 | Darker With the Lights On by David Hayden {Reviewed by THOMAS} The act of writing is an act of forgetting as much as it is an act of memory. Description replaces experience, if there was experience there to start with, or otherwise description precludes the experience described, permitting experience only of itself. The pencil’s mark obscures whatever line it traces. That which is described becomes digestible as text, becomes definite, finite and defined. Whatever is described becomes ersatz, the currency of exchange between a writer and a reader, the tin chip passed between parties to a language game, pretending understanding, pretending being understood, the cosiest, most intimate of couplings. How reassuring to have one’s expectations fulfilled by text, but how tiresome, this pact-as-habit, this plethora of detail, this obsessive mentioning that enervates the experience that gets obscured by words. But every signifier has its limit. Every mentioned thing is mentioned at the exclusion of another thing, the excluded or unincludable thing that pushes the mentioned into view while remaining, carefully, out of sight, hidden in the place of greater force, unseen, unfaced, the unseeable and unfaceable warping the mentioning by exerting its weight upon it from behind. A reader has no business to supply anything beyond the text, but also has to complete the text with nothing but their own paltry store of experiences to supply the meanings of the words. How to proceed? How to read the unseen mechanics behind but not referred to by the text? The reader too has ungraspable weights that can be induced to rise and touch the undersurface of the text, pressing up upon it as those of the author press down, two sides of one skin, the text the shared rind of two ungraspable depths, if there are such things as depths, otherwise, without depths, a synclastic and anticlastic flexing of the only surface, two dimensions modelled in a third. If it is what is excluded that potentises text, if it is what is destroyed by writing that makes writing do what writing does, then the stories of David Hayden in Darker with the Lights On move like the sharpened tip of a great black crayon as it scribbles out all memory and knowledge. Not in these stories the reassurance of the expected, nor that of continuity or clarity. Answers are not given, perhaps withheld, though withholding requires an existence for which no evidence ensues, but we are participants in the ritual taking away of knowledge, the deanswering of questions, itself a sort of understanding. Many of the stories concern themselves with the tensions between memory and perception, between two times running concurrently, memory snarling on details and producing not-quite-narrative but a stuttering intimation of the vast force of passing time. What unfaceable calamity bridged the idyll of memory with the torment of the present? In ‘Dick’, for me, perhaps, the most memorable story in the collection, the main character is buried to the waist in the sand, declaring snippets of memory, of idyll even, like some character shoved from Beckett to somewhere beyond the apocalypse, declarative not in Beckettian wearidom and decline but in extremis, the object of some cruelty, disoriented by their own presence, spouting words such as those that may have spoken by the condemnee in Kafka’s ‘Penal Colony’ reading aloud the words as they are inscribed into his flesh by the harrow. It often seems Hayden’s characters’ backgrounds are withheld not only from the reader but seemingly also from the characters themselves. They are being dememorised by their stories, or they exist, as perhaps we all do, with great voids where stories could be expected to be. But stories come from somewhere, unseen, and visit themselves upon us. “There were stories everywhere. Stories in the body, stories in and out of time, stories in the chosen and the unchosen, stories under glass, stories under water, stories under flesh, hot and cold, stories in tumult and silence.” Remembering and inventing contest the same attention, preclude each other but find themselves indistinguishable from one another, as a matter of course in fiction, more problematically so in the lives of writers and of readers. The characters are disoriented but grasp at every chance to climb into, or out of, some awareness: “He senses his head thinking, his trunk big and loose, his delicate fingers flickering at the ends of his arms and decides that he is conscious: real.” The stories’ worlds are composed of granules of awareness, snatches of phrases forced out against their silencing. Reading is akin to viewing through a narrow tube: the perspective is limited but the focus is immense. What is not seen is always there, deforming what is seen, but unglimpsable, unassailable beyond the vertigo of any attempt to look in its direction. Hayden produces a spare disorienting beauty on the level of the sentence. His admixture of restraint — even paucity — and excess, produces a surrealism truncated rather than efflorescent, its effects cumulative rather than expansive, a surrealism not the furthest expression of surrealism’s usual tired romantic literary inclinations but of their opposite, their extinguishment, not the surrealism of dreams but of the repetitive banging of the back of the head as the reader is dragged down a flight of steps, their eyes either closed or open. |
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A Mistake by Carl Shuker {Reviewed by STELLA}
Medical misadventure is the stuff of shouty headlines and third-hand anecdote: told, embellished and finger-pointing. We all know mistakes happen in all professions but when it comes to medicine we are quick to blame and sharply condemn. Accountability is fine, but where is the line between personal responsibility and institutional culpability? In Carl Shuker’s A Mistake, his latest novel, we are in crisis mode from the opening pages. A young woman with severe abdominal pain is in A&E — immediate surgery necessary. Elizabeth Taylor, perfectionist, surgeon, 27 hrs on her feet, is in charge and the theatre is ready — the stage set. We know that this is just the beginning of a disaster, and just as we, the reader, are shunted into the midst of this medical freneticism, the author calls cut and the clapper board comes down and we are taken back to 1986 — to the launch of the space shuttle Challenger. The tension is the same, the anticipation and our watchfulness as the audience just as intense. From the small confines of the theatre and looking down through Elizabeth’s eyes at her patient (well, her patient’s body — her awareness of the woman sometimes seems absent), we are suddenly surrounded by the hype