Walks with Walser by Carl Seelig  {Reviewed by THOMAS} “When what is distant disappears, what is near tenderly draws nearer,” said Robert Walser, according to Carl Seelig, about walking in the fog. Walser’s collar is crooked, or worn, or both, he carries his furled umbrella under his arm along the mountain path, his hat is battered, the band torn, he is wearing a suit, somewhat raffish, somewhat the worse for wear, but he has no overcoat. Walser does not feel the cold, says Seelig. He enjoys the clouds, the rain. He distrusts clarity. Walser enjoys his walks with Seelig but asks Seelig not to call for him on any day but Sunday, so as not to disturb the routine of the asylum, in Herisau. There he assembles paper bags with glue, sorts beans and lentils, cleans the rooms. “It suits me to disappear,” says Walser, according to Seelig, “as inconspicuously as possible.” Even from his early days, according to Seelig, who did not know Walser in his early days and so must have had this information from Walser, or possibly another source, though no other source suggests itself, Walser took long walks to overcome the effects of nightmares. Or anxiety. Or the panic that results from the inability to engage. Not that Walser suffers from the inability to engage, exactly, though he seldom talks without prompting, not even to Seelig, says Seelig. Seelig spends little time with Walser in the asylum, but instead on the mountain paths, walking in the cloud, and in the rain, the best weather, to the small village inns where they enjoy this wine or that, or beer, or cider, and cutlets, or fied egges, or dumplings, or cheese pies, whatever they are, or meatloaf, and pommes frites, or cabbage, or mashed potatoes and peas and white beans. Seelig records it all, afterwards, each detail of the walk and of the food and the drink and the waitresses, and every word that Walser speaks, we suppose, or, anyway, at least the essentials. With great equivalence. Off they walk again together, over the ridge, around the base of the mountain, Switzerland has many ridges and many bases of mountains, to clear their heads after the wine, and then to catch the train that will return Walser to the asylum and Seelig to wherever Seelig lives. Walser “harbours a deep suspicion of the doctors, the nurses, and his fellow patients, which he nonetheless skilfully tries to hide behind ceremonial politeness,” says Seelig, who either observes Walser more frequently than is recorded or has this information from the doctors. Seelig becomes, after all, Walser’s guardian after the deaths of Walser’s brother Karl and his sister Lisa. He republishes Walser’s work. To no avail. But Seelig is invisible to us, through making Walser visible when Walser doesn’t want to be visible. Seelig is Walser’s Boswell. Seelig is the narrator of Walser now that Walser narrates nothing. “Restraint is my only weapon,” says Walser, narrates Seelig. The restraint that made Walser significant as a writer is no different from the restraint that stopped him writing. “The less plot a writer needs, and the more restrained the setting, the more significant his talent,” says Walser, the author of, first, novels, then stories, then feuilletons, then microscripts approximating a millimeter in height in pencil on tiny scraps of paper, hidden about his person, in the Asylum in Waldau, unrecognised as actual writing until after his death, until they were deciphered in the 1990s, then nothing. When he first meets Seelig, because Seelig admires Walser's writing, Walser has already stopped writing. He has written nothing since he left Waldau and entered Herisau. Walser blames Hitler. Or society. Or the new superintendent at Waldau, according the Seelig. Walser blames editors, critics, other writers, according to Seelig. Walser’s work was admired by Kafka. He was admired by Benjamin, Sebald, Bernhard and Handke, according to them. To mention only a few. One critic called The Tanners “nothing more than a collection of footnotes,” according to Walser, according to Seelig. The Assistant was true, which is a surprise, at one time you could visit the advertising clock designed by Tobler, says Walser, says Seelig. Walser wrote the book in six weeks. The world changed. Walser changed, or he failed to change. He was celebrated and then increasingly ignored. He found it hard and then harder to get his work published. Even in the newspapers. “I could not perform for society’s sake,” says Walser, of his failure, according to Seelig, “All the dear, sweet people who think they have the right to criticise me and order me around are fanatical admirers of Herman Hesse. They are extremists in their judgement. That’s the reason I have ended up in this asylum. I simply lacked a halo, and that is the only way to be successful in literature,” says Walser to Seelig, according to Seelig, not without bitterness. Writing can only be done if it is the only thing done. Once, Walser alternated his writing with jobs as a servant or as a clerk, for money, for the time to write. Now he does not write. He wants to disappear. “It is absurd and brutal to expect me to scribble away even in the asylum. The only basis on which a writer can produce is freedom. As long as this condition remains unmet, I will refuse to write ever again,” says Walser, as recorded by Seelig. Walser’s turning away is from writing and from life. Walser's ceremonial politeness is his way of not existing, or of existing in his own absence. He is distant and withdrawn. He likes long walks, alone, we find out later, or with Seelig. He talks with Seelig, a little, when prompted, but not with others. As far as we know. The withdrawal that gives his writing such brilliance is the withdrawal that makes life unlivable, in the end, or at some point some way before the end, when one lets go of something, it is uncertain what, that everyone else grasps, naturally, or, more commonly, desperately, whatever it is, that keeps them clutching their lives. Walser, says Seelig, failed to take his own life, on more than a single occasion. His sister showed him the asylum at Waldau. He could think of no option but to enter. He did what was expected. He is diagnosed, when the term becomes available, as a catatonic schizophrenic, whatever that means, but his enjoyment of the walking, of the scenery, of the food and more especially the drink, and of the waitresses, seems genuine, at least through the eyes of Seelig, who knows him better than anyone, who sought him out because of his work and befriended him in the asylum and who accompanies him on long walks, who records everything and is sympathetic and transparent, at least to us, so that there is no reason to doubt Walser’s small and simple pleasures as they are recorded by Seelig, an affectionate man, on the level of smallness and simplicity at which they are experienced by Walser, who has set about perfecting smallness and simplicity until it resembles so very little it is almost nothing. Who is the sworn enemy of his own individuality. Who shows no emotion when told of the death of his brother, whom he loves, who refuses to break his routine to visit his sister, whom he loves, when she lies dying and asks him to come. “I too am ill,” says Walser, says Seelig. He doesn’t want to do what the other patients in the asylum aren't doing. He has an intestinal ulcer. “Must I be sick?” he asks the doctor, “Are you not satisfied to have me here in good health?” He refuses the operation. Just as well. “Is it true that you destroyed four unpublished novels?” asks Seelig. “That may be,” answers Walser, according to Seelig. Seelig says that Walser’s brother’s wife Fridolina had been told by Walser’s sister Lisa that Walser had destroyed a photograph of himself that had been taken by his brother Karl. “That may be,” answers Walser, records Seelig. Walser is convinced of his failure. At least of his inability to perform as he is expected to perform, to be successful as a writer, though he has an ambivalence towards success, to live even an ordinary life. Everything must be made smaller. “The snow has now turned to hail,” describes Seelig, of the weather. Walser carries steadfastly on. A life is full of details, even when those details are small, or insignificant, if there is such a thing as insignificant. If you wish to disappear you pay attention to the small. You have relinquished everything else and are relinquishing that too, with great care. The doctor says Walser has a disease of the lungs. It affects his heart. He should not leave the asylum grounds, says the doctor, according to Seelig. Walser accompanies Seelig to the train. The next time they walk, Walser does not walk well, says Seelig. He tires and stumbles. It seems there is not much of life left. Almost nothing. One day Walser goes for a walk. They find him later, face-up in the snow.

