>>Read Thomas's review.
>>"The road to Brexit starts here."
>>"The location of a great malady" - from Patrick Keillor's Robinson in Ruins.
>> "England is a very powerful country."
>> J.M. Coetzee: 'He and His Man' and Foe.
>>M.J. Carter on the literary artefacts of the colonial past.
>> The book is published by the wonderful small press, CB Editions.
>>"The road to Brexit starts here."
>>"The location of a great malady" - from Patrick Keillor's Robinson in Ruins.
>> "England is a very powerful country."
>> J.M. Coetzee: 'He and His Man' and Foe.
>>M.J. Carter on the literary artefacts of the colonial past.
>> The book is published by the wonderful small press, CB Editions.
>>'Jack Robinson' is a pseudonym of CB Editions publisher Charles Boyle. Read Thomas's reviews of other books by this 'Jack Robinson':
Blush (with Natalia Zagorska-Thomas)
>>Writing under the pseudonym 'Jennie Walker', Charles Boyle won the 2008 McKitterick Prize for 24 for 3.
>> The Manet Girl by Charles Boyle writing as 'Charles Boyle'.
>>Boyle's blog, Sonofabook.
>> Murmur by Will Eaves, also published by CB Editions, has just been awarded the 2019 Wellcome Prize. >>Read Thomas's review.
>>Click and collect a copy of our Book of the Week.
>>Click and collect a copy of our Book of the Week.
 |
When Robinson Crusoe in Daniel Defoe’s novel of the same name discovers the footprint of a stranger on the margins of the island he considers his domain, he builds defences and prepares violence. He wants to keep for himself his table, made with his own hands, his rude bowl, likewise the project of a man who has brought to DIY the gravitas of a spiritual exercise, and his parasol, but even more he wants to keep for himself the puritanical practices of useful labour, useful thought, austerity and self-restraint - he made a very small amount of rum last for ten years! - that are both the expression and the perpetuation of his isolation. He remains resistant to all that is not him. When given the opportunity, upon a suitably disadvantaged other, he shows himself prepared to teach but not to learn. The propagation of Defoe’s novel as an English classic over the centuries has both epitomised and contributed to a particularly noxious strand of Anglo-Saxon masculinity compounded of an arrogance and a superiority complex on the one hand and a concomitant deep insecurity and fear on the other, resulting in an instinct to devise rules, build defences and prepare violence. Jack Robinson, in this quick and subtle little book, not only sketches the deleterious effect upon English society of this thread of Englishness, leading to the Brexit crisis resulting from the projection of threat onto difference, but also traces the literary offspring of Ur-Crusoe, so to call him: Robinsons in books by Franz Kafka, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Muriel Spark and others, and in the films of Patrick Keillor, each either or both perpetuating or degrading the character with whom they are inescapably associated. ‘Robinson Crusoe’ remains a central topos for reactionary British nativism. It is no coincidence that, in the space of populist disaffection resulting from Conservative austerity policies, a prominent contemporary British fascist has adopted the pseudonym ‘Tommy Robinson’ in his xenophobic campaign for “respect for British heritage, values and tradition.” Robinson Crusoe, despite circumstances that make his attitudes increasingly ridiculous, cannot help but insist, with increasing violence, that he is master of ‘his’ island. Jack Robinson’s quarrel “is less with Defoe than with Crusoe and the uses which the book has been put to.” He observes that “Crusoe has amassed such gravitas - or rather, his emblematic status in British culture became so far reaching - that the natural development of his descendants was inescapably stunted.” Can this be healed? In Crusoe’s unthinking adherence to ‘heritage, values and tradition’, he is incapable of change or growth or understanding, incapable of opening himself to new experience, of accepting as an equal anyone different from himself. When Crusoe leaves the island he remains the slaver and misogynist he was when he arrived. All he has done is survived. “Defoe denies Crusoe self-doubt, which is another way of infantilising him. His blind trust in God shuts off all radical introspection.” Without that introspection there is no hope.
