Labour Day. We will be closed on Monday 28 October to recognise the rights of workers around the world. Normal hours will resume on Tuesday 29th.
Labour Day. We will be closed on Monday 28 October to recognise the rights of workers around the world. Normal hours will resume on Tuesday 29th.
 | Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata {Reviewed by STELLA} Meet Keiko, our anti-heroine. She’s an oddball character who has never fitted in. Finding work at a convenience store was a great relief to her family, who worried endlessly about what she would do with her life. They saw this part-time job as a great starting place for the eighteen-year-old, and for Keiko, the job - with its uniform, the precise order of the products, the store slogans called out with absolute enthusiasm - is a revelation, the first time in her life that she’s felt part of something. Being told what to say, and when, makes her ‘normal’. Now she’s been doing this for eighteen years - we meet thirty-six-year-old Keiko at the store being the perfect worker but increasingly questioned by her friends and family. Why is she still in this dead-end job? If she isn’t going to move on, she will, naturally, have to marry. When the lazy, cynical Shiraha is employed at her store, Keiko is repulsed and intrigued by him. As he shirks his responsibilities and laments being hassled about it, churning out his favourite phrase “things haven’t changed since the Stone Age”, it’s not too long until he is fired, his greatest misdemeanour being that he is looking for a wife - someone to ‘finance’ his life! After hitting on all the female staff - except for Keiko, who he sees as an old maid, not worth considering - he tries the customers, and this is his undoing. One evening, Keiko finds him hanging around outside the store, homeless and skint, and takes pity on him. However, Keiko has plans of her own. Keiko wants to please her sister (now married with a baby) and her parents (who constantly ask her if there is anything to report - both relieved and concerned that nothing has changed) and works up a plan to become 'normal'. Taking Shiraha into her tiny flat, they settle into a routine. Keiko goes to work and pays the bills, while Shiraha stays hidden (he wants to be left alone - he owes money to his brother, and his sister-in-law is on his case), making a comfortable place for himself in the bath (cushions and internet connection are all he needs). Keiko brings him food, most of which he complains about, from the convenience store - dented cans and expired use-by-date produce. He is her ‘pet’. Being a ‘couple’ takes the heat off Keiko and suddenly she is seen as normal by her colleagues, her old friends from school, and her family - no matter what Shiraha is like: a useless parasite. That she finally, at 36, has a man living in her apartment fills those around her with glee. Finally, Shiraha decides it is time for Keiko to leave the convenience store and better herself. Keiko is quite happy to go - everyone treats her differently now that she is ‘with’ Shiraha. Yet always she is drawn to the lights, sounds and pleasures of the convenience store - the hum, the stacks of cans and containers and the ever-changing specials. Charming, quirky and deadpan funny, Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman is her tenth novel but the first to be translated into English. Murata works part-time in a convenience store. |
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Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“Who eats in a cage? Or with a caged mouth?” There is either writing or not-writing (even though not-writing may be as specific concerning what is not written as writing is concerning what is), and the dividing line between the two is not so much a wall as a cliff, an inequality more effective than a barrier. Anne Boyer’s collection of prose poems, Garments Against Women, is everywhere alert to the ways in which the world as experienced by those who live in it is riven by inequalities. Those who wield a power or who benefit from the wielding of that power have little perceptual overlap with those upon whom that power is wielded or who suffer from the wielding of that power, but, interestingly, the advantaged live in a world of more restricted truth, even though the disadvantaged may feel the effects of this restriction. This asymmetry acts as a constraint upon those to whom falls more heavily the burden of existing, “lives diminished by the arrangement of the world,” their time forced into objects and taken from them by what is termed an ‘economic system’. Boyer’s poems interrogate her relationship with objects, for instance the garments she sews or that she buys from thrift shops: “the fabric still contains the hours of the lives.” Can these hours have their value restored? For whose benefit have these hours been put into objects? If “writing is the manufacture of impossible desires,” can we write of or read of objects without involving ourselves in the mechanisms by which time is taken asymmetrically from workers? Is it possible for an object to not exist except as a vicarious object, “an object which exists only as it might exist to another”? Are all objects more vicarious than not? “I am the dog who can never be happy because I am imagining the unhappiness of other dogs,” writes Boyer. How it is possible to write, even to imagine writing, even if one had the time to write, without writing ‘garments’ that are designed by and are to the benefit of those who have confined ‘writing’ in the narrow world of their advantage? Whose roles must be challenged and overhauled? “I will soon write a long, sad book called A Woman Shopping", writes Boyer, an self-described “addict of denial”, in the poem ‘A Woman Shopping’. “It will be a book about what we are required to do and also a book about what we are hated for doing.” Everyone is smothered by their role: “If a woman has no purse we will imagine one for her.” “Everyone tries to figure out how to overcome the embarrassment of existing,” but the real struggle is “not between actor and actor. It’s between actors and the stage.” Boyer’s poems provide subtle and often surprising insights into the relationships between individuals and their roles, desires and scripts, personal and societal misfortunes, struggle and survival, despair and surprising joy. Can writing effect real change? “I thought to have a name was to become an object,” writes Boyer. “I thought I was a charlatan. I was mistaken. I was not a charlatan, I was a search term.” |
>>Visit Clotilde Perrin's website.