and immensity of space science and we are looking up at the sky in wonder — waiting and on tenterhooks as the countdown begins. Shuker cleverly moves between these two situations building an energetic forcefield — and what some readers will feel is a distraction is anything but: technical language — medical in our hospital theatre and astrophysical at NASA mission control, blow-by-blow action — as the surgeons operate and as the NASA team relay information (the as-it-happens variety), the power hierarchy — who’s in charge in each scenario, and the realisation of the error (too late to save anyone). It all piles up around us — the chaos growing. Yet it is what happens next that will reveal more: the consequences for the medical team and for the engineers. Shuker’s Elizabeth Taylor is not the easiest character to slide along with — she’s a perfectionist, dedicated, frustrating, sometimes a lousy friend, brash, dismissive of fools, and is described variously as a brilliant surgeon and a ‘fucking psychopath’. Yet she's loyal, takes the rap for the mistake and, unlike the bureaucratic nightmare she has to work under, she’s not looking for the ‘good’ PR story even when there is wriggle room for her to distance herself from the crisis. But it’s hard to tell whether she has been altered by the mistake or is ultimately only concerned for her own record. Ego, power and success are themes that you expect in this story, and with these comes the flip side: young doctor burnout and suicide, overwork, failed relationships, doubt, recklessness and the unrelenting pressure to be right always. Shuker’s new novel is a departure in style from his previous work. The Method Actors, his first novel, which I read back in 2005, was a big, brilliant, complex book. A Mistake is sharp, scalpel-fine. Shuker has pared this novel back to bone and gristle, letting the reader feel, by being stabbed repeatedly with attack language, reckless behaviour, fleeting insights and snide dialogue, the intensity of this life and this error. The ending is as abrupt as the start and you will be wounded — but intrigued by that scalpel cut. Long after you read this novel you will have a scar to remember it by. |
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Aftermath by Rachel Cusk {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“All my memories are being taken away. Nothing belongs to me any more. I have become an exile from my own history. I no longer have a life. It’s an afterlife; it’s all aftermath.” Does Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath, published in 2012 on the brink of the three years of silence that preceded Outline, the first of the three books of Cusk’s completely remarkable ‘Faye’ project, provide any gleanings for readers of those novels as to the preconditions for their eventual production and for the austere perfection of their style? Aftermath is comprised of a series of personal essays (and one story) written in the painful period following Cusk’s separation from her husband and the father of her children, a period in which she tries desperately, obsessively, to make sense of the harm done to her indivisible concepts of herself and of her world. “Everything that was formless in our life together now belongs to me,” she writes. She surprises herself by declaring at the moment of crisis that her children belong to her alone and not to her husband. “The children belong to me: once I would have criticised such a sentiment, but of certain parts of life there can be no foreknowledge.” Cusk attempts to defend her unexpected claim with an appeal to a generalised form of biological privilege, though she is perhaps using the wrong wrench to grasp her situation (blame her therapist) and, in any case, the ambivalence between the particulars of her personality and the generic role of motherhood is suitably unresolved (and unresolvable): “I felt inhabited by a second self, a twin whose jest it was — in the way of twins — to appear to be me while doing things that were alien to my own character.” Cusk’s interpretative statements may flatten the pieces in which they appear, expelling the reader, but these pieces also contain details and descriptions as so sharp and enduring that they could only have been recorded in the vacuum created by the abandonment of pre-existing structures and approaches that accompany the self-abnegation that Cusk plays out in this book. The passage describing her visit to the dentist with her daughter, for example, or that describing the landlady of the place she stayed when she took her daughters on a horse-riding holiday in Devon, or that describing her boarder’s emotional disintegration, leave impressions against which a reader can have no defence. When Aftermath was written, Cusk had already repudiated most of the conventional novelistic crutches of fiction (plot, character, ‘invention’, &c) as “fake and embarrassing” and was convinced that the author’s own life was the only authentic subject for literature. Aftermath displays the perils of that approach but also shows the first stages of another, even more acidic ‘cleansing’ process: the removal of the author herself. When Cusk started writing again in Outline, this process is more or less complete (but can’t be more than complete): the author exists only as others say to her they see her to exist (self-definition is not possible, after all; we are only ever usefully — and non-definitively — defined by others) and, although the ‘Faye’ novels are full of ideas, they are not obviously imposed by the author as defining interpretations but are voiced at a degree’s or several degrees’ remove. In Aftermath Cusk suggests “the problem usually lies in the relationship between the story and the truth. … The closer the cut the more pleasing the effect,” and consciousness of this ‘problem’ is the impetus for her eventual production of the ‘Faye’ novels, which recalibrate the relationship between literature and life. At this stage, however, “it’s too late to run away from something whose nature I can’t in any case discern. It’s just a shape in the darkness, understanding or its opposite. I can’t tell.” She is approaching the silence that she will eventually pass through, shedding what will not serve.
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Rachel Cusk's Aftermath scrutinises the transformative period of her life marked outwardly by her divorce. What are the effects on women of the tectonic pressures of connection and separation evident in contemporary society? Cusk's work, as always, bursts with sharp observations and sharp sentences. New edition.
>>"The gears of life had gone into reverse."
>>Unhappy all the time.
>>"I was heading into total silence."