|
 | Lanny by Max Porter {Reviewed by STELLA} Lanny is an exquisite novel. You are immersed from the beginning (and I read this in a single sitting), the voice of Dead Papa Toothwort opening the past and present to the reader’s eyes. An ancient being, a force, a mythical creature, Dead Papa Toothwort is threatening and ambiguous, is present in the surroundings (in the earth and air) and, later we realise, in each of the villagers. This story is set in a village - a commuter trip from London. It is the story of a young boy, Lanny, and his disappearance. Lanny lives with his mother Jolie, a writer of grisly revenge crime novels, and his father Robert, a financial advisor working in corporate London. Lanny is unusual, creative and playful - a child of about eight who is fascinated by nature, loves ideas, and has an active imagination. Also living in the village is an artist, Pete, rather famous but now at the end of his career, nicknamed by his neighbours as ‘Mad Pete”. Art lessons with Pete are a wondrous thing for Lanny, and the two find solace in each other’s way of seeing the world and of being misfits. The book is split into three parts. In the first, we are introduced to our cast of players, their voices distinct and their desires articulated. Dead Papa Toothwort’s desire to take something living. His fascination with being within others and objects as he flits from one to the other is lyrical and sprightly while at the same time surrounding us with decay and darkness. Lanny’s Mum’s suffocation at the hand of village life and her cynicism will strike chords with trapped parents anywhere, while her description of her latest plots might make your skin crawl. Robert, pretty much the lousy father and unhappy husband, uncomfortable about his son’s oddness and more concerned with social status, is a familiar trope. And the other major voice in this novel is Pete, curious and generous but no hero. We only know Lanny through the eyes and ears of these characters, what they feel and describe, and their conversations and interactions with this child. In the second part, the style and pace change. The lines are fraught with urgency: Lanny has disappeared and he must be found. Here, the world of the village is laid bare in all its hypocrisy, prejudice and pettiness. The police arrest Pete and the villagers jump to conclusions supported by their small-mindedness. Old Peggy (our sage) directs her conversation directly to Dead Papa Toothwort, calling him out, but is disinclined to help the frantic Jolie - why does she dislike her so much? Both Robert and Jolie are understandably distraught, yet they both start imagining life without Lanny. Porter reveals the cruelty and tenderness of people with directness and spareness. The language is lean and taut but also encapsulates a lyricism that is melodic in parts but staccato and punchy when necessary. The final and third part of the novel is a dream-like sequence starring Pete, Robert and Jolie, an attempt to reveal Lanny’s whereabouts or to mystify us further. This is a novel to be immersed in, to re-read and think about, to appreciate the beauty of the language and the assuredness of the prose. A must for your reading pile this winter. |
NEW RELEASES
Published to mark the 300th anniversary of first publication of Robinson Crusoe, Good Morning, Mr Crusoe argues that the legacy of Defoe's novel is racism and misogyny embedded in the fabric of British society.
"The novelty here is the way Jack Robinson uses Crusoe to analyse the mad act of self-maiming we call Brexit. As he demonstrates, all the blinkered mental preconditions for the Leave campaign exist in the novel." - Observer
"A clever take-down of the classic novel." - Guardian
“Let’s say that in the course of all human experience, death is pure conjecture: it is, as such, not an experience. And all that which is not an experience is useless to mankind.” A bizarre series of medical experiments in Buenos Aires in 1907, involving decapitation as a means of contacting the so-called afterlife, is mirrored strangely in the life of a contemporary artist.