>>Gecko Press also brought us Clotilde Perrin's equally delightful Inside the Villains.
>>Have a look Inside the Villains.
>>The artist at work.
>>Opening children's emotions.
>>What is inside the red parcel?
>>Click and collect:
NEW RELEASES
Loop by Brenda Lozano $34
"I wish. I weave. I unravel. Am I getting closer or further away?"
Recovering from an unspecified accident, the narrtaor finds herself in waiting rooms of different kinds: airport departure lounges, doctors' surgeries, and, above all, at home, awaiting the retuen of her boyfriend, who has travelled to Spain following the death of his mother. While she waits, this contemporary Penelope writes and erases thoughts in her notebook, thoughts that range from stationery preferences to the different scales upon which life may be lived to the potentials and non-potentials of human relationships, comprising a unique journal of absences.
>>Having time without wanting it.
Two men named Asle live near each other on the western coast of Norway. Almost alternative versions of the same person, what happens when the two doppelgangers meet? Written in hypnotic prose that shifts between the first and third person, The Other Name calls into question concrete notions around subjectivity and the self. What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Through flashbacks, Fosse deftly explores the convergences and divergences in the lives of both Asles, slowly building towards a decisive encounter between them both.
At last — an honest and funny book about sexuality, bodies, puberty, &c. All the questions came from eight- and nine-year-olds, and are answered clearly and straight-forwardly. The drawings are very funny.
Ware’s first graphic novel since 2012’s Building Stories is anchored by the inconsequential events of a single day in a school in Ware’s hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, in 1975. It tells the interwoven stories of the titular pre-teen bully magnet and a handful of characters with whom his life, however glancingly, intersects.
"Mordantly melancholy and drawn and plotted with extraordinary precision." —Guardian
>>"I envy writers who suffer from no self-doubt."
In a world where we present our diverse selves through social media, chatbots and messaging, this dark novel listens in on intimate secrets, desires and adultery. This novel-within-a-novel charts the writing of a story about Richard and Anna, a middle-aged professional couple, who face the biggest crisis of their twenty-five-year marriage.
"Good Day? is a novel in dialogue that works with repetition and rhythm like a piece of music by Philip Glass. Unfolding as a series of conversations between a husband and wife—about fidelity and infidelity, about fiction and life—it blurs the boundaries between imagination and the self. Formally inventive, it is also elegant, compelling, and slips down a treat." —Judges' citation on short-listing the book for the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize.
Yuknavitch's unapologetically audacious novel gives a voice to Dora, the mute subject of Freud's famous and unresolved case study of hysteria, and makes her a contemporary everywoman, who, together with her alter-ego Ida (the real name of Freud's subject!), hatch a plan to put her psychiatrist in his place — a plan that soon gets satisfyingly out of control.
"Dora was too much for Sigmund Freud but she's just right for us." —Katherine Dunn
"Yuknavitch has exhibited a rare gift for writing that concedes little in its quest to be authentic, meaningful and relevant." —New York Times
>>Read Stella's review of Yuknavitch's The Book of Joan.
When Anne Boyer was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer in her early forties, it was an initiation into a whole new way of thinking about herself, about illness, and about mortality. Her harrowing, beautifully written memoir of survival explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, corporate lies, John Donne, pro-pain 'dolorists', the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism. It excoriates the pharmaceutical industry and the bland hypocrisies of 'pink ribbon culture' while also diving into the long literary line of women writing about their own illnesses and ongoing deaths: Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker, Susan Sontag, and others.
>>Read Thomas's review of Anne Boyers's Garments Against Women.
Do you dare to enter the house of Madame M? Who is hiding inside? Who is Madame M? A wonderfully spooky and quirky lift-the-flap book — full of surprises — from the creator of Inside the Villains.
An attractively presented and extremely appetising book, in which Darling-Gansser returns to Iran, the country of her childhood, and showcases recipes of traditional food.
>>Manuela's blog.
