BOOKS @ VOLUME #127 (11.5.19)
Reviews. Recommendations. Competitions. News. Events. The newest new releases. Our Book of the Week. Read our newsletter.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #127 (11.5.19)
Reviews. Recommendations. Competitions. News. Events. The newest new releases. Our Book of the Week. Read our newsletter.
 | Ursa by Tina Shaw {Reviewed by STELLA} Fast-paced, exciting and moving, Tina Shaw’s Ursa opens with Leho watching the Black Marks burning books. In the city of Ursa, there are two peoples - the Cerals and the Travesters. One works for the other; one has the resources while the other has the left-overs; one has choices while the other has none. Leho is a Ceral and a canny one at that - able to keep in the shadows, to wander the city unnoticed if he is constantly alert. What happened to make Ursa this way? And why is it getting worse for the Cerals? Is the idea of a promised new land too good to be true? In Tina Shaw’s teen novel we are introduced to a great cast of characters: Leho and his family - his grandmother who holds them all together through iron will, his mother who has been blinded by a sadistic officer of the Black Marks, his older sister who is secretly defiant, and his older brother working in the dangerous factory and plotting even more dangerous endeavours of a revolutionary nature. No one seems to take much notice of Leho, but he’s determined to prove his worth. Not only is he setting out to play his part in overthrowing the system, but he also has a greater secret - a new-found friendship with an unusual Travestor girl, Emee, who he is curiously drawn to. Will there be a time when a Ceral boy and Travestor girl can be friends? Shaw writes with great pace and lively descriptions of the disparate halves of the city, hooking the reader in. Through Leho’s eyes, we discover more about the world he lives in as he begins to understand more about the history of Ursa and the people's desires and needs. He begins to understand his older siblings and the difficulties they endure, and he begins to see the Travesters not as one oppressor but as people with diverse viewpoints. But he also sees increasing hardship and brutality as he is more engaged with an adult world through his work at the Director’s garden, a job he creates to get closer to the heart of control - dangerously close. And he is not the only one courting danger: revolution is coming. Can he save his family and his friends? What can one unnoticed boy achieve against the Black Marks, against the Director, against a system that is unfair? This is a coming-of-age story that has heart and hope. An increasingly important reminder of regimes that denigrate groups of people through control of resources, with borders and power for the benefit of a chosen few, in a time where nationalism and populist movements are on the rise. Excellent teen reading with its great story-telling and character development, and with an underlying message to rise up against oppression. |
 | The Faculty of Dreams by Sara Stridsberg {Reviewed by THOMAS} In this beautifully abject and uncomfortable biographical novel, Sara Stridsberg suspends her subject, Valerie Solanas, indefinitely at the point of death in San Francisco’s disreputable Bristol Hotel in 1988 and subjects her to a long sequence of interrogations by a self-styled ‘narrator’, superimposing upon the distended moment of death two additional narratives stands: of her life from childhood until the moment Solanas shot Andy Warhol in 1968, and from the trial via the mental hospital to society's margins and the Bristol hotel. Stridsberg has strung a multitude of short dialogues in these strands, typically preceded by the narrator setting the scene, so to call it, in the second person, and then scripting conversations between Solanas and the narrator, or with Solanas’s mother, Dorothy, or with her friend/lover Cosmogirl, or with Warhol or ‘the state’ or a psychiatrist or a nurse, or with the opportunistic Maurice Girodias, whose Olympia Press published Solanas’s remarkable SCUM Manifesto, a radical feminist tirade against the patriarchy at once scathingly acute and deliciously ironic. Stridsberg (aided by her translator into English, Deborah Bragan-Turner) conjures Solanas’s voice perfectly, animating the documentary material in a way that is both sensitive and brutal. This is, of course, both against and absolutely in line with Solanas’s wishes, making herself available to “no sentimental young woman or sham author playing at writing a novel about me dying. You don’t have my permission to go through my material.” The Solanas of the dialogues is often largely the deathbed Solanas, suspended in a liminal state between times and on the edge of consciousness, whereas her interlocutors are more affixed to their relevant times, for instance her mother Dorothy forever caught in Solanas’s childhood - in which Valerie was abused by her father and, later, by her mother’s boyfriends - yet hard to get free of, due to “that life-threatening bond between children and mothers.” The scene/dialogue mechanism that comprises most of the novel appears to remove authorial intrusion from the representation of Solanas’s life more effectively than a strictly ‘factual’ biography would have done, while all the time flagging the fictive nature of the project. “I fix my attention on the surface. On the text. All text is fiction. It wasn’t real life; it was an experience. They were just fictional characters, a fictional girl, fictional figurants. It was fictional architecture and a fictional narrator. She asked me to embroider her life. I chose to believe in the one who embroiders.” Stridsberg does a remarkable job at being at once both clinical and passionate, at undermining our facile distinctions between tenderness and abjection, between beauty and transgression, between radical critique and mental illness, between verbal delicacy and the outpouring of “all these sewers disguised as mouths.” Solanas shines out from the abjection of America, unassimilable, a person with no place, no possible life. “It was an illness, a deranged, totally inappropriate grief response. I laughed and flew straight into the light. There was nothing to respond appropriately to.” At the end of the book the three strands of narrative draw together and terminate together: Solanas shoots Warhol at the moment of her own death two decades later, and the personae are released. All except Warhol, who lived in fear of Solanas thereafter: “People say Andy Warhol never really came back from the dead, they say that throughout his life he remained unconscious, one of the living dead.” |
The winners of the 2019 OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS will be announced on Tuesday 14 May. In the lead-up, you have been able to indicate your preferred (or most likely) category winners using the VOLUME OCKHAMETER (and Acornometer). The books chosen by you as the winners are: The Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize: The Cage by Lloyd Jones (Penguin Books). The Peter and Mary Biggs Award for Poetry: Poūkahangatus by Tayi Tibble (Victoria University Press). The Illustrated Non-Fiction Award: Birdstories by Geoff Norman (Potton & Burton). The Royal Society Te Apārangi Award for General Non-Fiction: Memory Pieces by Maurice Gee (Victoria University Press). >>See how close the voting was in each category. The winner of a copy of each of Tuesday's official category winners (courtesy of the publishers) is Jennifer McKay. Many thanks to everyone who used the Ockhameter (and Acornometer).
