new." - Kevin Barry
In 1967 Sergeant Pepper transformed the way recorded music was presented - no longer were records just a collection of songs but rather a shaped entity in itself.
Profiles twenty-two of the gifted and self-destructive talents in rock history. From Brian Wilson to Syd Barrett, the Rolling Stones to Neil Young, Iggy Pop to Lou Reed, this title offers portraits that are unimaginable in the world of market driven music business.
"A genius wordsmith, Kent is the man who has lived rock'n'roll to the full. The Dark Stuff contains some of the best music journalism ever written." - Spectator
An unnamed country is leaving the darkness of a decade at war, and to commemorate the armistice the government commissions a new road connecting two halves of the state. Two men, foreign contractors from the same company, are sent to finish the highway. While one is flighty and adventurous, wanting to experience the nightlife and people, the other wants only to do the work and go home. But both men must eventually face the absurdities of their positions, and the dire consequences of their presence.
A blackly comic novel about lies, love, Lagos, and how blood is thicker - and more difficult to get out of the carpet - than water.
When Korede's dinner is interrupted one night by a distress call from her sister, Ayoola, she knows what's expected of her: bleach, rubber gloves, nerves of steel and a strong stomach. This'll be the third boyfriend Ayoola's dispatched in, quote, self-defence and the third mess that her lethal little sibling has left Korede to clear away. She should probably go to the police for the good of the menfolk of Nigeria, but she loves her sister and, as they say, family always comes first. Until, that is, Ayoola starts dating the fit doctor where Korede works as a nurse. Korede's long been in love with him, and isn't prepared to see him wind up with a knife in his back: but to save one would mean sacrificing the other.
Long-listed for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction.
From the former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, a timely and passionate case for the role of the well-designed object in the digital age. Fewer, Better Things explores the history of craft in its many forms, explaining how raw materials, tools, design, and technique come together to produce beauty and utility in handmade or manufactured items. Whether describing the implements used in a traditional Japanese tea ceremony, the use of woodworking tools, or the use of new fabrication technologies, Adamson writes expertly and lovingly about the aesthetics of objects, and the care and attention that goes into producing them.
30 years' work. 400 pages.
Represents the full arc of this outstanding Southern poet of place.
Seamus O'Mahony writes about the illusion of progress, the notion that more and more diseases can be 'conquered' ad infinitum. He punctures the idiocy of consumerism, the idea that healthcare can be endlessly adapted to the wishes of individuals. He excoriates the claims of Big Science, the spending of vast sums on research follies like the Human Genome Project. And he highlights one of the most dangerous errors of industrialized medicine: an over-reliance on metrics, and a neglect of things that can't easily be measured, like compassion.
"This systemic perversion of science and its method might the most obvious instance of the corruption O'Mahoney describes, but he casts his net much wider. He also considers, inter alia, the invention of pseudo-diseases, the connivance of the editors of medical journals in increasing the volume of papers, an uncritical deference to the simplifications of statistically-derived knowledge, and the dishonesty of failing to acknowledge the limits of what medicine can reasonably be expected to achieve." - Literary Review
The boy does not speak. The boy has no name. The boy, raised half-wild in the forests of southern France, sets out alone into the wilderness and the greater world beyond. Without experience of another person aside from his mother, the boy must learn what it is to be human, to exist among people, and to live beyond simple survival. As this wild and naive child attempts to join civilisation, he encounters earthquakes and car crashes, ogres and artists, and, eventually, all-encompassing love and an inescapable war.
Winner of the 2016 Prix Femina.
Explores contemporary migration to New Zealand through an examination of 200 personal essays written by 37 migrants from 20 different countries, spanning all ages and life stages. The Braided River presents migration as a lifelong experience that affects everything from language, home, work, family and friendship to finances, citizenship and social benefits.
An exclusive glimpse into the gardens of the world's leading restaurants - and access to innovative recipes inspired by them.
Journeying across the continents, writer Matt Collins and photographer Roo Lewis tie together both the historical context and modern-day applications of some of the world's most fascinating and iconic trees. They explore the heritage of woodlands from around the world and meet those whose lives are inexplicably bound to them. The book is divided into 10 main chapters, each of which explores a tree from a particular genus - Pine, Juniper, Oak, Hornbeam, Cherry, Beech, Birch, Chestnut, Douglas-fir and Poplar. Beautifully presented.
The popular Beijing Duck House in Rockville, Maryland has been serving devoted regulars for decades, but behind the staff’s professional masks simmer tensions, heartaches and grudges from decades of gruelling service work. When Duck House manager Jimmy Han tries to sell his father’s old restaurant to move to a more upscale location, these conflicts are set loose, testing the bonds of this working family and they must finally confront the conflicts and loyalties simmering beneath the red and gold lanterns.
Listed for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction.
>> Read a sample.
Find out about the books short-listed for each category in the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (read the judges' citations below). Click through to reserve your copies from our website. Use the OCKHAMETER to vote for your favourites and to win books.
Use the Ockhameter to vote for the books you think should win each section of the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (or, alternatively, for the books you think will win each section of the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards).
Click on the horse to vote.
All entries go the draw to win a copy of each of the four winning books. Entries close 10 May.
ACORN FOUNDATION FICTION PRIZE
The New Ships moves deftly back and forth in time and place as Peter Collie, his life eroding after the loss of his wife, tries to make sense of the past and find a way forward. With ageing parents, a flailing relationship with his son, and a past tragedy, the strata of life and family are excavated and entwined with ideas of art and literature to produce an intriguing and elegantly written novel with a wide cast of memorable characters and not a word out of place.