Dragons! Wolves! Sea monsters! Be the hero in this beautifully made wordless picture book adventure.
>>Watch Jeffrey Alan Love make his artwork.
>>More.
Flavour and colour from Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Israel, Turkey, Sicily, Andalusia, Sardinia, and Catalonia.
How are the experiences of gay, lesbian and transgender people embodied in objects that are associated with them? What makes an object queer? The contributors to this fascinating book take an array of objects — both ordinary and special — from throughout time and around the world, and show us how to access to the stories that give them meaning. Published by Otago University Press.
After her father's sudden death, Alexandra Fuller realizes that if she is going to weather his loss, she will need to become the parts of him she misses most. Tim Fuller was a self-exiled black sheep who moved to Africa to fight in the Rhodesian Bush War before settling as a banana farmer in Zambia. He was more afraid of getting bored than of anything else. What will Alexandra Fuller draw from his life?
At the age of seventeen, after a childhood in a foster family followed by six years in care homes, Norman Greenwood was given his birth certificate. He learned that his real name was not Norman. It was Lemn Sissay. He was British and Ethiopian. Sissay is a much-loved British poet.
"The great triumph of this work comes from its author’s determination to rail against what he rightly diagnoses as this institutionally endorsed disremembering of black and marginalised experience. It is a searing and unforgettable re-creation of the most brutal of beginnings." —Guardian
>> Sissay reads.
Twelve-year-old Natsu and her family live a quiet farm life in Manchuria, near the border of the Soviet Union. But the life they've known begins to unravel when her father is recruited to the Japanese army, and Natsu and her little sister, Cricket, are left orphaned and destitute. In a desperate move to keep her sister alive, Natsu sells Cricket to a Russian family following the 1945 Soviet occupation. The journey to redemption for Natsu's broken family is rife with struggles, but Natsu is tenacious and will stop at nothing to get her little sister back. An excellent novel in verse for older children.
A novel in which a woman, at a time of personal loss and crisis, must also survive social upheaval in Venezuela.
"Echoes of Borges." —The New York Times
A snowy adventure set in the wilds of Siberia. Lina escapes a Soviet prison camp with her friend Bogdan — and then has to elude a sorceress, and shadow wolves, too!
Make Alice's legs extend! Make the Cheshire Cat disappear, leaving its smile! Make the flamingo croquet mallet hit the hedgehog! Unfold the map of the Looking Glass world! The latest volume of the inventive Harper Design series of interactive classics.
A well-illustrated poetic celebration of the history of the relationship between humans and harakeke. Local author!
An interesting history of 150 years of scientific expeditions to Greenland, viewing the island as a gigantic laboratory with which to study climate change.
Explores our intimate relationship with the dark: why we are scared of it, why we need it and why the ever-encroaching light is damaging our well-being. Under the dark polar night of northern Norway, Sandberg meditates on the cultural, historical, psychological and scientific meaning of darkness, all the while testing the limits of her own fear.
By telling the stories of ordinary Turks, Genç gives insight into the contradictions of Turkish history and modern politics.
I Want My Hat Back and This Is Not My Hat and We Found a Hat and a frameable print in a giftable box!
>>Let Me Be Frank was and is a blog.
>>On creativity and comics.
>>A comic interview.
>>Standing room only!
>>How to draw a book review.
>>Read Stella's review of Laing's superb graphic memoir Mansfield and Me.
>>Other books by Sarah Laing.
>>Laing has illustrated—and done the cover for—Paula Green's Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand women's poetry.
>>Compostable poets.
>>And a talking mural!