After the Sickness has killed off her parents, and the bombs have fallen on the last safe cities, Monster emerges from the Arctic vault which has kept her alive. When she washes up on the coast of Scotland, everyone she knows is dead, and she believes she is alone in an empty world.Monster begins the long walk south, scavenging and learning the contours of this familiar land made new. Slowly, piece by piece, she begins to rebuild a life. Until, one day, she finds a girl: another survivor, feral, and ready to be taught all that Monster knows. But the lessons the girl learns are not always those Monster means to teach.
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Climate change is happening and the potential long-term costs are incalculable. But how do we manage the short-term costs of mitigation? How do we undertake a low-emissions transition that won't undermine the public support that it relies upon? This book makes the case for a careful revolution and provides the tools to prepare New Zealanders for change.
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Three decades of the application of Moore's sharp and quirky mind to every cultural manifestation from books to films to politics (and back to books) has left this marvelous residue of essays and criticism. Now in paperback.
>> "The route to truth and beauty is a toll road."
Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers.
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A rigorous examination of the insidious history and damaging consequences of race science — and the unfortunate reasons behind its apparent recent resurgence across the globe.
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“Tough, luminous stories.” —New York Times
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Ridiculed for his slowness when he was young, John Franklin used those same qualities to explore the Arctic and pave the way for the discovery of the Northwest Passage.
"Offers all the pleasures of the best historical fiction." —Daily Telegraph
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Tells the story of the energy boom's impact on a small town at the edge of Appalachia and of one woman's transformation from a struggling single parent to an unlikely activist.
Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
Using such models as Joseph Cornell's box constructions, crazy quilts, and specimen displays, Joni Tevis places fragments in relationship to each other in order to puzzle out lost histories, particularly those of women.
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Shatters mainstream consensus on politics and personhood, offering in its place a bracing analysis of a perilous world and how we should live in it.
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Burmese food draws techniques and ingredients from Thailand, India and China but has its own landscape of flavours.
McGlasson’s novel brings to life an odd slice of British history from 1926, when the Panacea Society flourished in Bedford. Largely made up of women who had lost husbands, brothers or sons in the Great War, the Society is centred on the figure of Octavia, a prophetess and self-proclaimed Daughter of God, who claims to have been sent to pave the way for the return of Jesus.
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A graphic novel of Turing's life.
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>> Come and hear contributors Donna McLeod, Sarah Lin Wilson and Kerry Sunderland and the book's editor, Naomi Arnold discuss what anxiety feels like, what causes it, what helps and what doesn't. This Thursday, 27 June, 5 PM at KUSH (5 Church Street, just down the street from VOLUME).
>>'Ghost Knife' by Ashleigh Young.
>>'In a Scorched Room' by Michelle Langstone.
>>Holly Walker tell us what her anxiety feels like.
>> Read 'Arise and Pass Away' by Danyl McLauchlan.
>>'We Are Loved, We Are Loved' by Aimie Cronin.
>>'On Being Sectioned on Friday the 13th' by Paula Harris.
>>"Naming' by Bonnie Etherington.
>>Naomi Arnold on Radio NZ.
>>Another interview with Naomi Arnold.
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>>'Ghost Knife' by Ashleigh Young.
>>'In a Scorched Room' by Michelle Langstone.
>>Holly Walker tell us what her anxiety feels like.
>> Read 'Arise and Pass Away' by Danyl McLauchlan.
>>'We Are Loved, We Are Loved' by Aimie Cronin.
>>'On Being Sectioned on Friday the 13th' by Paula Harris.
>>"Naming' by Bonnie Etherington.
>>Naomi Arnold on Radio NZ.
>>Another interview with Naomi Arnold.
>>Breaking free from anxiety.
>>"Give me back my anxiety chair!" —Sarah Lin Wilson
>> Out of the Woods by Brent Williams and Korkut Öztekin
>> First We Make the Beast Beautiful by Sarah Wilson [no relation]
>> First We Make the Beast Beautiful by Sarah Wilson [no relation]
 | Pill by Robert Bennett {Reviewed by STELLA} Another gem from the 'Object Lessons' series, Pill is a fascinating account of the history and consequences of psychotropic medications. Starting with the drug revolution of the 1950s, when the new wave of pills moved the treatment of mental health away from ECT and the asylum, Bennett takes us on a philosophical exploration through several developments. Chapters 1 to 5 are titled by their pill name: 'Thorazine', 'Valium', 'Lithium', 'Prozac' and 'Adderall'. He lays out his explorations within the cultural context of each period, delving into literature, film and television — those visible cultural markers that predict and reflect social behaviour. From Brave New World and its Soma to the Mom of The Brady Bunch — your very average American housewife, taking her valium to calm herself before the neighbours come over for a gathering — to the documentary Prozac Nationand several memoirs (Terri Cheney, Elizabeth Wurtzel), to well-known films, Silver Linings Playbook, and television, The Sopranos. He draws all this and more together, creating an interesting and revealing essay that reflects on the complex and diverse world of psychotropic medications and pills in general. Our decade has been described as “living in the most medicated era humanity has ever known”, and thinking about this makes one ponder the why and how of this explosion in taking pills. Some, of course, is the necessity for better drugs to help those who have mental illnesses cope in our everyday world, while other pills enhance or change our interaction with the world beyond ourselves, while other pills calm — mother’s little helper, Valium, and brother’s little helper, Ritalin (see The Simpsons and Bart’s dosing). The final chapter, entitled 'Coda', is equally absorbing. Bennett describes his own manic episodes — he is bipolar — and the effect of his different medications on his own functionality. Endlessly thoughtful and highly engaging, Bennett stresses that “Pill isn’t a book about mental illness, at least not directly; rather a philosophical exploration of how psychotropic medications...are used to treat mental illnesses and the larger philosophical implications of those medications’ abilities (and inabilities) to reconstruct the neuro-circuitry of the human brain.” Are we the same person when medicated? Which identity is dominant — the nature of the pill or the essence of ourselves?