Lloyd Jones has delivered a dark but clear-eyed parable of who and what we become when supposedly decent societies master the art of ‘othering’. The narrator’s intense specificity in detailing the two captive strangers’ processes and behaviours, without any seeming emotional context, allows the book to become quietly horrific, the banality of its evil played out as studious observation. It is a courageous book in its insistence upon not directly engaging with its seeming lack of humanity. But the cumulative effect is that its chilling images and their implications do just that.
>> Read Thomas's review.
Spare, unsentimental and unforgettable, This Mortal Boy is a masterful recreation of the events leading up to the real-life hanging of “jukebox killer” Albert Lawrence (Paddy) Black at Mount Eden prison in 1955. With seemingly effortless proficiency, Kidman creates an intensely human and believable story as she positions Paddy, newly arrived from Ireland, within the moral panic of post-war New Zealand, the restless vulnerability of Auckland’s teen culture and the damning preconceptions of the legal profession, all leading to the appalling inevitability of his death.
All This by Chance is a remarkably immersive three-generational family saga revealing the persistence of a wartime past on our personal histories and the undeniability of traumatic memory. In rich, often intense prose Vincent O’Sullivan weaves the dramatic tension of his story through time and place, from a German concentration camp and post-war London to Italy, Greece, Africa and New Zealand, all the while holding his characters to the unbreakable thread that binds them to the impossible demands of the Holocaust.
>> Read Stella's review.
MARY AND PETER BIGGS AWARD FOR POETRY
Helen Heath’s collection, by turns thoughtful and moving, asks how the material world, including technology, might mediate – or replace – human relationships. The experimental first half uses found poems to engage how artifacts – sex dolls, buildings – become objects of human passion. The elegiac second half offers a touching speculative narrative: a woman embeds her deceased partner’s personality into software to avoid letting go. The question Heath suggests is perhaps less whether friends are electric and more whether they can, or should be.
Erik Kennedy’s frequently playful book offers intellectual and aesthetic surprises, not least of which in the way it moves beyond its ironic mode to at times vulnerable meditations on politics, family, relationships and the self. The collection is notable for experiments in structure and prosody, weaving the contemporary, per the collection’s title, with updated nods to received forms such as the sonnet and rhyme. Kennedy’s frequently light tonal touch belies the difficulty of the linguistic manoeuvres it deftly performs.
Therese Lloyd’s The Facts combines ekphrasis, literary influence and the personal poem. At times darkly humorous and at others intensely uncomfortable, these poems explore a contemporary approach to the confessional lyric, interrogating emotional experience while maintaining self-awareness and a willingness to look outwards. One engaging thread in the collection is its investigation of the role of art and spirituality in relation to individual trauma and the process of healing.
Tayi Tibble’s first collection brings us fresh, bold poems that saunter and shimmy with an unsettling self-assurance through a range of uncomfortable and familiar tropes. Her words are vital on the page: skewing and renewing the dusky maiden as millennial sex kitten. Her kūpenga snares scenes that an Aotearoa audience will recognise as our own awkward, unequal, power dynamic. Her lyrical kaupapa draws us in to peer at a two-way mirror that is playful, brutal, seductive and disquieting.
>> Read Stella's review.
ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION AWARD
In this powerful account of aspects of recent environmental history in Aotearoa New Zealand, the author brings together a wealth of first-hand accounts and stories to provide an important record of the individuals and groups who made commitments to forest conservation and activism. Historic illustrations and well-chosen archival materials create a sense of context for the reader, while the use of contemporary photography captures the splendour of the natural environment that the book so rightfully celebrates.
Thoughtfully designed and beautifully presented, the creators of this book about the murals made by artist E. Mervyn Taylor in the 1950s and 1960s have paid considerable attention to both content and production values and the result is impressive. The writers are diverse, the text engaging, and with the aid of well chosen illustrations the book delivers texture and context to a group of important and often overlooked public art works. It also makes a significant contribution to the broader understanding of artistic and cultural activity in mid-century New Zealand.
This striking book detailing 3000 years of Sāmoan tattooing immediately invites closer investigation as a result of its integrated approach to design, photography, typography and writing. The ambitious scope of the subject matter and the knowledge of the main authors results in an important body of new scholarship, while the texts remain clear, accessible and engaging. Invited writers add a range of perspectives and experiences appropriate to the subject and intention of the book.
This handsomely designed and elegant book offers an expanded history of the birds of Aotearoa New Zealand. The combination of text and illustrations creates a work that is detailed, wide-ranging and informative, illustrating the writer’s advanced understanding of his subject. Birdstories seamlessly brings iconic historical images together with the work of more recent artists and designers to create a volume that presents a real sense of how these birds became a feature of our visual, natural and cultural history, while reinforcing a strong conservation message.
ROYAL SOCIETY TE APĀRANGI AWARD FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION
This deeply moving and often surprising story is a delight to read. Set against the backdrop of the onscreen double-act many of us will remember, Hudson & Halls conveys the humour, enduring love and drama of this couple’s public and personal relationship. Joanne Drayton’s fresh approach to storytelling highlights significant social and political moments over four decades and three countries, while the story and the book design celebrate some of the kitsch flamboyance of the pair and the period.
A fresh and evocative take on the memoir from Maurice Gee, one of New Zealand’s favourite fiction writers. Three years after the publication of a comprehensive biography, he offers his own Memory Pieces, a compelling three-part memoir exploring his parents’ relationship, his own childhood, and his Swedish-born wife Margaretha’s childhood. This well-crafted and often riveting story is told with warmth and generosity, and presented in a beautifully produced book.