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The Testaments by Margaret Atwood {Reviewed by STELLA}
Hailed as 'the book of our time', Margaret Atwood takes us back to Gilead in her much-anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale: The Testaments. And a testament it is. It’s fifteen years since the doors closed on Offred, and we are quickly absorbed again into the world of Gilead through the witness accounts of its fall by two women: 'Witness Testimony 369A' and 'Witness Testimony 369B'. These 'found transcripts' are now studied along with other records of the women of Gilead. As you can imagine, these are far and few considering the scant access to (and inability to read) the written word by those who lived in Gilead. The most compromising and informative manuscript is known as 'The Ardua Hall Holograph', written by Aunt Lydia — one of the four founding Aunts. And in we go, into Gilead and into the walls of the silenced. Here we are buried knee-deep in treachery, in bullying and political machinations — in a society bereft of honesty and bound by dogma. Lydia and the founding Aunts hold powerful positions within this structure, yet this substructure does little but feed the demands of the Commanders (the elite) and is at the mercy of their whims. Lydia as the appointed leader has played a poker-faced game — always wary of Commander Judd, playing her cards with humility but always (she hopes) with a trump up her sleeve. It is a dangerous game, one that she and the Aunts cannot win, but survival is possible. The strength of The Testaments is in Lydia’s voice: complex, assured and terrified, we start right at the beginning with her. The downfall of America as it was, the destruction of democracy, and the denial of human rights to all women and most men. Lydia had been a judge and the commanders see in her abilities that will be useful to them in this autocratic regime. She has the prospect of being a ‘judge’ again, albeit one that goes against all her beliefs — deciding who will be a Handmaid, an Aunt, an Econowife, a Wife; how crimes of men, as well as women, will be punished — but all this within the strict code of Gilead, one that the Commanders have designed. Aunt Lydia is both revered and feared, reflecting her status in and worth to Gilead, but she has a secret — her written record (the Holograph) hidden in the depths of the inner library of Ardua Hall. The witness testimonies are from two young women, one Agnes — a daughter of a commander — and the other,a teenager living in Canada, just over the border outside Gilead. As the story unfolds, their lives become intertwined. The codes of Gilead have affected them both. Agnes, a privileged child, is ‘schooled’ by the Aunts, along with the other commanders’ daughters. They are readied for marriage — schooled in the arts of embroidery and flower arranging and indoctrinated in the rules of Gilead. When her father takes a new wife, Paula, it is quickly decided that at thirteen Agnes is ready for marriage, something she is understandably terrified of. Rescued from this plight by announcing that she has been ‘called’, she escapes into the confines of Ardua Hall to train as a Pearl Girl on the road to being an Aunt. Here she meets Jade, a meeting that will have a profound effect on her and many others in Gilead. There is much more to the plot but you will have to read The Testaments — to say more would spoil the revealing page-turner. When The Handmaid’s Tale was first published in the 1980s it felt like a dystopia, hardly believable despite its resonances in women’s rights movement of that time. But when there was renewed interest in the last few years (partly due to the television series) it felt more prescient and urgent. The increasing power of elites, the decreasing autonomy of women and minorities (think abortion laws in America, revoking of the right to peaceful protest, increased police and military power in the face of ‘terrorism’, control of media and data to shift political opinion and influence voter behaviour) makes The Testaments (and its predecessor) more vital, and frighteningly close to the edge of what could be. Are we brave enough like the women in The Testaments to fight for a humane society or are we undone by the helplessness as part of an insane society? Or are some of us complacent — unwilling to risk our small bubble of safety and superiority? These are the challenges of Gilead. It is interesting to note that Atwood does not include anything in her ‘dystopias’ that has not already occurred. Announced this week, The Testaments is the joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | Wittgenstein's Nephew by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS} "It is a folk art of sorts, always longing to kill oneself but being kept by one’s watchful intelligence from killing oneself, so that the condition is stabilised in the form of lifelong controlled suffering,” wrote Thomas Bernhard in Correction. In the ‘autobiographical’ novel Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A friendship, Bernhard explores the conditions needed for continuing to live in an intolerable world by at once both aligning and contrasting his accommodation of the contradictory impulses for survival and self-destruction with the accommodation or lack of accommodation made between these impulses by his friend Paul Wittgenstein, whose resulting madness periodically incapacitated and ultimately destroyed him. The novel opens with the narrator and Paul both confined to departments in the Baumgartner Höhe hospital in Vienna, “isolated, shunted aside, and written off:” the narrator in the pulmonary department, not expected to live, and Paul in the psychiatric department, receiving brutal electroconvulsive therapy and kept in a caged bed. The two had met at the apartment of a mutual friend at a time when the narrator was afflicted by suicidal thoughts, when at the height of his despair Paul appeared as his “deliverer”, a man who, like the narrator, ''loved and hated human beings with equal passion and equal ruthlessness.” Whereas the narrator writes because “I am forced to defend myself and take action against the insolence of the world in order not to be put down and annihilated by it,” Paul has no such defence. “Paul allowed himself to be utterly dominated by his madness, whereas I have never let myself be utterly dominated by my equally serious madness: one might say that he was taken over by his