>>"I wrote the essay I needed to read."
>> The catharsis of candour.
>>"Why can't I let go more often?"
>>“After years of teaching Beckett plays, I am finally living in one.”
>> "Silence is a killer."
>> '1916 and Me.'
>>“Everybody has to decide on the way they want to tell their own story from their own perspective.”
>>"I've been asked to be the token woman."
>>The book is published by the exemplary tiny Irish publisher Tramp Press.
>>Tramp Press on throwing the book at sexism.
>>Click and collect.
>>Another edition.
 | Blue Self-Portrait by Noémi Lefebvre (translated by Sophie Lewis) {Reviewed by THOMAS} It takes approximately an hour and a half to fly from Berlin to Paris. Upon that hour and a half, a human memory, especially one working at neurotically obsessive speed, can loop a very large amount of time indeed, an hour and a half is plenty of time to go over and go over the things, or several of the things, the unassimilable things, that happened in Berlin, in an attempt to assimilate those things, although they are not assimilable, in an attempt, rather, albeit an involuntary attempt, an unconscious attempt, if that can be called an attempt, to damage oneself by the exercise of one’s memories, to draw self-blame and self-disgust from a situation the hopelessness of which cannot be attributed to anything worthy of self-blame or self-disgust but which is sufficiently involved to exercise the self-blame and self-disgust that seethe always beneath their veneer of not-caring, of niceness, the veneer that preserves self-blame and self-disgust from resolution into anything other than self-blame and self-disgust. Upon this hour and a half can be looped, such is the efficacy of human memory, not only, obsessively, the unassimilable things that happened in Berlin but also much else that happened even into the distant past, but, largely speaking, the more recent things that have bearing upon, or occupy the same memory-pocket, not the best metaphor, as the unassimilable things that happened in Berlin, for disappointment and failure seldom happen in a vacuum but resonate with, even if they are not the direct result of, disappointments and failures reaching back even into the distant past, perhaps especially into the distant past, self-blame and self-disgust having the benefit, or detriment, if a difference can be told between benefit and detriment, of binding experiences, or clumping them, to form an identity, and, not only this, upon that hour and a half can be looped also an endless amount of speculation and projection as to what may be occurring in the minds of others, or in the mind of, in this case, a specific other, a German-American pianist and composer with whom the narrator, who has been visiting Berlin with her sister, has had some manner of romantic encounter, so to call it, the extent of which is unclear, both, seemingly, to the narrator and, certainly, to the reader, the reader being necessarily confined to the mental claustrophobia of the narrator, on account of the obsessive speculation and projection and also the inescapable escapist and self-abnegating fantasising on the part of the narrator, together with the comet-like attraction-and-avoidance of her endless mental orbit around the most unassimilable things that happened in Berlin, or that might have happened in Berlin, or that did not happen in Berlin but are extrapolative fantasies unavoidably attendant upon what happened in Berlin, untrue but just as real as truth, for all thoughts, regardless of actuality, do the same damage to the brain. Lefebvre’s exquisitely pedantic, fugue-like sentences, their structure perfectly indistinguishable from their content, bestow upon her the mantle of Thomas Bernhard, which, after all, does not fall upon just any hem-plucker but, in this case, fully upon someone who, not looking skyward, has crawled far enough into its shadow when looking for something else. Where Bernhard’s narrators tend to direct their loathing outwards until the reader realises that all loathing is in fact self-loathing, Lefebvre’s narrator acknowledges her self-loathing and self-disgust, abnegating herself, rather, for circumstances in which self-abnegation is neither appropriate nor inappropriate, her self-abnegation arising from the circumstances, from her connection with the circumstances, from her rather than from the circumstances, her self-abnegation not, despite her certainty, having, really, any effect upon the circumstances. Not at all not-funny, pitch-perfect in both voice and structure, full of sly commentary on history and modernity, and on the frailties of human personality and desire, providing for the reader simultaneous resistance and release, Lefebvre shares many of Bernhard’s strengths and qualities, and the book contains memorable and affecting passages such as that in which the narrator recalls playing tennis with her mother-in-law, now her ex-mother-in-law, and finding she is not the type for ‘collective happiness’, or her hilariously scathing descriptions of Berlin’s Sony Centre or of the restaurant in what was Brecht's house, or of the narrator's inability to acknowledge the German-American pianist-composer's wife as anything but 'the accompaniment' — or, indeed, many other passages but the excellence of the book is perhaps less in the passages than in the book as a whole. |
 | The Book of Flora by Meg Elison {Reviewed by STELLA} Meg Elison’s 'The Road to Nowhere' is definitely a journey, from the brilliant The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, a deserved winner of a Philip K. Dick Award for Distinguished Science Fiction, to the final and third in the series, The Book of Flora. The third instalment carries on from The Book of Etta, with the surviving women of Nowhere and the battle of Eistel — the defeat of The Lion — ensconced in the underground city to Ommun. Yet life here with the leader, prophet-like Alma, doesn’t suit everyone. It’s a place of rigid social structures and religious/cultural rituals that are controlled by Alma and her beliefs. While life is ‘good’ here compared to many settlements in the world above ground, and much safer than being on the road, it doesn’t accept everyone for who or what they are. Flora is one who doesn’t fit — who doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere — she's always an outsider. With no role assigned to her, she takes it upon herself to travel the roads as a raider, looking for books — raiding abandoned libraries: medical and herbal books for Alice; farming manuals for the men of Ommun who, as part of the workforce, keep the wheels turning, producing food, and maintaining the mechanisms in this subterranean structure (presumably a massive and well-equipped fallout shelter from the old world) and who, more importantly, are kept for their breeding potential in this carefully curated community. Flora’s friends Eddy/Etta, Alice and Keida are here with her in this book, bringing some of the relationships and ideas from The Book of Etta into play again. Diving into this much anticipated third instalment, I would recommend going back to the second book to recap, as there is no preamble to get you up to speed again. Travelling takes Flora to Shy, an all-female (and wonderfully indulgent) city where food is plentiful and lush, life is sensuous and pleasure is embraced. Tempted as she is to stay here, the contempt the women of Shy have for the male species makes Flora uncomfortable, and her close ties with Eddy, in particular, draw her back to Ommun. But not for long. Soon enough the stifling atmosphere dominated by Alma drives Flora and her friends onwards. But to what? Where is their journey taking them and what are they searching for? In this dystopian future, now shaking itself down into a series of