Beautifully written and highly engaging, We Can Make a Life is the story of a remarkable family and their life in the South Island. Told with warmth and curiosity by an exciting new writer with a fresh and compelling voice, Chessie Henry’s powerful memoir explores her childhood, family dynamics, mental health, and the impact of the Christchurch and Kaikoura earthquakes on her family. The assuredness of the writing is complemented by the attractiveness of the book.
In this exquisitely produced book, Anna Rogers introduces us to the little-known story of New Zealand’s medical services during the Great War. Ambitious in scope, and engagingly written, all dimensions of the medical effort are covered, as are the significant challenges the doctors, nurses, stretcher-bearers, ambulance drivers and pharmacists faced in treating the traumatic impacts of war on the bodies and minds of soldiers. A remarkable history told with skill, compassion and empathy.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #122 (6.4.19)
Read our latest NEWSLETTER and find out about the books we've been reading, about our Book of the Week, new releases, giveaways, amusements, and upcoming events (including something rather exciting happening in September).
>> Read Thomas's review.
>> The author reads from his novel.
>> An interview with Max Porter.
>> Printing the letterpress pages.
>> How Lanny came to be.
>> Porter reads from his first novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers.
>> Read Thomas's review of Grief is the Thing with Feathers.
>> Pushing the boundaries of the written word.
>> Coffee with Max Porter.
>>GIVEAWAY: We have a signed and numbered letterpress printing of an extract from Lanny (you can see this being printed here) and a Lanny tote bag to give away courtesy of Faber & Faber and Allen & Unwin NZ. To go in the draw, purchase a copy of the book during April.
 | Lanny by Max Porter {Reviewed by THOMAS} Wherever humans gather they begin to do each other harm. The size of human gathering that optimises this harm is called, in England, a village. Neither small enough for differences to be accommodated nor large enough for them to be ignored, a village allows its inhabitants full exercise of their capacities for intolerance, for suspicion, for collective cruelty. In Max Porter’s poetic and affecting short novel Lanny, a couple move to one such village with their highly imaginative son, Lanny. The first part of the book is told in the alternating voices of the parents and of Pete, the elderly artist from whom Lanny receives art lessons. Lanny’s mother is trying to pull out of a period of depression, writing a crime thriller, and his father continues to commute to London, both a presence and an absence in the lives of the other members of his family. We see the ethereal Lanny through their eyes, but it is perhaps Pete who identifies most with his original ways of thinking and original ways of seeing. Narrated in the voices of these characters, the text provides access only to what they are prepared to acknowledge, leaving uncertain spaces. There is a fourth ‘voice’ in this first part of the book, that of ‘Dead Papa Toothwort’, a personification of a force of nature suppressed in modern life, a principle of decay and regrowth, assailing social fixity and seen primarily in its negative aspect as a force of destruction or death. From beneath the structures of stultification that comprises, to Porter, English village life, even Englishness itself, from the land, from growing and rotting things, from nature, comes the force that will bring down those structures. The first part of the book is saturated with ominous feeling as Toothwort approaches and wanders the village. As with the plant from which he gets his name, Toothwort is parasitic: like death, he has no form but the form he borrows, no words but the words he borrows. “He does the voices,” writes Porter, after Shakespeare, referring to himself, perhaps, as much as to his character. The Toothwort sections are comprised largely of odd snippets and freighted phrases such as are overheard in passing the conversations of others, lines often arranged on the page in a typographically eccentric way like the verbal detritus they are. Just as Toothwort uses phrases gleaned from the village to remake into his purposes, so does the author. A text always contains the ominous presence of the author’s intention, the author as a fateful presence, constructing the sentences but at the same time drawing them towards their death. Toothwort appears in the guise of ordinary things because the ordinary really is full of horror and the kind of undoing that he represents. He is “reckoning with the terrible joke of the flesh and the rubbery links between life and death.” Toothwort wanders the village and ‘chooses’ Lanny, the being most like himself. The second part of the book is told in myriad unattributed but distinct voices of people in the village, along with Lanny’s parents, Pete, and people involved in the search for Lanny after he disappears. These muttered, declaimed, gossipped or published passages demonstrate how, after a crisis is not quickly resolved, the worst aspects of people often come to the fore and people speak and act their prejudices, suspicions, jealousies and resentments, using them to vault to conclusions that relieve their uncertainty. Pete is beaten, Lanny’s mother slurred, anyone with a difference resented or suspected. The village builds itself into an unhealthy state of what could only be called excitement. These ‘external’ snippets are uncomfortable. The reader, like the villagers, is a voyeur, implicated in the crisis that exists for and because of those - villagers and readers - who observe and shape the crisis. We jump to conclusions and reveal our prejudices as do the villagers. We resent the author who reveals us to ourselves as the stories of the voyeurs swamp the facts (or, rather, the absence of facts). The third part of the book begins in the most internal of modes: the dreams of those closest to Lanny (his parents and Pete), dreams of Toothwort-catalysed possible Lannys and possible fates for Lanny. The sequence resolves into a dream of Lanny’s mother, of how Toothwort reveals Lanny to her in this dream, of how she wakes, “breathes in the flesh particles of generations of villagers before her and it tastes like mould and wet tweed,” and finds him, and of what comes after. Lanny’s mother is “caught between what is real and what is not,” however, and I can’t excise my suspicion that the entire sequence, including its resolution, is her dream or desire, a ‘possible’ but not necessarily ‘true’ story, a trajectory in her mind, a disengagement from other, external, possibly more ‘true’ stories - but isn’t fiction always like this? This is a remarkable book. Porter has the uncanny ability to evoke the ordinary and then make it reveal a certain beauty and depth and horror just as it slips away from our ability to hold it in our minds. |