madness, whereas I have always exploited mine. … Paul had only his madness to live on; I have my lung disease as well as my madness. I have exploited both, and one day I suddenly made them the mainspring of my existence.” Both the narrator and Paul exhibit neuroses (such as “the counting disease”) as a means of resisting the pull of annihilation, and share a passion for music (‘culture’ itself being a neurotic mechanism for collectively resisting the pull of annihilation). All efforts, though, to act as if the intolerable is tolerable are increasingly difficult to maintain. “As we get older we have to employ ever subtler means in order to produce such endurable conditions, resorting to every possible and impossible trick the mind can devise.” The narrator knows that continuing is always only a postponement of the moment at which continuing becomes impossible: “I had behaved towards myself and everything else with the same unnatural ruthlessless that one day destroyed Paul and will one day destroy me. For just as Paul came to grief through his unhealthy overestimation of himself and the world, I too shall sooner or later come to grief through my own overestimation of myself and the world.” Paul is destroyed by their shared madness, but the narrator is not yet destroyed. He survives by, in effect, sacrificing Paul. The narrator at ones both claims and disavows Paul as his alter ego, both emphasises and denies their shared identity (is that not always so with friendships?): “We gradually discovered that there were countless things about us and within us that united us, yet at the same time there were so many contrasts between us that our friendship soon ran into difficulties, into even greater difficulties, and ultimately into the greatest difficulties.” When Paul, debilitated by his bouts of madness and the brutality of his treatment, desperate for some practical demonstration of friendship, invites the narrator to his apartment and the narrator sees in its squalor and hopelessness “the last refuge of a failure,” he feels a sudden revulsion for Paul and flees, leaving Paul weeping on his sofa (the last remaining artefact of his squandered former wealth). The narrator finds despicable what he once found admirable. His own destruction yawns too near his feet and he abandons his friend. He sees Paul as spent, as a man dying. “I myself could naturally not feel the same about Paul’s shadow as I had about the real Paul of earlier days. … I preferred to have a bad conscience rather than meet him [for] we shun those who bear the mark of death.” When the narrator returns from a period overseas he learns of Paul’s death in a mental hospital in Linz a few days after attacking his cousin in his final madness, and of Paul’s lonely, abject funeral. “To this day I have not visited his grave,” he states. Paul’s death could be seen as the narrator’s displaced suicide, as a way in which the narrator has continued to exist. “I had met Paul, I now see, precisely at the time when he was beginning to die,” he says. “It seems to me that I was basically nothing but a twelve-year witness of his dying, who drew from his friend’s dying much of the strength he needed for his own survival.” He goes on: "It is not far-fetched to say that this friend had to die in order to make my life more bearable and even, for long periods, possible." This book is both a tender tribute to a friend, written in guilt, and an unflinching examination of that guilt. |
NEW RELEASES
"By an extraordinary act of the imagination we are transported into the inner world of a girl who, after brutal abuse as a slave to Nigerian jihadis, escapes and with dogged persistence begins to rebuild her shattered life. Girl is a courageous book about a courageous spirit." —J.M. Coetzee
Pre-nineteenth-century Maori society was complex: rich tribal economies were built and flourished, and there was a focus on valuing the whenua and resources that supported all. The dominant form of settlement and the focal point of social and economic activities were Kainga (unfortified villages). However, colonial settlement and the discriminatory policies of successive governments disrupted social structures and severed the connections to Kainga. Today, the home ownership rate for Maori is well below the national average and Maori are over-represented in the statistics of substandard housing. Rebuilding the Kainga charts the resurgence of contemporary papakainga on whenua Maori over the last three decades. Kake draws on innovative international models to sketch out a vision where Maori are supported to build businesses and affordable homes on whanau, hapu or Treaty settlement lands and describes the policy direction needed to make this a reality.
Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland. With more than a mile of shelving, real log fires in the shop and the sea lapping nearby, the shop should be an idyll for bookworms. Unfortunately, Shaun also has to contend with bizarre requests from people who don't understand what a shop is, home invasions during the Wigtown Book Festival, and Granny, his neurotic Italian assistant, who likes digging for river mud to make poultices. It's all true. Follows the wildly successful The Diary of a Bookseller.
>>Sean shows us how to deal with a broken Kindle.
>>As it happens.
Hendy records his attempts to 'walk the talk' on climate change: "By avoiding planes for a year, I found that I had cut my carbon dioxide emissions from travel to just over 1 tonne. This was a reduction of 95 per cent from my 2017 carbon footprint from travel. It felt good." Was this initiative merely symbolic? Did it compromise his work, his life? And has it left him feeling more optimistic that we can, indeed, reach a low-emissions future?
A novel in the form of what is ostensibly a nature diary, precisely chronicling the narrator's interest in the local flora and fauna and the passing of the seasons. Ash before Oak is also the story of a breakdown told slantwise, and of the narrator's subsequent recovery through his re-engagement with the world around him. A substantial section in the latter part of the book is set in New Zealand, and features appearances by Jenny Bornholdt and Gregory O'Brien.
>>Read an extract.
One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two girls–sisters, eight and eleven–go missing. In the ensuing weeks, then months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women.
Finalist for the US National Book Award.