Don't Forget to Feed the Cat was assembled by Maclennan's daughter, Mary Bell Thornton from the letters back and forth between Maclennan and his family in New Zealand. His notes of gallery visits are appended. The book is published by The Cuba Press.
>> Please come to the launch of the book at VOLUME on Tuesday 14th May and 5:30.
>> Stewart Bell Maclennan was also an accomplished artist. >See some of his prints here. > See some others of his works here. >>And some watercolours here.
>> A biographical sketch of Stewart Bell Maclennan.
>> 1957.
>> The National Art Gallery was housed in the Dominion Museum building in Wellington, and was absorbed into Te Papa in 1998.
>>A poem by Mary Bell Thornton.
>>'Before the Act'.
>> Women in the Field, One and Two by Thomasin Sleigh features the National Art Gallery during Maclellan's stewardship.
>> Click and collect.
>> An abbreviated artist biography:
In her new poetry collection, Ashleigh Young (author of the Wyndham-Campbell prize-winning Can You Tolerate This?) fails to learn to drive, vanishes from the fossil record, and finally finishes writing a book.
Ashleigh Young will be appearing at the 2019 VOLUME Mapua Literary Festival, 20-22 September. Save the date.
>> Read Thomas's review of Can You Tolerate This?
Harwicz drags us to the most uncomfortable and fascinating aspects of love, need and dependency, by analysing the dynamics between a mother and her adult daughter, both searching through their own past and present as they try to give meaning to their lives and relationship. Feebleminded is the second book in Harwicz's 'involuntary trilogy', following the astounding Die, My Love.
"A kick up the arse to the literary novel. Feebleminded disassembles form, sensibility, everything." - Joanna Walsh
>>Read an extract.
>> Harwicz talks about the book at our Paris branch.
>>Read Thomas's review of Die, My Love.
A collection in five parts, Susan Howe's new book opens with a preface by the poet that lays out some of Debths' inspirations: the art of Paul Thek, the Isabella Stewart Gardner collection, and early American writings; and in it she also addresses memory's threads and galaxies, "the rule of remoteness," and "the luminous story surrounding all things noumenal." Following the preface are four sections of poetry: 'Titian Air Vent', 'Tom Tit Tot' (her newest collage poems), 'Periscope', and 'Debths'. As always with Howe, Debths brings what she terms "a not-being-in-the-no."
"Howe’s critical poetics are based, like Duchamp’s, in the powerful way in which we can reframe, re-contextualize what has been excluded from our traditional frames of attention." —Literary Hub
"Howe is bringing everything to the table, including poetry, history, research, politics, autobiography, imagination, obsession and love, all the while demonstrating how strange, puzzling, and untamed writing and thinking can be." —Maggie Nelson (Artforum)
>> Susan Howe reads from Debths.
When Gilbert Silvester, a journeyman lecturer on beard fashions in film, awakes one day from a dream that his wife has cheated on him, he flees - immediately, irrationally, inexplicably - for Japan. In Tokyo he discovers the travel writings of the great Japanese poet Basho. Suddenly, from Gilbert's directionless crisis there emerges a purpose: a pilgrimage in the footsteps of the poet to see the moon rise over the pine islands of Matsushima. Falling into step with another pilgrim - a young Japanese student called Yosa, clutching a copy of The Complete Manual of Suicide - Gilbert travels with Yosa across Basho's disappearing Japan, one in search of his perfect ending and the other the new beginning that will give his life meaning.
Short-listed for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize
"Almost miraculous in its successful blending of potentially clashing tones. The Pine Islands is a story that doesn’t tie up loose ends but leaves themes scattered as needles on the forest floor, allowing the reader to spot their patterns. The best approach to this beguiling, unpredictable book is to follow Gilbert’s advice on reciting poetry: 'to let it affect you, and simply accept it in all its striking, irrational beauty'." - The Guardian
Set around a small family farm on the edge of a bog, a few miles from the river Shannon, Minor Monuments is a collection of essays unfolding from the landscape of the Irish midlands. Taking in the physical and philosophical power of sound and music, and the effects of Alzheimer’s disease on a family, Ian Maleney questions the nature of home, memory, and the complex nature of belonging.
"Minor Monuments is brilliant, pulsing with intellect and insight, with each observation composed so beautifully as to be deeply moving. This is the kind of book that changes its reader." – Lisa McInerney
>> Ian Maleney, Sinead Gleeson and Emilie Pine on the new wave of Irish personal essays.
Porter's unnamed narrator is on a road trip between Auckland, Whangara and Levin with her friends Ashi and Ilana, haunted by the spectre of her emotionally abusive ex-boyfriend, her complicated family background and New Zealand's colonial history. Jealousies intensify as the young women work out who they are and who they might become.
Winner of the 2018 Michael Gifkins Prize.
"Attraction peels back the landscape to reveal deeper truths. The writer is right inside her material—a road trip that delivers a political and sexual coming-of-age narrative. The book is a slow-burning fuse that brims with intensely felt experience. Porter is an exciting new talent." - Lloyd Jones
>> Ruby Porter talks.
Stewart Bell Maclennan was the first director of New Zealand's National Art Gallery (from 1946 to 1968). In 1958 he travelled to America and Europe to visit and learn from leading galleries. His letters home from this trip are marked by great personal charm and are presented here with sketches made while travelling (he was also an accomplished artist).
>> Mary Bell Thornton, The Cuba Press and VOLUME would be delighted if you attended the launch of Don't Forget to Feed the Cat at VOLUME on Tuesday 14 May at 5:30.