communities who are finding their own ways to deal with infertility, shortage of females, slave traders and the collapse of the old world, there are new structures that enable people to coexist with each other and find solace in belonging to a place. Flora, Alice and Eddy are travelling together but seeking different answers and are blindly heading back to the beginning of it all — the unnamed midwife’s territory in the old world of San Francisco — to look for these answers. As with the other two books, the issue of fertility and childbirth are at the fore, and, even more so, gender politics and ideas around identity and fluidity. This continuing journeying is grounded in books — in the books of the old world and the new, in the books of The Unnamed Midwife, of Etta and now of Flora herself (writing her story as an old woman living in a peaceful island community), and in the stories gathered and copied by scribes. My favourite image from this novel is the large gunship that has been converted into a floating library. Armed and ready to defend knowledge and the history of the human race against all who wish to obliterate these stories, the women — the Librarians — are the toughest yet! Elison leaves us with a curious evolutionary speculation at the end but gives us a gripping and wild journey on the way in 'The Road to Nowhere' trilogy. |
NEW RELEASES
In middle age, a writer finds herself despairing and uncomprehending at how modern Britain has become a place of such greed and indifference. In an attempt to understand her country and her species, she and her lover rent a van and journey across France to the Mediterranean, across Italy to the Balkans and Greece and on to the islands. To travel through space is also to travel through time: along the way, they drive through the Norman Conquest, the Hundred Years War, the wars with the Huguenots, the fragility of the Italian Renaissance, the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the current refugee crisis, meeting figures from Europe's political and artistic past — a Norman knight, Joan of Arc, Ariosto, d'Annunzio and Alan Moore's nihilistic Rorschach, each lending their own view of humanity at its best and at its very worst. Very interesting.
"The closer they get to their destination, the further they are from finding any definitive answers, and even the questions have become elusive. But this shifting, unsure quality, made luminous with an extraordinary descriptive brilliance, emerges as the book’s strength." —Guardian
"A masterclass in the short story — bold, irreverent and agonisingly funny'." - Sally Rooney
“Flattery tells the truth but tells it slant, so that from her sentences, to her symbolism, to her zany, often surrealist plots, her stories fizz with humour and surprise. Flattery's writing — as subversive as it is original — has more than charm; acknowledging the terror, it celebrates the joy of humour in a hollow, imploding world.” —Irish Independent
“If tradition is the kitchen sink, Flattery removes it from the wall, smashes it to pieces, and dances all over it with delight. With a literary voice that is as sophisticated and erudite as it is spiky and hilarious, Flattery has taken the short story format into an exciting, energetic, and multifaceted dimension.” —Sunday Independent
>>Flattery reads.
Every year on Leila’s birthday Shalini kneels by the wall with a little yellow spade and scoops dry earth to make a pit for two candles. One each for herself and for Riz, the husband at her side. But as Shalini walks from the patch of grass where she held her vigil the man beside her melts away. It is sixteen years since they took her, her daughter’s third birthday party, the last time she saw the three people she loves most dearly: her mother, her husband, her child.
"Intelligent, chilling and deeply moving." —Kamila Shamsie
"Leila does for the barbarity of contemporary Indian nationalism what The Handmaid's Tale did for the yoke of patriarchy. It is urgent, gripping, topical, disturbing, and announces a talent we'll be talking about for years to come." —Neel Mukherjee
A fascinating insight into how a publisher can not only publish important books (and unimportant ones), but also shift cultural conversation and change the way we engage with literature.
>>Visit the Faber archive.
A novel taking the form of a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity.
“A lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal. Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” —The Washington Post
In 1945, as the army retreated, the German people were surrendered to the enemy with no means of defence. A wave of suicides rolled across the country as thousands chose death — for themselves and their children — rather than face the defeat of the Third Reich and what they feared might follow. Drawing on eyewitness accounts, Huber tells of the largest mass suicide in German history and its suppression by the survivors-a fascinating insight into the feelings of ordinary people caught in the tide of history who saw no other way out.
The earliest evidence of a human and a pet can be traced as far back as 26,000 BC in France where a boy and his 'canid' took a walk through a cave. Their foot and paw prints were preserved together on the muddy cave floor, and smoke from the torch the boy carried was left on the walls, allowing archaeologists to carbon-date their journey. And so, the story unfolds, from these prehistoric days all the way up to the present, of our innate and undeniable need to live in the close company of animals.
Writing of hermits, cowboys, changing seasons, and the wind, Ehrlich draws us into her personal relationship with this 'planet of Wyoming' she has come to call home. Ehrlich captures the beauty and harshness of natural forces in these remote reaches of the West, and the people who live there.
"Vivid, tough and funny. Wyoming has found its Whitman." —Annie Dillard
A fact-filled tour of the world's most wonderful winged creatures. Yuval Zommer's distinctive illustrations show off some of the most colorful, flamboyant, impressive, and wacky birds of the sky.
>>Other wonderful books by Zommer.
Will Albert ever get a quiet moment in which he can read his book?
In 1939, when he was eight years old, Auerbach was sent to England to escape the Nazi regime. His parents stayed behind and died in a concentration camp in 1943. Now in his eighties, Auerbach is still producing his distinctly sculptural paintings of friends, family and surroundings in north London, where he has made his home since the war. As well as being a friend of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Leon Kossoff, Auerbach lends his story to one of the strands of W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants.
>>The forces of creation and destruction at work.
Billy Bragg argues that accountability is the antidote to authoritarianism, and that without it, we can never truly be free. He shows us that Freedom requires three dimensions to function: Liberty, Equality, and Accountability - and the result is a three dimensional space in which freedom can be exercised by all.
>> A long career of radical critique.
Fun facts! Incredible illustrations!
Quantum physics tells us that a particle can be in two places at once. Indeed, that particle is also a wave, and everything in the quantum world can be described entirely in terms of waves, or entirely in terms of particles, whichever you prefer. All of this was clear by the end of the 1920s. But to the great distress of many physicists, let alone ordinary mortals, nobody has ever been able to come up with a common sense explanation of what is going on. Physicists have sought 'quanta of solace' in a variety of more or less convincing interpretations. Gribbin introduces us to six.