 | The End We Start From by Megan Hunter As her waters break, the water rises. London is flooding and a young mother is about to give birth. Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From is a mesmerising and poetic novel in the vein of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, yet it is quieter and more illuminating. Sparse and brilliant sentences and thought pieces punctuate the pages, each word vital and necessary. Hunter has taken a journey and laid bare its essence and emotional pinpoints. We only know the family through the eyes of the mother - she is ever present in our consciousness - and those around her are known by their capital letter only, R (her partner), Z (her child), R’s parents N & G. Each moment is a struggle. Leaving London, finding safe roads, arriving in the countryside to the short-lived refuge at N &G’s home. Food and supplies are running out, and a visit to the nearest town brings only disaster. And the waters continue to rise, sending people further north across borders and into foreign territory, to refugee camps where conditions are far from ideal but camaraderie is useful for a new mother and her babe. Hunter looks us in the eye and, through her characters, contemplates the choices that people make in a crisis, the alliances they build despite fear and mistrust, the risks they will take to survive as well as the psychological patterns that play out - behaviours that defy rationality but express an innate necessity for self-determination. When R leaves the camp intent on finding better solutions, he is as much running away as he is securing his sanity. The need to be alone and uncrowded by humanity is paramount. Our narrator moves herself onward, determined to find safety and tranquility for herself and her child despite the danger of permanently losing contact with R. She hopes she is leaving enough clues - even when those clues are little more than stating her existence to herself and the broken landscape around her. This is a world that doesn’t stretch too far from reality - climate will (and does already) alter how we live on the earth and we will increasingly see the movement of people due to extreme weather. This novella could be described as Cli-fi (Climate science fiction), but at its nub it is a book about love and connection, about how humanity endures and what we can overcome even when it alters us irrevocably. At the start of the book, Hunter has chosen to quote from T.S.Eliot: What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning, The end is where we start from. This leads you into the first chapters and from there you will not want to leave until you get to the end - the new beginning. Hunter’s language is evocative, and her observations prescient. Delicate, precise and memorable, this is a novella to be immersed in. |
NEW RELEASES
The much anticipated new novel from the author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers taps deep veins of language and folklore as it tells of a young boy who becomes the focus of a mythical force.
"It's hard to express how much I loved Lanny. Books this good don't come along very often. It's a novel like no other, an exhilarating, disquieting, joyous read. It will reach into your chest and take hold of your heart." - Maggie O'Farrell
A wonderful, beautiful illustrated book in which Shapton demonstrates how memories accumulate and images haunt us, how stories and histories perpetuate themselves through residues that become increasingly firmly lodged in our minds. From the author of the innovative novel Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris: Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry.
“Guestbook reveals Shapton as a ventriloquist, a diviner, a medium, a force, a witness, a goof, and above all, a gift. One of the smartest, most moving, most unexpected books I have read in a very long time.” – Rivka Galchen
>> Leanne Shapton's website.
A woman's teenage son takes his own life. It is incomprehensible. The woman is a writer, and so she attempts to comprehend her grief in the space she knows best: on the page, as an imagined conversation with the child she has lost. He is as sharp and funny and serious in death as he was in life itself, and he will speak back to her, unable to offer explanation or solace, but not yet, not quite, gone.
"As always, Li writes with a shimmering and deeply felt precision. The tone is both astringent and faintly mischievous, recalling the dialogue in a J.M. Coetzee novel or the wordplay of Ali Smith and Lydia Davis." - Guardian
"Controlled understatement, scrupulous and unsparing lucidity - a work of great moral poise and dignity. I have not read such a compelling work in years." - Independent
>> Li wrote the book following the suicide of her own son.
>> Read Thomas's review of Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life.
What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times? Spring. The great connective. With an eye to the migrancy of story over time, and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tells the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown Smith opens the door.
"Her best book yet." - Observer
"There are some writers who never let you down. They’re not big stars and their books are not preceded by a tsunami of hype. They simply do what writers do best, producing novels that are so apparently effortless that a wise reader recognises just how difficult they must be to construct. Tessa Hadley is one such writer. Throughout her career, Hadley has explored the middle-class existence, its ennui and its deceptions, with great skill. She has a keen psychological insight that allows her to create multifaceted characters that remain with the reader long after the story has come to an end. It’s no surprise, then, that Late in the Day is a powerful addition to her already distinguished body of work. Really, a rather brilliant novel." - John Boyne, Irish Times
>>Listed for the 2019 Folio Prize.
The Baby is a mother's project and a writer's project - how to reconcile these two demanding roles? What is a baby? And why are there so few of them in literature?
"Vintage Darrieussecq: tender, disturbing and indelible." - Chloe Hooper
Hadassah's poetry deals with themes of love, sex and depression. She describes it" "Politically it's about leaning in to the negative stereotypes projected onto women, and exploring what it means to embrace and humanise them. Personally it's about me working through the loss of the life I thought I would have. Overall it's about how, no matter what happens, women always have shared experiences of moving through the world."
>>'Ruined Women'.
The new utterly convincing and compelling novel from Whangaroa resident David Vann, reimagining his father's final days. Middle-aged and deeply depressed, Jim arrives in California from Alaska and surrenders himself to the care of his brother Gary, who intends to watch over him. Swinging unpredictably from manic highs to extreme lows, Jim wanders ghost-like through the remains of his old life, attempting to find meaning in his tattered relationships with family and friends. As sessions with his therapist become increasingly combative and his connections to others seem ever more tenuous, Jim is propelled forwards by his thoughts, which have the potential to lead him, despairingly, to his end.