New Zealand musician Shayne Carter tells the story of a life in music, taking us deep behind the scenes and songs of his riotous teenage bands Bored Games and the Doublehappys and his best-known bands Straitjacket Fits and Dimmer.
"Life life life. Music music music. Girls girls girls. Funny, painful, reflective and raw." - Emily Perkins
>> Shayne Carter talks with Kim Hill.
>> DoubleHappys live, Dunedin, 1984.
Ambivalence, angst, excoriating self-observation, the individual assailed by and assailing the crowd. The works of Kierkegaard prefigured the modern condition and still reward and surprise.
"Compelling." - Guardian
A lethal cocktail of memoir and criticism. A documentary through the speaker's post-adolescent relationships. An arrangement of time in Chemnitz, Bergen, Dublin, Paris, Gwangju, Munich and Madrid. An intimate portrayal of unstable masculinity and sexual repression. A study in artifice, honesty, faith and the image. An autobiography of a compulsive liar.
"One of the most interesting writers working in Ireland today. His essays demonstrate not only an impressive depth of learning, but an even more necessary depth of feeling." - Sally Rooney
Kudos forms, with Outline and Transit, one of the most remarkable literary projects of this decade. Cusk's effective removal of her narrator from the books, using her as an aperture through which the characters reveal their worst characteristics while trying to display their best, gives the books an austere clarity which liberates the reader from impediments in their own thought and perception. Highly recommended. Thomas's favourite book of 2018, now in paperback.
>>Read Thomas's "review".
>> Outline.
>> Transit.
Landfall 237 edited by Emma Neale $30
Featured artists: Sharon Singer, Ngahuia Harrison, Peter Trevelyan. Results and winning essays from the 2019 Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition, and judge’s report by Emma Neale. Writers: John Adams, Peter Bland, Laura Borrowdale, Bill Bradford, Iain Britton, Medb Charleton, Stephen Coates, Carolyn DeCarlo, John Dennison, Lynley Edmeades, David Eggleton, Joan Fleming, Jasmine Gallagher, John Gallas, Brett Gartrell, John Geraets, Tim Grgec, Michael Hall, Rebecca Hawkes, Joy Holley, Aaron Horrell, Gail Ingram, Claudia Jardine, Sam Keenan, Erik Kennedy, Arihia Latham, Jessica Le Bas, Wes Lee, Tina Makereti, Ria Masae, Cilla McQueen, Zoë Meager, Robynanne Milford, Sean Monaghan, Art Nahill, Kavita Nandan, Rachel O’Neill, Maris O’Rourke, Claire Orchard, Joanna Preston, essa may ranapiri, Anna Rankin, Jeremy Roberts, Leanne Radojkovich, Carrie Rudzinski, Kerrin P. Sharpe, Sarah Shirley, Rachel Smith, Elizabeth Smither, Catherine Trundle, Kirsteen Ure, Tam Vosper, Tom Weston, Anna Woods, Kirby Wright. Reviews.
The author of Arctic Dreams searches for meaning in a natural world increasingly damaged by the actions and inaction of humans.
"Horizon is magnificent; a contemporary epic, at once pained and urgent, personal and oracular. It tells the story of Lopez’s life through six main landscapes – from Cape Foulweather on the Oregon coast to the Queen Maud Mountains of Antarctica, by way of Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, the Turkana Uplands of East Africa and Port Arthur in Tasmania. Place becomes the means of fathoming time. Horizon is long, challenging and symphonic. Its patterns only disclose themselves over the course of a full, slow reading. Rhythms rise and surge across 500 pages; recursions and echoes start to weave. This is a book to which one must learn to listen. If one does, then – to borrow phrases from Lopez – 'it arrives as a cantus, tying the faraway place to the thing living deep inside us'. He has given us a grave, sorrowful, beautiful book, 35 years in the writing but still speaking to the present moment: 'No one can now miss the alarm in the air.'" - Guardian
Jon Savage's oral history of Joy Division is the last word on the band that ended with the suicide of Ian Curtis in Macclesfield on 18 May, 1980. It weaves together interviews conducted by the author, but never used in the making of the film Joy Division (2007) which told the story of the band in their own words, as well as those of their peers, collaborators, and contemporaries.
>>'I Remember Nothing'.
Following a route from the Cairngorms of Scotland to the fire-watch lookouts of Washington State, from Iceland's 'Houses of Joy' to the Utah desert; frozen ghost towns in Svalbard to shrines in Japan; Roald Dahl's Home Counties writing hut to a lighthouse in the North Atlantic, Richards explores landscapes which have inspired writers, artists and musicians, and asks: why are we drawn to wilderness? What can we do to protect them? And what does the future hold for outposts on the edge?
A poetry collection from the author of Deleted Scenes for Lovers. "It's probably best described as a bit of heavy artillery - an ode to female adolescence and the ongoing challenges of female embodiment. If the collection had an overarching theme, it would be one of giving voice to a group of strong female characters of different ages. It's constructed around different stories. It has a backbone of three long cycles of poems, of different people who have had different traumatic experiences." - Tracey Slaughter
An important new collection, written by Jacqueline Carter, David Geary, Patricia Grace, Briar Grace-Smith, Whiti Hereaka, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Kelly Joseph, Hemi, Kelly, Nic Low, Tina Makereti, Kelly Ana Morey, Paula Morris, Frazer Rangihuna, Renee, Robert Sullivan, Apirana Taylor, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Clayton Te Kohe, Hone Tuwhare and Briar Wood.
Animalia retraces the history of a modest peasant family through the twentieth century as they develop their small plot of land into an intensive pig farm. In an environment dominated by the omnipresence of animals, five generations endure the cataclysm of war, economic disasters, and the emergence of a brutal industrialism reflecting an ancestral tendency to violence. Only the enchanted realm of childhood and the innate freedom of the animals offer any respite from the visible barbarity of humanity.
