BOOKS @ VOLUME #143 (7.9.19)
What have we been reading? What would we recommend that you read? What is happening in the world of books? Find out in our NEWSLETTER.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #143 (7.9.19)
What have we been reading? What would we recommend that you read? What is happening in the world of books? Find out in our NEWSLETTER.
 | Women in the Field, One and Two by Thomasin Sleigh {Reviewed by STELLA} Ruth Bishops is an independent woman in her mid-30s attempting to shape a place for herself in the art world of London in the 1950s. Always interested in drawing, and encouraged by her aunt, she has attended the Slade Art School thanks to a small inheritance. Her time there is disrupted by the war, but she finishes her in the late 40s, her talents being in writing about art and critiquing her fellows’ work. With a small amount of attention garnered from a book she has written on contemporary art, she gains a position at the Fisher Gallery as a keeper: to catalogue the collection, research, and assist with exhibitions. Here, she finds herself in a role she loves, but also in a patriarchal institution where she has to prove herself over and above her male counterparts and is often relegated to overlooked or plainly ignored when it comes to input and meetings. When a retiring director makes her the English advisor* (partly out of spite for his nemesis) to the National Art Gallery of New Zealand, things take an unexpected turn in her rather planned and predictable life. At an exhibition opening she is introduced to an eccentric Russian emigre, Irina Durova, who, on hearing of her role as an advisor, starts to badger Ruth about viewing her work. Eventually, Ruth gives in and arranges to visit Irina’s studio, where she finds a vast array of work spanning several decades. Drawn to two paintings from Irina’s final days in Russia (she migrated to London in 1913), she suggests these to committee at the National Art Gallery, having little hope that they will take her advice. Yet, despite controversy, they do. Irina and Ruth’s relationship develops as they plan the process of getting the works to New Zealand, and surprisingly Irina insists they accompany the works to Wellington. Ruth, who is having difficulties at the Fisher due to petty jealousies and office politics, as well as class and gender prejudices, is happy to have a change of scene, and finds herself on the way to the southern climes. Thomasin Sleigh has written a compelling novel, cleverly blending factual details into this fictional work. The historical references are light-handed, sometimes sharply amusing and fitting, placing this story well in its period. Her prose style is apt: the tone and language feel just right for the time. The two female leads are both convincing: Irina - a hive of conflicting impulses and an off-handedness that points to a deception; and Ruth - a seemingly naive yet highly observant individual who has grit at her core. Yet this is more than a story of two women making their mark on the page, more than a story of two paintings and their meaning: Sleigh is talking about colonisation, immigration, class and gender. As an art writer, she brings insight and knowledge to this interesting period and shows how art can be a catalyst for changing attitudes. Women in the Field, One and Two (a wonderfully playful title) is a novel that is both thoughtful and provocative, a missive about the art world and creative female practice now, as much as it is about the 1950s. Issues of paternalism, prejudice and favouritism still abound. What does it take and what do you give up to be free and creative? As Irina states: “I kept going and I wouldn’t go back. I had to make it work, because...because that was all I could do. I didn’t know that there were special rules, a special game, about whose art gets seen and whose art is remembered.” The most compelling New Zealand novel I have read this year: clever, witty and engaging.
(*the gallery had English advisors until 1972.)
Thomasin Sleigh will be talking with Stella at the VOLUME MAPUA LITERARY FESTIVAL on 21 September. >>Book your tickets now. |
 | These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy {Reviewed by THOMAS}
The desire to understand must not be confused with the desire to know, especially in biography. Too often and too soon an accretion of facts obscures a subject, plastering detail over detail, obscuring the essential lineaments in the mistaken notion that we are approaching a definitive life. Such a life could not be understood. Instead a whittling is required, a paring from the mass of fact all but those details that cannot be separated from the subject, the details that make the subject that subject and not another, the details therefore that are the key to the inner life of the subject and the cause of all the extraneous details of which we are relieved the necessity of acquiring (unless we find we enjoy this as sport). Jaeggy, whose brief fictions, such as those in I am the Brother of XX, remain as pleasant burrs in the mind long after the short time spent reading them, has here written three brief biographies, of Thomas De Quincey, John Keats and Marcel Schwob, each as brief and effective as a lightning strike and as memorable. Jaeggy is interested in discovering what it was about these figures that made them them and not someone else. By assembling details, quotes, sketches of situations, pin-sharp portraits of contemporaries, some of which, in a few words, will change the way you remember them, Jaeggy takes us close to the membrane, so to call it, that surrounds the known, the membrane that these writers were intent on stretching, or constitutionally unable not to stretch, beyond which lay and lies madness and death, the constant themes of all Jaeggy’s attentions, and, for Jaeggy, the backdrop to, if not the object of, all creative striving. How memorably Jaeggy gives us sweet De Quincey’s bifurcation, by a mixture of inclination, reading and opium, from the world inhabited by others, his house a place of “paper storage, fragments of delirium eaten away by dust”, and poor Keats, whose “moods, vague and tentative, didn’t settle over him so much as hurry past like old breezes,” and Schwob, with his appetite for grief tracing and retracing the arcs of his friends’ deaths towards his own. These essays are so clean and sharp that light will refract within them long after you have ceased to read, drawing you back to read again. Is the understanding you have gained of these writers something that belongs to them? Too bad, you will henceforth be unable to shake the belief that you have gained some access to their inner lives that has been otherwise denied.
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>>Read Stella's review.
>>Read an extract.
>>Halliday talks about the book, about the differences between fiction and non-fiction, &c.
>>Why Asymmetry has become a literary phenomenon.
>>To what extent is the 'Alice' character Halliday, and to what extent is the 'Ezra Blazer' character Philip Roth?