"A nearly flawless novel." —The New York Times
"Dismantles the conventions of detective fiction." —The New Yorker
A blend of Surrealism, 'Pataphysics and mysticism, Daumal's allegorical novel tells of the climbing of a mountain, the slopes of which begin everywhere but the summit of which is forever beyond reach. >>Mountain climbing in the theatre.
>>Alejandro Jodorowsky's film The Holy Mountain was (somewhat loosely) inspired by the book.
>>As was this work by John Zorn.
A horrendously funny Kiwi road novel and coming-of-age story. 18 year old Andy Ingle, with his yellow typewriter called Half-Arse under his arm, embarks on one of the great Kiwi road trips, hitchhiking from Palmerston North to Dunedin, over to the West Coast and back up to Auckland. On the way falling in with drug dealers, a washed-out Professor of Literature, members of the Miss NZ Pageant, and a rag-tag collection of some of the most eccentric and entertaining characters to appear in Kiwi fiction. Enjoyable.
An excellent book for young people, deconstructing received notions of masculinity and their toxic repercussions, and reassembling masculinity in the light of the experiences of men of colour, LGBTQI men, and men whose experience of manhood is atypical in the English-speaking world. Enables young men to feel at home in their gender and thereby less vulnerable to the consolations of chauvinism as offered by the far right (for example).
An embarrassment to the Health Department, an object of pity to a few, a source of fear to many.
>>Visit Quail Island.
The heady optimism of the Internet's early days is gone. Technologies that were meant to liberate us have deepened inequality and stoked divisions. Tech companies gather our information online and sell it to the highest bidder, whether government or retailer. Profits now depend not only on predicting our behaviour but modifying it too. How will this fusion of capitalism and the digital shape our values and define our future?
"Everyone needs to read this book as an act of digital self-defence." —Naomi Klein
Delicious, quick plant-based evening meals from this most personable of food writers.
>>Also available: Greenfeast: Spring, summer.
A quietly observant novel set in an Oslo emerging from austerity.
"The kind of novel that does not shout loudly, but is borne along by fine characterisation and wisdom disguised as sparkling gold grains, consolidating Lars Saabye Christensen's position as Oslo's premier home-town poet." —Dagsavisen
Once, the mighty tohora, or southern right whale, was a common sight in winter off the coast of Aotearoa. But it proved to be an easy target for the 19th-century whalers, and was soon driven to the edge of extinction. In the 20th century, however, it became a protected species, and once commercial whaling was virtually stopped, the southern right whale made a comeback.
Little Eepersip doesn't want to live in a house with doors and windows and a roof, so she runs away to live in the wild - first in the Meadow, then by the Sea, and finally in the Mountain. Her heartbroken parents follow her, bringing her back home to 'safety' and locking her up in the stifling square of the house. But she slips away once more, following her heart into the richness of untrammelled nature and disappearing forever. First published in 1927 and written by a child of just twelve years old, The House Without Windows is an extraordinary paean to the transcendent beauty of the natural world, and the human capacity to connect with it.
Winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Hans Christian Anderson Award.
"An enchanting book. These pages simply quiver with the beauty, happiness and vigour of forests, seas and mountains. I can safely promise joy to any reader of it. Perfection." —Eleanor Farjeon
A fascinating account of how languages emerge, change and influence the way we think.
"A rewarding and necessary read." —Guardian
Life in Bearmouth is one of hard labour in the mines, and reward will come in the next life with the benevolence of the Mayker. Newt accepts everything - that is, until Devlin arrives. Devlin starts to force Newt to ask questions, to look around, to wonder if the rules are divine or simply a way of keeping everyone under control. A powerful and original young adult novel.
Traces the entwined histories of the struggle for equality on the bases of gender, class and race, and challenges white feminists to examine race and class prejudice within their movement.
Since the 1970s, astronomers have been aware that galaxies have far too little matter in them to account for the way they spin around: they should fly apart, but something concealed holds them together. That 'something' is dark matter — invisible material in five times the quantity of the familiar stuff of stars and planets. By the 1990s we also knew that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. Something, named dark energy, is pushing it to expand faster and faster. Across the universe,this requires enough energy that the equivalent mass would be nearly fourteen times greater than all the visible material in existence.
>>Dark Matter live.
Social media have put new pressures on appearances, and new technologies have made our bodies more alterable than ever. If the way we view our bodies is very much tied in with the way in which we view ourselves, are we more fulfilled or less secure as this relationship changes?
>>"I have never encountered a novel that felt so utterly like a gift." —Anna Smaill
>>"I wasn't writing a book to be published; I was writing my way to happiness."