"Del Amo’s prose throws a bucket of slurry from some unspeakable mire over the conventions of pastoral fiction." - Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times
>>Read an extract.
A delightful book blending Greek and Turkish influences into a distinctive relaxed cuisine.
Without calculus, there would be no computers, no microwave ovens, no GPS, no space travel. But before it gave us almost infinite powers, calculus was behind centuries of controversy, competition, and even death. One of the most anticipated books on mathematics of the year.
>>On synchronisation.
To the Occupant by Emma Neale $28
Poems that challenge the open and latent violence of contemporary life, from refugee crises to rape, poverty and mental illness to climate change, while revealing the extraordinary in the everyday, where a childs-eye view of the world can witness the wonder of the new or the shadow of darkness.
Emphasises the importance of economic justice, both within countries and internationally, to the survival of democracy. Unless structural economic bias in favour of corporate interests is addressed at a governmental level, advances in technology will benefit only the elite, and increase disaffection.
Includes generous selections of the poetry, literary and other essays of this influential critic, poet and editor.
Bass player extraordinaire Charles Mingus, who died in 1979, is one of the essential composers in the history of jazz. Beneath the Underdog is his celebrated, wild, funny, demonic, anguished, shocking and moving memoir. New edition.
>>Live, 1964.
Tragedy permits us to come face to face with the things we don't want to know about ourselves, but which still make us who we are. It articulates the conflicts and contradictions that we need to address in order to better understand the world we live in. Critchley demolishes our common misconceptions about the poets, dramatists and philosophers of Ancient Greece - then presents these writers to us in an unfamiliar and original light.
>>Critchley on tragedy.
Postcard Stories uses the arrangement of a collection of 100 remarkable postcards (all reproduced in slightly more than full colour) as a way of constructing stories in the form of brief sequential texts, often reaching a haiku-like intensity. Lots of slightly sad fun. "Putting a hand-tinted postcard of the Shanghai Gas Co. next to one of the Pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem creates a certain frisson. Places far removed in space and time suddenly form an unexpected relationship and a story begins."
"At once sweeping and intricate, gorgeous and austere." - Gregory O'Brien
"Original, readable and charming." - Murray Edmond.
>> Gregory O'Brien's launch speech.
>> Meet Richard von Sturmer.
Use the VOLUME OCKHAMETER (and Acornometer) to vote for the books your think should (or might) win at the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and go in the draw for a copy of each of the eventual category winners. >>Find out more about the finalists and use the OCKHAMETER (and Acornometer). The winners will be announced on Tuesday 14 May.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #126 (4.5.19)
Reviews. Events. Amusements. Recommendations. News. Prizes. Book groups. Courses. New releases. Find out about them in our NEWSLETTER.
>>Read Thomas's review.
>> Read an extract.
>>"Life is chancier than we imagine."
>>Murmur has just been awarded the 2019 Wellcome Book Prize (for a book that engages with some aspect of medicine, health or illness).
>> Murmur was a joint winner of the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
>> Murmur was short-listed for the 2018 Goldsmiths Prize.
>> Murmur is published by the exemplary CB Editions.
>> Hear the opening section read aloud.
>> NOTHINGINTHERULEBOOK interview with Will Eaves.
>> The author's website.
>> Will Eaves and other CB Editions authors at Shakespeare & Company.
>> 20 questions for Will Eaves.
>> A bit about Alan Turing.
>> The Strange Life and Death of Dr Turing.
>> Could you pass the Turing Test?
>> Ian McEwan's new novel Machines Like Me speculates an alternative trajectory for Alan Turing and A.I.
>> Read Thomas's review of The Absent Therapist by Will Eaves.
>> Read Thomas's review of The Inevitable Gift Shop by Will Eaves.
>> Will Eaves performs from The Absent Therapist.
 | Murmur by Will Eaves {Reviewed by THOMAS} No algorithm can entertain a proposition as being both true and not true at the same time. This necessary computational allergy to contradiction enabled Alan Turing during his time at Bletchley Park in World War 2 to significantly decrease the time it took to break the German codes (“from a contradiction you can deduce everything,” he wrote), thus saving many lives. It would also provide a good test for ‘thought’ as opposed to ‘computation’ in artificial intelligence, and have implications for the eventual ‘personhood’ or otherwise of machines. “Machines do nothing by halves,” writes Will Eaves in Murmur, a beautifully written, sad and thoughtful novel based on Turing. Machines cannot but incline towards explication, whereas it is our inability to access the mind of another that verifies its existence as a mind.* “It isn’t knowing what another person thinks or feels that makes us who we are. It’s the respect for not knowing,” writes Eaves. In 1952 an English court found Alan Turing guilty of ‘Gross Indecency’ for admitted homosexual activity (then a crime in Britain), and he submitted to a year-long regime of chemical castration via weekly injections of Stilboestrol rather than imprisonment. Turing’s chemical reprogramming, speculates Eaves, struck at the core of his identity, his mind at first barricading itself within the changing body and then seemingly inhabiting it once more, but resourceless and compliant. Is personhood always thus imposed from without, or does personhood lie in the resistance to such an imposition? What conformity to expectations must be achieved or eschewed to accomplish personhood? The murmur inMurmur is an insistent voice that rises from Alec Prior’s (i.e. Alan Turing’s) sub-computational mind as it reacts to, and reconfigures itself on the basis of, its chemical reorientation. A narrator in the third person, waiting in ambush in mirrors and other reflective surfaces, Prior’s reflection, assails and supplants Prior’s first-person narrative, breaches the functional boundaries of his identity, describes Prior as “a man in distress, a prisoner of some description?”, unpicking his autonomy, and acting as a catalyst for the emergence of material (memories, voices, impulses) from the deep strata of Prior’s mind, much of it foundational (such as Prior’s formative relationship with a fellow student at high school), atemporal or, increasingly, counterfactual (a series of imagined letters between Prior and his friend and colleague June, with whom he was briefly engaged (parallelling Turing’s relationship with Joan Clarke, June was unconcerned by Prior’s homosexuality but he decided not to go through with the marriage) veers towards a confused and