The winner of our Condensed Milk poetry competition was Tony Beyer, whose poem 'White Fright' condensed the novel Moby-Dick into 20 wonderful lines. >>Read the poem here. 
Many thanks to all entrants for all your concentrated work! 

The picture at right shows a selection of the canned entries we received. 

“We wanted the strangers to be comfortable. We wanted them to be more like us, and to be more responsive to our own willing faces. We wanted them to be available." When two strangers arrive in a rural town, refugees from a disaster they cannot name, why do they end up locked in a cage and dehumanised by the townsfolk? 
This week's BOOK OF THE WEEK is Lloyd Jones's urgent novel The Cage. 
>> Read Thomas's review. 
>>Lloyd Jones will be talking with Philip Woollaston at the VOLUME MAPUA LITERARY FESTIVAL on 21 September. Click through to find out more and book your tickets now. 
>> Jones discusses the book with Gregory O'Brien. 
>>Jones wants you to hate his book. 
>>Louise O'Brien reviews the book on Radio NZ. 
>>"Vivid and meticulous." —The Guardian
>> Radio from across the ditch. 
>> Some book club notes!
>>Other books by Lloyd Jones. 

BOOKS @ VOLUME #140 (17.8.19)

Read our latest newsletter of our reviews, events and recommendations.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman      {Reviewed by STELLA} I was beguiled initially by the cover of this book, then the title, then the recommendation by Megan Hunter (author of The End We Start From), and after that the description. Forty women in an underground bunker with no clear understanding of their captivity. Why are they there? What was their life before? And as the years pass, what purpose do the guards, or those who employ the guards, have for them? The narrator of this story is a young woman—captured as a very young child—who knows no past: her life is the bunker. The women she lives with tolerate her but have little to do with her and hardly converse with her. She is not one of them. They have murky memories of being wives, mothers, sisters, workers. They know something catastrophic happened but can not remember what. The Child (nameless) is seen as other, not like them, not from the same place as them. The Child has been passing the days and the years in acceptance, knowing nothing else, but her burgeoning sexuality and her awareness of life beyond the cage (she starts to watch the guards, one young man in particular), limited as it is to this stark underground environment, also triggers an awakeness. She begins to think, to wonder and ask questions. As she counts the time by listening to her heartbeats and wins the trust of a woman in the group, The Child’s observations, not clouded by memories, are pure and exacting. We, as readers, are no closer to understanding the dilemma the women find themselves in, and like them are mystified by the situation. Our view is only that of The Child and what she gleans from the women—their past lives that are words that have little meaning to her, whether that is nature (a flower), culture (music) or social structures (work, relationships)—this world known as Earth is a foreign landscape to her. When the sirens go off one day, the guards abandon their positions and leave. Fortunately for the women, this happens just as they have opened the hatch for food delivery. The young woman climbs through and retrieves a set of keys that have been dropped in the panic. The women are free, but what awaits them is in many ways is another prison. Following the steps to the surface takes them to a barren plain with nothing else in sight. What is this place? Is it Earth? And where are the other people? Will they find their families or partners or other humans? The guards have disappeared within minutes—we never are given any clues to where they have gone—have they vapourised? Have they left in swift and silent aircraft? The women gather supplies, of which there are plenty, and begin to walk. I Who Have Never Known Men is a feminist dystopia in the likes of The Handmaid’s Tale or The Book of the Unnamed Midwife but is more silent, more internal and both frustrating and compelling. I found myself completely captivated by the mystery of this place and the certainty of the young woman. The exploration of humanity and its ability to hope and love within what we would consider a bleak environment, and the magnitude of one woman to gather these women to her and cherish them as they age is exceedingly tender. The introduction by Sophie MacKintosh ( author of The Water Cure), which I recommend reading after rather than before, adds another layer of meaning to the novel. I Who Have Never Known Men is haunting and memorable—a philosophical treatise on what it is to be alone and to be lonely, and what freedom truly is.

Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick  {Reviewed by THOMAS}  “Fact is to me a hindrance to memory,” writes the narrator in this remarkable collage of passages evoking the ways in which past experiences have impressed themselves indelibly upon her. The sleepless nights of the title are not so much those of the narrator’s youth, though these are either well documented or implied and so the title is not not about them, but those of her present life, supposedly as “a broken old woman in a squalid nursing home”, waking in the night “to address myself to B. and D. and C.—those whom I dare not ring up until morning and yet must talk to through the night.” As if the narrator is a projection of the author herself, cast forward upon some distorting screen, the ten parts of the book make no distinction between verifiable biographical facts and the efflorescence of stories that arise in the author’s mind as supplementary to those facts, or in substitution for them. Elizabeth the narrator seems almost aware of the precarity of her role, and of her identity as distinct from but overlapping that of the author: “I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today.” Hardwick writes mind-woundingly beautiful sentences, many-commaed, building ecstatically, at once patient and careering, towards a point at which pain and beauty, memory and invention, self and other are indistinguishable. Spanning over fifty years, the book, the exquisite narrowness of focus of which is kept immediate by the exclusion of summary, frame or context, records the marks remaining upon the narrator of those persons, events or situations from her past that have not yet been replaced, or not yet been able to be replaced, by the ersatz experiences of stories about those persons, events and situations. “My father…is out, because I can see him only as a character in literature, already recorded.” Hardwick and her narrator are aware that one of the functions of stories is to replace and vitiate experience (“It may be yours, but the house, the furniture, strain toward the universal and it will soon read like a stage direction”), and she/she writes effectively in opposition to this function. Observation brings the narrator too close to what she observes, she becomes those things, is marked by them, passes these marks on to us in sentences full of surprising particularity, resisting the pull towards generalisation, the gravitational pull of cliches, the lazy engines of bad fiction. Many of Hardwick’s passages are unforgettable for an uncomfortable vividness of description—in other words, of awareness—accompanied by a slight consequent irritation, for how else can she—or we—react to such uninvited intensity of experience? Is she, by writing it, defending herself from, for example, her overwhelming awareness of the awful men who share her carriage in the Canadian train journey related in the first part, is she mercilessly inflicting this experience upon us, knowing it will mark us just as surely as if we had had the experience ourselves, or is there a way in which razor-sharp, well-wielded words enable both writer and reader to at once both recognise and somehow overcome the awfulness of others (Rachel Cusk here springs to mind in comparison)? In relating the lives of people encountered in the course of her life, the narrator often withdraws to a position of uncertain agency within the narration, an observatory distance, but surprises us by popping up from time to time when forgotten, sometimes as part of a we of uncertain composition, uncertain, that is, as to whether it includes a historic you that has been addressed by the whole composition without our realising, or whether the other part of we is a he or she, indicating, perhaps, that the narrator has been addressing us all along, after all. All this is secondary, however, to the sentences that enter us like needles: “The present summer now. One too many with the gulls, the cry of small boats on the strain, the soiled sea, the sick calm.”

Book of the Week. How would it be if poetry written by women in New Zealand had a house that you could visit, in which you could spend time, and from which you could emerge having made new friends? Luckily, Paula Green has made us such a house. Wild Honey:Reading New Zealand women's poetry brings literary pioneers such as Jessie Mackay, Blanche Baughan, Lola Ridge and Eileen Duggan out of the shadows to stand with contemporary literary provocateurs such as Hera Lindsay Bird and Tayi Tibble. 

>>Paula serves Wild Honey.

>>Have a look inside the book. 

>>On the cover by Sarah Laing. (>>Sarah Laing's new book is due out in October!)

>>How to deserve a place in the literary canon. 

>>Walking and grooving. 