(This review was written while listening to Johnny Cash’s 'Hurt').
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 | Charges by Elfriede Jelinek {Reviewed by THOMAS} Who speaks for whom? And to whom? For whom is it appropriate to speak? For whom is it necessary to speak? For whom is it even possible to speak? Whose voices cannot be heard? Whose voices overspeak the voices of those who cannot be heard and take away the meanings of their words? Which is rather to say perhaps that they can be heard but not understood. Which is rather to say that they might as well not have been heard. What meanings do words have when those who speak them have been denied those aspects of their lives that provide the meanings for words? Who then owns or controls the meanings of words? Are there words for which the meanings cannot be taken away even by those who would take away the meanings of words? What do these words refer to? To what extent are words the weapons of all battles, especially of those battles for which there are no other weapons? To what extent are all crises also crises of language? To what extent can crises be addressed, assuaged or remedied in language? To what extent can crises not be addressed, assuaged or remedied at all if they are not addressed, assuaged or remedied in language, either first, or later, or in parallel with any other attempt to address or assuage or remedy such crises? Charges is comprised of three dramatic monologues, or, rather, choruses, or, rather, one dramatic monologue or chorus with a ‘Coda’ and an ‘Appendix’, spoken largely as a mutable plural first person, expressing the experiences of refugees reaching Europe during the urgent humanitarian crisis of recent years, but multivocal and restless enough between those multiple voices to encompass varying viewpoints and experiences. The text takes the form of a complaint, and has conscious parallels with Æschylus’s The Suppliants (in which, rarely for Greek theatre, the chorus are the protagonists, in that case the Danaids, who, having fled their home country to avoid intolerable circumstances, plead first with the ruler of Argos and then with its citizens, who ultimately grant them protection). Charges is remarkable for the obsessive propulsion, subtle shifts and emotional charge of its sentences, which move with such urgent necessity, both exploring and resisting all that is represented by the word “plight”, so often and so easily applied to refugees, who rather have common needs, very much the needs of all humans, than a plight, other than that their needs, these common human needs, are not met by those denying them through selfishness, hatred or fear, if we can distinguish between hatred and fear, and between these and selfishness. The refugees, in addition to seeking permission to have their needs, the common human needs, met, are resisting the single story applied upon them from without, both by those to oppose and by those who support them, seeking to retain their individual stories, their individual losses, despite being reduced to the level of concern almost exclusively for their common human needs, which are not met. Who would deny them? Who is in a position to deny them? It is in the nature of a crisis for the stories of the individual victims to be lost beneath the story of the crisis, for each active ‘I’ to be subsumed by the passive ‘we’ of those branded with the crisis. Jelinek’s text springs initially from anger at the ‘plight’ of a group of mainly Syrian refugees who reached Vienna, took refuge in a prominent church and were then moved by the authorities to a less visible location. The tone reaches a mocking pitch when addressing the authorities’ reluctance to provide for the basic needs of this group ("You have poured all your intentions into one formula and now you can't get your intentions out of this formula."), especially while blithely granting citizenship to individuals who are helped to sidestep the qualifications for citizenship. “Calculations always contain violence,” writes Jelinek. Language becomes the way not only in which needs are expressed but also the way in which needs are denied. A thing and its opposite may well be a pun, not only by homophony or etymology but by referent. There is not enough water to drink but plenty to drown in. Charges is evidence that it is possible, perhaps by aligning the particular and the general through the subtlety and force of its language, for the direct treatment of a political issue to deepen a work of art, both in its content and its form. Language is the battleground upon which writers must contest, or else upon which they submit. “The conquest of the world as image, that’s history.” |
NEW RELEASES
The Diary of a Young Girl in te reo Māori.
>>Published by the New Zealand Holocaust Centre to mark what would have been Anne Frank's 90th birthday.
>>Why it's significant Anne Frank's diary has been translated into Te Reo Māori.
A collection of outstanding non-fiction (essays, speeches, &c) written in the two-decade gap between The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a period in which Roy found that the urgency of her political and social convictions led her to engage with a wide spectrum of issues.
"Although Roy writes in her foreword that 'Not one iota of my anger has diminished' since the time of writing these essays, they do not come across as angry. Instead, their impact comes from their precision, research and damningly clear reportage." —Guardian
>>"Literature provides shelter."
"Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people."
In here sixties, Ernaux looks back to a time forty years previously, when she was unexpectedly pregnant and sought an abortion. Her text interrogates her memory for meaning.
>>Another edition.
>>Read Thomas's review of Ernaux's wonderful book The Years.
Crocodiles come from far and wide to seek Little Doctor's care. She treats each one with skill and kindness. Little Doctor marvels at these fearless beasts, listening to their stories, while she diagnoses and cures what ails them. But when she meets Big Mean, the largest crocodile in the land with jaws clamped tightly shut, Little Doctor can't figure out what's wrong. And she might be just a little bit afraid... Beautifully illustrated.