>> Read an extract.
Superb nature writing about the animals and plants that live in and around an English pond.
"Britain's finest living nature writer." - The Times
>>Also available: The Wood.
Written with great subtlety and economy, Josipovici's novel, told from the perspectives of Pierre Bonnard, his wife and their daughter, reveals the depths of pain and harm that not only give rise to art but also result from the circumstances of its production. From the author of the Goldsmiths shortlisted The Cemetery in Barnes.
"What is caught in the paintings and the novel is a pristine look, a moment between words." - Michael Rosen
"Its translucence fosters an extraordinary purity of form and concept. It is serious, even challenging about the conditions of artistic production." - Observer
"Josipovici proves once again to be one of the very best writers now at work in the English language." - Guardian
An estranged family’s tragic story is incrementally revealed in this surreal young adults' novel. Family abuse and neglect and disordered substance use are part of the lives of many of the characters here, but, at the root, this white family has been poisoned by virulent racism.
"Heavily meditative, this strange and heart-wrenching tale is stunningly original." - Kirkus
>>A.S. King on identifying the author's purpose.
Everyone eats potatoes, but what do they mean? To the United Nations they mean global food security (potatoes are the world's fourth most important food crop). To 18th-century philosophers they promised happiness. Nutritionists warn that too many increase your risk of hypertension. For the poet Seamus Heaney they conjured up both his mother and the 19th-century Irish famine. The potato is entangled with the birth of the liberal state and the idea that individuals, rather than communities, should form the building blocks of society. Potatoes also speak about family, and our quest for communion with the universe. Thinking about potatoes turns out to be a good way of thinking about some of the important tensions in our world.
Sylvie rows across a lake to her wedding. Madeleine flees to Paris and works in Le Livre Bleu bookshop. Isobel is summoned to her doctor's surgery late one afternoon. Smither weaves the stories of three generations of women and life in three cities - Auckland, Paris, Melbourne - into this well-observed novel.
"Elizabeth Smither brings wit, warmth and wisdom to this absorbing and beautifully written inter-generational story." - Peter Simpson
>> Someone we know reviews the book.
A survey of work by more than 70 contemporary floral designers who are truly extending the boundaries of their art. Your mouth will drop open.
>> Have a look inside and resist if you can.
Fetishised, demonized, celebrated, outlawed, the high heel is central to the iconography of modern womanhood. But are high heels good? Are they feminist? What does it mean for a woman (or a man) to choose to wear them? Meditating on the labyrinthine nature of sexual identity and the performance of gender, Brennan moves from film to fairytale, from foot binding to feminism, and from the golden ratio to glam rock.
Available for the first time in English, these various writings (letters, apologia, appreciations of fellow artists, interviews, farcical film scripts, prose poems, manifestos) give insight into the various incarnations of the artist: Surrealist, literalist, celebrity, rascal.
''Mind on Fire is a truly powerful, arresting, haunting account. Arnold Thomas Fanning has reckoned with the darkest matter of his heart and mind, and I challenge anyone not to be moved by that.'' - Sara Baume
''In this strange and singular book, Fanning mercilessly excavates the infernal underworld of his own years of madness. The book is ultimately not quite like anything else I've read, and brought me as close to the lived reality of mental illness as I have ever been. It's a significant achievement: a painful, inexorable work of autobiography, whose existence is its own form of redemption.'' - Mark O'Connell
''Incredibly important.'' - Emilie Pine
>> Short-listed for the 2019 Wellcome Prize.
Tourists, terrorists, secularists, hackers, fundamentalists, transhumanists, algorithmicians - in this book Roberto Calasso considers the tribes that inhabit and inform the world today, a world that feels more elusive than ever before. Yet once contrasted with the period between 1933 and 1945, when the world made a partially successful attempt at self-annihilation, the new millennium begins to take on an unprecedented form. What emerges is something illusory, ever-shifting and occasionally murderous - the unnamable present.
Posing as news snippets, which may or may not represent actual events, Fénéon's briefest-of-brief 'novels' appear originally in the Paris daily newspaper Le Matin in 1906. They still read as Molotov cocktails of irony hurled against both literature and life.
>> Read a selection.
A beautiful picture book telling the story of Pat Brown, a post-WW2 child migrant from London who now lives in Nelson.
>>The book will be launched at VOLUME at 4:30 PM on Wednesday 24 April on Pat's 80th birthday. All welcome (there will be cake).
Traverso puts the current cocktail of right-wing populism, identitarianism, Islamophobia, and regressive nationalist anti-globalism into a historical context: what we are seeing is neither the reproduction of old fascisms nor something wholly new.
Clever, eco-conscious recipes for daily household goods: mayonnaise, crackers, yoghurt, bread, muesli bars, hummus, cheese, food wraps, cleaners, air fresheners, balms, hand scrubs and candles.
The Night Book and Soon in one vicious volume. An unflinching look at politics and power, contemporary New Zealand society and the arid morality of the privileged.
>>And a TV series!
An insightful an sympathetic account of life in a remote Muslim village in the highlands of Pakistan. Henson has also recorded villagers' autobiographical stories in Women of Shimshal.
Degradation, childhood trauma, unrequited love, irreconcilable relationships - what more could you want?
Death never has a day off, so he has accumulated a lot of leave entitlement. HR insists he use it up, so off Death goes to take a break in the Land of the Living. How do the living relax and enjoy themselves? Graphic novel.