non-existent future in which a child of theirs remarks to Prior, “You’re changing. You’re lots of different people, lots of things, and all at once.”). What is the relationship between memory and fantasy, and what is the pivot or fulcrum between the two? When the first-person narration restabilises it is a new first person, one constructed from without (“There was another me, speaking for me.”). Consciousness is detached from what it contains, but made of it. “I am the body in the bed. I’m what sees him. I am the room.” But it is consciousness’s detachment from its object, its resistance to connection (a machine cannot help but connect), its yearning for what it is not and what is not (“yearning is a sort of proof of liberty”), its inaccessibility, its ability to see itself from the couch of its exclusion (“a shared mind has no self-knowledge,” writes Eaves-as-Prior-as-Turing), its cognisance of the limitations of narrative, its capacity to suspend disbelief in fictions, its ability to use a contradiction as a stimulant to thought rather than a nullification, its fragility and tentativeness that distinguishes thinking from computation. Artificial intelligence will not achieve personhood through mimesis, learning or algorithmic excellence, but only, if ever, through qualities that eschew such virtues: “We won’t know what machines are thinking once they start to think.” * “As soon as one can see cause and effect working themselves out in the brain, one regards it as not being thinking, but a sort of unimaginative donkeywork. From this point of view one might be tempted to define thinking as consisting of ‘those mental processes that we don’t understand’. If this is right, then to make a thinking machine is to make one that does interesting things without our understanding quite how it is done.” - A.M. Turing (‘Can Automatic Calculating Machines Be Said to Think’ (1952)) |
 | Now, Now, Louison by Jean Frémon {Reviewed by STELLA} A second-person fictional autobiography, Now, Now, Louison creates its own genre. Jean Frémon - art critic, curator, novelist, poet and essayist - has painted a portrait in words of the artist Louise Bourgeois; a story of a life in memory: his memory. Frémon first met Bourgeois in the 1980s and curated both her first European show at the Galerie LeLong in Paris in 1985 and her final Parisian show decades later. He visited her in New York over 30 years until her death in 2010, saving snippets of conversation and eavesdropping on her life and work. He started this writing project in 1995, so while he states that this is from memory, and the ‘novel’ was published well after her death in French in 2016 (translated into English by Cole Swenson and published by Les Fugitives press in 2018), there is something of the voyeur in this telling. The narration moves from ‘you’ do this, 'you’ do that as the observer Frémon, to 'I' am, 'I' do, 'I' remember as the central character Louise. It is as if Jean Frémon has thought so intently about the artist he has moved his mind and his words into her mouth, into her head, so that the two superimpose each other. You are here, as the reader, the observer and the observed, as well as the being within the artist’s mind, the curator of your own destiny. This shouldn’t work as a device, but in fact it does, and remarkably well thanks to the prowess of Frémon's writing - subtle and exacting. The prose is like a making process - building patterns and rhythm, building a form - a sculpture chiselled out of pain, love and contradiction. It is a compelling way to tell a life, to create an understanding of a sharp and brilliant - as well as a reclusive - artist, an artist completely bound up in her own work, with an incredible sureness and, at the same time, a devastating doubt.Louise Bourgeois’s work is now well known, especially her giant spiders, her fascinating drawings, and her textile works of the body and female sexuality. In Now, Now, Louison we are given a glimpse into her life, her family and feelings of abandonment, her fraught relationship with a mother who died too young and with a philandering father who wanted her to be someone other than who she was; her ‘escape’ to America, and the life she carved out for herself. Her ongoing art practice, mostly unnoticed during her lifetime - she was well into her 60s when the world started taking notice of her work - marks the pages in description and explanation in a emotionally charged and psychological way: Frémon does not so much describe as reflect the atmosphere of Louise Bourgious, creating, through his subtle use of langauge, through repetition of themes and fragments of knowledge, an essence of the woman who scuplted, painted and stitched. This is not a biography, not a work of fact. It is purposely a novel, yet Jean Frémon in this short work creates an intensely interesting portrait of an intensely interesting person. This is a book that takes the reader to a point of maybe understanding, but more importantly to a place in which to be with Loiuse, the artist, the young girl, the elusive woman and the intellectual. In the words of Siri Hustvedt, “She is here in this book, the artist I have called 'mine’ because I have taken her into my very bones, but I did not know the woman. I know her works.” |
NEW RELEASES
Deeply and splendidly illustrated, this book, which finds parallel expression in a touring exhibition organised by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, focuses on Hodgkins as a traveller across cultures and landscapes: teaching and discovering the cubists in Paris, absorbing the landscape and light of Ibiza and Morocco, and exhibiting with the progressive Seven & Five Society in London.
When Frances Hodgkins left New Zealand in 1901, location became a key factor in her determination to succeed as an artist. Curator Mary Kisler follows Hodgkins through England, France, Italy, Morocco, Spain and Wales to discover the locations in which Hodgkins constantly pushed her exploration of modernism. Well illustrated, too.
"Sophie Collins’s poetry collection inquisitively picks apart the assumption that women lack creative autonomy, and that female-authored literature only ever reflects on real, often domestic, experience. She exposes the murky politics behind readership and reception with rigorous investigation and clever, almost comical, allegory. Collins’s combination of collage and reportage demonstrates her daring formal innovation. Who Is Mary Sue? is a startlingly original text that requests a different mode of reading, one that encourages avoiding labels and easy conclusions." - Guardian
>>"An interrogative unknowability, nobody, anybody, a mask, a lens, a multitude."
>> At Shakespeare & Company.
One night a former surgeon, who struggles to operate a clinic in impoverished rural India, is visited by a family bearing wounds from which they could not have survived. As he, at their request, sews up the wounds of the dead so that they can return to life at sunrise, he learns a lot more about the strange relationship between life and death. A novel.