>> Charlotte Grimshaw on the book's "fantastic power".
>>Out of this world and into another.
>>"650 pages wasn't enough for me."
>>Knox on continuing.
>>Twittering rigours.
>>Lie down and listen! Elizabeth Knox will be at VERB Wellington in November.
>>We have a few freshly signed copies!
>>Other books by Elizabeth Knox.
 | The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman It is always with some trepidation that you approach the new books of your favourite authors. There is a sense of nervous anticipation as you open the covers. Will it be as good as the others? Will it take you to new ground? I’m happy to report that I was transported to Lyra’s world and very pleased to be back in it, so engaged with her world in The Secret Commonwealth that it proved difficult to go to work or sleep. The second 'Book of Dust' takes us twenty years on from La Belle Sauvage. Lyra Silvertongue is now a young woman completing her university studies, and her life is taking a turn for the worse: her daemon Pantalaimon is angry with her, and when Pan sees a murder committed while out walking alone at night (if you know the world of Lyra, you will know that it is not normal for people to be separated from their daemons), the seemingly safe environs of Oxford and the colleges begins to unravel at an alarming rate. Danger is pursuing Lyra — someone wants her controlled, wants something from her and not in a nice way. Escaping Oxford, which is no longer a safe haven (the new master is not sympathetic to this orphan), she finds shelter with Malcolm Polstad’s family. Finally learning about her rescue in The Great Flood by the then 11-year-old Malcolm, she is both astonished by her childhood history and angry that so many secrets have been kept from her. Yet this is a different Lyra than her eleven-year-old self of Northern Lights. While still determined, there are also the more adult emotions of doubt and fear holding her back. She is questioning her beliefs, her understanding of herself and the people around her. Quarrelling one evening with Pan, he accuses her of losing her imagination — something she scoffs at and dismisses. Pan’s frustration is palpable — they are both saddened by their ability to separate physically and this has left a gaping psychological gulf that neither Lyra nor Pan can overcome. When Pan leaves her to seek answers — to find Lyra’s ‘imagination’, Lyra begins her own journey to the East. It is dangerous for her in Brytan and she needs to flee — but where can she go? Her first step is to old friends, the Gyptains, and here we meet again some of the characters from those first books in the 'His Dark Materials' trilogy. Pullman deftly pulls in the threads of Lyra's childhood and weaves in her new quests. The story-telling is as always exceptional. She must find Pan; she needs to go East. What is so special about a rose that is grown in the desert and why does the Magisterium want it so badly? Scientists and theologians alike are determined to uncover something about this material, and there seems to be a link to Dust. We follow the journeys of Pan, Lyra and Malcolm on their separate trajectories to the east: Pan in search of what is wrong at the heart of his relationship with Lyra; Lyra seeking Pan, the reason for the brutal murder and the mysteries of the invisible worlds; and Malcolm to find Lyra and, as a member of the secret organisation Oakley Street, to find out what the Magisterium is up to. Across the world, both east and west, the Magisterium has become stronger and more powerful. We see a more dictatorial state and one where political and economic machinations are affecting people adversely. There is less autonomy, a crackdown on debate and dissent, people are displaced, and inequality is on the rise, with a small elite in charge with the backing of military and police. The Secret Commonwealth is more compelling than the first in 'The Book of Dust' series but is also darker, more violent and challenging. I am awaiting with greater anticipation the third in this trilogy! If you haven’t read any of the 'Lyra' books you need to start at the beginning with Northern Lights. |
 | This Tilting World by Colette Fellous {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Tomorrow, yes, I will leave this house. I’ll abandon the village and the life here, all the faces that I love I will leave.” Following the death of a friend at sea and the murder of 38 people on her local beach at Sousse in 2015, Fellous determines that she will leave her native Tunisia, this time for good. “Even if leaving tears me apart, even if leaving destroys me, I cannot do anything else.” For those, like Fellous, whose business is words, exile, the preparation for exile, and whatever is carried into exile must consist primarily of words, and Fellous determines to write “this book that I mean to finish before daybreak, as a farewell gesture to the country.” She has found herself inseparable from Tunisia, but she has “come back to see, in order more easily to disengage.” Handling object after object, she stows her memories ready for departure, not only her own memories of growing up in Tunisia’s ancient but shrinking Jewish community, of leaving to further her (formal and informal) education in France as a teenager, of repeatedly returning to the country of her birth, but also those of her parents, especially those of her father, who left Tunisia for Paris in his sixties and never returned nor spoke of the life he had left behind, and who has recently died of a heart attack. In preparation for leaving the past behind, Fellous sets out to heal, through words, through memory, her parents’ “deep wordless wound of having left their country so brutally, as if it were a natural step: this they kept in silence, folded deep