In this attractive book, Babbs teaches us to identify and appreciate twenty trees commonly to be found on city streets, and leads our curiosity into their lore and uses.
"Full of gems; a manifesto for green cities. Babbs will turn us all into urban rangers, an unquiet army of neighbourhood watchers." —Max Adams
Across the globe 'politics as usual' are being rejected and faith in neoliberalism is fracturing beyond repair. Are we doomed or is there an opportunity to build a better system?
On June 28, 1969, the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village, was raided by police. But instead of responding with the typical compliance the NYPD expected, patrons and a growing crowd decided to fight back. The five days of rioting that ensued changed forever the face of gay and lesbian life.
Includes Kevin Barry, Eimear McBride, Lisa McInerney, Stuart Neville, Sally Rooney, Kit de Waal, Belinda McKeon.
Examines the epochal and cultural phenomenon that is 1984 in all its aspects: its roots in the utopian and dystopian literature that preceded it; the personal experiences in wartime Britain that Orwell drew on as he struggled to finish his masterpiece in his dying days; and the political and cultural phenomena that the novel ignited at once upon publication and that far from subsiding, have only grown over the decades. The manifestations of its influence in contemporary popular culture and (gulp) politics are even wider than you may have suspected.
Air pollution has become the world's greatest environmental health risk, and science is only beginning to reveal its wide-ranging effects. Globally, 19,000 people die each day from air pollution, killing more than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and car accidents combined. But, as Smedley demonstrates, air pollution is a problem that can be solved.
Browne argues that the same spark that triggers each innovation can be used to counter its negative consequences, and that we must not put any brakes on technological advancement if we are to overcome the problems arising from technological advancement.
The first British women to set foot in India did so in the very early seventeenth century, two and a half centuries before the Raj. Women made their way to India for exactly the same reasons men did - to carve out a better life for themselves. In the early days, India was a place where the slates of 'blotted pedigrees' were wiped clean; bankrupts given a chance to make good; a taste for adventure satisfied - for women. They went and worked as milliners, bakers, dress-makers, actresses, portrait painters, maids, shop-keepers, governesses, teachers, boarding house proprietors, midwives, nurses, missionaries, doctors, geologists, plant-collectors, writers, travellers, and - most surprising of all — traders. As wives, courtesans and she-merchants, these tough adventuring women were every bit as intrepid as their men, the buccaneering sea captains and traders in whose wake they followed; their voyages to India were extraordinarily daring leaps into the unknown.
Against the backdrop of the First World War, Albert Einstein and Arthur Eddington developed and promulgated the theory that would reconfigure the universe.
The fairy tale retold to suit more socially aware times. Illustrations by Arthur Rackham.
A Finnish novel exploring random acts of chance and how ordinary people cope with extraordinary events. A young girl loses her mother when a block of ice falls from the sky. A woman wins the lottery jackpot twice in a row. A man is struck by lightning five times. Is there meaning to be found?
Democracy means rule by the people, but in practice even the most robust democracies delegate most rule making to a political class. The gap between the public and its public officials might seem unbridgeable in the modern world, but Legislature by Lot presents a close examination of an inspiring solution: a legislature chosen through 'sortition' — the random selection of lay citizens.
Daniel is a sixteen-year-old drug dealer and he's going to jail. Then, suddenly, he's not. A courtroom intervention. A long car ride to a big country house. Other 'gifted delinquents': the elusive, devastating Rachel, and Alex, so tightly wound he seems about to shatter. So where are they? It's not a school, despite the 'lessons' with the headsets and changing images. It's not a psych unit — not if the absence of medication means anything. It's not a jail, because Daniel's free to leave. Or that's what they tell him. He knows he and the others are part of an experiment. But he doesn't know who's running it or what they're trying to prove. And he has no idea what they're doing to him.
"The Subjects is energetic and compelling from the opening pages. And in Daniel we find a voice that I was worried was disappearing from Australian fiction: unpretentious, smart and lacking in all mawkishness. It’s a joy to hear him, and it is a joy to read a book of such complex ideas that is also alert to the art of storytelling." —Christos Tsiolkas
A compelling and original novel exploring the imaginative territory surrounding the life and works of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, one of Japan's outstanding modern writers (author of 'Rashōmon' and 'In a Bamboo Grove'), who was active during the turbulent Taishō period (1912-1926 (including the 1923 earthquake)), and who killed himself at the age of 35 in 1927. New edition.
"David Peace not only lays bare the psyche of an era in which Japan came of age as a modern nation, he gives us a stunning, intense, profound and moving portrait of the life and death of a great writer." —Japan Times
"David Peace writes the boldest and most original British fiction of his generation." —New York Times
>> David Mitchell talks with David Peace.
A Book About Whales teaches young readers everything they need to know about the largest mammals on earth: how they have evolved over millions of years, what and how they eat, their migration patterns, and more Andrea Antinori's whimsical black-and-white illustrations bring their underwater world to life.
The second wave of stories in this thoughtfully selected and beautifully designed series issued to mark Faber & Faber's 90th birthday has reached our shores. Come in and make your selection, or click here.