We have no 'inner life'. There are no 'depths' to plumb. The unconscious is a myth. There is only surface and nothing beneath. Chater challenges the bases of psychology using the latest research and a determination to show that all thought actually takes place in the moment. Fascinating, provocative and convincing.
"Light the touchpaper and stand well back." - New Scientist
Why are words so important to Jews? Novelist Amos Oz and historian Fania Oz-Salzberger survey Jewish history to explain the integral relationship of Jews and words. Do Jews have a homeland only in their texts?
How do we take in the beauty of our planet while processing the losses? What trees can survive in the city? Which animals can survive in the wild? How do any of us - humans, animals, trees - find a forest we can call home?
>>Sophie Cunningham on Radio NZ.
The Dollmaker by Nina Allan $38
When two dollmakers get together, we begin to wonder just who are the dolls? Dolls are people, too, but perhaps not quite like us.
"A haunting literary experiment." - Guardian
Conversations about pregnancy, birth and parenting between two New Zealand writers (one of whom is also a paediatrician).
A wonderful graphic novel based on Wulf's The Invention of Nature.
A fiercely feminist novel of the Trojan War, seen through the eyes of the women and goddesses caught up in it.
>> Epic win!
Milla knows two things to be true: Demons are real, and fear will keep her safe. Milla's whole world is her family's farm. She is never allowed to travel to the village and her only friend is her beloved older brother, Niklas. When a bright-eyed girl named Iris comes to stay, Milla hopes her loneliness might finally be coming to an end. But Iris has a secret she's forbidden to share: The village is cursed by a demon who possesses girls at random, and the townspeople live in terror of who it will come for next. A feminist YA riff on the Medusa myth.
A quietly affecting novel based around Edward Hopper's wife, Josephine.
"Christine Dwyer Hickey’s writing shows deep understanding of human weakness." - Irish Times
"A brilliant portrait. With a beguiling grace and a deceptive simplicity, Christine Dwyer Hickey reminds us that the past is never far away - rather, it constantly surrounds us, suspends us, haunts us." - Colum McCann
"A richly detailed chronicle of Arab language and culture offering thought-provoking parallels between past and present. Mackintosh-Smith has an enviable ability to enrich the big picture with fascinating detail." - Guardian
The true story of how a renowned writer's struggle with mood storms led her to try a remedy as drastic as it is forbidden: microdoses of LSD.
"Relentlessly honest and surprisingly funny." - Washington Post
Authentic, simple food from the south of Spain.
Authoritative and clear. From the author of India: The cookbook.
On 26 September 2014, 43 male students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College went missing in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. According to official reports, the students commandeered several buses to travel to Mexico City to commemorate the anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre. During the journey, local police intercepted the students and a confrontation ensued. By the morning, they had disappeared without a trace. Over 40000 people have been 'disappeared' in Mexico in the last decade. Hernandez unpicks the web of corruption and brutality behind the 43.
>>It could happen anywhere.
Very well done.
An excellent survey of innovation - and of the change in the concept of 'the house' - through the 20th and early 21st centuries.
the West can no longer presume to impose its ideology on the world, and crucially, that it must stop seeking to intervene, politically and militarily, in the affairs of other nations.
It's 1839 and you are a medical student working on your first human body dissection. Under the watchful eye of Dr Walker, peel the flaps back to reveal the inner workings of the human body, from bone and muscle, to the brain, eyes, heart, lungs and everything in-between.
We are delighted to announce the 2019 VOLUME MAPUA LITERARY FESTIVAL, a boutique literary festival featuring some of New Zealand’s most interesting writers will be held in Mapua on the weekend of 20-22 September. You will hear from authors whose books you have enjoyed and discover authors whose books you will go on to enjoy. The intimate scale of the festival will enable you to meet and talk with authors and other literary enthusiasts. Writers attending the festival this year will include LLOYD JONES, who was short-listed for the 2007 Booker Prize for Mister Pip, and whose novel The Cage is a finalist for the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize in the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. ASHLEIGH YOUNG, whose essay collection Can You Tolerate This?won the prestigious 2017 Windham–Campbell Prize, will be appearing, along with CARL SHUKER, whose new novel, A Mistake, explores the impact of a medical misadventure on the life of a Wellington surgeon. Novelist and essayist PAULA MORRIS will return from her stint as the Katherine Mansfield fellow in Menton in time to attend the festival, andANNETTE LEES will speak about her book Swim, which records her year of daily wild swimming as well as being a history of New Zealand outdoor swimming. Renowned poet and art writer GREGORY O'BRIEN will be attending, along with poet JENNY BORNHOLDT, and THOMASIN SLEIGH will speak about her novel Women in the Field, One and Two, which looks at the Modernist moment in the establishment of the New Zealand National Art Gallery from a feminist perspective. LYNN JENNER will discuss the relationship between words and land, and EIRLYS HUNTER, whose adventure novel The Mapmaker’s Race has delighted many children, will hold a session, as well as participating in one of the community events organised around the festival by the Mapua Community Library. A 'literary' quiz evening will be held as a fundraiser for the library. The programme will be released in June. Save the Date: 20-22 September 2019.
>> Read Stella's review.
>> "We must look to ourselves for hope."
>> "Luminous and generous." - Guardian
>> "This young generation is showing us that we need to change and we can change."
>> How should authors approach the task of writing a novel today?
>>On newness and the novel.
>>The book is also available as a lovely hardback.
>> Read Stella's reviews of the other books in the quartet published so far: Autumn and Winter.
>> The covers feature paintings by David Hockney: 'Early November Tunnel', 'Winter Tunnel' and 'Late Spring Tunnel'.
>>Hockney at work on the series.
>> Hockney's 'Four Seasons' video installation.
>> Other books by Ali Smith.
>>'Once upon a life'.