"Comemadre is a story about the limits of science and discovery, about the purpose and process of art, about the dangers of the unchecked male ego, and much more. Beneath each of these distinct intentions, though, the book is not fundamentally theoretical, but relational. Larraquy imagines a complicated world of webbed human bonds that span generations. Each of these bonds is pulling on another, creating unique tension, unique threats, and unique possibilities. Larraquy’s scientists and artists attempt to uncover their true natures on both personal and existential fronts. In the process, their desire to be validated and accepted by others becomes all-encompassing. As these relationships carry the narrative and take center stage, it becomes apparent that guilt and desire can easily transform into violence once acted upon. The profound tragedy suggested by Comemadre is that in the absence of extended validation, that validation is too often stolen by force. At the book’s fundamentally relational foundation, Larraquy demonstrates that the tenderness which results from shared vulnerability is often undergirded by a violence springing from the same source." - Full Stop
40th birthday special. It’s 1979. The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, China introduces its one-child policy, Margaret Thatcher is elected as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and an old Cambridge student magazine is relaunched. This special edition marks Granta’s 40th birthday by bringing together some of its best writing from the past forty years. Featuring: Angela Carter, Kazuo Ishiguro, Todd Mcewen, Bruce Chatwin, James Fenton, Primo Levi, Amitav Ghosh, Raymond Carver, Philip Roth, John Gregory Dunne, Ryszard Kapuściński, Joy Williams, Don Delillo, John Berger, Gabriel García Márquez, Bill Buford, Lindsey Hilsum, Lorrie Moore, Hilary Mantel, Ian Jack, Edward W. Said, Diana Athill, Edmund White, Ved Mehta, Alexandra Fuller, Binyavanga Wainaina, Mary Gaitskill, Lydia Davis, Jeanette Winterson, Herta Müller. What more could you want?
After her mother’s death, Nunu moves from Istanbul to a small apartment in Paris. One day outside of a bookstore, she meets M., an older British writer whose novels about Istanbul Nunu has always admired. They find themselves walking the streets of Paris and talking late into the night. What follows is an unusual friendship of eccentric correspondence and long walks around the city.
“Ayşegül Savaş is an enormous new talent who writes with the rigour of Didion and the tenderness of Sebald. Walking on the Ceiling holds the immediacy of youth and the depth of long-earned wisdom at once. Its elegant voice is sure to summon old memories and longings from each reader, relighting them anew.”—Catherine Lacey
Could millions of jobs soon be eliminated by artificial intelligence and robots? From driverless cars to digital assistants, the world of work is on the cusp of a technological revolution that is generating hopes and fears alike. But are the robots really knocking at the door? What does all this mean for New Zealanders? Kinley Salmons new book is a call to start debating - and choosing the future we want. Kinley Salmon grew up in Nelson and now works as an economist in Washington DC.
>>Come and hear Kinley Salmon talk on Thursday 23rd May at KUSH, 5 Church Street. Door open and coffee available from 5 PM. See you there.
Beautifully presented. Includes extracts from Sculpting in Time, and pieces by Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Paul Satre and other on Tarkovsky's particular approach to film-making.
>>Watch Tarkovsky's films on your device.
From her entry into parliament in 1975 at age 23 until the epoch-changing 1984 general election that was triggered by her telling Robert Muldoon that she intended to cross the floor to vote against the National government on nuclear- free legislation.
>>Muldoon calls the snap election after consulting the Governor General and the bottle.
"The Shakespeare scholar’s fun, insightful and profoundly approachable study of 20 of his plays is perhaps the finest critique of his work to date." - Guardian
A remarkable New Zealand lawyer (1916-2007) whose lifelong commitment to social justice, legal reform, gender equality and community service left a profound legacy. She was married to Bill Sutch, who died in 1975 after being acquitted of charges of spying.
"AND Little Boy, grown up after an endless series of confusions transplantations transformations instigations fornications confessions prognostications hallucinations consternations confabulations collaborations revelations recognitions restitutions reverberations misconceptions clarifications elucidations simplifications idealisations aspirations circumnavigations realisations radicalisations and liberations, Grown Boy came into his own voice and let loose his word-hoard pent up within him." Ferlinghetti conveys his 100 years on the planet as a torrent of words bearing him on through time.