 | On the Come Up by Angie Thomas {Reviewed by STELLA} Angie Thomas won critical acclaim for her debut novel, The Hate U Give(T.H.U.G.), a sharp-edged and heartfelt teen novel that grappled with racial prejudice and violence, and with stopping the circle of violence. It was raw and beautiful both as a novel and as a film. Her second book, On the Come Up, looks at some of the same issues and at growing up in some of the poorest communities in America. Bri has a dream, just like many sixteen-year-olds, but the chance of her capturing this dream is proving elusive. Growing up poor, even when you are bussing to the school in the next neighbourhood (your local is too dangerous) where you might have an opportunity to gain a scholarship for college, means an empty fridge, the power’s often cut, and your brother, who should be in college continuing his study, is working at the local pizza shop. Add that Bri’s dream is to be a rap star (something her mother is okay with as long as her grades come first) and she can’t make enough to cut a track, her mom just lost her job, she's got a crush on her best friend, her favourite aunt who has promised to help her make connections in the music world is too tied up in the drug world, and everyone is comparing her to her ‘famous’ dad who was the victim of a drive-by shooting, things aren’t looking so good. When Bri wins a rap competition (a bit like a sing-off), suddenly an opportunity arises that looks too good to be true — she’s got a new manager who is going to introduce her all the right people and they like her style — because she’s got it — the ability to make it big. Her rap goes viral, but it’s not what she expected. And this is where the story gets interesting — Bri is challenged to work out what she wants, what is important and how to be true to herself. Angie Thomas in On The Come Up confronts violence in black communities, the circular problems of drugs and gangs, and the stereotypes of colour — what white people think about you and what black people expect of you. As Bri gets increasingly frustrated by the situation she finds herself she is pushed to a place where she needs to make a decision about who she is and to confront what her culture means to her, not what it means to the music industry, the money makers and the gangs. Making it big will mean sacrifices and taking on a mantle she doesn’t feel comfortable with — her decision will change her place in the world — will it be a way out of the projects or swallow her whole? This is also a story about a young woman coming of age looking behind the masks of posturing and preening, finding out about love and realising how necessary friendship and family are. Tough issues, sassy characters and plenty of truth. |
 | How I Get Ready by Ashleigh Young {Reviewed by THOMAS} Every time, when reading or when writing, that we come to the end of a sentence or, in poetry, a line, we come to a point at which our continuation, the continuation of the text, our continued inhabitation of the text or vice-versa, is suddenly less certain, less than certain, perhaps quite uncertain, there is a break, a space, a moment of hesitation or panic — or relief — before we continue, before the text continues, before we jolt back onto the rails of the text and hurtle on, or feel our way along, towards the next uncertainty. All text is, under all else that it is, an essay in the movement through time, an essay in the prolongment of the self, so to call it, an essay in continuation, a triumph of audacity over doubt. The poems in Ashleigh Young’s new collection can be read as hesitations arrayed upon racks of words. They often have unpunctuated breaks — spaces — within a line, in addition to line breaks, stanza breaks, full stops, commas and all the rest, creating almost a stammer, a poetry of hesitation, of feeling for the right word or phrase or sense or image to continue. “But he had / this way of talking, like his voice doesn’t quite know // how to come out of his face. Why does he have to stare / at the ground, when he is among friends? You can have patience / with someone’s struggles for a length of time / but not for much longer than one minute.” But it is, as well, despite and because of this, a poetry of continuation, of the overcoming of impediments and doubts. It is not for nothing that the image of Young riding — wriding — her bicycle appears in so many of these poems: the momentum of the riding/writing carries her and us on through the gaps under which yawn uncertainty and anxiety. We hesitate, take notice, and are carried on. As with Young’s memorable and subtle essay collection Can You Tolerate This? (>>read my review of this here), How I Get Ready touches, when passing, subjects that would just cause pain if approached head-on, and Young's humour is at once playful (has poeticism ever been more subtly satirised than with the words “the leaf-blowered path”?) and sensitively descriptive of the masses with which it avoids collision. The momentum of the poems also holds together — and sometimes only just holds together — the closely noticed image-fragments that comprise them, an experience like riding a bicycle over a scattering of acorns and noticing the tiny explosions as each one is crushed by the bicycle’s tyres (the ‘I’ of the poems is too close to see other than what she sees), and the poems, like the experiences they embody (whether they record them or induce them), are often precarious, just pulling together, or almost pulling apart. “Which one of you is going to / stand up / in full sentences / and which one is going to / do the helpless dance”. This precarity is sometimes perhaps due to the tendency of an internal state to overwhelm and external circumstance, even though this is often paradoxically experienced as an external circumstance threatening to overwhelm an internal state. This disjuncture between the ‘internal’ and the ‘external’ provides much of the vigorous tension in many of the poems — some of which intensify towards a panic which is left unresolved, unresolvable, but left behind — and it is Young’s frankness about the chaotic tendencies of images, of noticing, together with her awareness of the performative approaches that make life liveable, that point a hesitant way towards a poetry and a life that is both possible and authentic. The last and title poem of the book, ‘How I Get Ready’, deals with the “pure, bitter difficulty” of getting ready to go out into the world, of Young’s going-out clothes “ironed smooth, laid out like a disappearance.” Her continued existence in that world is uncertain: “I can see I am not getting ready at all; if anything / I am getting unready.” |
>>Writers include: Jane Goodall, Yo-Yo Ma, Jacqueline Woodson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Mary Oliver, Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer, Rebecca Solnit, Elizabeth Gilbert, Shonda Rhimes, Alain de Botton, James Gleick, Anne Lamott, Diane Ackerman, Judy Blume, Eve Ensler, David Byrne, Sylvia Earle, Richard Branson, Daniel Handler, Marina Abramović, Regina Spektor, Elizabeth Alexander, Adam Gopnik, Debbie Millman, Dani Shapiro, Tim Ferriss, Ann Patchett, a 98-year-old Holocaust survivor, Italy’s first woman in space, and many more immensely accomplished and largehearted artists, writers, scientists, philosophers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and adventurers whose character has been shaped by a life of reading.
>> Illustrators include: Sophie Blackall, Oliver Jeffers, Isabelle Arsenault, Jon Klassen, Shaun Tan, Olivier Tallec, Christian Robinson, Marianne Dubuc, Lisa Brown, Carson Ellis, Mo Willems, Peter Brown, and Maira Kalman.
>>See some sample pages.
>>Maria Popova curates the book-positive Brain Pickings blog.
>> Numerous contributors speak about the book.
>>Some art from the book.
NEW RELEASES
Macfarlane takes us on a journey into the worlds beneath our feet. From the ice-blue depths of Greenland's glaciers, to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves, this is a deep-time voyage into the planet's past and future.
"Extraordinary and thrilling." —Guardian
>>'Silt'.
>>On creating the cover.
A remarkable novel exploring mother-daughter relationships and identity in relation to place, social class and the body.
"This book is sublime. It dares to be different, to look in a different way. Andrews is not filling anyone's shoes, she is destroying the shoes and building them from scratch." —Daisy Johnson
>>Read an extract.
>>"I didn't feel I deserved to speak."
>>Glimpsed in reflection.