>> The art of fiction.
>>How much does Ali Smith speculate about the meeting of Rainer Maria Rilke and Katherine Mansfield in the Hôtel Château Bellevue in Sierre in 1921?
>>'Half an Apple.'
 | Spring by Ali Smith {Reviewed by STELLA} Beginning with a tirade of exclamatory statements, Spring opens with a hammering of words that are explosive and nonsensical, but, unfortunately, messages that have made sense to many and have swayed ordinary people into populist and damaging thinking - exclamations that play on fear, isolation and frustration. The third in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, Spring brings us the promise of something even better than Autumn and Winter. At the end of Winter, I wondered where Ali Smith would take this quartet, and Spring does not disappoint. In each volume of the quartet, the protagonist is seeking something within themselves, as well as from their contemporary landscape of Brexit, while also drawing on their own and the collective history. In Spring, a man stands on the train platform of a remote Scottish town. Richard Lease, a film director, is mourning the death of his close friend and collaborator, scriptwriter Paddy Heal. Standing on the edge of the platform waiting for the train, he unravels his life and relationship with Paddy, their work and her humanity. The last project, which hadn't progressed beyond concept but now has a new (and in Richard’s eyes, an unworthy) scriptwriter, is a fictional account of the meeting of Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke at a hotel in France where Mansfield was convalescing. As Richard turns the earth of his past looking for solace and has on-going internal conversations with his ‘imaginary daughter’, we are shunted into the immediate reality of DCO (Detention Centre Officer) Brittany Hall, employed by private company SA4A. Brittany, a young woman trapped in the bureaucracy and brutality of the system, is difficult to empathise with. Educated but poor, she needs a job like anyone else and has been subsumed by the culture that permeates the refugee centre, one where fellow humans are seen as numbers and problems. Walking into this centre comes a school girl, a girl with a mythological story and seemingly mystical powers. How does she get through the layers of security to the office of the manager of this centre? Brittany’s introduction to the power of this unusual child is an announcement that the toilets have been cleaned - at a school girl's demand - in the centre to the disbelief of the workers and the refugees alike. Brittany is thrown into this girl's world in an unexpected, way with startling consequences. Ali Smith’s brilliance is even more evident here than in the two previous seasonal novels, Autumn and Winter. How she pulls together these strands - a film-maker who has given up, a security officer brutalised by a system, a child determined to make a difference, and several other intriguing strands, is a demanding feat in itself, but the other layers - references to Mansfield and Rilke, the impact of writers and artists to champion change and new thinking through their work, the politics of borders and fascism, nods to other literary scripts (Shakespeare, Keats, Dickens), and an accompanying artist (Hockney’s works decorate the covers of these books, and each book hooks into an artist of related period - in Spring this is Tacita Dean) - make this brilliant writing, with a highly intelligent analysis of contemporary Britain, and a book (a quartet) that demands your attention. Ferocious and tender. |
 | One-Way Street by Walter Benjamin {Reviewed by THOMAS}What form would literature take if it was the expression of the organising principles of an urban street rather than those of literary tradition? Between 1923 and 1926, Walter Benjamin wrote a series of unconventional prose pieces in which “script - after having found, in the book, a refuge in which it can lead an autonomous existence - is pitilessly dragged out into the street by advertisement and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos.” On the street, text, long used to being organised on the horizontal plane in a book, is hoisted upon the vertical plane, and, having been long used to a temporal arrangement like sediment, layer upon layer, page upon page, text is spread upon a single plane, requiring movement from instance to instance, walking or, ultimately, scrolling across a single temporal surface, a surface whose elements are contiguous or continuous or referential by leaps, footnotes perhaps to a text that does not exist, rather than a structure in three dimensions. Even though Benjamin did not live to see a scroll bar or a touch screen or a hyperlink he was acutely aware of the changes in the relationship between persons and texts that would arrive at these developments.“Without exception the great writers perform their combinations in a world that comes after them,” he wrote, not ostensibly of himself. As we move through a text, through time, along such one-way streets, our attention is drawn away from the horizontal, from the dirt (the dirt made by ourselves and others), away from where we stand and walk, and towards the vertical, the plane of desire, of advertising, towards the front (in all the meanings of that word), towards what is not yet. It is not for nothing that our eyes are near the top of our bodies and directed towards the front, and naturally see where we wish to be more easily than where we are (which would require us to bend our bodies forwards and undo our structural evolution). In the one-way street of urban text delineated by Benjamin, all detail has an equivalence of value, “all things, by an irreversible process of mingling and contamination, are losing their intrinsic character, while ambiguity displaces authenticity.” The elitism of ‘the artwork’ is supplanted by the vigour of ‘the document’: “Artworks are remote from each other in the perfection [but] all documents communicate through their subject matter. In the artwork, subject matter is ballast jettisoned by contemplation [but] the more one loses oneself in a document, the denser the subject matter grows. In the artwork, the formal law is central [but] forms are merely dispersed in documents.” What sort of document is Benjamin’s street? It is a place where detail overwhelms form, a place where the totality is subdued by the fragment, where the walker is drawn to detritus over the crafted, to the fumbled over the competent, to the ephemeral over the permanent. The street is the locus of the personalisation and privatisation of experience, its particularisation no longer communal or mediated by tradition but haphazard, aspirational, transitory, improvised. Each moment is a montage. Writing is assembled from the fragments of other writing. Residue finds new value, the stain records meaning, detritus becomes text. In the one-way street, particularities are grouped by type and by association, not by hierarchy or by value. The here and now of the street is filled with referents to other times and other places. The overlooked, the mislaid, the abandoned object is a point of access to overlooked or mislaid or abandoned mental material, often distant in both time and space, memories or dreams. Objects are hyperlinked to memories but are also representatives of the force that drives those experiences into the past, towards forgetting. But the street is the interface of detritus and commerce. Money, too, enables contact with objects and mediates their meaning. New objects promise the opportunity of connection but also, through multiplication, abrade the particularity of that connection. Benjamin’s sixty short texts are playful or mock-playful, ambivalent or mock-ambivalent, tentative or mock-tentative, analytic or mock-analytic, each springing from a sign or poster or inscription in the street, skidding or mock-skidding through the associations, mock-associations, responses and mock-responses they provoke, eschewing the false progress of narrative and other such novelistic artificialities, compiling a sort of archive of ways of reading a street as text (and of writing text as a street), a text describing the person who walks there. |
NEW RELEASES
A family from New York take a road trip into the parts of the US that used to be Mexico as a convoy of children approach the dangerous US border from the Mexican side, and an inhumane reception.