>>Post a poem by a New Zealand woman on the Nelson Poetry Map!

>>Celebrate National Poetry Day on Friday 23 August.

NEW RELEASES

Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick         $23
First published in 1979, Sleepless Nights is a unique collage of fiction and memoir, letters and essays, portraits and dreams. Hardwick's experience of living in the twentieth century is indelibly presented in the most remarkable sentences. 
"A series of fleeting images and memories united by the high intelligence and beauty of Hardwick's prose." —Sally Rooney
"Extraordinary and haunting." —Joan Didion

""Brilliant, brittle and strange, unlike any preconceived notion of what a novel could be. Few new books have felt so revolutionary or so brave." —Lauren Groff

"A novel of mental weather that enchants by the scrupulousness and zip of the narrative voice, its lithe, semi-staccato descriptions and epigrammatic dash." —Susan Sontag

Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick      $25

Sidelined. Betrayed. Killed off. Elizabeth Hardwick considers the history of women and literature. She imagines the lives of the Brontes, Woolf, Eliot and Plath; the fate of literary wives such as Zelda Fitzgerald and Jane Carlyle; and the stories of fictional heroines from Richardson's Clarissa to Ibsen's Nora. Hardwick mines their childhoods, marriages, and personalities to probe the costs of sex, love, and marriage.

"Hardwick's sentences are burned in my brain." —Susan Sontag

You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian      $35
An audacious short story collection dealing largely with power imbalances in sexual relationships and the ways in which the desirable and the undesirable can be hard to distinguish. Includes the viral sensation 'Cat Person'. 
>>Read 'Cat Person'. 
>>What it felt like when 'Cat Person' went viral. 
>>"Dating is caught up in ego, power and control."

Inland by Téa Obreht      $38
The Wild West might well be wilder than expected in this novel in which a woman waits with her youngest son and her husband's 17-year-old cousin for her husband to return from seeking water, and for her older sons to return after an argument. Is a mysterious beast stalking the land? What lies beyond the safety of the homestead? The decision is made to set off on an expedition that will change everything.
"This exquisite frontier tale from the author of The Tiger’s Wife is a timely exploration of the darkness beneath the American dream. Inland’s message is a rebuke to isolationist US policies written with a panache and heart." —Guardian
>>"I threw 1400 pages in the trash."

The Government of No-One: The theory and practice of anarchism by Ruth Kinna           $48

"Ruth Kinna's book will be the standard text on anarchism for the twenty-first century. Written with brio, quiet insight and clarity and taking us from the nineteenth century anarchist Proudhon to Occupy and Rojava, this offering will appeal to the novice student, the activist and the grizzled professor." —Carl Levy

Madam and Eve: Women portraying women by Liz Rideal and Kathleen Soriano         $85
An excellent survey of the many different media and approaches that women have used in the last 50 years to create images of themselves and other women.

Obedience to Authority: An experimental view by Stanley Milgram       $25
In the 1960s, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram carried out a series of experiments that forever changed our perceptions of morality and free will. The subjects—or "teachers"—were instructed to administer electric shocks to a human "learner," with the shocks becoming progressively more powerful and painful. Controversial but now strongly vindicated by the scientific community, these experiments attempted to determine to what extent people will obey orders from authority figures regardless of consequences. 
"Milgram's experiments on obedience have made us more aware of the dangers of uncritically accepting authority." —Peter Singer, New York Times

Mitochonrial Eve by Kirsten Warner      $15
May your heart leave your body like channel surfing, up a salt river you have to go days to find. May you look up from the good dark soil running through your fingers like melting ice caps and say: “Outside the sky there is sun.”
A poetry collection from the author of The Sound of Breaking Glass. 

In the Shadow of Wolves by Alvydas Šlepikas       $33
As the Russians advance into East Prussia, women and children are forced out of their homes to make way for the victorious troops. Their fight for survival is only just beginning. Facing critical food shortages and the onset of a bitterly cold winter, some of the older children, the 'wolf children' secretly cross the border into Lithuania, begging the local farmers for work or food they can take back to their starving families. 

What If...? by Thierry Lenain and Olivier Tallec     $40
The child sits and observes the troubles of the world. What if we made it different? The child decides to be born!

The Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones by Daniel Mendelsohn        $53
Moving between the Latin classics and the modern likes of Virginia Woolf, Brideshead Revisited, Battlestar Galactica, and Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, these essays expose the heart of antiquity — still beating in our art and our everyday lives. In some essays, Mendelsohn shows how readily we still call on the Greeks and Romans as role models. In others, he illuminates the surprising modernity of canonical works — including Homer's interest in artificial intelligence. We see Sappho alongside Girl, Interrupted, read the mythic side of Spider-Man, and come to understand a little better our relentless fascination with the Titanic. 

The Book of Imprudent Flora by Claudio Romo      $55
With stunning illustrations throughout, the book is written as a travel diary by Lazaro de Sahagun, eminent naturalist and explorer and concerns his voyage to a mysterious isle and subsequent cataloguing of the astonishing life forms, each with a unique history and mode of existence. Perhaps, as Lazaro muses, if the earth is a living organism as he believes, places like this island are necessary for the planet to safeguard these marvellous species from 'future periods of global decadence.'

Made in Japan: Awe-inspiring graphics from Japan today      $60
Japan's remarkable contemporary graphic and packaging design springs from cultural depths, melding history, traditional art and philosophy. A good survey. 

Words and Pictures: Writers, artists, and a peculiarly British tradition by Jenny Uglow          $28
Words & Pictures explores the relationship between verbal and visual storytelling through three encounters between writers and artists. It looks at how artists have responded to two great, contrasting works, Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress; at Hogarth and Fielding, great innovators, sharing common aims; and at Wordsworth and Bewick, a poet and engraver, both working separately, but both imbued with the spirit of their age. A brief coda turns to a fourth relationship: writers and artists who collaborate from the start, like Dickens and Phiz, and Lewis Carroll and Tenniel.

Food: The history of taste by John Freedman         $30
Surveys the history of changing tastes in food and fine dining — what was available for people to eat, and how it was prepared and served — from prehistory to the present day. Since earliest times food has encompassed so much more than just what we eat — whole societies can be revealed and analysed by their cuisines. In this wide-ranging book, leading historians from Europe and America piece together from a myriad sources the culinary accomplishments of diverse civilisations, past and present, and the pleasures of dining.

Heads of the Coloured People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires     $26
A short story collection revealing the hypocrisies in a supposedly post-racial society.
"Her stories feel simultaneously like the poke of a stick and a comforting balm." —Bim Adewunmi, Guardian
>>"I wanted to see more stories about nerdy black people." 

King and Emperor: A new life of Charlemagne by Janet L. Nelson      $65
Reinterpreting primary sources, Nelson provides new insights into Charlemagne's motivations and into how he was seen by his contemporaries, both commoners and nobles. 

My Museum by Joanne Liu          $32
Art is everywhere in the art gallery, from the visitor's tattoos to the way the light falls across the floor. While other visitors are busy trying to find their way through the museum's galleries, or fighting for room to view a masterpiece, the character in this book examines the gallery upside down from a bench, plays with his shadow, and makes friends with the custodian.

Mr Gumpy's Rhino by John Burningham          $30
Mr Gumpy is back! An orphaned rhinoceros needs looking after, but soon ends up helping everyone. 

Chopin's Piano: A journey through Romanticism by Paul Kildea        $28

Traces the history of Chopin's 24 Preludes through the instruments on which they were played, the pianists who interpreted them, and the traditions they came to represent. 