Stunning black-and-white photographs of underwater life.
A novel portraying the activism and subversion that were everyday realities in the darg communities of New York in the 1980s and 1990s, as remembered by a group of drag queen 'mothers'.
"Niven Govinden is a true force of fierceness and beauty." —Olivia Laing
When Rosie and Jules discover a ground-breaking clinical trial that enables two women to have a female baby, they jump at the chance to make history. Fear-mongering politicians and right-wing movements are quick to latch on to the controversies surrounding Ovum-to-Ovum (o-o) technology and stoke the fears of the public. Can Rosie's and Jules's relationship survive?
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. Reprinted and back in stock!
On-the-ground documentation of areas where Europeans of African descent are juggling their multiple allegiances and forging new identities. Here is an alternative map of the continent, taking the reader to places like Cova Da Moura, the Cape Verdean shantytown on the outskirts of Lisbon with its own underground economy, and Rinkeby, the area of Stockholm that is 80 per cent Muslim. Johny Pitts visits the former Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, where West African students are still making the most of Cold War ties with the USSR, and Clichy Sous Bois in Paris, which gave birth to the 2005 riots, all the while presenting Afropeans as lead actors in their own story.
Almost twenty-five years ago, Raphael wrote Never Mind the Bollocks, which recorded the extra obstacles women faced in rock and popular music. In this book, she finds that, although the names and faces may have changed, the obstacles remain disappointingly similar.
Allison has run away from home and with nowhere to live finds herself hiding out in the shed of what she thinks is an abandoned house. But the house isn't empty. An elderly woman named Marla, with dementia, lives there — and she mistakes Allison for an old friend from her past called Toffee.
A new edition of this important work by the fine radical historian.
"A triumph of complex interpretation and delicious prose." —Guardian
In 2003, Osama al-Kharrat returns to Beirut after many years in America to stand vigil at his father's deathbed. The city is a shell of the Beirut Osama remembers, but he and his friends and family take solace in the things that have always sustained them: gossip, laughter, and, above all, stories. Osama's grandfather was a hakawati, or storyteller, and his bewitching stories — of his arrival in Lebanon, an orphan of the Turkish wars, and of how he earned the name al-Kharrat, the fibster — are interwoven with reimagined classic tales of the Middle East.
Twelve-year-old Shane Woods is just a regular boy. He loves pitching for his baseball team, working on his graphic novel, and hanging out with his best friend, Josh. But Shane is keeping something private, something that might make a difference to his friends and teammates, even Josh. And when a classmate threatens to reveal his secret, Shane’s whole world comes crashing down.
It will take a lot of courage for Shane to ignore the hate and show the world that he’s still the same boy he was before. And in the end, those who stand beside him may surprise everyone, including Shane.
The Yukon River is almost 2,000 miles long, flowing through Canada and Alaska to the Bering Sea. Weymouth journeyed by canoe on a four-month odyssey through this wilderness, encountering the people who have lived there for generations. The Yukon's inhabitants have long depended on the salmon who each year migrate the entire river to reach their spawning grounds. Now the salmon numbers have dwindled, and the encroachment of the modern world has changed the way of life on the Yukon, perhaps for ever. Weymouth's portraits of these people and landscapes offer an elegiac glimpse of a disappearing world.
"Weymouth combines acute political, personal and ecological understanding, with the most beautiful writing reminiscent of a young Robert Macfarlane." —Sunday Times
It's the night of the annual Autumn Equinox Festival, when the town gathers to float paper lanterns down the river. Legend has it that after drifting out of sight, they'll soar off to the Milky Way and turn into brilliant stars. This year, Ben and his classmates are determined to find out where those lanterns really go, and they made a pact with two simple rules: No one turns for home. No one looks back.The plan is to follow the river on their bikes for as long as it takes to learn the truth, but it isn't long before the pact is broken by all except for Ben and (much to Ben's disappointment) Nathaniel, the one kid who just doesn't seem to fit in. A graphic novel for children, full of magic, wonder, and unexpected friendship.
Follow! Point! Press! Interact with the bright, bold artwork to complete simple activities using your fingers. Follow the wiggly dog to pat him on the head, help the butterflies get to the flowers and lots more. Features tactile embossing on every page. These activities are perfect for encouraging the development of fine motor skills.
In the alternative 1980s London of the novel, Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda’s assistance, he co-designs Adam’s personality. What happens in the relationship triangle that inevitably develops between these three?
>>Personalising the mannequin.
>>Just more sophisticated clockwork?
>>A.I. is already penetrating our lives.
>>"I write about love, music, physics, maths, history."
>>Who's going to write the algorithm for the little white lie?