>> Read Thomas's review.
>> Try Gregory Kan's text manipulator!
 | Under Glass by Gregory Kan {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“It’s hard / for the world of all possible things / to choose the things that actually happen,” writes Gregory Kan in a book that poses the same generative problems to text as it does to ‘life’ (so to call it). By what methods do we combine and recombine, filter and refilter, separate and reseparate, alter and realter whatever it is in which we find ourselves when we have got sufficiently far in these processes to call this finding? To be aware and to continue to be aware is to maintain the most delicate of balances between words and the thoughts that they both describe and form, and Kan’s remarkable second book, Under Glass, is written with sufficient clarity to obscure that which it does not address, and with sufficient subtlety that the wounds it leaves are difficult to pinpoint (they are pinpoint wounds). The book is comprised of two finely written helical strands. A sequence of short prose pieces in the first person and present tense describe, with careful precision,the narrator’s progress across a landscape and then descent below a lighthouse, drawn by an elusive “second sun”, as black as it is bright, uncertain of its interiority or exteriority. The prose is personal but specific, describing precisely a ‘world’, but one inaccessible to others, a dream world, or a world that has the same relationship to this one as have the worlds of dreams. The verse sequence spliced or twisted through this narrative is often addressed to ‘you’, speaks of ‘we’, is interpersonal, emotional, dealing in nondefinitive generalisations, if such things are possible, almost completely devoid of specific evidence of a forensic or narrative (or forensonarrative or narratoforensic) sense. “Confusing myself is a way to be honest.” Sometimes there is the feeling that a shortcoming or realisation of some sort lies in the past, something that subtly destabilised the nature of a relationship, something that has introduced uncertainty into an area formerly filled with hope (hope being, after all, only an immature form of uncertainty). “I draw my ideas cruelly around me.” “Sometimes I write so that you can be punished / the way I think I deserve to be punished.” The verse pieces take place at a time when an apparent relationship has the apparent bulk of its happenings in its past (but is this not always the case?), the weight of this past pulling at and attenuating the progress into the future. How to go on? What second sun can keep us aware enough to move towards it? Intimacy is the predicament in the verse, just as aloneness is in the prose. Where the verse begins by saying, “The things that are really big and really close / are too big and too close to be seen,” the prose reaches the point in the pursuit of the second sun at which it says, “I recognise the second sun from a distance, but not up close.” The prose with its deliberate track and the verse with its hovering double-spaced lines slowing our reading almost touch, resonate, snag themselves upon each other. “The second sun reveals all and remembers nothing.” At the end of the book, the prose narrator has gone far enough, deep enough, into the interior ‘place’ to step through a crack in that second sun, and the ‘I’ of the verse has relinquished sufficient autonomy to, or acknowledged sufficient autonomy of, the ‘you’ for the wall between the internal and the external to be breached simultaneously from both directions, for the worlds to be inverted, turned inside-out about the separating skin that is the only part of ourselves that we can know to exist, the external reached through the most internal thing, that which was lost seen for the first time once it is finally released. Under Glass is a subtle and powerful book, so cleanly written that it leaves no palpable residue but rather a flavour, a quality of awareness indistinguishable from the longing to reread.
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 | Enchantée by Gita Trelease {Reviewed by STELLA} The world is changing and Camille must find her place in it if she is to survive. It's a time of strife in France. On the cusp of a revolution, the court and its aristocrats are enraptured by their own fantasy, living the high life in their palaces, playing games, partying and gambling while the people in the street starve, die of disease, and the harvests are crippled. But for Camille, her problems are more immediate. She’s seventeen, her parents have died from smallpox, her younger sister, Sophie, is still frail and recovering from her brush with the disease, and her brother, the supposed bread-winner of the family, is mired in debts and drunkenness. Paris 1789, on the edge of revolution, is not an easy, nor safe, place for a young woman, but Camille has a gift: a little magic at her fingertips. Being able to turn small nubs of metal into coin means bread and candles. But the coins are only temporary and, as Camille has to venture further and further from her home, she realises that something more dramatic is required. The turning point comes out of desperation when Alain, her brother, steals the rent money that she has carefully hidden away and, protesting this theft, he rages against her, striking her down. Maman always warned against opening the partially burnt chest, but needs must and Camille discovers her magic is far more powerful than she imagined. Also more dangerous. Transformed by a dress reeking with dark magic and alive to the touch, Camille enters the glittering world of Versailles and the crazy wickedness of the court - only to gamble for what she and Sophie need. Yet she is enchanting and enchanted - captured by the hunger of the magic, fascinated by the glamour of the court, propelled on by the wit and intrigue of those she meets and their pretty and petty, sometimes dangerous, liaisons. As the Baroness de la Fontaine she navigates this world at first nervously and then at ease, with an appetite she can’t quite believe of herself. Being the Baroness takes its toll though, and the more she lives this double life, the greater the curse of the powerful magic, draining her of vitality and leading her towards a dark tunnel of sacrifice and dangerous individuals. All are not who they seem. In the world of Camille, life isn’t straightforward either. A chance encounter with a group of young men - balloon enthusiasts and amateur scientists - sets her on another course of discovery about herself and her ability to be daring and brave, physically and emotionally. At the centre of this world is Lazare, the reluctant aristocrat and charming (and good-looking) aeronaut - both accepted into the upper-class circles by dint of birth and his powerful fathe,r and looked down upon for his difference - his part-Indian heritage. Camille is both drawn to him yet perplexed by him and her new-found emotions. How can she trust anyone and be truthful, when her life is so complicated? Can she control the magic or will the magic dominate her? This teen novel is filled to the brim with history, intrigue, danger, friends and enemies, love and deceit. Highly enjoyable and charmingly compelling. |
NEW RELEASES
Chris McCabe playfully reclaims the inventive spirit of the founding text of Modernism in English: Ulysses. Tracing the same structure as the original, McCabe describes the events of the following day, 17th June 1904. Stephen Dedalus wakes up, hungover, with scores and debts to settle, unaware that Leopold Bloom is waking up in Eccles street with his own plans for him. Dedalus is shot through with cut and paste disruptions from the Digital Age. From 1980s Text Adventure gaming to Google maps and pop-ups. McCabe picks up the tradition of Laurence Sterne and B.S. Johnson, underpinning the paragraphs of his storytelling with concrete poetry.