BOOKS @ VOLUME  #139 (10.8.19)

Read our latest newsletter.

Our Book of the Week has just won the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year award at the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.
Bomb by Sacha Cotter and Josh Morgan is set firmly in Aotearoa. This summery, exuberant tale will resonate with any child who has ever tried to do something that scares them. The detailed, artful illustrations are as joyous and assured as the story they capture. The unwavering love and encouragement of the child’s Nan illuminates a strong and convincing message about being yourself and having the courage to do things in your own way. 
>>Read Stella's review. 
>>The book trailer. 
>>Making the biggest splash. 
>>"Layer upon layer of goodness and wonder."
>>All the winners in the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. 
>>Read it in te Reo: Te Pohu (translated by Kawata Teepa).
>>Sacha Cotter's website. 
>>The illustrator and the designer. 
>>The Bomb Song.
>>And now with 400 children.
>>And there's a baby!
>>Huia Publishing also took the Young Adult Fiction Award at the NZBACYA for Legacy by Whiti Hereaka.

The Bomb by Sacha Cotter and Josh Morgan   {Reviewed by STELLA} The top prize, The Margaret Mahy Book of the Year, at this year’s New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, went to The Bomb! This lively and delightful picture book by Sacha Cotter and Josh Morgan is a great story, wonderfully illustrated, is laced with humour, and has a message to boot. Be yourself! An important refrain in our media-saturated world that continuously sends us messages about how we ‘should’ be and how our children ‘should’ be. It’s summertime in New Zealand and this could be anyone’s local beach, favourite river waterhole, or pool. Everyone can do the bomb...except for one boy who can’t quite seem to make it happen — no matter what. His mantra doesn’t work — “Hear my song, see my lines, check my moves, they’re so fine..” Even Nan, his stalwart supporter, with her encouraging positive vibes, can’t help (until he hears her). Everyone(!) has advice: “ More weight. More height. More hair. More puku. Bigger shorts”. But nothing helps. The bomb is a ...plop. But then he discovers the secret! He’s going to do it his way. Here’s a story you can pull out and read again and again. It’s always going to spark fires with its celebration of being yourself and finding your own way to your goal and the things that delight you. The text is a joy to read, with its rhythm and energetic language. (If you really like the text, check out the song!) And there is a te Reo edition, Te Pohu. The illustrations are tremendously playful, with things to find and keep discovering on every page, and show us a story that could only be in New Zealand — the trees, the birds, the icecreams in their cones. The book has verve and bounce as well as depth, exploring the subtler relationship between a child and those who support them in their endeavours (it’s dedicated to Sacha's and Josh’s grandmothers!), alongside themes of anxiety and confidence, without being cloying. The Bomb is sure to become a New Zealand classic. It is a joy each time you read it. I wonder how many excellent tree-like diving platforms will appear this summer!

Peat by Lynn Jenner    {Reviewed by THOMAS} If words are the currency both of poetry and of the interface with bureaucracy, what is the role of a poet as a ‘public intellectual’ in New Zealand? What is the relationship between the ‘creative’ and the ‘responsive’ parts of a writer’s mind? Are these parts distinct, or does one somehow inform the other, or does each inform each? Lynn Jenner’s bookPeat is the sort of book that keeps thinking inside your head after you have finished reading it. It is at once a record of the effect on community, history and land of the building (between 2013 and 2107) of the Kapiti Expressway, a so-called ‘Road of National Significance’, near Jenner’s home, and a record of Jenner’s tentative and sensitive quest to get to know Dunedin-based poet Charles Brasch (1909-1973) through his poetry, memoir and letters to the editor, through historical residua, by visiting the houses in which he had lived, and by touching his books in the Otago University Library. The first half of the book consists of essays of varying length, concerning one or the other topic, or both (when relating Brasch’s visit to Douglas Lilburn in Kapiti in 1950). The essays generally arrange their contents temporally, as narratives or micronarratives. The second half of the book consists of two alphabetical ‘glossaries’, or archives, on the two subjects, arranging their contents spatially and providing depth and colour to terms and entities referred to in the essays. It is as if these archives are the strata, the histories, the settled ‘facts’ from which the essays — the hesitant and uncertain trials in what Jenner calls “the unshapely present” — arise and into which they feel for meaning. “Stories of the present resist endings,” writes Jenner, and the unifying element of the book is Jenner’s attempt to see whether the enigmatic Brasch can provide some way of aligning or usefully arranging the outward-facing and inward-facing lives of a poet. As soon as the Kapiti Expressway was proposed it began to change the relationship between the local community and the land, and between the various people in that community. Jenner seeks to understand some of this change. “From the moment the project had received consent, the Expressway began to speak with its own voice, and for more than three years, it had not stopped. ... In 2017 I still believed that the Expressway had a character and that I could discern that character from its behaviour, as you might a person.” Once completed, it is the noise of the road that impacts most heavily on the community (“Noise is a short word. Say it slowly and it sounds a little like a dentist’s drill”). Because this noise (eventually) falls within regulatory standards, and because it affects the community unevenly, it becomes a divisive rather than a cohesive element. “The fact that the community at large ‘moves on’ so quickly, and the unpleasant situation still happening to a few becomes invisible, bothers me.” In Charles Brasch’s letters to the editor and other writings about his community, he expresses strong concern about developments that deplete rather than enhance the aesthetic life of Dunedin’s citizens, and shows a keen and almost pained interest in the quality of change. “Brasch was first and always concerned with beauty,” writes Jenner, and he believed that the experience of beauty, be it in art, nature or civic life, was a vital way in which people of all sorts could improve themselves and their lives. Although Brasch was white, male, and wealthy, he was also very much an outsider in the New Zealand of his time: Jewish, sensitive, socially and sexually enigmatic. “Brasch doesn’t fit into any single category,” Jenner observes, and this reflects Brasch’s thoughts about himself, when he speculates that the writing of the ‘outer’ concerns of his life (so to call them) may provide some sort of pivot around which he might swing such ‘inner’ concerns as the writing of poetry: “These sketches, I see now, have a purpose, a use for me: they will remake me, create an image of myself & so give me in my own eyes a reality & a stability that I scarcely possess even yet, & a continuity which I have never achieved. They may offer me a centre to write poetry from, possibly a hint of direction too.” Peat may well be reaching for the same mechanism, a calibration of inner and outer concerns, of the individual with society, of the physical world with time.

NEW RELEASES

Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand women's poetry by Paula Green     $45
Green explores New Zealand poetry as if it were a house, moving from room to room and through time, releasing historical female poets from definition or exclusion by traditional male gatekeepers, bringing literary pioneers such as Jessie Mackay, Blanche Baughan Lola Ridge and Eileen Duggan out of the shadows to stand with contemporary literary provocateurs such as Hera Lindsay Bird and Tayi Tibble. Includes biographies of 195 poets. Illustrated by Sarah Laing. 
>>Have a look inside. 

La belle dame avec les mains vertes by Evangeline Riddiford Graham       $15
The future’s a disaster. Everyone knows it’s time to get proofing. But you, you’re out of energy to bolt down the bookshelf. You can’t afford a carbon-neutral kitchen. Balance the math & trash the books: you won’t ever have a house. You little worm. Do you really think you deserve your own bedroom? Fear not! If you can’t afford to be part of the problem, you can still buy into the compromise. La Belle Dame avec les mains vertes offers a solution for your every civic grievance. Set down in writing, made in New Zealand, one last blast of arts & crafts. La Belle Dame sees your plaint, & raises it. Would you like to register a charge, or a lamentation?
A green and grumpy, very funny ode to life in contemporary Tāmaki-makau-rau, in the form of a double sestina.
>>Read Thomas's review of Evangeline Riddiford Graham's Ginesthoi. Evangeline read at VOLUME in 2017.