>>"Asymmetry is not a mystery novel, at least not in the way that we typically think about that genre. But there is most certainly a mystery at the novel’s core, one that arises from the book’s structure — two seemingly unrelated novellas appended by a short coda — rather than its plot."
>>Come and discuss the novel at our book group on Thursday 19 September.
>>Start reading.
NEW RELEASES
No-one's sanity is safe from the pen (or, plausibly, keyboard) of novelist Nell Zink. This novel tackles the 90s music scene, hipsterdom, climate change and political misadventures on the minimal and maximal scale. It is hugely funny, audacious, sharp and indelible (as you would expect).
"Doxology is superb. In terms of its author’s ability to throw dart after dart after dart into the center of your media-warped mind and soul, it’s the novel of the summer and possibly the year. It’s a ragged chunk of ecstatic cerebral-satirical intellection. It’s bliss." —The New York Times
>>"I am afraid I have to tell you, Nell, you have no subconscious mind."
>>"Post-sensitive is not a bad description of Zink’s Weltanschauung."
>>“He started playing ukulele soon after his mother died.”
On the surface, Vivian Maier lived a quiet life as a loving, firm and feisty nanny for wealthy families in Chicago and New York. But throughout four decades, she took more than 150,000 photos, mainly with Rolleiflex cameras. The pictures were only discovered in an auction shortly before she died, impoverished and feasibly very lonely. In a time when self-obsession and representation are at an all-time high, Vivian Maier holds a particular fascination. Who was this eccentric person? Hesselholdt's novel seeks to penetrate the enigma.
>>Read an excerpt.
>>Finding Vivian Maier.
>>Read Thomas's review of Hesselholdt's Companions.
Levy's new novel is both subtle and audacious, exposing power play on both personal and epochal levels in the story of a man hit twice by cars on the same crossing but in different decades, causing his life to turn under itself like a Möbius strip.
"Brilliant." —Sam Byers, Guardian
>>Levy talks about the book.
>>Other books by Deborah Levy.
>>In her writing shed.
In the age of Trump, fake news and clickbait headlines, it is easy to despair about the future of journalism. The New Zealand and global media are in upheaval: the old economic models for print journalism are failing, public funding has been neglected for decades, and many major news organisations are shedding journalists.
A remarkable collaboration between an outstanding illustrator and an outstanding writer. When Self saw Blake's slightly macabre illustrations of people making their ways across moonlit landscapes in eccentric vehicles, he went home and wrote a set of similarly baroquely strange and moon-saturated texts. This astounding book contains both.
Hotel Middlemore, aka Middlemore Hospital, "is the smallest country on earth / tinier than the Vatican / yet more secure / you couldn't escape in a laundry basket / or by disguising yourself as a psychiatrist". "Everyone who is here deserves to be / no possibility of a mistake / doctors do not err / a privilege to know I am a participant / in an enterprise which cannot commit a blunder". Michael Morrissey's 12th book of poetry casts a wry but compassionate eye on life in a New Zealand psychiatric ward: "I'm in the best hotel in the world / grandest view / hot and cold running / but it's a psychiatric ward / everyone mad except me / and I too am mad / as a butchered snake / ram-raided by delusion / I have bipolar disorder which comes / and goes / of its own free will." From Hotel Middlemore Michael Morrissey, "God's blue astronaut / lonely but unafraid", takes us on a journey from a psychiatric ward to "beyond infinity / and back again".
Many of the poems written after 1962's Collected Poems, and those excluded from that collection, have not been published before.
"As all good writing has to, his writing came from his life. Each poem belonged to the life, like dark threads pulled away from the frayed sleeve of an old coat. I call that quality authenticity." —James K. Baxter, Landfall 99
Disturbed by the rising anti-Semitism Wolfskehl had left Germany for Switzerland and Italy in 1933. When Italy began to adopt anti-Jewish legislation he fled Europe for distant New Zealand which he had heard was an ‘island of racial equality’. For ten years he found asylum here and the peace to go on writing. Though almost blind, the open-minded and curious German-Jewish poet soon became engaged in the social and cultural life of the country, befriending and influencing many of the leading younger writers, such as R. A. K. Mason, Frank Sargeson, A.R.D. Fairburn and Denis Glover.
>>Writings by Wolfskehl.
The second volume of memoir from Ihimaera, following Maori Boy and telling of his experiences as a young writer making his way in a pakeha world, trying to find a place and a voice, exploring his identity and sexuality, and trying to put a secret in his past behind him.
Did you know that mathematics can be beautiful and that it is used in nature every single day? Have you ever wondered how prime numbers can protect us, or why bees use hexagons in their hives?
A collection of very personal essays exploring childhood, marriage, life as an All Black wife, and a poignant and strikingly honest reflection on the death of her first born, Toby.
"Lind Burgess can make you laugh and break your heart, often in the same sentence. Clear-eyed and wise, these essays are the stories we share to survive." —Diana Wichtel
>>Burgess talks with Lynn Freeman.
Equips your whanau with the first words you need to speak te reo at home together.
Simple, practical and engaging. From the author of the spectacularly popular and useful Maori Made Easy and Maori at Home.
A good introduction to what to expect on a visit to a marae, in te reo Maori, English and Mandarin.
Europe and its relationship with the rest of the world have always been defined by cumulative effects of migrations within and beyond its edges, and migrants have always stood at the heart of the European experience. This book explores the experiences of those seeking a safer or better life, and the effects of their migration upon both the societies they leave and those into which they are welcomed (or not).