Setting of to search for the bells that were used for timekeeping before the arrival of the Jesuits, Sherman follows a fascinating path through Tokyo's history and contemporary variety.
"A completely extraordinary book, unlike anything I have read before. At once modest in tone and vast in scale and ambition, it extends in all directions, delicately wrought, precise, unfaltering, lucid and strange as a dream. I haven’t felt so excited about an investigation into place since I first read W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. Like Sebald, Sherman is concerned with war, brutality, nostalgia and loss, but her search for the meaning of time is also radiant and absolutely humane." —Olivia Laing
"The Bells of Old Tokyo is part personal memoir, part cultural history, but wholly unique. The fragile, fragmentary poetry of its prose so beautifully captures the transience of Tokyo time, the constant cycle of destruction and reconstruction, and the nostalgia for that which has been lost and yet wonder at all that remains to be found. It is the best book I have read about Tokyo written this century." —David Peace
A journal of emerging arts and letters in Aotearoa New Zealand, this issue a co-production with Mouthfull. Contributors include: Eliana Gray, Sean Hartery, Alisdair Armstrong, Molly Robson, Rhys Feeney, Erik Kennedy, Tyler Barrow, Carolyn DeCarlo, George Turner, Joy Holley, fleshy.disguise, Georgie Johnson, Sara Cowdell, Ursula Le Sin, Malibu Stacy, BIGSWEAT, O & the Mo, Gangster Phanny, H4LF CĀST, Vanessa Crofskey, Madshrew, Rebecca Hawkes, Jessica Lim, Robbie Motion, Briana Jamieson, Wes Lee, Jordan Hamel, Carter Imrie-Milne, Adam Price, Liv Gallagher, Michaela Keeble, Rose Peoples, Flynn Gough, Catriona Britton, Caroline Shepherd, Curtis Mills, Jane Arthur.
>>Visit Mouthfull.
Science is revealing how our brains are wired to construct and respond to narrative. Stories are ordering, sense-making machines, helping our brains to render the frantic incoherence of chaotic existence into comprehensible narratives. They are the matrix by which we understand our lives and our selves. Storr shows how and why fiction works - and how we can apply narrative to read our lives.
"Hugely compelling." —Guardian
>>Storr telling.
Vegetable-based recipes from Slater, whose personable, thoughtful books and relaxed approach increase our appreciation of eating and cooking. The Autumn/Winter volume will appear in Spring.
>>Visit Slater's website.
In a 1970s commuter town, Tracey Thorn's teenage life was forged from what failed to happen. Her diaries were packed with entries about not buying things, not going to the disco, the school coach not arriving. Before she was a bestselling musician and writer, Tracey Thorn was a typical teenager: bored and cynical, despairing of her aspirational parents. Her only comfort came from house parties, Meaningful Conversations and the female pop icons who hinted at a new kind of living.
>>'On My Mind' (1983).
>>'Missing' (1994).
Born in 1937 in a small town in the north of England, David Hockney had to fight to become an artist. After leaving his home in Bradford for the Royal College of Art in London, his career flourished, but he continued to struggle with a sense of not belonging, because of his homosexuality, which had yet to be decriminalized, and his inclination for a figurative style of art not sufficiently 'contemporary' to be valued. Trips to New York and California—where he would live for many years and paint his iconic swimming pools—introduced him to new scenes and new loves, beginning a journey that would take him through the fraught years of the AIDS epidemic. A hybrid of novel and biography, Life of David Hockney offers an overview of the painter who shook the world of art with a vitality and freedom that neither heartbreak nor illness nor loss could corrode.
In this collection of short stories, blending elements of horror, science fiction, mythology, and feminism, Armfield explores women's experiences in contemporary society, mapped through their bodies. As urban dwellers' sleeps become disassociated from them, like Peter Pan's shadow, a city turns insomniac. A teenager entering puberty finds her body transforming in ways very different than her classmates'. As a popular band gathers momentum, the fangirls following their tour turn into something monstrous. After their parents remarry, two step-sisters, one a girl and one a wolf, develop a dangerously close bond. And in an apocalyptic landscape, a pregnant woman begins to realize that the creature in her belly is not what she expected.
Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, tells of a life that navigates, and transcends, abuse, addiction, self-destruction and the crushing loss of a stillborn child. Her memoir is also a paean to the pursuit of beauty, self-expression, desire, and the exhilaration of swimming.
>>The beauty of being a misfit.
>>Read Stella's review of The Book of Joan.
Delving into humanity's deep evolutionary past to look at how complex creatures like us emerged from single-celled life, Ball offers a new perspective on how humans think about ourselves. In an age when we are increasingly encouraged to regard the 'self' as an abstract sequence of genetic information, or as a pattern of neural activity that might be 'downloaded' to a computer, he return us to the body - to flesh and blood - and anchors a conception of personhood in this unique and ephemeral mortal coil.
Apricot Irving grew up as a missionary’s daughter in Haiti during a time of upheaval. Her father’s unswerving commitment to replant the deforested hillsides, despite growing political unrest, threatened to splinter his family. Drawing from her parents’ journals, as well as her own, Irving retraces the story of her family, the missionaries in the north of Haiti, and the shattered history of colonisation. The Gospel of Trees grapples with the complicated legacy of those who wish to improve the world.
"Irving moves seamlessly between the wide-eyed perspective of the child and the critical gaze of the adult, creating a tale as beautiful as it is discomfiting. The question that haunts her also haunts her book: 'Should we have kept trying, even if we were doomed to fail?'” —The New Yorker
An astounding collection of postcards by illustrators around the world affirming solidarity with refugees. Powerful and beautifully done.
The Mongol Derby is the world's toughest horse race. A feat of endurance across the vast Mongolian plains once traversed by the people of Genghis Khan, competitors ride 25 horses across a distance of 1000km. Many riders don't make it to the finish line. In 2013 19-year-old Lara Prior-Palmer entered the race.
>>An unlikely victory.
>>From the horse's mouth.
From the political propaganda of the Bayeux Tapestry and First World War soldiers with PTSD, to the maps sewn by schoolgirls in the New World, Threads of Life stretches from medieval France to contemporary Mexico, from a POW camp in Singapore to a family attic in Scotland. It is a chronicle of identity, protest, memory, power and politics told through the stories of the men and women, over centuries and across continents, who have used the language of sewing to make their voices heard, even in the most desperate of circumstances.