Roland Wakelin (painter), Dulcie Deamer (writer and libertine), Jean Devanny (novelist and feminist), Douglas Stewart (editor and writer) and Eric Baume (journalist and media personality) had little in common in personality, proclivities and politics. Yet they all experienced fame and/or notoriety in the 'West Island' while being largely forgotten in their country of origin.
What if you were a novelist in a world where the only media people consumed was spectacular pornography about war with titles like Wonder Woman and Captain America? What if your country had elected as its leader a shameless millionaire who was stealing your money, your democracy and your dignity? What if the media were owned by filthy rich men who didn't give two shits about any of it as long as it continued to make them filthy rich?Wouldn't it be enough to send you certifiably insane? To make you write a novel about an immortal lesbian fairy that mimicked the conventions of movies like Wonder Woman but became an accidental allegory for #MeToo? To write a savage death wail of a satire about how the rich stole everything from us?Enough to make you, reader, consider laying off the spectacular pornography about war for long enough to read it?
"Ayelet Gundar-Goshen has justifiably won plaudits for her two previous novels, Waking Lions and One Night, Markovitch. In Liar, Nofar, a socially awkward, unhappy teenage girl, inadvertently accuses a faded talent show star of sexually assaulting her. The police procedures and press furore create a momentum of their own and Nofar finds herself trapped in an ever greater web of deceit. Gundar-Goshen skilfully explores various dynamics of power – sexual, coercive, authoritative, familial – and portrays with great compassion and insight the humiliation, loneliness and rage of society’s outsiders. A perceptive and exquisitely observed novel, Liar should win Gundar-Goshen a wide international readership." - Guardian
A passionate defence of humanity and a work of radical optimism from the author of Postcapitalism. How do we preserve what makes us human in an age of uncertainty? Are we now just consumers shaped by market forces? A sequence of DNA? A collection of base instincts? Or will we soon be supplanted by algorithms and A.I. anyway? The notion of humanity has become eroded as never before. In this book Paul Mason argues that we are still capable - through language, innovation and co-operation - of shaping our future. He offers a vision of humans as more than puppets, customers or cogs in a machine.
>>"The world order is being ripped to shreds by an alliance of ethnic nationalists, women-haters and authoritarian leaders who are harnessing the power of machines and algorithms to do it."
Poetry from the Future: Why a global liberation movement is our civilisation's last chance by Srećko Horvat $40
Capitalism and historical revisionism have constructed a new world of normalized apocalyptic politics in which our passivity is guaranteed if we believe there is no future. This is a radical manifesto for hope in democracy, union and internationalism. Horvat is an associate of Slavoj Žižek and Yanis Varoufakis and is standing for the EU elections as part of DiEM25.
>>"The current system is more violent than any revolution."
1945. They have survived the Blitz, but when Simon, Patricia, Evelyn and Larry step through a mysterious library door, it is the beginning of their most dangerous adventure yet. They discover the magical world of Folio, where an enchanted kingdom of fairy knights, bears and tree gods is under threat from a sinister robot army. The many stories of the Library are locked in eternal war, and the children's only hope is to find their creator - a magician who has been lost for centuries.
A very accessible and well illustrated history of the series of conflicts between the Crown and various groups of Maori between 1845 and 1872, conflicts that form the often unacknowledged background to much else in New Zealand history.
From the author of the monumental The Great War for New Zealand.
In 1902, the young German writer Rainer Maria Rilke traveled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin. He returned many times over the course of his life, by turns inspired and appalled by the city's high culture and low society, and his writings give a fascinating insight into Parisian art and culture in the last century.
Since Britain's 2016 referendum on EU membership, the nation has been profoundly split: one side fantasising that the referendum will never be acted upon, the other entrenched in questionable assumptions about reclaimed sovereignty and independence. Underlying the cleavage are primal myths, deeper histories, and political folk-legends. James Meek, 'the George Orwell of our times', goes in search of the stories and consequences arising out of a nation's alienation from itself. Perceptive.