"Gatrell’s eye for detail and sensitivity make this a compelling account that challenges the 'us'-and-'them' framing into which much discussion of migration is forced. Its great strength is that it treats the emotional and cultural aspects of the subject with as much respect as the historical facts and figures." —Guardian
Exploring the terrain between activism and apathy, Sylvia Nissen considers what it means to be a political actor from the perspective of students today. Drawing on in-depth interviews with New Zealand tertiary students, she traces their 'desires' for different types of politics, the 'demands' they experience at university, and the 'doubts' that underscore their political engagement.
Ever since Crusoe was cast away (and probably well before that), distant islands have been scattered across our collective imagination. In this wonderful book, Lewis-Jones, who brought us the wonderful The Writer's Map, allows eighty of the world's leading illustrators to draw a map of an island that really ought (or perhaps ought not) to exist. Includes islands by Christ Riddell, Edward Carey, Aina Bestard, Coralie Bickford-Smith, Tom Gauld, Isabel Greenberg, William Grill, Daniel Reeve (NZ), Herve Tullet, and Takayo Akiyama.
Once upon a time there were a frog and a toad who were very good friends. Frog was always enthusiastic — Toad wasn't so sure. All four deeply loved 'Frog and Toad' books now appear in one lovely hardback volume.
Lindisfarne, famous for its monastery, home to Saints Aidan and Cuthbert and the place where the celebrated Lindisfarne Gospels were written, is an island rich in history: the Romans knew it as Insula Medicata, it reached the height of its fame in the dark ages, and survived Viking raids before being abandoned after Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries. Moffat walks cross-country and through history.
>>Things we know: Derek Jarman's The Tempest was filmed on Lindisfarne.
Rutt travels to the remotest edges of the British Isles in search of the seabirds that make their homes there. In the face of a looming environmental crisis, his investigation is both personal and passionate.
Demonstrates the cultural enrichment that results from an influx of refugees.
A beautifully illustrated introduction to the lives of insects.
A clear guide to the successful making of sourdough leavened pastries and sweet doughs as well as more traditional breads.
From the author of Fresh India.
Melinda is an outcast at Merryweather High. Something happened over the summer - something bad - and now nobody will talk to her, let alone listen. So what's the point in speaking at all? Through her work on an art project, Melinda is finally able to face what really happened that night. But before she can make peace with the ghosts of the past, she has to confront the reality of the present - and stop someone who still wishes to do her harm. Only words can save her. She can't stay silent. Not any more.
An excellent graphic novel version of Laurie Halse Anderson's classic empowerment story.
A year spent keeping bees is a year spent learning about yourself and your place in the world.
''Finely written and insightful'' —Guardian
''A mesmeric, lovely, quietly powerful book. A gentle but compelling account of the redemption that comes from relationship and attention.'' —Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast
''A profound, funny and sometimes deeply moving book that describes a year of inner city bee keeping, while dancing between the history of bees and us and what it means to be human in our modern world.'' —Julia Blackburn, author of Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske
When information is a weapon, everyone is at war. We live in a world of influence operations run amok, a world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, Trump. We've lost not only our sense of peace and democracy — but our sense of what those words even mean.
An endlessly enjoyable large hardback collection of Cowley's best poems and stories. Absolutely both giveable and haveable.
PRE-PUBLICATION ORDERS are being accepted now for these books (use the 'click and collect' button on our website to reserve your copies):
Available Tuesday 10 September.
>>Read an extract.
Released Thursday 12 September.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #142 (31.8.19)
Find out what we've been reading and what we think you'd like to read in our latest newsletter.
 | Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday {Reviewed by STELLA} Opening with a bored young woman sitting on a bench in New York — bored with waiting for something to happen, bored with her book and bored with herself — Asymmetry cleverly lets you into a sliver of Alice’s mind. Actually, not even that much. A well-known older writer sits down and starts a conversation — one that finally gets around to his ‘line’. “Are you game?” (A line that later will reappear with hand-clapping irony!) Lisa Halliday’s debut novel riffs on the greats of American modern fiction — the male novelists that is. It’s fairly obvious that our older writer, Ezra Blazer, is based on a somebody or an amalgam of ‘someones’, and it won’t come as a surprise when you discover that Halliday had a relationship with Philip Roth when she was in her early twenties. Cue the novel-as-life, life-as-novel moment. Yet Halliday gives us a double (or maybe even a triple) twist in this captivating novel of three parts. Part one — 'Folly' — details Alice’s affair with the older author Blazer. She’s an editorial assistant at a publishing house who is easily won over by the dynamic and controlling Blazer. She’s a willing participant, and although we are never given the last damaging scene — the breakup — we are well aware that the end will come in this affair, one in which Alice is both unhappy (really) but content (sort of) with the money that is lavished on her, the account at the ritzy department store and the crack in the door to a ‘better’ life, which she is sometimes allowed through. In return she will be kind to the ailing writer with his bad back and declining libido, fetch and carry for him as necessary, and listen to his opinions. The text's style here is snappy and wry. While we don’t discover too much about Alice’s internal life, we can enjoy the voyeuristic pleasures of watching through the keyhole, and there are some great sardonic moments — ‘peppercorns’ (piquant and spicy) of literary references and cultural textures (baseball and music). Layered under this ‘folly’ are the machinations of politics and social structures of the 2000s, topics that will come to the fore in part two — 'Madness'. We are suddenly thrown out of Alice’s world into Amar’s. Born on a plane coming to America, he is an American Iraqi. We meet him at border control, in London 2009, en route to Kurdistan (to visit his brother). Not surprisingly, he’s been pulled out of the queue and is answering a long series of questions from Denise, the immigration officer. Between numerous and repetitive questions and waiting in the holding cell, we get close and personal with Amar: his life growing up in the US, his time studying in London, his immediate family and the connections to his relatives in Iraq. Unlike Alice, with Amar Ala Jaafari we are given a full story, childhood, parents and a sibling (Sami), his failed relationship with Maddie (who his younger self scorned for her ambition to be a doctor), and his own academic crisis moving from doctoring to economics. Much of the story centres on his adult years — travelling back to an increasingly dangerous Baghdad with his parents to visit relatives, and his time in London where he becomes friends with a jaded war correspondent. We circle around the politics of the middle east, the American invasion of Kuwait, and the bombing of Baghdad and subsequent war in Iraq. Immersed in Amar’s story, as a reader I was wondering where and how Alice’s life would overlap. How would they meet? What was the connection? Yet the two parts stood separate and disconnected in all ways, aside from some themes that are played out quite differently. While in 'Folly' we are voyeuristic, in 'Madness' we are completely engaged — moved to be involved. Yet Halliday does not leave it there, and the final and brief third part, 'Ezra Blazer’s Desert Island Discs', a recorded interview for BBC radio, gives us the connecting lines so we can join the dots. Asymmetry is an enjoyable and clever novel, one that plays with the idea of the novel and questions the role of the author and imagination. It's a consciously delicious demonstration of fiction. |