A Viking girl is swept by a storm on to a desolate English beach. Cruelly orphaned there, Ylva becomes set on revenge, tracking a killer through dangerous hinterland. She wants only the favour of the Norse gods and the comfort of her stories. But when a stranger decides to protect Ylva - seeming to understand her where others cannot - Ylva must decide if her story will end in vengeance or forgiveness.
Since the demise of the USSR, the mantle of the largest planned economies in the world has been taken up by the likes of Walmart, Amazon and other multinational corporations. For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market capitalism. Their remarkable success appears to vindicate the old idea that modern society is too complex to be subjected to a plan. And yet, as Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue, much of the economy of the West is centrally planned at present. The real question is whether planning can be democratic. Do the corporations' successes prove that Socialism is possible?
The concept of disparity has long been a topic of obsession and argument for philosophers but Slavoj Zizek would argue that what disparity and negativity could mean, might mean and should mean for us and our lives has never been more hotly debated. Disparities explores contemporary 'negative' philosophies from Catherine Malabou's plasticity, Julia Kristeva's abjection and Robert Pippin's self-consciousness to the God of negative theology, new realisms and post-humanism and draws a radical line under them. Instead of establishing a dialogue with these other ideas of disparity, Slavoj Zizek wants to establish a definite departure, a totally different idea of disparity based on an imaginative dialectical materialism.
The Jallianwala Bagh massacre, also known as the Amritsar massacre, took place on 13 April 1919 when troops of the British Indian Army under the command of Acting Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer fired rifles into a crowd of unarmed Punjabi civilians who had gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar, Punjab. For ten minutes, the troops continued firing, stopping only when 1650 bullets had been fired. Not a single shot was fired in retaliation. According to legend, a young, low-caste orphan, Udham Singh, was injured in the attack, and remained in the Bagh, surrounded by the dead and dying, until he was able to move the next morning. Then, he supposedly picked up a handful of blood-soaked earth, smeared it across his forehead and vowed to kill the men responsible, no matter how long it took. The truth, as Anand has discovered, is more complex but no less dramatic.
Why did Heiða Guðný Ásgeirsdóttir turn her back on a modelling career and become a sheep farmer and green activist in Iceland?
>> Meet an Icelandic shepherd.
When the human creatures appeared, they ravaged the forests and hunted many birds to extinction. The flightless Striggs had only one option: They went down, down under the ground . . . And it’s there, as you may have heard it whispered, that they still remain. Far below, in a place of stone and darkness . . . Over thousands of years, they colonised a labyrinth of tunnels and caves, but even underground the Striggs are not safe: chemicals now pollute their water and a deadly sickness threatens the flock. Even worse: an inquisitive young Strigg discovers a human boy, trapped deep in a well. Humans are to be feared and saving him could mean travelling to the surface, a place of untold peril.
"I didn't write this book. I stole it." A Parisian bookbinder stumbles across a manuscript containing three stories, each as unlikely as the other. The first, 'The Education of a Monster', is a letter penned by the poet Charles Baudelaire to an illiterate girl. The second, 'City of Ghosts', is a noir romance set in Paris in 1940 as the Germans are invading. The third, 'Tales of the Albatross', is the strangest of the three: the autobiography of a deathless enchantress. Together, they tell the tale of two lost souls peregrinating through time. Replete with literary references and metafictional pyrotechics, Crossings is a novel in three parts, designed to be read in two different directions, spanning a hundred and fifty years and seven lifetimes.
>>Read an extract.
A boy follows the river from its trickling source in the mountain snow all the way to the coast.
Black Americans show how they subvert and resist racism.
A woman in the totalitarian NAS [USA] of 20 years hence is suddenly thrust back into small-town Wisconsin of 1959 in this dystopian novel that asks, How damaging are our concepts of future and past?
A young girl is exiled from her family after she reveals her brothers’ involvement in a brutal crime in this tense and probing novel.
No two civilisations have spoken so many words about each other in recent years as those of Islam and the West. And no two seem to have communicated less. People Like Us confronts the themes that define this chasm head-on: women, jihad, secularism, terrorism, reformation and modernity. Its piercing examination of these subjects reveals our thoughtless and destructive tendency to assume that the world's problems could be solved if only everyone became more like us.
A showcase of the breadth and depth of the national collection.
In the wake of the apocalypse, Flora has come of age in a highly gendered post-plague society where females have become a precious, coveted, hunted, and endangered commodity. But Flora does not participate in the economy that trades in bodies. An anathema in a world that prizes procreation above all else, she is an outsider everywhere she goes, including the thriving all-female city of Shy.
>>Read Stella's reviews of The Book of the Unnamed Midwife and The Book of Etta.
YA novel exposing the underbelly of the fashion industry in an era of #TimesUp and #MeToo.
Abraham cries at the first same-sex marriage in Britain, loses herself in the world's biggest drag convention in LA, marches at Pride parades across Europe, visits both a transgender model agency and the Anti-Violence Project in New York to understand the extremes of trans life today, parties in the clubs of Turkey's underground LGBTQ+ scene, and meets a genderless family in progressive Stockholm.
In May 2012 Auckland businessman Matt Blomfield found himself the target of a vicious online attack, the work of far right Whale Oil blogger Cameron Slater. The attack came out of the blue, destroying Blomfield’s reputation and career, stealing his identity, turning him into a social outcast. Two years after the online attack began an armed gunman came to Blomfield’s house and tried to kill him. He only survived because the intruder’s shotgun misfired. Blomfield spent seven years and hundreds of thousands of dollars taking a defamation case against Slater, which he ultimately won, establishing that Slater’s vendetta was based entirely on lies. How did Slater get away with calculated on-line bullying and character assassination for so long?
>>Dirty tactics.
>>Blomfield talks with John Campbell.