What if our lives are largely predetermined, hardwired in our brains - and our choices over what we eat, who we fall in love with, even what we believe are not real choices at all? Neuroscience is challenging everything we think we know about ourselves, revealing how we make decisions and form our own reality, unaware of the role of our unconscious minds.
Monday Charles is missing, and only Claudia seems to notice. Claudia and Monday have always been inseparable - more sisters than friends. So when Monday doesn't turn up for the first day of school, Claudia's worried. When she doesn't show for the second day, or second week, Claudia knows that something is wrong. Monday wouldn't just leave her to endure tests and bullies alone. Not after last year's rumors and not with her grades on the line. Now Claudia needs her best--and only--friend more than ever. But Monday's mother refuses to give Claudia a straight answer, and Monday's sister April is even less help.
As Claudia digs deeper into her friend's disappearance, she discovers that no one seems to remember the last time they saw Monday. How can a teenage girl just vanish without anyone noticing that she's gone?
Four novellas: 'The Wife', 'The Steppe', 'Ward No. 6' and 'My Life', demonstrating the subtlety of Chekhov's perceptions and the effective economy of his prose. Selected and introduced by Janet Malcolm.
A book conveying what it’s like to live in a world where shaking a stranger’s and, catching a taxi or touching a door handle are fraught with fear and dread. This memoir charts the author’s breakdown after migrating from New Zealand to England: what begins as homesickness and career burn-out develops into depression, contamination phobia and OCD. Increasingly alienated from all the things that previously gave her life meaning and purpose – family, work, nature, literature – the author is forced to confront a question once posed by the young Virginia Woolf: ‘How is one to live in such a world?’
On 26 April 1986 at 1.23 am a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine exploded. While the authorities scrambled to understand what was occurring, workers, engineers, firefighters and those living in the area were abandoned to their fate. The blast put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation, contaminating over half of Europe with radioactive fallout. Masterful. Jaw-droppingly readable.
>>Chernobyl vs. The Zone.
A novel exploring the tension between notions of what it means to be an American and what it means to be Other, an immigrant for instance.
"Rich and polyphonic. Unflashy almost to the point of comedy, happy to include humdrum dialogue about, say, weather or food seasoning, the novel’s round-robin mode nonetheless accumulates a kind of revelatory power, setting aside top-down commentary in favour of side-by-side juxtaposition – a narrative style that ultimately functions as a plea for more listening, as well as highlighting the quiet irony of the title, which ends up being hard to read as anything more than just 'Americans'." - Guardian
It's 1947, and India, newly independent of British rule, has been separated into two countries: Pakistan and India. The divide has created much tension between Hindus and Muslims, and hundreds of thousands are killed crossing borders. Half-Muslim, half-Hindu twelve-year-old Nisha doesn't know where she belongs, or what her country is anymore. When Papa decides it's too dangerous to stay in what is now Pakistan, Nisha and her family become refugees and embark first by train but later on foot to reach her new home.
"MacCarthy refutes the often ill-researched reductionist characterisations of Gropius as the arrogant, dour modernist. Instead, she passionately weaves a gripping and powerful narrative deserving of a wide audience while also making for essential reading for anyone studying architecture and design." - Irish Times
The heady optimism that accompanied the advent of the Internet is gone replaced by a deep unease. Technologies that were meant to liberate us have exacerbated social inequalities and stoked explosive political climates across the world. Tech companies gather our information online and sell it to the highest bidder, whether government or retailer. In this world of surveillance capitalism, profit depends not only on predicting our behaviour but modifying it too. How will this fusion of capitalism and the digital shape our values and define our future?
"Groundbreaking, magisterial, unmissable." - Financial Times
>>Interview with Zuboff.