 | Screen Tests by Kate Zambreno {Reviewed by THOMAS} He finishes the book and draws up the green table to write his review. He takes a slip of paper from between the pages of the book, his reading notes, he calls such slips upon which he usually notes down quotes from the book he is preparing to review, or ideas he may have had during reading the book, which may or may not have arisen from the book, reading notes which are intended to make the writing of each week’s review a little easier for him, though ease is not exactly his aim in writing the reviews, in fact, if he wanted ease, he wouldn’t write reviews at all, or he would just say, Read this book. I enjoyed it and I think you will too. Or words to that effect. He looks at both sides of the slip of paper, but the only thing he has written on it this week seems to be a sentence that is presumably a quote from the book Screen Tests by Kate Zambreno. “When one writes, one is already someone else.” Fair enough, he thinks. That is the sort of thought he might think if he thought thoughts, he thinks, but more likely it is the sort of thought he would copy out of a book, though this sense of the word ‘copy’ seems more appropriative than he is comfortable with, perhaps, he thinks, revealing something shamelessly (or shamefully, he can’t decide) acquisitory about his reading. Appropriative and not appropriate. Kate Zambreno’s book consists of 58 “stories”, some of them as short as a sentence, some as long as a few pages, followed by five “essays”, written a few years earlier, somewhat longer. In fact, the only real difference between the “stories” and the “essays”, he thinks, is their length. The “essays” are more obviously the result of sustained effort, that sense of essaying, he thinks, though they take no real effort to read, they are easy and pleasurable to read, he thinks, even if not quite as easy and pleasurable to read as the “stories”, which are written with such lightness and quickness that they are already inside the reader’s mind, fully formed, claiming space, before the reader is aware that their beauty is snide, prickly, misanthropic, resonant with misery and failure. Both the “stories” and the “essays”, he thinks, are commonly about, or “about”, writers, artists, actors, filmmakers, photographers and others, engaged in a doomed, and therefore, perhaps, heroic, or, if not heroic, then pathetic, or, if such a thing is possible, both heroic and pathetic struggle with the forces of entropy, age, boredom, depression, addiction, AIDS, poverty, prejudice, and so forth, forces that will strip them of the benefit of their intellectual labour and convert it into intellectual capital that can be appropriated by someone else. He doesn’t know if this intellectual labour/ intellectual capital model is useful, even of itself, though it has been something he has been thinking a bit about lately, suspicious as he is of the workings of intellectual capital just as he is of those of financial capital, and, anyway, it is too heavy and clumsy a tool with which to grasp the poignant evanescences of Screen Tests. When he does write his review, he thinks, if he actually manages to write a review, he will instead say something about the way in which Zambreno’s intense interest in, he will probably call it obsession with, her subject matter identifies her, in her own mind, with another precarious, tentative creative person unable to distinguish a tightrope from a tripwire. “Can one’s obsession be a form of autobiography?” she asks, and it soon becomes evident, he will write, that the unfiltered openness of an obsession allows an immeasurable quantity of cross-contamination between the parties, or, if not so much between the parties, between the obsessor and the idea she has of the other with whom she is obsessed, to the extent that the two can no longer be usefully distinguished. All Zambreno’s pieces in the book are in the first person, he has noted, though this note is mental and not on the almost empty slip of paper that pretends to be his reading notes, all Zambreno’s pieces are I pieces, all her obsessions are self-obsessions, indeed surely all obsessions must be self-obsessions, for reasons already roughly sketched, all Zambreno’s obsessions are self-obsessions but what better access to the experience of another could be provided than through the aperture of obsession? Is this not what literature is for? For Zambreno, as for us all, he thinks, identity is porous, she is the people she writes about, she writes to be them, she writes to somehow exist, to survive, to enact, as they do, a “revolt against disappearance.” She is someone else in order to be herself, he thinks, maintaining the first person but destabilising its referent, in much the same way, he thinks, as he might write in the third person to give the impression that he is not writing about himself, to deflect the eye of a reader but also to destabilise the third person referent, for, he thinks, it must be the case that obsession transgresses identity in both directions. When Zambreno has writer’s block when working on one of her essays she says to herself, “I am unsure of what is the use of all this first person anymore,” and when he similarly has reviewer’s block when faced with reviewing Screen Tests, a book about which it would perhaps be better if he merely wrote, Read this book, I enjoyed it and I think you will too, or words to that effect, he finds himself unable to proceed because he fears that, even if he writes in the third person it might seem as if he is writing about himself instead of about the book Screen Tests by Kate Zambreno even though he really is writing about the book Screen Tests. He would not like people to think he was writing about himself, especially when he was not, and, even worse, he would not like them to think that he was expecting them to be interested in his writing about himself when he certainly would never expect them to be so interested, even if he was writing about himself, which he was not. This is the nature of my reviewer’s block, he thinks. I cannot proceed because I do not wish to be present in the text but I cannot proceed without being present in the text. He drinks his fourth cup of coffee and stares at the blank screen of his computer, the screen upon which he was to compose his review. I have still made no progress, he thinks, though, he supposes, four cups of coffee are in themselves a form of progress. |
NEW FORMS OF POLITICAL ORGANISATION, edited by Campbell Jones and Shannon Walsh, is published by Economic and Social Research Aotearoa as a means to stimulate debate about "new forms of politics and new ways of understanding politics."