Lunch at 10 Pomegranate Street by Felicita Sala       $35
A beautiful picture book, with recipes from all the various people that live in the apartment building.
>>Visit Sala's website!

How to Live by Helen Rickerby         $25
Where are the female philosophers? Why are women silenced? Who can tell us how to live? In her fourth collection of poetry, Helen Rickerby takes readers on a journey into women’s writing, a quest for philosophical answers, and an investigation of poetic form. The poems in How to Live engage in a conversation with ‘the unsilent women’ — Hipparchia and George Eliot, Ban Zhao and Mary Shelley. They do so in order to explore philosophical and practical questions: how one could or should live a good life, how to be happy, how to not die, how to live. Rickerby thinks through the ways that poetry can build up and deconstruct a life, how the subtext and layers inherent in poetry can add to the telling of a life story, and how different perspectives can be incorporated into one work  the place where poetry meets essay, where fiction meets non-fiction, where biography meets autobiography, where plain-speaking meets lyricism, where form pushes against digression.

BACK Before You Know by Murray Edmond       $20
"The paired allegorical poetry tales in BACK Before You Know take on history and the perky fatalised body—as ‘The Fancier Pigeon’ sprightly-deathly observes, “The world is fixed / in ice and fire” and symmetry and entropy “go together / like two girls in a bar.” Edmond writes with a wry deliciousness in a pace from which one can’t turn away – we stop in the heart and we can’t stop anything in these forward cantering loops through fabled destiny." —Lisa Samuels
"Murray Edmond joins the rich tradition of late modernist folk poetry, which also includes Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger and Tom Pickard’s The Ballad of Jamie Allan. Wistful and riotous by turns, these two startling fables radiate with human warmth. They ring beautifully true." —Steven Toussaint 

Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial resistance and British dissent by Priyamvada Gopal     $55
Insurgent Empire shows how Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were active agents in their own liberation. What is more, they shaped British ideas of freedom and emancipation back in the United Kingdom. Priyamvada Gopal examines a century of dissent on the question of empire and shows how British critics of empire were influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies, from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. In addition, a pivotal role in fomenting resistance was played by anticolonial campaigners based in London, right at the heart of empire. Much has been written on how colonised peoples took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. Insurgent Empire sets the record straight in demonstrating that these people were much more than victims of imperialism or, subsequently, the passive beneficiaries of an enlightened British conscience—they were insurgents whose legacies shaped and benefited the nation that once oppressed them.
>>The author changes the mind-set. 

AUP New Poets 5: Carolyn DeCarlo, Sophie van Waardenberg, Rebecca Hawkes       $30
A sampler of interesting emerging poets.

The Stories of Eileen Duggan, edited by Helen J. O'Neill        $35
Duggan wrote two collections of short stories but never presented them for publication. These appear here for the first time, with a substantial introduction by John Weir. 
>> Duggan's Selected Poems has/have just been reprinted.        

The Big Little Thing by Béatrice Alemagna       $30
It unexpectedly arrived. It brushed past someone in the street. It weaves its way in and out of people on the street. It catches people completely unaware. But what is this It? A beautiful, quirky large-format book.
[Answer: happiness!]

Talking Heads: Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem       $22
Fear of Music, the third album by Talking Heads, was recorded and released in 1979. Edgy, paranoid, funky, addictive, rhythmic, repetitive, spooky, and fun — with Brian Eno's production, it's a record that bursts out of the downtown scene that birthed the band, and hints at the directions (positive and negative) they'd take in the near future. Here, Jonathan Lethem takes us back to the late 1970s in New York City and situates Talking Heads as one of the most remarkable and enigmatic American bands. 
>>'Heaven'.

Maresi: Red Mantle ('The Red Abbey Chronicles' #3) by Maria Turtschaninoff      $19
For Maresi, like so many other girls, the Red Abbey was a haven of safety in a world ruled by brutal men. But now she is a young woman and it is time for her to leave. She must take all that she has learned from her sisters and return to her childhood home to share the knowledge she has gained. But when Maresi returns to her village, she realises all is not well - the people are struggling under the rule of the oppressive Earl, and people are too busy trying to survive to see the value of her teachings. Maresi finds she must use all the terrible force of the Crone's magic to protect her people, but can she find the strength to do so when her heart is weakening with love for the first time?
>>This is an excellent YA series.

On the End of the World by Joseph Roth        $23
Having fled to Paris in January 1933, on the day Hitler seized power in Germany, Joseph Roth wrote a series of articles in that 'hour before the end of the world', that he foresaw was coming and which would see the full horror of Nazism, the Second World War, and, most crucially for Roth, the final irreversible destruction of a pan-European consciousness.

Scary Stories for Young Foxes by Christian McKay Heidicker, illustrated by Junyi Wu           $33
When fox kits Mia and Uly are separated from their litters, they quickly learn that the world is a dangerous place filled with monsters. As the young foxes travel across field and forest in search of a home, they'll face a zombie who hungers for their tender flesh, a witch who wants to wear their skins, a ghost who haunts and hunts them, and so much more. 

Crisis and Duplication by David Merritt      $15
Welcome to the coalface of poetry: a unique combination of poems & polemics by David Merritt, the "people's laureate" (often seen hawking his words on the streets of Nelson and elsewhere), fused together for the first time. Concerning influence both literary & otherwise, the history of the desktop publishing revolution, best practices for making rich compost out of brute materialist society. Two lyrical essays paint a world where there's no good reason to see DIY printing & gardening as significantly separate skill sets.

The Way Through the Woods: Of mushrooms and mourning by Long Litt Woon      $40
A grieving widow discovers a most unexpected form of healing - hunting for mushrooms. Long Litt Woon met Eiolf a month after arriving in Norway from Malaysia as an exchange student. They fell in love, married, and settled into domestic bliss. Then Eiolf's unexpected death at fifty-four left Woon struggling to imagine a life without the man who had been her partner and anchor for thirty-two years. Adrift in grief, she signed up for a beginner's course on mushrooming—a course the two of them had planned to take together—and found, to her surprise, that the pursuit of mushrooms rekindled her zest for life. 

Pen in Hand: Reading, re-reading, and other mysteries by Tim Parks       $33
How can other people like the books we don't like? What benefit can we get from rereading a work? Can we read better? If so, how? These and many other questions, ranging from the field of writing to that of reading and translation, are addressed by the always incisive Tim Parks.

Selected Poems by Denis Glover, edited by Bill Manhire       $30
Printer, typographer, publisher, boxer, sailor, drinker, scholar, satirist, wit — and poet. New edition.
>>Quardleoodleardlewardledoodle.
>>Quardleoodleardlewardledoodle. 
>>Quardleoodleardlewardledoodle. 
>>Quardleoodleardlewardledoodle. 
>>Quardleoodleardlewardledoodle. 

Dinosaur Hunter: Joan Wiffen's awesome fossil discoveries by David Hill and Phoebe Morris          $25
Wiffen's discovery of therapod bones in Hawke's Bay in 1975 proved that dinosaurs featured in New Zealand prehistory — overturning what was thought at that time. 

Yemen in Crisis: The road to war by Helen Lackner          $37
Excellent analysis of the blights of the autocracy, neoliberalism and international interference that led to economic collapse, famine and civil war. 