A Thousand Small Sanities: The moral adventure of liberalism by Adam Gopnik $40
A defence of liberal values and world-view, and of democracy itself, against new dogmatisms.
"Supremely intelligent." - Guardian
An artist makes some mistakes when making a picture book, but these mistakes become the book and drive the story onward.
2019 CATEGORY WINNERS
{ Click on the covers to secure your copies }
ACORN FOUNDATION FICTION PRIZE
This Mortal Boy by Fiona Kidman (Vintage, Penguin Random House) $38
Judges' citation: In This Mortal Boy Fiona Kidman has written an intensely human and empathetic story, recreating the events leading to the real life hanging of “jukebox killer” Paddy Black at Mount Eden prison in 1955. With seeming effortlessness, she pulls the reader into mid-century New Zealand – the restlessness of a new urban youth culture, the moral panic that led to the Mazengarb report, the damning assumptions of the legal profession and the unchallenged omissions that eased the pathway to a young man’s death. Kidman draws her characters deftly, alternating between the bravado and vulnerability of Auckland’s young bodgie culture and the desperation of a poor and disempowered family in Ireland. The result is moving, memorable, authentic and urgently relevant to our times.
MARY AND PETER BIGGS AWARD FOR POETRY
Are Friends Electric? by Helen Heath (Victoria University Press) $25
Judges' citation: Helen Heath’s collection impresses with its broad thematic reach, its willingness to tackle complex issues, and its poetic risk-taking. By turns thoughtful and moving, Are Friends Electric? asks how the material world 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. Technology is situated in relation to the natural world, and to issues of gender, sexuality and power. The elegiac second half offers a touching speculative narrative: A woman embeds her deceased partner’s personality into software to avoid letting go. Heath asks if friends can—or should—be electric, and probes deeper questions about what it means to be human.
ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION AWARD
Tatau: A cultural history of Samoan tattooing by Sean Mallon and Sébastien Galliot (Te Papa Press) $75
Judges' citation: Excellence in an illustrated work of non-fiction is to be found in the flawless integration of text, illustration and design. Tatau: A History of Sāmoan Tattooing is the exemplar of those goals. Creating a cohesive whole that incorporates multiple writers and a wide range of illustrations and artworks is a difficult task, and this publication achieves this with authority, style and integrity. It is a visual feast, and at the same time celebrates the tactile pleasure of a book in the hand, and should be acknowledged as a milestone in contemporary publishing. And, most importantly, quality design is met with innovative writing that both records and opens up new territory, creating a book that will expand and enrich the knowledge of readers throughout Aotearoa, the Moana Pacific and beyond.
ROYAL SOCIETY TE APĀRANGI AWARD FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION
Hudson & Halls: The food of love by Joanna Drayton (Otago University Press) $50
Judges' citation: Set against the backdrop of the double act many of us will remember, Hudson & Halls reveals the humour and drama of this couple’s onscreen chemistry, and is a deeply moving and often surprising account of their private life. Set within the context of significant social and political moments over four decades and three countries, Joanne Drayton’s fresh approach to storytelling makes this a must-read. In its design, the kitsch flamboyance of the pair and the period is celebrated in a way that is quirky, engaging and in keeping with the tone and vibrancy of the couple. Hudson & Halls is not simply the story of celebrity chefs: it is a generous, multi-layered, and touching account of companionship and enduring love.