>>Visit the ESRA.
Read some extracts:
>> 'Nation destroying: Sovereignty and dispossession in Aotearoa New Zealand' by Ben Rosamond
>> 'Land, housing and capitalism: The social consequences of free markets' by Shane Malva
>> 'Political organisation and the environment' by Amanda Thomas
>> 'The resurgence of the radical left in Europe' by David Parker
>> 'Why we need a new left wing party' by Sue Bradford
>> 'Constitutional Transformation and the Matike Mai Project', a kōrero between Moana Jackson and Helen Potter.
>> Other ESRA research.
NEW RELEASES
New Forms of Political Organisation edited by Campbell Jones and Shannon Walsh $20
Could politics be anything other than the administration of the economy in the interests of the already privileged? This volume collects innovative thinking about new forms of politics, new forms of political organisation and new ways of thinking politics. Contributions include 'Nation destroying: Sovereignty and dispossession in Aotearoa New Zealand' by Ben Rosamond, 'Land, housing and capitalism: The social consequences of free markets' by Shane Malva, 'Political organisation and the environment' by Amanda Thomas, 'The resurgence of the radical left in Europe' by David Parker, 'Why we need a new left wing party' by Sue Bradford, 'Constitutional Transformation and the Matike Mai Project' a kōrero between Moana Jackson and Helen Potter.
Fierce Bad Rabbits: The tales behind children's picture books by Clare Pollard $37
What is The Tiger Who Came to Tea really about? What has Meg and Mog got to do with Polish embroidery? Why is death in picture books so often represented by being eaten? The best picture books are far more complex than they seem — and darker too. Interesting.
Memories of Low Tide by Chantal Thomas (translated by Natasha Lehrer) $33
Raised near the beaches of Arcachon, Chantal inherits from her mother a deep love of swimming in the sea. Through her young eyes, Thomas vividly evokes the sensory pleasures of the beach: the smell of seaweed on the shore, the first sharp touch of cold water. With her parents' troubled marriage in the background, the young Chantal roams the maritime landscape freely. In a series of short chapters, Thomas depicts her growing sense of independence through her developing connection to her environment.
Flora Tristan: Feminism in the age of George Sand by Sandra Dijkstra $27
A fascinating biography of the early Victorian feminist and social activist Flora Tristan, who chronicled the conditions of women and labour from the sugar plantations of Peru to the mills of industrial England.
Becoming Beauvoir by Kate Kirkpatrick $44
"One is not born, one rather becomes, a woman." Similarly, one is not born, one rather becomes, Simone de Beauvoir. In this important new biography, drawing on new primary sources. Kirkpatrick sheds light on some of the more complex corners of de Beauvoir's life and gives a remarkably lively reassessment of her relevance to modern feminism and autofiction (so to call it).
The Weil Conjectures: On maths and the pursuit of the unknown by Karen Olsson $40
When Olsson came across the letters between the mathematician André Weil and his sister, the philosopher Simone Weil, she was struck by the way in which, between them, they grappled with the differences (and similarities) between abstract thought and practical approaches to life. What is the relationship between analytical and creative thought?
Blueprint by Theresia Enzensberger $38
A novel set in 1920s Germany, where an ambitious young woman learns about love, feminism and modern architectural design at the Bauhaus. Enzenberger's book is also an introduction to the aesthetic and political debates of the modernist avant-garde, and an examination of the opportunities and challenges for female artists in Weimar Germany.
The Shamer's Daughter ('The Shamer Chronicles' #1) by Lene Kaaberbøl $19
Dina has unwillingly inherited her mother's gift: the ability to elicit shamed confessions simply by looking into someone's eyes. To Dina, however, these powers are not a gift but a curse. Surrounded by fear and hostility, she longs for simple friendship. An excellent new series from the author of 'Wildwitch'.
Life Finds a Way: What evolution teaches us about creativity by Andreas Wagner $43
A beguiling symmetry links Picasso struggling through forty versions of Guernica and the way evolution transformed a dinosaur's claw into a condor's wing. How does the existing become the new?
It Rained Warm Bread by Gloria Moskowitz-Sweet, Hope Anita Smith and Lea Lyon $33
A novel in verse for children, telling the true story of Moishe Moskovitz, who was thirteen when he was sent to Auschwitz in 1939. Nearing despair near the end of the war, Moishe was saved by an act of kindness. That was the day it rained warm bread.
Our Women on the Ground: Arab women reporting from the Arab world edited by Zahra Hankir $40
A growing number of intrepid Arab and Middle Eastern sahafiyat — female journalists — are working to shape nuanced narratives about their changing homelands, often risking their lives on the front lines of war. The nineteen essays here show that, from sexual harassment on the streets of Cairo to the difficulty of travelling without a male relative in Yemen, their challenges are unique — as are their advantages, such as being able to speak candidly with other women at a Syrian medical clinic or attend an exclusive beauty contest for sheep in Saudi Arabia.