>>10 shocking moments.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #129 (25.5.19)
Find out what we've been reading — and what you'll be reading next — in our latest NEWSLETTER.
 | Jobs, Robots & Us: Why the future of work in New Zealand is in your hands by Kinley Salmon {Reviewed by STELLA} The robots are coming, but not yet. The hype from the tech companies and the media has us all on edge. What sort of world are we heading towards? Are half our jobs going to disappear? And how will new innovations alter the ways in which we live? In Kinley Salmon’s Jobs, Robots & Us, he asks us to take a step back — away from the exclamation headlines and suave entrepreneurs in suits — and take a longer and sometimes more wary look at the next wave of technological change. And Salmon’s book is specifically looking at New Zealand, an economy that he believes has the hallmarks to be nimble, to take the opportunity to be in change of its own destiny, and to create a healthy and wealthy environment in this future workplace. In this timely book he outlines the kinds of innovation that are possible, and which is best at creating jobs. He gives perspective to the technological changes of the past and present, and uses this analysis to project what the future might be like. There is a particular emphasis on looking at the challenges that New Zealand currently has, and the necessary changes and improvements we would need to make to ensure a positive outcome. He focuses on six aspects and their associated toolboxes: tools that would need to be implemented through policy to encourage business to respond accordingly. He sketches out two different future scenarios: one, most familiar to us, which involves a greater degree of technology in our everyday lives, but also has work (better work) at its centre; and another that means we ‘work’ less or not at all in roles where automation and AI do the work better and more cheaply, but where there is a UBI (Universal Basic Income) and opportunities for added income or what we would recognise as ‘lifestyle’ projects to satisfy our desire to be productive. Both of these scenarios require improved education and new skills training to allow us to prosper in a high-tech world. Amid all this is the challenge to harness the harms of production. The environmental impact of continued and increasing production and consumption is the problem of our times — one which we have ignored for too long. While some measures have been in place to attempt to alleviate these negative impacts on the planet, these have been slow in happening, not yet enough and require more compliance. Salmon recognises the problems of work-creation and the environment, and proposes higher carbon taxes and measures to ensure that business look towards a sustainable future, enforced by regulation and planning at a governmental level. There is plenty to think about in this book, and it’s an important study of our own particular economy and circumstances. While this is one view, Salmon’s — that of an economist, academic and millennial — is an analysis that will stimulate discussion and debate. The sub-title of this work is Why the future of work in New Zealand is in our hands, and this is his call to us all: to think, discuss and choose what kind of future we want for ourselves and the next generations. |
 | Correction by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Finding himself the literary executor of his friend Roithamer after Roithamer’s suicide, the narrator returns to Austria, to the room in the garret of the house their mutual school-friend the taxidermist Hoeller built above the Aurach Gorge, the room in which Roithamer sought refuge from the world to think and plan and perfect the cone-shaped house he built for his sister in the exact centre of the Kobernausser Forest (the house which was so ‘perfect’ and so ‘suited to her particular character’, or so Roithamer intended, that she died (or was relieved of the burden of having to keep herself alive (Austrians’ ‘national folk art’ being “to think constantly about killing themselves without actually killing themselves”)) immediately upon entering it), the room in which Roithamer wrote, rewrote and re-rewrote the manuscript ‘About Altensam and everything connected with Altensam (with special attention to the Cone’ (which the narrator considers Roithamer’s masterwork)), despite its differing and conflicting versions, along with ‘hundreds of thousands’ of passages on slips of paper and preparatory drawings for the nihilistic structure of the Cone, which the narrator prepares himself to ‘sift and sort’. In the second of the two relentless paragraphs that comprise the book, the narrator reads Roithamer’s manuscript (the ‘corrected’ and shorter second version and the ‘re-corrected’ and even shorter third version (and the slips of paper)) and is progressively and ultimately completely subsumed by Roithamer’s voice, its absolutism, its monstrous ambivalences, tectonic self-contradictions and tiresome petulance, as Roithamer obsesses over his miserable childhood and youth at his immensely wealthy family’s home at Altensam, his attempts to oppose himself to his family, in particular to his step-mother (‘that Eferding woman’), his sale of the family estate at Altensam after it was perniciously left to him by his father (who surely knew that Roithamer hated Altensam and would bring about its destruction), all building to a maniacal crescendo of invective and self-abnegation. Even within the claustrophobic subjectivity of Roithamer’s mind, each assertion, as soon as it is stated, begins to move towards its negation: “We’re constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously, because we recognise at every moment that we did it all wrong (wrote it, thought it, made it all wrong), acted all wrong, how we acted all wrong, that everything to this point of time is a falsification, so we correct this falsification, and then we again correct the correction of this falsification, and we correct the result of the correction of a correction and so forth, so Roithamer. But the ultimate correction is one we keep delaying…”. As with the narrator, so ultimately with Roithamer: persons and facts do not endure; the mechanisms of thought and language, when permitted to run their course, are destructive to all equally: entities, identities, personalities, actualities are all mere contingencies to an ineluctable process of devastation.
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Frances Hodgkins: European journeys edited by Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler (published by Auckland University Press and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki) is a deeply and splendidly illustrated that finds parallel expression in a touring exhibition organised by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. The book 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. In Finding Frances Hodgkins (published by Massey University Press), Mary Kisler has also written an account of following Hodgkins through England, France, Italy, Morocco, Spain and Wales in search of the locations in which Hodgkins constantly pushed her exploration of modernism. This book is well illustrated, too.
>>On the trail of Frances Hodgkins.
>>Sample pages of European Journeys.
>>Radio slide-show.
>>A life in colour. >>The exhibition is currently showing at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
>>Why (briefly) Hodgkins is important.
>>On the reputation of Frances Hodgkins.
>>Slide show with Chopin.
>>What happened when Kate Sylvester discovered Frances Hodgkins.
>>The Frances Hodgkins Retirement Village(!)
>>Obituary (1947).
NEW RELEASES
In this playful and inventive reimagining of Mary Shelley's 1818 classic, Winterson explores the possibilities of love in a world of artificial intelligence, cryogenics and robotic simulacra.
>>"I did worry about looking at sexbots."
In this playful and inventive reimagining of Shakespeare's and Wilkins's Pericles, Haddon explores the possibilities of storytelling and the power of the imagination in a world distorted by abuse and tradition.