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani          $33
The first decade of the twenty-first century marked the demise of the current world order. Despite widespread acknowledgement of these disruptive crises, the proposed response from the mainstream remains the same. Against the confines of this increasingly limited politics, a new paradigm has emerged. Bastani claims that new technologies will liberate us from work, providing the opportunity to build a society beyond both capitalism and scarcity. Automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, is instead the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness. Bastani conjures a new politics: a vision of a world of unimaginable hope, highlighting how we move to energy abundance, feed a world of nine billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology and build meaningful freedom for everyone. Gosh.

Stone Men: The Palestinians who built Israel by Andrew Ross       $37
"They demolish our houses while we build theirs." This is how a Palestinian stonemason, in line at a checkpoint outside a Jerusalem suburb, described his life to Andrew Ross. Palestinian 'stone men', using some of the best-quality limestone deposits in the world and drawing on generations of artisanal knowledge, have built almost every state in the Middle East except one of their own. Today the business of quarrying, cutting, fabricating, and dressing is the Occupied Territories' largest private employer and generator of revenue, and supplies the construction industry in Israel, along with other countries in the region and overseas. 

The Sun on My Head by Geovani Martins          $25
Thirteen stories set in Rio's largest favela, gravitating around the lives of boys and men who struggle with the violence involved in growing up on the less favoured side of the 'Broken City'.

Escape from Earth: A secret history of the space rocket by Fraser MacDonald     $45
Everyone knows that rockets are just toys, the stuff of cranks and pulp magazines. Nevertheless, in the 1930s, an engineering student named Frank Malina set out to prove the doubters wrong. With the help of his friend Jack Parsons, a grandiose and occult-obsessed explosives enthusiast, Malina embarked on a journey that took him from junk yards and desert lots to the heights of the military-industrial complex. Malina designed the first American rocket to reach space and established the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But trouble soon found him: the FBI suspected Malina of being a communist. 

The Neon Bible by John Kennedy Toole           $23
John Kennedy Toole, who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his bestselling comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces, wrote The Neon Bible for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among Toole's heirs. Thirty-five years after it was written and twenty years after Toole's suicide at thirty-one, the novel was freed for publication.

Nailing Down the Saint by Craig Cliff       $38
Duncan Blake is a New Zealand filmmaker whose move to LA has not gone to plan. After a series of setbacks, he's working at a chain restaurant, his marriage is on shaky ground after a porn-related faux pas and his son won't stop watching Aladdin. When Duncan gets the chance to scout locations for a fated director's biopic of Saint Joseph of Copertino, it's the lifeline he's been searching for. But in Italy, in the footsteps of the seventeenth-century levitator, he must confront miracles, madness and the realities of modern movie making. 
>>"It's bad for your health" (recommended viewing!)

The winners in the 2019 NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG ADULTS have just been announced.

Click through to reserve your copies.




MARGARET MAHY BOOK OF THE YEAR + PICTURE BOOK OF THE YEAR

The Bomb by Sacha Cotter and Josh Morgan (Huia Publishing)    $23
Set firmly in Aotearoa, this summery, exuberant tale will resonate with any child who has ever tried to do something that scares them. The detailed, artful illustrations are as joyous and assured as the story they capture. The unwavering love and encouragement of the child’s Nan illuminates a strong and convincing message about being yourself and having the courage to do things in your own way.




WRIGHT FAMILY FOUNDATION ESTHER GLEN AWARD FOR JUNIOR FICTION

The Dog Runner by Bren McDibble (Allen & Unwin)      $19
Be transported to a convincingly rendered dystopian future in which all grasses have been destroyed. The only real chance of survival for Ella and her half-brother Ellery is to leave the city and travel with their magnificent doggos by dogcart, across the wilderness to Ellery’s family farm — and hope. Danger is everywhere, food and water scarce. Resilience and resourcefulness are essential in this enthralling, fast-paced ecological drama.




YOUNG ADULT FICTION AWARD

Legacy by Whiti Hereaka (Huia Publishing)      $25
Riki wakes after an accident to find he’s gone back a century. He is mistaken for his great-grandfather, who happens to be a soldier in the middle of Egypt during WW1 — a long way from present-day Wellington and his girlfriend. The convincing characterisation and scene setting help readers understand the moral complexities and challenges of life as a Māori soldier during the WW1 campaigns.





ELSIE LOCKE AWARD FOR NON-FICTION  + BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD

Art-tastic by Sarah Pepperle (Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū)    $30
The meanings and methods behind iconic works in the Christchurch Art Gallery collection are uncovered, using dazzling design features that are instantly engaging. This book shows how art can touch us at every level, from cultural to emotional, and it’s all done with a madly ‘art-rageous’ sense of humour. A highly interactive book which connects young people with art and encourages readers to try out the art techniques.



RUSSELL CLARKE AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATION

Puffin the Architect by Kimberly Andrews (Penguin Random House)     $20
An architect takes on the toughest clients yet in this clever story, full of warmth and gentle surprise. Luminous and detailed illustrations reveal cross-sections of each animal’s house, and encourage exploration. The rhythm and rhyme are impeccable, with a refrain listing the essential requirements for the perfect home — readers are left in no doubt that friends and family are the most important ingredients.



WRIGHT FAMILY FOUNDATION TE KURA POUNAMU AWARD FOR TE REO MAORI

Te Haka a Tānerore by Reina Kahukiwa, illustrated by Robyn Kahukiwa, translated by Kiwa Hammond (Mauri Tū)    $30
Legend says Tamanuiterā (sun) and Hine Raumati (summer maiden) had a son named Tānerore. On scorching hot days, the mother and son haka to the sun from the parched earth. As they do this, their hands shake vigorously, reflecting the heatwaves that shimmer between Papatūānuku and Ranginui. ‘Ko te reo te mauri o te mana Māori’ shines through in this ancient pūrākau and is creatively intensified by stunning original artwork.

BOOKS @ VOLUME #138 (3.8.19)

Our newsletter contains our reviews and recommendations, information about our events and courses, news and competitions. 

Book of the Week: Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann 
In the wholly remarkable Malina, originally published in German in 1971, Bachmann draws the reader into a world stretched to the very limits of language. An unnamed narrator, a writer in Vienna, is torn between two men, who may or may not exist outside her head. 
>>"Malina continues to reveal new possibilities in literature and new impossibilities in living." —read Thomas's review. 
>>Read an extract. 
>>Detonating the container of consciousness. 
>>A singular woman adrift. 
>>"We could call her happiness self-deception."
>>"I don't understand how one can live."
>>Reading Ingeborg Bachmann. 
>>Is Malina "the truest portrait of female consciousness since Sappho"?
>>"The outrageous has become the everyday."
>>Malina was made into a film by Werner Schroeter in 1991. 
>>As a piece of physical theatre. 
>>A brief biography of Bachmann. 
>>Books by Bachmann.
>> Fun fact: Bachmann appears as Maria in Thomas Bernhard's last novel, Extinction. 