Fundamental: How quantum and particle physics explains everything (except gravity) by Tim James $38
J. B. S. Haldane once said, "Reality is not only stranger than we imagine — it's stranger than we can imagine." Who better to guide us towards the mind-bending fundamentals of physics than the ever lively Tim James (author of Elemental: How the periodic table can explain (nearly) everything). PS: The Higgs boson is not the end of the story.
Mysterium by Susan Froderberg $30
Inspired by the true story of Nanda Devi Unsoeld’s 1976 death while climbing her namesake mountain, Susan Froderberg’s novel tells the tale of a courageous woman’s ascent to the summit of India’s highest peak to honor her fallen mother.
"The book offers the unusual combination of an intellectual challenge coupled with a brutal but ecstatic story." —Publishers' Weekly
Sardine: Simple seasonal Provençal cooking by Alex Jackson $50
A unique French provincial cuisine with Italian and North African inflections.
Two for Me, One for You by Jörg Mϋhle $20
Can the bear and the weasel learn to share?
On the Marsh: A year surrounded by wildness and wet by Simon Barnes $40
An account of the rewilding of three-and-a-half hectares of marshland in Norfolk set against parallel with that of a family finding the benefits of living closer to nature.
Promise of a Dream: Remembering the sixties by Sheila Rowbotham $27
Captures well the excitement, challenges and obstacles experienced by women breaking the rules of politics, sex, relationships and their place in the world.
Lost in the Spanish Quarter by Heddi Goodrich $33
A novel of two students searching for love and belonging in the Spanish Quarter of Naples. The author (who, strangely, shares a name with the protagonist) lives in New Zealand.
The Writing on the Wall: How one boy, may father, survived the Holocaust by Juliet Rieden $38
In 1938, as the Nazis were marching on Prague, a Jewish couple made a heartbreaking decision that would save their eight-year-old son's life but destroy their family. Years later, that son's daughter finds her family name repeated many times over on the Holocaust memorial on the wall wall of the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague. She traces the grim fate of cousins and aunts and uncles through the archives of Auschwitz and Theresienstadt.
Awatea and the Kawa Gang by Fraser Smith $25
Can Awatea and his friends foil the poachers during their school holidays? The exciting sequel to Awatea's Treasure.
The New Populism: Democracy stares into the abyss by Marco Revelli $27
The word 'populism' has come to cover all manner of sins. Yet despite the prevalence of its use, it is often difficult to understand what connects its various supposed expressions. From Syriza to Trump and from Podemos to Brexit, the electoral earthquakes of recent years have often been grouped under this term. But what actually defines 'populism'? Is it an ideology, a form of organisation, or a mentality? Marco Revelli seeks to answer this question by getting to grips with the historical dynamics of so-called 'populist' movements. While in the early days of democracy, populism sought to represent classes and social layers who asserted their political role for the first time, in today's post-democratic climate, it instead expresses the grievances of those who had until recently felt that they were included. Having lost their power, the disinherited embrace not a political alternative to -isms like liberalism or socialism, but a populist mood of discontent. The new populism is the 'formless form' that protest and grievance assume in the era of financialisation, in the era where the atomised masses lack voice or organisation.
Superheavy: Making and breaking the periodic table by Kit Chapman $33
Creating an element is no easy feat. It's the equivalent of firing six trillion bullets a second at a needle in a haystack, hoping the bullet and needle somehow fuse together, then catching it in less than a thousandth of a second — after which it's gone forever. From the first elements past uranium and their role in the atomic bomb to the latest discoveries stretching our chemical world, this book reveals the stories lurking at the edges of the periodic table.
Could politics be anything other than the administration of the economy in the interests of the already privileged? This volume collects innovative thinking about new forms of politics, new forms of political organisation and new ways of thinking politics. Contributions include 'Nation destroying: Sovereignty and dispossession in Aotearoa New Zealand' by Ben Rosamond, 'Land, housing and capitalism: The social consequences of free markets' by Shane Malva, 'Political organisation and the environment' by Amanda Thomas, 'The resurgence of the radical left in Europe' by David Parker, 'Why we need a new left wing party' by Sue Bradford, 'Constitutional Transformation and the Matike Mai Project' a kōrero between Moana Jackson and Helen Potter.
What is The Tiger Who Came to Tea really about? What has Meg and Mog got to do with Polish embroidery? Why is death in picture books so often represented by being eaten? The best picture books are far more complex than they seem — and darker too. Interesting.
Raised near the beaches of Arcachon, Chantal inherits from her mother a deep love of swimming in the sea. Through her young eyes, Thomas vividly evokes the sensory pleasures of the beach: the smell of seaweed on the shore, the first sharp touch of cold water. With her parents' troubled marriage in the background, the young Chantal roams the maritime landscape freely. In a series of short chapters, Thomas depicts her growing sense of independence through her developing connection to her environment.
A fascinating biography of the early Victorian feminist and social activist Flora Tristan, who chronicled the conditions of women and labour from the sugar plantations of Peru to the mills of industrial England.
"One is not born, one rather becomes, a woman." Similarly, one is not born, one rather becomes, Simone de Beauvoir. In this important new biography, drawing on new primary sources. Kirkpatrick sheds light on some of the more complex corners of de Beauvoir's life and gives a remarkably lively reassessment of her relevance to modern feminism and autofiction (so to call it).