TE MŪRAU O TE TUHI - MĀORI LANGUAGE AWARD
He Kupu Tuku Iho: Ko te Reo Maori te Tatau ki te Ao by Tīmoti Kāretu and Wharehuia Milroy (Auckland University Press) $50
Judges' citation: He tai mutunga kore te ranga whai reo e āki kau ana ki te aroaro o te tokorua kātuarehe, ngā ruānuku o te reo o nehe, ki nāianei rangi. He whāiti taua urunga, engari i konei ka wherawhera mai. He maioha tēnei nā Tīmoti Kāretu rāua ko Te Wharehuia Milroy, kia hou mai te tāura ki waenga pū i ā rāua kōrerorero, he kōrero paki, he hokinga mahara o te ohinga, ā, pakeke noa. He puanga rautangi ki te hauangi. Kapohia e te tini. He tatau e puare ana i tō rāua ao. Staunch advocates of our spoken reo have relentlessly sought to sit down with these two most influential exponents of reo Māori, from the past and for today. Few have had the opportunity, He Kupu Tuku Iho now opens that door. Tīmoti Kāretu and the late Wharehuia Milroy invite the reader into their conversations, their yarns and musings from decades of cultural experience. This book’s value is undeniable. Its language, accessible. This is a doorway to their world.
MitoQ Best First Book Awards:
HUBERT CHURCH PRIZE FOR FICTION
The Sound of Breaking Glass by Kirsten Warner (Mākaro Press) $35
Judges' citation: In The Sound of Breaking Glass first time novelist Kirsten Warner presents a surreal, satirical and deeply moving story of multi-generational trauma. Through her central character Christel, we are confronted by the unresolved legacy of the Holocaust and the unaddressed corruption of adolescence. In revealing the impact of this history through an illusory censorious shape-shifter – Big Critic – and the Golem-like Milk Bottle Man, Warner takes her readers on a frenetic and ambitious narrative that tests the boundaries of storytelling. That she achieves this without compromising character or credibility is testament to her skills as a writer. The Sound of Breaking Glass is vivid, intelligent, funny and as compelling as it is inventive.
JESSIE MACKAY PRIZE FOR POETRY
Poūkahangatus by Tayi Tibble (Victoria University Press) $20
Judges' citation: In a year of strong first collections, Tayi Tibble’s remarkable book stood out. Poūkahangatus drew us in again and again with the strength of its voice, its narrative power, its formal experimentation, and the depth of the feelings it manifests and invokes. With an unsettling self-assurance, Tibble takes us on a tour of senses, scenes and a range of uncomfortable tropes that an Aotearoa audience may recognise as our own. Awkward and unequal power dynamics are battled out brutally on the page with a self-conscious attention to the ways the past plays out in the present. Her lyrical kaupapa draws us in to gaze at a two-way mirror through gestures that are by turns playful, angry, seductive and disquieting.
JUDITH BINNEY PRIZE FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION
Whatever It Takes: Pacific Films and John O'Shea, 1948-2000 by John Reid (Victoria University Press) $60
Judges' citation: Approaching an extensive archive for a first-time author is a daunting prospect, and one on which many an established biographical writer has come to grief. Whatever It Takes is an impressive debut, covering a complex story that highlights a unique part of our visual culture and social history. It is clearly written and carefully structured, with an approach to illustrations that is sympathetic to the original nature of the film-based imagery being reproduced. The design and illustrations create a richly contextual, evocative sense of the original time and place. The final result is a book that records a remarkable story and reflects an emerging non-fiction writer of great potential.
E.H. MCCORMICK PRIZE FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION
We Can Make a Life by Chessie Henry (Victoria University Press) $35
Judges' citation: Beautifully written and highly engaging, Chessie Henry’s We Can Make a Life is a powerful and gripping story of a family coping with personal trauma in the midst of national tragedy. Told with warmth and curiosity, this is both a candid account of the impact of the Christchurch and Kaikoura earthquakes on her family and a touching tribute to her adventurous parents. The beautiful writing is complemented by a considered approach to the design and production. An assured and compelling first book by an exciting new voice, this book is honest, compassionate, and in its coverage of personal responses to traumatic events is emotionally revealing without being sentimental.
>>Find out the category winners chosen by respondents to the VOLUME OCKHAMETER (and Acornometer).
>>Find out the category winners chosen by respondents to the VOLUME OCKHAMETER (and Acornometer).
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.