All My Goodbyes by Mariana Dimópulos    {Reviewed by STELLA} “It’s the same thing time and time again, shamelessly, tirelessly. It doesn’t matter whether it’s morning or afternoon, winter or summer. Whether the house feels like home, whether somebody comes to the door to let me in. I arrive, and I want to stay, and then I leave.” All My Goodbyes is a novel for the restlessness in us all. Mariana Dimopulos’s protagonist is a young woman on the move. Leaving Argentina at 23 in an attempt to thwart her father’s ambitions and to escape the confines of what she sees as her predictable life, she heads to Madrid with the idea of being an ‘artist’, smoking hashish and hanging out, discussing ‘ideas’ with other travellers. After only a month, she is bored and on the move again, reinventing herself — being Lola or Luisa — whichever identity fits, being a tourist or a traveller, making new backstories, but never quite the truth. She is ambiguous to those she meets and, at times, to the reader also. We follow, or aptly, interact with her life over a decade as she swings between several European places — Madrid, Malaga, Berlin and Heidelberg to mention a few — and South America, washing up in rural Patagonia. The narrative is fractured as she relays her memories, skidding across one experience to the next and back again in a looping circuit, tossing us backwards and forwards in time. We are taken into conversations and thrown out again; we interact with those she has formed relationships with and ultimately said goodbye to. We see her as a traveller, tourist, voyeur, baker, shelf stacker, factory worker, farmhand. Upon this fractured narrative, a web is woven as we piece together the relationships that make her and break her — and always there is an impending sense of something or someone that will change her, a sense of threat with the axe taking centre stage. Dimopulos’s writing is subtle and agile. We do not mind being tossed on our protagonist's sea. In fact, we are curious. We love her late-night conversations with Julia in her kitchen, leaning up against the bench with the sleepy Kolya bunched up in his mother’s arms; we wonder when she will give in to the gentle charms of the scholar Alexander; and question why she is fascinated by the uber entrepreneur Stefan. We know, before it happens, that she will abandon them all, that her desire to leave is greater than her desire to stay. She travels full circle: we encounter her back in her homeland — still restless, still moving — living in the southernmost part of Patagonia. Working for Marco and his mother she finally finds a place to stop. Yet deceit and disaster settle here and take her onward and away, against her will and desire. Is she the architect of her own disaster, creating impossible situations? Her abandonment of people in her life is at times mutually beneficial, at other times cruel. Why does she not speak up, or face up to herself, when she could make a difference? Her riposte is always to leave — to turn her back. While the themes in this novel are restlessness, abandonment and departure, the writing, in contrast, is assured, subtly ironic, agile and so compelling that you will want to reread this — you will want to keep arriving.

Selfies by Sylvie Weil   {Reviewed by THOMAS} The hands holding the book in the painting by Markus Schinwald, and the black curtains between which they protrude, are painted in such a way as to make the viewer suspect that they are looking at a painting, or a part of a painting, by some Old Master, and the viewer, upon researching further, feels a little cheated to find that the artist is still alive. Had we perhaps confused even the name Markus Schinwald with that of some minor Germanic Old Master — perhaps a painter of agonising crucifixions, memento mori and surgically accurate Sts. Sebastians — which would have given this painting, in which the person holding the book into the light is effectively bodiless, concealed behind curtains, a disconcertingly suppressed reference to physical suffering? Maybe we should not feel cheated. Maybe it is the reference to the reference, by way of our confusion, that gives the painting, for us, its meaning. In the picture I didn't end up taking of myself I am sitting in an elderly armchair, the pile of its plush worn to the ghost of its original pattern on the arms and upper back. Beside me is a rather spindly green table upon which sits a vase of stocks, wilted at their tops, and a small empty coffee cup, a lip-mark of coffee at its rim. The sideboard behind me is stacked with books, and the fading light falls from my right onto the book I hold at an odd angle as if trying to postpone the moment in which I will have to get up and switch on a light. I am wearing a heavy mustard jersey, no longer worth darning, under which another jersey can be seen, and my head is thrust awkwardly forward over the oddly angled book, which I seem to be on the verge of finishing. Its title can be read despite the shadow: Selfies by Sylvie Weil.  * The thirteen exquisite pieces of memoir that comprise Selfies each begin with a description of an actual artwork, a self-portrait by a woman ranging from the thirteen century to today. This ekphrasis is followed by a description of a (possibly hypothetical) self-portrait by Weil which echoes or resonates with the historical work and provides a means of access to the third section of each piece, a more (but variously) lengthy examination of one of the more significant or uncomfortable aspects of Weil’s life. This tripartite structure demonstrates how viewing art can unlock new levels of understanding of our own lives, and how the communication of a stranger’s moment by means of a surface invariably stimulates the viewer’s memory to read that moment in terms of moments from the viewer’s own life, moments pressing at the surface of consciousness from the other side, so to speak. Viewing is remembering. The rigour and delicacy Weil demonstrates in viewing the artists’ works allows her to apply a similar set of criteria to her own memory-images, resulting in a remarkably nuanced set of realisations to be accessed and conveyed, potentially provoking a similar deepening of access in a reader to her or his own memories. Weil’s prose, pellucidly translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, gauges subtle shifts of tone, frequently shifting our understanding of situations or persons before any knowledge about them is attained. The awful American mathematician with whom Weil had a love affair, her son’s mother-in-law, the close friend of her mother’s, the unsympathetic owners of a “Jewish” dog, are all revealed as having complex and often ambiguous relationships with the surfaces they present. Weil’s sentences, at once so straight-forward and so subtle, can move both outwards and inwards at once, operating at various depths simultaneously, as when Weil describes responses to her adult son’s mental breakdown: “I reply politely to friends who say: ‘I wouldn’t be able to cope if something like that happened to my son.’ I didn’t tell them that it could happen to anyone. And that they would cope, as people do. They’d have no choice. I don’t reply that they deserve to have it happen to them. Deep down, I agree that it is unlikely to happen to them. Not to them.” Precision often leads us to the verge of humour, as when Weil describes “the remains of a smile abruptly cut short, as if by the sudden and unexpected arrival of a dangerous animal.” The ‘Self-portrait as an author,’ springing from a description of a 1632 self-portrait of Judith Leyster seen as an advertisement for her portrait commissions (a commercial imperative), is a devastatingly perfect Cuskian account of the people who visited Weil’s signing table at a literary festival. The book is full of images, or moments, details, that implant themselves in the mind of the reader and continue to resonate there in a way similar to the reader’s own memories. What is the purpose of self-depiction? “Everyone takes selfies,” Weil observes. “It’s a way of going unnoticed,” but at the same time each selfie is a form of searching, an attempt to locate oneself, somehow, in the circumstances that comprise one’s life. Memory is the only way we have to attempt to make sense of these moments.

NEW RELEASES 

Selfies by Sylvie Weill        $38
"A beguiling series of vignettes, by turns wry, amusing and disturbing, inspired by self-portraits by women artists and reflecting on the images they provoke. An illuminating survey of the author's various identities, in a fractured world, as mother, lover and writer." —Michèle Roberts
"A new genre is born: the short selfie collection! Lively, inventive, compassionate, aching, morally complex and troubling, I loved these self-portraits more than anything I’ve read lately." — Lauren Elkin

The Wind That Lays Waste by Selva Almada        $32
“What knocks me out about The Wind That Lays Waste—a novel that starts in the great pause before a storm—is how it delivers exactly that compressed pressurised electricity of a gathering thunderstorm: it sparks and sputters with live-wire tension. The story centres around a reverend who is evangelising across the Argentinian countryside with his teenage daughter, when their car breaks down. This act of God, or fate, leads them to an ageing, atheist mechanic and his young helper. As a long, strangely intimate day passes, curious tensions ebb and flow, until finally the storm breaks over the plains. Perfectly translated by Chris Andrews, this is a book for readers who like that metallic taste and the feeling of the hairs on the back of their necks rising.”—Barbara Epler

Sweet Home by Wendy Erskine         $35
Ten stories set in Belfast, laying bare the heartbreak and quiet tragedies that run under the surface of everyday lives. A reclusive cult-rock icon ends his days in the street where he was born; a lonely woman is fascinated by her niqab-wearing neighbours; a husband and wife become enmeshed in the lives of the young couple they pay to do their cleaning and gardening.
"With skill and style, Erskine unpicks the underlying complexity of ordinary lives, the unexpected intricacy of ordinary situations. These are stories about ramification as opposed to redemption; dark, bittersweet and perfectly formed." —Sara Baume
>>Erskine reads from the book. 