“Parts of this book will remain with me, and pollute my reading of Hamlet and Ulysses, forever. I also add it to my personal library of Great Books About Dead Fathers.” – Max Porter (author of Grief is the Thing With Feathers)
The much anticipated autofictional novel from the author of What I Loved. The process by which an author looks back on her earlier self and turns their mutual regard into fiction is utterly compelling.
"Among the many riches of Siri Hustvedt's portrait of a young woman finding her way as an artist are her reflections on how acts of remembering, if they reach deep enough, can heal the broken present, as well as on the inherent uncanniness of feeling oneself brought into being by the writing hand. Her reflections are no less profound for being couched as philosophical comedy of a Shandean variety." - J. M. Coetzee
>> "I'm writing for my life."
>> "Everything is autobiography and nothing is."
>> On reading.
A wonderful collection of accounts by outstanding people of how books and reading helped them become who they are. Each letter is accompanied by a full-page illustration from an outstanding book illustrator. Includes contributions from Jane Goodall, Neil Gaiman, Jerome Bruner, Shonda Rhimes, Ursula K. Le Guin, Yo-Yo Ma, Judy Blume, Lena Dunham, Elizabeth Gilbert, Jacqueline Woodson, Marianne Dubuc, Sean Qualls, Oliver Jeffers, Maira Kalman, Mo Willems, Isabelle Arsenault, Chris Ware, Liniers, Shaun Tan, Tomi Ungerer, and Art Spiegelman.
>> Preview on Brain Pickings.
A subtle and intelligent novel 'about' the relationship - and the sapce -between the art a woman views and thinks about, and her own life. What associative sparks are released in our minds when viewing art?
"Gainza is a writer who feels immediately important. I felt like a door had been kicked open in my brain." - Guardian
>> The artworks mentioned in the book.
>> Stuttering cultures.
Uncertain Manifesto by Frédéric Pajak $35
The writer and artist Frederic Pajak was ten when he began to "dream of a work that would mingle words and images: bits of adventure, collected memories, sentences, phantoms, forgotten heroes, trees, the stormy sea," but it was not until he was in his forties that this dream took form. This unusual book is a memoir born of reading and a meditation on the lives and ideas, the motivations, feelings, and fates of some of Pajak's heroes: Samuel Beckett and the artist Bram van Velde, and, especially, Walter Benjamin, whose travels to Moscow, Naples, and Ibiza, whose experiences with hashish, whose faltering marriage and love affairs and critique of modern experience Pajak re-creates and reflects on in word and image. Pajak's moody black-and-white drawings accompany the text throughout, though their bearing on it is often indirect and all the more absorbing for that. Between word and image, the reader is drawn into a mysterious space that is all Pajak's as he seeks to evoke vanished histories and to resist a modern world more and more given over to a present without a past.
>> Walter Benjamin in Ibiza.
"I found Sea People the most intelligent, empathic, engaging, wide-ranging, informative, and authoritative treatment of Polynesian mysteries that I have ever read. Christina Thompson's gorgeous writing arises from a deep well of research and succeeds in conjuring a lost world." - Dava Sobel
"To those of the western hemisphere, the Pacific represents a vast unknown, almost beyond our imagining; for its Polynesian island peoples, this fluid, shifting place is home. Christina Thompson's wonderfully researched and beautifully written narrative brings these two stories together, gloriously and excitingly." - Philip Hoare
"Reading Mark Leidner’s writing taught me how to write, and I owe him an enormous debt of gratitude. He is my favourite writer. His new collection of short stories Under The Sea is unbelievably good. The stories range from long realist pieces about teenagers trying to recover stolen drugs and a middle aged women having a meltdown in a coffee shop to a Chekhovian drama set in an ant colony and a kid writing his memoirs in the style of Philip Marlowe." - Hera Lindsay Bird
>>Hera Lindsay Bird's unholy love for Mark Leidner.
Ernaux's account of her experiences having an illegal abortion while a 23-year-old student in Paris in 1963 is meticulous, nuanced, and, because of its dispassionate tone, moving.
>> Read Thomas's review of The Years.
In this remarkable memoir, McBee, a trans man, trains to fight in a charity match at Madison Square Garden while struggling to untangle the vexed relationship between masculinity and violence. Through his experience boxing - learning to get hit and to hit back, wrestling with the camaraderie of the gym, confronting the betrayals and strength of his own body - McBee examines the weight of male violence, the pervasiveness of gender stereotypes, and the limitations of conventional masculinity.
Shortlisted for the 2019 Wellcome Prize and the 2018 Baillie Gifford Prize.
Doggerland supposes a world in the not so distant future suffering the effects of climate change, pollution, surveillance and decay. It tells the story of an old man (who isn't really that old) and a boy (who isn't really still a boy) living alone in a post apocalyptic world tending to a vast wind farm.