"The extraordinary force and vividness of Haddon’s prose ensure that The Porpoise reads not as a metatextual game but as a continually unfolding demonstration of the transporting power of stories. The Porpoise is also about humanity stripped down to its starkest elements by forces beyond its comprehension and control; about damage and survival, and the balancing act between the two." - Guardian
After water and air, sand is the natural resource that we consume more than any other - even more than oil. Every concrete building and paved road on Earth, every computer screen and silicon chip, is made from sand.
The lower sea levels of the Ice Age exposed a vast land bridge between Asia and North America, but the land bridge was not the only way across. Different people arrived from different directions, and not all at the same time. The first explorers of the New World were few, their encampments fleeting. The continent they reached had no people but was inhabited by megafauna-mastodons, giant bears, mammoths, saber-toothed cats, five-hundred-pound panthers, enormous bison, and sloths that stood one story tall. The first people were hunters-Paleolithic spear points are still encrusted with the proteins of their prey-but they were wildly outnumbered and many would themselves have been prey to the much larger animals.
By 1979, we knew all that we know now about the science of climate change - what was happening, why it was happening, and how to stop it. Over the next ten years, we had the very real opportunity to stop it. Why was nothing done? What does this mean for us now?
Chariandy draws upon his personal and ancestral past, including the legacies of slavery, indenture, and immigration, as well as the experience of growing up as a visible minority in the land of his birth to explain to his daughter the politics of race.
A narrative non-fiction account of Egypt after the 'Cairo Spring', speculating on parallels between contemporary life and Egyptian lives in ancient history.
"Nuanced and deeply intelligent—a view of Egyptian politics that sometimes seems to look at everything but and that opens onto an endlessly complex place and people." - Kirkus
>> A visit to Abydos.
A resilient Turkish writer's account of his imprisonment that provides crucial insight into political censorship amidst the global rise of authoritarianism.
"Read this - it will explain why you ever read anything, why anyone ever writes." - A.L. Kennedy
When our heroine Ophelia is promoted to Vice-storyteller by Farouk, the ancestral Spirit of Pole, she finds herself unexpectedly thrust into the public spotlight and her special gift is revealed to all. Ophelia knows how to read the secret history of objects and there could be no greater threat to the nefarious denizens of her icy adopted home than this. The second book in this intriguing YA series, following A Winter's Promise.
>>Read Stella's review of the first book.
At the end of hostilities in 1918, a radical new beginning was not only possible but unavoidable. Now in paperback.
Marie-Madeleine Fourcade's group's name was Alliance, but the Gestapo dubbed it Noah's Ark because its agents used the names of animals as their aliases. No other French spy network lasted as long or supplied as much crucial intelligence as Alliance - and as a result, the Gestapo pursued its members relentlessly, capturing, torturing, and executing hundreds of its three thousand agents.
Amundsen's South Polar conquest is an extraordinary tale that combines risk, intrigue and personal conflict. A man of striking intelligence and a single-minded thirst for world records, Amundsen's astute planning and shrewd strategy propelled him into first place. Such a man, with everything to lose, will stop at nothing to secure his goal. Told for children.
As an educated, married noblewoman whose husband was in captivity, Colonna was able to develop relationships within the intellectual circles of Ischia and Naples, and became a confidante of Michelangelo, Charles V, Pope Clement VII and Pope Paul III, Pietro Bembo, Baldassare Castiglione, Pietro Aretino, Queen Marguerite de Navarre, Reginald Pole, Isabella d'Este, and others. Her early poetry began to attract attention in the late 1510s and she ultimately became one of the most popular female poets of sixteenth-century Italy.
For decades now, Pico Iyer has been based for much of the year in Nara, Japan, where he and his Japanese wife, Hiroko, share a two-room apartment. But when his father-in-law dies suddenly, calling him back to Japan earlier than expected, Iyer begins to grapple with the question we all have to live with: how to hold on to the things we love, even though we know that we and they are dying. In a country whose calendar is marked with occasions honouring the dead, this question has a special urgency and currency.
"An exquisite personal blend of philosophy and engagement, inner quiet and worldly life. It's Iyer's keen ear for detail and human nature that helps him populate his trademark cantabile prose." - Los Angeles Times
"My name is Hanna. I am 15. I am Latvian. I live with my mother and grandmother. My father is missing, taken by the Russians. I have a boyfriend and I'm training to be a dancer. But none of that is important any more. Because the Nazis have arrived, and I am a Jew. And as far as they are concerned, that is all that matters. This is my story."
Poulantzas's book was the first major Marxist study of German and Italian fascism to appear since the Second World War. It carefully distinguishes between fascism as a mass movement before the seizure of power and fascism as an entrenched machinery of dictatorship. It compares the distinct class components of the counter-revolutionary blocs mobilzed by fascism in Germany and Italy; analyses the changing relations between the petty bourgeoisie and big capital in the evolution of fascism; discusses the structures of the fascist state itself, as an emergency regime for the defense of capital; and provides a sustained and documented criticism of official Comintern attitudes and policies towards fascism in the fateful years after the Versailles settlement.
With recipes drawn from throughout Greece.
The world's largest archipelago of spices.
There is a continuity between humans and other species, and, in fact, the characteristics that we generally consider the most human are those most widely shared with other species.
A striking novel about secrets on occupied Guernsey in 1940 and their repercussions fifty years later, from the author of The Model Occupation - The Channel Islands under German Rule, 1940-1945 and Love of Country.
Driven to his deathbed by an incurable disease, the thirty-year-old impoverished gentleman Chulkaturin decides to write a diary looking back on his short life. After describing his youthful disillusionment and his family's fall from grace and loss of status, the narrative focuses on his love for Lisa, the daughter of a senior civil servant, his rivalry with the dashing Prince N- and his ensuing humiliation. These pages helped establish the archetype of the 'superfluous man', a recurring figure in nineteenth-century Russian literature.
Princess Arnica is so sweet and gentle that when she smiles even wolves and bears forget their fierceness. Everyone loves her, but she loves only Poor Johnny. Luckily, he loves her too, and even more luckily she has a very sensible king for a father, who is happy for her to marry whomever her heart desires. Just one problem: the Witch with a Hundred Faces has cast a spell on Arnica and Johnny which means that one of them, at any one time, must always be a duck, and the other human Who can help them? Only the Seven-headed Fairy!
>>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.
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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.
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 | 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. |