When Olsson came across the letters between the mathematician André Weil and his sister, the philosopher Simone Weil, she was struck by the way in which, between them, they grappled with the differences (and similarities) between abstract thought and practical approaches to life. What is the relationship between analytical and creative thought?
A novel set in 1920s Germany, where an ambitious young woman learns about love, feminism and modern architectural design at the Bauhaus. Enzenberger's book is also an introduction to the aesthetic and political debates of the modernist avant-garde, and an examination of the opportunities and challenges for female artists in Weimar Germany.
Dina has unwillingly inherited her mother's gift: the ability to elicit shamed confessions simply by looking into someone's eyes. To Dina, however, these powers are not a gift but a curse. Surrounded by fear and hostility, she longs for simple friendship. An excellent new series from the author of 'Wildwitch'.
A beguiling symmetry links Picasso struggling through forty versions of Guernica and the way evolution transformed a dinosaur's claw into a condor's wing. How does the existing become the new?
A novel in verse for children, telling the true story of Moishe Moskovitz, who was thirteen when he was sent to Auschwitz in 1939. Nearing despair near the end of the war, Moishe was saved by an act of kindness. That was the day it rained warm bread.
A growing number of intrepid Arab and Middle Eastern sahafiyat — female journalists — are working to shape nuanced narratives about their changing homelands, often risking their lives on the front lines of war. The nineteen essays here show that, from sexual harassment on the streets of Cairo to the difficulty of travelling without a male relative in Yemen, their challenges are unique — as are their advantages, such as being able to speak candidly with other women at a Syrian medical clinic or attend an exclusive beauty contest for sheep in Saudi Arabia.
J. B. S. Haldane once said, "Reality is not only stranger than we imagine — it's stranger than we can imagine." Who better to guide us towards the mind-bending fundamentals of physics than the ever lively Tim James (author of Elemental: How the periodic table can explain (nearly) everything). PS: The Higgs boson is not the end of the story.
Inspired by the true story of Nanda Devi Unsoeld’s 1976 death while climbing her namesake mountain, Susan Froderberg’s novel tells the tale of a courageous woman’s ascent to the summit of India’s highest peak to honor her fallen mother.
"The book offers the unusual combination of an intellectual challenge coupled with a brutal but ecstatic story." —Publishers' Weekly
A unique French provincial cuisine with Italian and North African inflections.
Can the bear and the weasel learn to share?
An account of the rewilding of three-and-a-half hectares of marshland in Norfolk set against parallel with that of a family finding the benefits of living closer to nature.
Captures well the excitement, challenges and obstacles experienced by women breaking the rules of politics, sex, relationships and their place in the world.
A novel of two students searching for love and belonging in the Spanish Quarter of Naples. The author (who, strangely, shares a name with the protagonist) lives in New Zealand.
In 1938, as the Nazis were marching on Prague, a Jewish couple made a heartbreaking decision that would save their eight-year-old son's life but destroy their family. Years later, that son's daughter finds her family name repeated many times over on the Holocaust memorial on the wall wall of the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague. She traces the grim fate of cousins and aunts and uncles through the archives of Auschwitz and Theresienstadt.
Can Awatea and his friends foil the poachers during their school holidays? The exciting sequel to Awatea's Treasure.
The word 'populism' has come to cover all manner of sins. Yet despite the prevalence of its use, it is often difficult to understand what connects its various supposed expressions. From Syriza to Trump and from Podemos to Brexit, the electoral earthquakes of recent years have often been grouped under this term. But what actually defines 'populism'? Is it an ideology, a form of organisation, or a mentality? Marco Revelli seeks to answer this question by getting to grips with the historical dynamics of so-called 'populist' movements. While in the early days of democracy, populism sought to represent classes and social layers who asserted their political role for the first time, in today's post-democratic climate, it instead expresses the grievances of those who had until recently felt that they were included. Having lost their power, the disinherited embrace not a political alternative to -isms like liberalism or socialism, but a populist mood of discontent. The new populism is the 'formless form' that protest and grievance assume in the era of financialisation, in the era where the atomised masses lack voice or organisation.
Creating an element is no easy feat. It's the equivalent of firing six trillion bullets a second at a needle in a haystack, hoping the bullet and needle somehow fuse together, then catching it in less than a thousandth of a second — after which it's gone forever. From the first elements past uranium and their role in the atomic bomb to the latest discoveries stretching our chemical world, this book reveals the stories lurking at the edges of the periodic table.
NEW RELEASES
Two middle-aged Irish gangsters in a Spanish port await a ferry from Tangier in their search for the wayward daughter of one of them. Barry is brilliant at catching the voices of the two, and at capturing lives that resonate with both pathos and humour. Charlie and Maurice are Barry's equivalents of Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon, opening depths of humanity despite their limitations as persons.
Long-listed for the 2019 Booker Prize.
"A true wonder." —Max Porter
"Visionary. What distinguishes the book beyond its humour, terror and the beauty of description is its moral perception." —Guardian
"Brilliantly funny and terrifying at once, I was completely lost inside its dark craziness. Barry blends glorious voluptuous prose with entrancing storytelling." —Tessa Hadley
>>Read Thomas's review of Barry's Beatlebone.
Another wonderfully disconcerting, perfectly structured novel from the author of All My Goodbyes. When her son is born, the mother is unable to feel a bond with him, and we are led through a fugue-like account of her history of willful emotional detachment and (often failed) performative social roles.
"Mariana Dimópulos's writing, with its delightfully strange perspectives, its selfishness, its iciness and its passion, its power and its vulnerability, seems somehow to condense the poetry of mathematics. Imminence posits an elegant formula for the experience of contemporary womanhood." —El País
>>Read Stella's review of All My Goodbyes.