>>Inside the writer's studio.
 | Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan {Reviewed by STELLA} With his inheritance, self-professed geek Charlie Friend buys himself an Adam — just one of 25 Adam or Eve models of AI humanoids. Charlie would have preferred an Eve, but, no surprise, these have sold out quickly. Living in a dingy flat in Clapham, playing the stock market (none too successfully) and being obsessed with his upstairs neighbour Miranda are the central facets of our protagonist's life. Adam arrives on a stretcher and is unwrapped. Sitting at the kitchen table he is charging while Charlie studies the manual and decides that Miranda can share in Adam’s programming (there are some personality traits/preferences that owners can add). And hence a trio is born: Charlie sees Adam as someone that they have created and, while Adam does his bidding — he is a helpful machine — you, as the reader, from the beginning of this smart and intriguing contrivance, get the feeling that Adam, with his superior knowledge (access to knowledge — he’s always wired in) and his machine learning abilities, is not at all subservient. Both Miranda and Charlie have blemishes on their human record: Charlie, once a tax lawyer, just escaped a custodial sentence for fraud, and Miranda has a deep secret, which Adam quickly uncovers with a little research. You may get the sense that Adam is malign, but this far from the truth. He is highly likeable — generally amenable and curious about the world and human arts and culture. He is a wonderful friend to Charlie, and has the added bonus of earning him quite a stack of money thanks to his prowess in numbers, playing the stock exchange. And he has fallen in love with Miranda, but promises Charlie to restrict his affections to writing haiku love poems. Surprisingly, I found myself suspicious of my fellow humans — their selfish and sometimes shallow desires and their often contradictory behaviour. As the plot heats up, Charlie and Miranda’s relationship develops and the trio fall into a companionable and successful pattern. Life is on the up for the young couple as wealth comes their way and emotionally they mature into what we might say are better humans, and this in the face of a faltering Britain — a counterfactual 1980s that is. McEwan has cleverly devised this story of technological advances in the past, a past where Alan Turing is still alive, Britain has lost the war in the Falklands, and Thatcher has left government in tears. One can be forgiven for thinking that McEwan is having a sly dig at the political shenanigans of today’s Britain. It’s intelligent and funny, with little twists that will rise a wry smile. But, as Adam discovers Shakespeare, the reader will come to see that all is not fair in love nor war. Miranda’s secret will lead to a denouement that reveals the complexities and contradictions of human behaviour, the ethics of machines, and our own morality. It will make you wonder whether the world is ready for the coming robots — and are the robots going to be pleased to be here with us? |
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Contre-Jour by Gabriel Josipovici {Reviewed by THOMAS}
The background in a painting of Pierre Bonnard often assumes more importance than the foreground, overwhelming the subject with the force of greater light and colour. Bonnard’s work, according to critic Roberta Smith, is remarkable for “the heat of mixed emotions, rubbed into smoothness, shrouded in chromatic veils and intensified by unexpected spatial conundrums and by elusive, uneasy figures.” Gabriel Josipovici’s subtle, disconcerting and remarkable novel, Contre-Jour: A triptych after Pierre Bonnard, is written in a similar way, against the light, a work of obsessive background that at once conceals and reveals its subject. The first and longest of the three sections of the novel is addressed bitterly by a young woman to her estranged mother, lamenting that she was forced to leave the family house, pushed out of the all-consuming relationship between her mother and her father, an artist who obsessively works to turn life into art, making him a passive but controlling observer, sketching and painting everything around him and draining them of autonomy and meaning. “‘Nothing stands still, nothing opens itself to our gaze but always retreats, vanishes, turns into something else,’” the daughter reads in her father’s notebook. The daughter returns again and again to the moment when she realised her exclusion from her parents’ relationship, when, as a child, she came into the bathroom where her mother was lying in the bath and noticed her father in the corner sketching, excluding her by his gaze. “Though your eyes are open,” she accuses her mother, “ and you must have seen me, you did not react to my presence. But perhaps you didn’t see me. Perhaps it is only in my memory that your eyes are open.” In one moment, which was no different perhaps from many other moments (incidentally, Bonnard repeatedly painted his wife Marthe de Méligny in the bath after they moved from Paris to the south of France in 1939 and before her death in 1942), in a moment that was merely an iteration of an obsessively repeated super-moment, the daughter realises that “it was not possible for the three of us to be together.” Could this moment, so like so many other moments, have been different? “Should a word have been said then, by me, by you, by him, which, unsaid, made all speech between us impossible ever after?” The gaze that binds her parents into the relationship from which art is produced, the relationship that excludes all else, is the gaze that nullifies the daughter. “And do you know what that made me feel? Not just that I was not wanted, but that I did not exist, I had never existed and I would never exist.” The words come “as if I had nothing to do with the words I speak to you. As if there were not spoken by me but to me or at me or in me. In my head. In my mouth. Wherever it is that words resound. In some space or place where words resound.” The daughter realises that the gaze simultaneously sustains and nullifies its object, her mother, and that the mother’s complicity in the obsessively visual relationship was a way of destroying both herself and monopolising her husband. “When you turned your face to the wall and cried he sat there in the corner sketching.” Obsession defers depression. “What you wanted, I think, as time went by, was to disappear entirely, to efface yourself from his presence. There was something that was killing you in his even-handed depiction of everything around him.” The second section of the novel is addressed by the mother to the daughter, whom she blames for their estrangement, and with whom she has many times attempted contact. “I have written you letters and posted them at the corner of the street. Why do you never reply?” The mother is stricken by the impossibility of a relationship with her daughter, impossibility within herself as much as in the daughter or the situation: “Where does it come from, this love one is supposed to give?” In the same way that the father has written in his notebook, of his art, “I want my people to be bathed in time as the impressionists bathed them in light,” the novel shows its characters overwhelmed by the temporal medium in which everything takes place, and the characters are depicted not so much against light (contre-jour) as against time (contre-temps). “You wake up and things have changed but you know that things have been changing for a long time,” the mother says. Despite the capturing of moments (“When he is not sketching me I wonder if I am really there.”), or perhaps because of this, time is always the overwhelming, unresolvable problem. “‘How to paint what happens when nothing happens?’ he used to say. I knew what he meant,” the mother says. “Nothing happens and nothing happens and nothing happens and all of a sudden there is a whole life gone and you realise that all those nothings were in fact everything.” The mother tells of a visit to her daughter’s apartment, which went so improbably well that we begin to suspect what is eventually manifestly the truth: the daughter does not exist and has never existed. The daughter is the delusional creation of the ‘mother’, but a creation that cannot receive or return love. “Oh my daughter. Whom I never had. For whom I longed. … If I had had you all the world would have been different. Even if things had been bad between us. It would have been different if I had had a daughter. Not this great emptiness. This great silence.” Reality, without the daughter, is intolerable, and, towards the end, we learn of the reason for the move from Paris to the countryside, and for the seemingly obsessive attention given by the artist to his subject: “Why could we not go on living in a fourth floor flat? Because of the animals? No. Because I tried to jump out of the window.” The daughter, the voice of the daughter, the daughter who exists only as a voice, the voice of the entire first section of the novel (the voice who said, “I had never existed and I would never exist. … I have nothing to do with the words I speak to you. As if there were not spoken by me but to me or at me or in me. In my head. In my mouth. Wherever it is that words resound,” &c), is a product entirely of the ‘mother’s’ mind, just as it is, in turn, a product, along with the ‘mother’s’ voice, of the author’s mind (and, by extension, of the reader’s mind). If the daughter exists, to the extent that she exists, and it cannot be said that she does not exist, in the way that all fiction exists, for the saddest of reasons in the mother’s mind, what does this tell us about the author’s mind (and, by extension, the reader’s mind)? What does this tell us about the mental operations that, when not overwhelming our sanity, we call fiction? The third and last section of the novel is a very short, sad and straightforward letter from the artist informing a friend of his wife’s death. It constitutes the only ‘objective’ element in the novel.
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NEW RELEASES
A completely remarkable novel providing access to the mind of Alan Turing (here 'Alec Pryor') as he undergoes chemical castration after being convicted of homosexuality. Eaves's insights into the nature of consciousness and identity, and their implications for artificial intelligence, are subtle and humane. New edition. Highly recommended.
"A really extraordinary book, unlike any other." —Max Porter
"A shining example of the moral and imaginative possibilities of the novel." —The Guardian
Winner of the 2019 Wellcome Prize. Co-winner of the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
>>Read Thomas's review.
"A marvel, a wonder—a deeply strange little novel about medicine, memory, and fox possession. With her delicate prose, arch tone, and mischievous storytelling, Wunnicke proves herself a master of the form." —Kirkus
Trakl, in his brief life (1887—1914), produced poems of awful visual power and symbolic density, distilling the horrors of existence, and of war, into verse that lies at the black heart of German expressionism. Hugely influential across genres through Europe, Trakl now has this crisp new English translation.
Greville Texidor, one-time Bloomsbury insider, globetrotting chorus-line dancer, former heroin addict, anarchist militia-woman and recent inmate of Holloway Prison, became a writer only after arriving in New Zealand as a refugee in 1940. First in remote Paparoa, and then on Auckland's North Shore as a central member of Frank Sargeson's circle of writers and intellectuals, she recalled many of the events of her life in the novella These Dark Glasses and a dazzling series of stories. After Texidor left New Zealand for Australia and Spain in 1948 she continued to write but finished little. She killed herself in 1964. Her published and some unpublished fiction is collected in In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot. All the Juicy Pastures at last brings this important New Zealand writer into focus.
In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot begins with Texidor's most fully achieved piece of work, 'These Dark Glasses'. Distinguished by sophisticated writing and acute psychological insight, it is set on the south coast of France during the Spanish Civil War. The stories which follow range from Spain and England to New Zealand, where she writes unsentimentally and unerringly of the environment of the time. 'Goodbye Forever', the unfinished novel which concludes the volume, is Texidor's most sustained piece of writing on New Zealand. The central character, Lili, is a Viennese refugee who arrives amongst the writers of Auckland's North Shore. She is exotic and alone, and her slow collapse is plotted with minute observation.
An incisive look at the beginnings of contemporary or art photography in New Zealand. Interviews with Gary Baigent, Richard Collins, John Daley, John Fields, Max Oettli, John B Turner, Len Wesney and Ans Westra, and a superb range of images.
>>Athol McCredie answers some questions.
At once both fiction and non-fiction, Heti's novel, if it is a novel, confronts the central philosophical problem of prospective parenthood: should we bring new life into the world? If that wasn't difficult enough, how can we determine whether or not it is a suitable thing for us? Now in paperback (and also still in hardback (both covers by Leanne Shapton)).
>>Read this review by Sally Rooney.
>>"The only place you can be free is in your writing."
Bengali legend meets history meets politics meets adventure as Ghosh breaks new ground in this novel addressing crises of our time: climate change and migration. The novel is his first since The Great Derangement, his book that examines our inability — at the level of literature, history, and politics — to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.
If you are much, much bigger than anyone else, is it possible to fit in?