"An unremittingly wet book, damp and cold and rusted, blasted by waves and tempests, but also warm, generous and often genuinely moving. It is a debut of considerable force, emotional weight and technical acumen." -Guardian
"The Road meets Waiting for Godot: powerful, unforgettable, unique." - Melissa Harrison
>> Listed for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.
A murderer's confession shows how widely the roots of his crime are spread in the injustices of the modern world. Ah Hock is an ordinary, uneducated man born in a Malaysian fishing village and now trying to make his way in a country that promises riches and security to everyone, but delivers them only to a chosen few. With Asian society changing around him, like many he remains trapped in a world of poorly paid jobs that just about allow him to keep his head above water but ultimately lead him to murder a migrant worker from Bangladesh.
There are two peoples living in the city of Ursa: the Cerels and the Travesters. Travesters move freely and enjoy a fine quality of life. Cerel men are kept in wild camps and the women are no longer allowed to have children. The Director presides over all with an iron fist. Fifteen-year-old Leho can’t remember a time when Cerels lived without fear in Ursa. His parents once tried to organise an uprising – his mother was blinded, and his father was taken away. But now his world is changing. Revolution is coming. People will die. Will Leho be able to save his family?
Rosie Belton uses captures with intimacy and immediacy the earthquakes experienced by the people of Canterbury. Nothing could have prepared her, she says, for the severity of the quakes, starting with the first one in 2010, and then the ongoing disruption over the next six years: the grinding reality of living through so many months of shaking and the after-effects. Like many creative individuals, Belton found that writing about those terrible events as they unfolded developed into a coping mechanism. And now, the result of her careful record-keeping and reflections can be read and appreciated by others whose lives have been affected by similarly unwanted change.
"I am reminded of what Harold Nicholson wrote about London during the Blitz: the same uncertainty as to what horror was going to happen next.” – Michael Palin
>> Come and hear Rosie Belton speak. The Suter (Bridge Street). Wednesday 10 April, 5:30 PM.
Harsu has five droplets of god blood and a treasured cloak to remember his father by. Now his father is gone, he lives with his mother, his only friend an old onager donkey. And something is not right with Harsu's mother. She has started kidnapping children, and sometimes her skin grows a soft down, little sharp ears emerge, and she turns into a horrible stoat. Harsu doesn't know if five godlet drops are enough to help him rescue the kidnapped children and turn his own mother to good. And now that he is twelve, he too might be becoming a were-animal.
Can machines be creative? Will they soon be able to learn from the art that moves us, and understand what distinguishes it from the mundane? Du Sautoy examines the nature of creativity, as well as providing an essential guide into how algorithms work, and the mathematical rules underpinning them. He asks how much of our emotional response to art is a product of our brains reacting to pattern and structure, and exactly what it is to be creative in mathematics, art, language and music.
>> Too dangerous to release?
"There used to be an empty chair at the back of my class, but now a new boy called Ahmet is sitting in it. He's nine years old (just like me), but he's very strange. He never talks and never smiles and doesn't like sweets - not even lemon sherbets, which are my favourite! But then I learned the truth: Ahmet really isn't very strange at all. He's a refugee who's run away from a War. A real one. With bombs and fires and bullies that hurt people. And the more I find out about him, the more I want to help."
>> The book has just won the Waterstones Children's Book Prize.
Isolated and arrestingly beautiful, the island of Capri has been a refuge for renegade artists and writers fleeing the strictures of conventional society from the time of Augustus, who bought the island in 29 BC, to the early twentieth century, when the poet and novelist Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen was in exile there after being charged with corrupting minors, to the 1960s, when Truman Capote spent time on the island. Also features the Marquis de Sade, Goethe, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Compton Mackenzie, Rilke, Lenin, and Gorky.
From the first time he was stopped and searched as a child, to the day he realised his mother was white, to his first encounters with racist teacher, race and class have shaped Akala's life and outlook. In this book he takes his own experiences and widens them out to look at the social, historical and political factors that have left Btitain where it is today. Covering everything from the police, education and identity to politics, sexual objectification and the far right, Natives speaks directly to British denial and squeamishness when it comes to confronting issues of race and class that are at the heart of the legacy of Britain's racialised empire.
"My book of the year. It's personal, historical, political, and it speaks to where we are now. This is the book I've been waiting for - for years." - Benjamin Zephaniah
"This powerful, wide-ranging study picks apart the British myth of meritocracy." - David Olusoga, Guardian
>> Unfiltered.
An empathetic biography of this esteemed Chilean poet, possibly murdered for opposing the Pinochet regime.
Virginal, chaste, humble, patiently waiting for rescue by brave knights and handsome princes: this idealised - and largely mythical - notion of the medieval noblewoman still lingers. Yet the reality was very different, as Kelcey Wilson-Lee shows in this account of the five daughters of the English king, Edward I. The lives of these sisters - Eleanora, Joanna, Margaret, Mary and Elizabeth - ran the full gamut of experiences open to royal women in the Middle Ages.
Three women on three continents are forced by circumstances to rebel against their fates. Their stories plait together like a braid. An untouchable in India, a wig-maker in Sicily, a lawyer in Canada - are they linked by more than their courage?
Demonstrates a method of drawing using spherical perspective and shows it to be more accurate than more commonly used perspectival methods.
From Acker's earliest interviews - filled with playful, evasive, and counter-intuitive responses - to the last interview before her death where she reflects on the state of American literature.
>> A Kathy Acker documentary.
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.
>> 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. |