"The grand boulevard of palm trees led to the cloakroom of the angels". This is a tiny treasure of a book: 28 dreams exquisitely painted by Dominique Zehrfuss with texts by her husband Patrick Modiano (who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014).
A novel in which twelve interconnected stories chart the lives and experiences of black women in contemporary Britain.
Long-listed for the 2019 Booker Prize.
"Bernadine Evaristo can take any story from any time and turn it into something vibrating with life." —Ali Smith
"Bernadine Evaristo is one of those writers who should be read by everyone, everywhere. Her tales marry down-to-earth characters with engrossing storylines about identity and the UK today." —Elif Shafak
What kind of story can be told from a careful description of a house and all its contents? This is the way to give the most rounded and exhaustive possible account of a still elusive life. Full of verbal tricks and unexpected references, Clerc's clever piece of sociology-posing-as-pseudo-sociology is an experiment with the potentials of the novel. Shelve with Life, A User's Manual by Georges Perec and A Journey Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre.
Being small can be overwhelming in a city. People don't see you. The loud sounds of the sirens and cyclists can be scary. And the streets are so busy it can make your brain feel like there's too much stuff in it. But if you know where to find good hiding places, warm dryer vents that blow out hot steam that smells like summer, music to listen to or friends to say hi to, there can be comfort in the city, too. We follow our little protagonist, who knows all about what its like to be small in the city, as he gives his best advice for surviving there.
Sour foods have never been more fashionable, with the spotlight falling on foodstuffs as disparate as Belgian sour beer and Korean kimchi. But what is it that makes sourness such an enticing, complex element of the eating experience? And what are the best ways to harness sour flavours in your own kitchen?
New fiction from Andrew O'Hagan, Elif Shafak, Adam Foulds, David Means, Jem Day Calder, Magododi OuMphela Makhene, Caroline Albertine Minor, Thomas Pierce, Adam O'Fallon Price, Amor Towles. And Tom Bamforth on the refugee camp in Bangladesh known as 'Cox's Bazaar'.
Vibrant, kaleidoscopic stories from the author of Kintu, re-imagining the journey of Ugandans who choose to make England their home.
Winner of the 2018 Windham Campbell Prize.
Based on the ichijuu-sansai tradition — which literally means 'one soup, three dishes' — uncomplicated, delicious small plates are served with steamed rice, and can be enjoyed any time of day.
An ironic dystopia novel satirising our era of big-tech hyperconnectedness and ensuing corporate management of our personal interactions.
"Zed is a novel that takes our strange, hall-of-mirrors times very seriously indeed. It is a work of delirious genius." —Guardian
Literary icon Edmund White made his name through his writing but remembers his life through the books he has read. For White, each momentous occasion came with a book to match: Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, which opened up the seemingly closed world of homosexuality while he was at boarding school in Michigan; the Ezra Pound poems adored by a lover he followed to New York; the biography of Stephen Crane that inspired one of White's novels. But it wasn't until heart surgery in 2014, when he temporarily lost his desire to read, that White realized the key role that reading played in his life: forming his tastes, shaping his memories, and amusing him through the best and worst life had to offer.
An excellent guide through the science of sourdough and around its pitfalls, with more than 40 recipes for making superb bread at home.
The intriguing story of the New Zealander and the Australian who met at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, collaborated on pivotal experiments using a particle accelerator, and, all in the name of science, happened to lay the groundwork for the development of nuclear weapons.
When a young boy's grandfather dies suddenly, he feels overwhelmed and confused. They will never see each other again. To his delight, they meet again in a dream, where his grandfather takes him to Transfer City, where departed loved ones live on through our memories. In this modern telling of the afterlife, death is not an ending, but a new start to life, just like the Immortal Jellyfish which is constantly maturing and then regressing, staying as present as our deceased loved ones do in our memories.
Beautifully written, illustrated and presented, this book would be ideal as a family gift.
>>Hear Tessa Duder speak about the book! Thursday 12 September, 6:15. Elma Turner Library, 27 Halifax Street.
A compact collection of little pieces assembled by The London Library from the writings of past members such as Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, EM Foster, and Leigh Hunt.
>>Visit the London Library.
 | No-One is Too Small to Make a Difference by Great Thunberg {Reviewed by STELLA} Greta Thunberg has been in the news constantly over the last few weeks as she sails to America to present at the Climate Action Summit in New York on 23 September and the UN climate conference in Santiago in early December. In fact, she has been the focus of news stories, positive and negative, for over a year. Why is a sixteen-year-old from Sweden so newsworthy? Several reasons. She spear-headed the Schools Strike, not through organising them but by being an example to other young people with her FridaysforFuture action. She has a clear message about climate change and she has spoken at the UN, the European Parliament and several high-profile demonstrations. And she is seen as a threat by those who do not want to see changes that may mean losing their ability to profit from the planet. The speeches recorded in this small book, No One Is Too Small To Make a Difference, are direct, frightening (she doesn’t mince her words), and passionate. She calls on the powers that be to ACT NOW, to follow the recommendations of scientists and the recommendations of successive climate findings from international organisations—recommendations that international bodies and governments agree with, but have not acted on. Her main message is that we must stop our reliance on fossil fuels, decrease carbon emissions dramatically by 2020 (next year), and that we have less than 12 years to make it count. Her message is to the adults who have not acted on scientific evidence, to the corporations that continue to believe in on-going growth economics, and to young people everywhere to take the initiative to make change happen. Greta Thunberg inspires not only the young, but reminds us all that the time to act and to change is now. An essential read for us all. |
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Walks with Walser by Carl Seelig {Reviewed by THOMAS}
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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!
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.” |