For the next generation of green fingers there are different ways to bring nature into the home. Make your own pots, build balcony boxes, create your own bird feeders and even get friendly with worms! Each activity has been carefully chosen to create living, renewable and sustainable environments for kids and their families. Each activity has been carefully written by Kirsten Bradley, a leading practitioner in permaculture for kids and co-founder of Milkwood permaculture farm in Australia, and the book is illustrated by Romanian folk artist Aitch.
A funny, sympathetic and human novel about a couple born in the same British Muslim community in west London whose families are rivals involved in running two different mosques.
Drawing on his family's own experience emigrating from India to Britain and America, and years of reporting around the world, Suketu Mehta subjects the worldwide anti-immigrant backlash to withering scrutiny. The West, he argues, is being destroyed not by immigrants but by the fear of immigrants. He juxtaposes the phony narratives of populist ideologues with the ordinary heroism of labourers, nannies and others, from Dubai to New York, and explains why more people are on the move today than ever before. As civil strife and climate change reshape large parts of the planet, it is little surprise that borders have become so porous. The book also stresses the destructive legacies of colonialism and global inequality on large swathes of the world. When today's immigrants are asked, 'Why are you here?', they can justly respond, 'We are here because you were there.' And now that they are here, as Mehta demonstrates, immigrants bring great benefits, enabling countries and communities to flourish.
A remarkable collection of primary sources: letters, memoirs, diaries and other documents of the period, accompanied by images, many previously not published.
An excellent survey of documentary images: carvings, drawing, engravings, paintings, photographs.
Inara Verzemnieks's grandmother’s stories recalled the family farm left behind in Latvia, where, during WWII, her grandmother Livija and her grandmother’s sister, Ausma, were separated. They would not see each other again for more than 50 years. Raised by her grandparents in the USA, Inara grew up among expatriates, scattering smuggled Latvian sand over the coffins of the dead, singing folk songs about a land she had never visited. When Inara discovers the scarf Livija wore when she left home, this tangible remnant of the past points the way back to the remote village where her family broke apart. Coming to know Ausma and the trauma of her exile to Siberia under Stalin, and her grandfather’s own complex history, Inara pieces together Livija’s survival through the years as a refugee.
A bilingual graphic novel accessibly exploring the history and importance of New Zealand's founding document.
"Congratulations on the purchase of this exclusive product, tailor-made just for you. It will provide you with years of continuous existence." A fun and fascinating guide to the inner workings of one of nature's most miraculous but misunderstood creations: the human brain. This user-friendly manual offers an accessible guide to the 'machine' you use the most, deconstructing the brain into its constituent parts and showing you both how they function and how to maintain them for a longer life.
After Culloden and the ascendancy of new elites, the 'rationalisation' of land-use in Scotland (largely to serve the woollen trade) entailed the fracturing of social structures and the displacement of crofters and others. The resulting diaspora contributed to the European settlement of New Zealand in the nineteenth century. Devine's history is enlightening and overturns many myths.
Manne argues that misogyny should not be understood primarily in terms of the hatred or hostility some men feel toward all or most women. Rather, it's primarily about controlling, policing, punishing, and exiling the 'bad' women who challenge male dominance.
"Compelling." —Guardian
For over two thousand years, the inhabitants of St Kilda maintained a thriving, tightly-knit community on one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. Theirs was an isolated lifestyle completely dependent on the seasons and the elements for its survival. A lifestyle out of which developed a culture based on subsistence, resilience, mutual trust and caring. A culture that knew no crime, had no need of cash, and took care of its weakest members without question. This unique way of life came abruptly to an end in August 1930, when the now-depleted community of only thirty-six men, women and children begged the British Government to evacuate them to the mainland. Why did the islanders leave, and where did they go? What became of them? This beautiful picture book is told through the eyes of Norman John Gillies, the last child born on St Kilda.
Shows the complex emotional and social lives of farmed animals.
"Unbelievably inspiring." —Peter Wohlleben
Appearance Stripped Bare: Desire and the object in the work of Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons, even edited by Massimiliano Gioni $120
In the first half of the 20th century, Marcel Duchamp redefined what we consider art and what it means to be an artist. Many of his ideas return, transformed, in the work of Jeff Koons, born when Duchamp was 68 years old and whose own career challenged the art world of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This is the first book to explore the affinities between these two highly influential artists, whose creative universes similarly question the function of objects and the allure of commodities. International art historians, writers, and curators contribute their expertise on topics such as each artist's persona, as well as reflecting on the influence of technology and sexuality on their work.
Sometimes your eyes can play tricks on you, especially in the dark. Transparent overlays turn night into day and reveal the actuality behind the impression.
On her twelfth birthday Cecilia goes out with her parents and sister to celebrate with a visit to a museum. On their way Cecilia drops the marble that her sister gave her as a present, and running to pick it up she is taken away on an empty underground train into a dark and deep tunnel. The fun family outing becomes a much more serious mission when Cecilia finds that she and her marble have a very important role to play in freeing the inhabitants of the tunnels from the tyrannical rule of the Corvus.
Stories exploring situations in which desire, cutting through the demands of daily life, blurs all rational distinctions between what is important and what is distraction. Boyle has also published as Jack Robinson and Jennie Walker, and is the publisher of CB Editions.
Fifty stories from people who faced their deepest fears, including Neil Gaiman, Adam Gopnik, Andrew Solomon, Rosanne Cash, and Cristina Lamb.
>> The Moth.
>>"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.