"Beautiful, pleasurable, engrossing, beguiling, brilliantly intricate and constantly surprising." - James Wood, New Yorker
"A mould-breaking new classic. The novel truly becomes novel again in Luiselli's hands - electric, elastic, alluring, new." - New York Times
"Valeria Luiselli offers a searing indictment of America's border policy in this roving and rather beautiful form-busting novel. Among the tale's many ruminative ideas about absences, vanished histories and bearing witness, it offers a powerful meditation on how best to tell a story when the subject of it is missing." - Daily Mail
"A novelist of a rare vitality." - Ali Smith
>> Writing as a vehicle for political rage.
A well-illustrated survey of native flora and its significance in culture, history, medicine, craft and cuisine.
When the Croatian War of Independence breaks out in her hometown of Vukovar in the summer of 1991 the narrator of The Hotel Tito is nine years old, nestled within the embrace of family with her father, her mother, and older brother. She is sent to a seaside vacation to be far from the hostilities. Meanwhile, her father has disappeared while fighting with the Croatian forces. By the time she returns at summer’s end everything has changed. Against the backdrop of genocide (the Vukovar hospital massacre) and the devastation of middle class society within the Yugoslav Federation, our young narrator, now with her mother and brother refugees among a sea of refugees, spends the next six years experiencing her own self-discovery and transformation amid unfamiliar surroundings as a displaced person. As she grows from a nine-year old into a sparkling and wonderfully complicated fifteen-year-old, it is as a stranger in her own land.
>>Read an extract.
>>Another extract.
First published in 1949, Böll's novel centres on the story of a German soldier, Andreas, taking a train from Paris (France) to Przemyśl (Poland). The story focuses on the experience of German soldiers during the Second World War on the Eastern Front where fighting was particularly vicious and unforgiving.
An exceptionally good graphic novel account of the voyage of the Beagle. From the creators of the equally wonderful Audubon: On the wings of the world.
The only way for us to fully understand human behaviour, Wilson argues, is to study the evolutionary histories of nonhuman species. Of these, he demonstrates that at least seventeen - from the African naked mole rat and the sponge-dwelling shrimp to one of the oldest species on earth, the termite - have been found to have advanced societies based on altruism, cooperation and the division of labour. These rare eusocial species form the prehistory to our human social patterns, even, according to Wilson, suggesting the possible biological benefits of homosexuality and elderly grandmothers.
Simon is in love with Lou. He doesn't care that she has nits - or does he?
A young girl in Harlem discovers slam poetry as a way to understand her mother's religion and her own relationship to the world.
"Poignant and real, beautiful and intense." - Kirkus
"The shape-shifting protagonist of this magic-realist novel, twenty-two-year-old Paul Polydoris, belongs to 'all the genders', able to change his body at will. Exploring the malleability of gender and desire, and paying homage to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the book follows Paul—sometimes Polly—as s/he searches for love and the 'uncontaminated truest' self. The quest leads through New York City at the height of the AIDS crisis, Iowa City’s queer punk scene, off-season Provincetown, a womyn’s festival in Michigan, and, finally, San Francisco. Lawlor successfully mixes pop culture, gender theory, and smut, but the great achievement here is that Paul is no mere symbol but a vibrantly yearning being, 'like everybody else, only more so'." - The New Yorker
A wonderful combination of prose, verse and illustration, telling the story of two brothers in conflict in London during World War 2.
Some things are very big, others very small. All are interesting.
Claudia Jones was missing for months - possibly abducted, possibly by aliens. When she returns to Blithedale High School, questions still surround her disappearance, and her presence has a strange effect on the students around her. Follows Losing the Girl.
While quantum mechanics is currently our best theory of nature at an atomic scale, it has many puzzling qualities - qualities that appear to preclude realism and therefore give an incomplete description of nature. Smolin is convinced that there must be a realist atomic theory that avoids these problems.
Delicious Middle-Eastern food from the author of Persiana and Feasts.
Building on the work of previous biographers, Liedman creates a definitive portrait of Marx and the depth of his contribution to the way the world understands itself. He shines a light on Marx’s influences, explains his political and intellectual interventions, and builds on the legacy of his thought. Liedman shows how Marx’s Capital illuminates the essential logic of a system that drives dizzying wealth, grinding poverty, and awesome technological innovation to this day. Now in paperback.
Essays covering everything from his passion for ferns, swimming, and horsetails, to his final case histories exploring schizophrenia, dementia, and Alzheimer's.
1968 saw an extraordinary range of protests across much of the western world. Some of these were genuinely revolutionary - around ten million French workers went on strike and the whole state teetered on the brink of collapse. Others were more easily contained, but had profound longer-term implications: terrorist groups, feminist collectives, gay rights activists.
>>Come and choose something from our ever-changing Read & Resist display.
"Although Professor Stephen Westaby was born with the necessary coordination and manual dexterity, it was a head trauma sustained during university that gifted him the qualities of an exceptional heart surgeon: qualities that are frequently associated with psychopathy."
How do various animals jump? How do you jump?
>>Lonely Asian woman seeks lonely Asian women.
>> Exploding stereotypes.
>>In conversation with Pip Adam.
>> Publisher interviews writer.
>>The thing about hobbies.