Eileen Gray: A house under the sun by Zosia Dzierżawska and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes      $33
An exquisite graphic novel about the architect and designer's life and work in the 1920s on her exemplary Modernist Villa E-1027.
>>Visit Villa E-1027

Story of a Secret State: My report to the world by Jan Karski         $26
It is 1939. Jan Karski, a Polish student, enjoys a life of parties and pleasure. Then war breaks out and his familiar world is destroyed. Now he must live under a new identity, in the resistance. And, in a secret mission that could change the course of the war, he must risk his own life to try and save those of millions.
"Astonishing, thrilling, morally grave, electrifying." —Independent

This Really Isn't About You by Jean Hannah Edelstein     $25
In 2014 I moved back to the United States after living abroad for fourteen years, my whole adult life, because my father was dying from cancer. Six weeks after I arrived in New York City, my father died. Six months after that I learned that I had inherited the gene that would cause me cancer too. When Jean Hannah Edelstein's world overturned she was forced to confront some of the big questions in life: How do we cope with grief? How does living change when we realise we're not invincible? Does knowing our likely fate make it harder or easier to face the future? 
"A most magnificent, beautifully written memoir." —NIna Stibbe

Pale Horse, Pale Rider: The short stories by Katherine Anne Porter          $26
A collection that gathers together Pulitzer Prize-winning short fiction, including 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider', where a young woman lies in a fever during the influenza epidemic, her childhood memories mingling with fears for her fiance on his way to war, and 'Noon Wine', a haunting story of tragedy and scandal on a small dairy farm in Texas.
"Katherine Anne Porter's short stories are unsurpassed in modern fiction." —Robert Penn 
"Porter writes English of a purity and precision almost unique in contemporary fiction." —Edmund Wilson

Orange World, And other stories by Karen Russell         $37
Surreal short stories set in the swamps of Florida, often with ecological issues underpinning their plots.
"Russell’s writing inhabits its own universe, with metaphor and simile taking us to strange new places; we are led by the hand and find ourselves completely submerged, only later to come to, groggily, in our own world." —Guardian

Nobber by Oisín Fagan          $38
An ambitious noble and his three serving men travel through the Irish countryside in the stifling summer of 1348, using the advantage of the plague which has collapsed society to buy up large swathes of property and land. They come upon Nobber, a tiny town, whose only living habitants seem to be an egotistical bureaucrat, his volatile wife, a naked blacksmith, and a beautiful Gaelic hostage. Meanwhile, a band of marauding Gaels are roaming around, using the confusion of the sickness to pillage and reclaim lands that once belonged to them. As these groups converge upon the town, the inhabitants, who up until this point have been under strict curfew, begin to stir from their dwellings, demanding answers from the intruders. A deadly stand-off emerges from which no one will escape unscathed.
"Nobber is hallucinatory and sly, conjuring a densely strange and savagely captivating world. There are lots of novels, and there are lots of novels that are all much alike, but there is nothing like Nobber." —Colin Barrett

What We Really Do All Day: Insights from the Centre for Time Use Research by Jonathan Gershuny and Oriel Sullivan      $26
Are we spending more time at work than we would have 50 years ago? Are we sleeping less? How has the Internet affected the way we use our spare time? Everything we do takes time, and it feels like our lives are busier than ever before. Yet a detailed look at our daily activities reveals some surprising truths about the social and economic structure of the world we live in. 
>>Research!

A Brief History of Life on Earth by Clémence Dupont        $50
A wonderful illustrated book of evolution, the concertina pages of which fold out to a frieze as long as a triceratops. 
>>Other work by Dupont. 

The Socialist Manifesto: The case for radical politics in an era of extreme inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara       $33
"Accessible, irreverent and entertaining, Bhaskar Sunkara has delivered a razor-sharp guide to socialism's history, transformative promise, and path to power. This book also serves as an irresistible invitation to join in building that power, and in shaping the radically democratic future that is our best hope in these make-or-break times." —Naomi Klein 
"From one of the brightest stars of the American left, essential reading for anyone who wants to build a new society based on people's needs, not profit for the elite." —Owen Jones

Novacene: The coming age of hyperintelligence by James Lovelock        $37
A remarkably hopeful look at the coming of beneficent AI and their partnership with humans as part of an organic planetary consciousness, 'Gaia'. 

The Critic as Artist by Oscar Wilde         $20
 "To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own." Arguably the most complete exploration of his aesthetic thinking, and certainly the most entertaining, in this book Wilde seeks to demolish the supposed boundary between art and criticism. Wilde champions idleness and contemplation as prerequisites to artistic cultivation. For Wilde, criticism is not subject to the work of art, but can in fact precede it: the artist cannot create without first engaging his or her critical faculties.

Picnic in the Storm by Yulilo Motoya         $25
A housewife takes up bodybuilding and sees radical changes to her physique - which her workaholic husband fails to notice. A boy waits at a bus stop, mocking businessmen struggling to keep their umbrellas open in a typhoon - until an old man shows him that they hold the secret to flying. A woman working in a clothing boutique waits endlessly on a customer who won't come out of the fitting room—and who may or may not be human. A newlywed notices that her husband's features are beginning to slide around his face—to match her own.

Winner of the Kenzaburo Oe Prize and the Akutagawa Prize. 

Night-Gaunts, And other tales of suspense by Joyce Carol Oates        $23
Stories of the uncanny, death, sex, longing, murder, &c, exploring the tense dynamic between lust and revulsion.

My City by Joanne Liu       $32
Max is asked to mail a letter for his mother. As he walks through his neighborhood in search of a mailbox, he encounters all sorts of interesting things like falling leaves dancing in the wind, skyscrapers towering in the distance, and junk being piled into a rubbish truck. All around him adults hurry on their various errands, too busy to appreciate these wondrous details. His walk through the city leads Max to discover that the mailbox is actually right next door to his own house. 

The Need by Helen Phillips          $37
A woman fights to retain her sense of self amidst the chaos of work, motherhood and alternative universes.

Stand by Me by Wendell Berry         $40
Beautifully written evocations of the rural Kentucky of Berry's childhood. 

The Lark Ascending: The music of the British landscape by Richard King         $37
'The Lark Ascending', Ralph Vaughan Williams's 'pastoral romance for orchestra' was premiered in 1921. Over the course of the twentieth century this piece of music, perhaps more than any other, worked its way into the collective consciousness to seemingly define a mythical concept of the English countryside: babbling brooks, skylarks, hayricks. But the birth and legacy of the composition are much more complex than this simplified pastoral vision suggests. The landscape celebrated as unsullied and ripe with mystique is a living, working, and occasionally rancorous environment—not an unaffected idyll. On a chronological journey that takes him from postwar poets and artists to the late twentieth century and the free party scene which emerged from acid house and travelling communities, Richard King explores how Britain's history and identity has been shaped by the mysterious relationship between music and nature.

BOOKS @ VOLUME #137 (27.7.19)

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