inside, like so may others, not daring to touch on or venture near it; and this I meant to feel in my turn. This they had passed down to me, it had become my wound. And perhaps, after all, it was this I had sought to treat by returning, by trying to recover their childhood.” Using a method that owes something to Proust and a style that owes something to Rimbaud (exquisitely translated into English by Sophie Lewis), Fellous’s beautiful prose moves delicately, like the most tentative and searching thought, around and between entities in her memory that are either too fragile or too awful to be approached directly. In this way she achieves what she calls, after Barthes, her “struggle for softness,” her overcoming of violence by rejecting the language of violence. “It was Barthes, there’s no question, more than my parents, who taught me to read the world, to leave nothing in limbo. All things observed, all words spoken, every silence between two words, every link between two sentences.” Fellous’s approach to draw together all elements: times, people, objects, memories, sensations; to pack her book with the great cluster of experiences that comprise what it is to be herself, to show with words how a mind can approach and encompass these experiences, all the while knowing that the past is being squeezed out of the present, excluded from a world that is changing. “Could all of us, perhaps, without knowing it, the French, the Italians, the Maltese, the Jews, the Greeks, the Muslims of this country, we who watch and play together in this cafe, in this small nowhere-town, yes, could all of us already be refugees, already hostages or prisoners, or even disappeared?” Human well-being is a precious, fragile, evanescent thing, easily destroyed, she knows. “What to make of this violence, all those dead on the beach, all the dead everywhere, they are in me, haunting my lips and my eyes.” Those expelled from their own lives have only memories as their possessions: “This is the story of so many exiles, of all those who today cross the Medierranean and die at sea, in their thousands they go, are lost in their thousands, their story is ours too, it tugs at our hearts.” Fellous knows that she must leave Tunisia, in order to prevent her memories from being overwritten by an unaccommodating world: “I know that only by leaving will I save everything that lies before me now.” She completes her book, her memory-luggage, and departs. But, in the end, even this last leaving is uncertain: “I knew I could not do it — I couldn’t help it, I would always be returning.” |
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Coventry by Rachel Cusk {Reviewed by THOMAS}
How does the reviewer even attempt to begin to write his review of a collection of essays treating diverse personal and literary subjects and first published in various media over a range of ten years? Does he point out that, during this ten years, the author of the essays wrote a remarkable set of three novels that were not only hugely enjoyable to read but also tested and redefined the ways in which fiction could be written, and also tested and redefined the relationship between ‘fiction’ and ‘real life’? If he does, is this the point at which he might attempt to divert attention from the quality or otherwise of his current review by directing, perhaps via useful hyperlinks, the reader of the said review to read instead his previous reviews of the three remarkable novels of what he and no-one else calls the ‘Faye Project’: Outline, Transit and Kudos (or, in the perverse order in which he read them, Kudos, Transit and Outline), which reviews are probably more than one reader could tolerate of his reviewing in one sitting, thus relieving him of the pressure to review the essay collection at all, but also, unfortunately, defeating the purpose of reviewing the essay collection, which is to bring to the attention of this possibly actual reader of his review something of the pleasures, qualities and benefits of the essay collection? Would it be a good idea to proceed from a mention of the ‘Faye Project’, so to call it, to emphasise the unifying consideration of the essays in Coventry in their capacities to provide insights into the astringent, rigorous, restless mind of the writer behind these novels (though perhaps not very far behind), or would this approach relegate the essays to a secondary and supportive tier to the appreciation of the so-called ‘Faye Project’? Would this relegation be appropriate or inappropriate for the reviewer’s and the reviewer’s reader’s (supposing there is one) appreciation of the essay collection? Would it do the essay collection a disservice or a service (or whatever the opposite of a disservice is)? Is it relevant or irrelevant to an appreciation of what the reviewer and no-one else calls the ‘Faye Project’ to gain from the essays collected in Coventry further and possibly (but only possibly) more direct insights into the concerns, both literary and personal, of the author Rachel Cusk, or should the value of such insights be independent of the ‘Faye Project’, in which case this should be the last time the reviewer mentions it? Does a collection as diverse in subject and dispersed in time as Coventry even need to be treated in a unified fashion? Should the individual essays be perhaps treated individually? Should the reviewer perhaps point out that, although there is much to be gained from the reading of almost all of these essays, there is nothing in particular further to be gained from reading them together, or in any particular order, or in any particular relationship between any of them? Although it is true that the essays are arranged in three groups, which seem to be, firstly, essays that arise from the experiences the author has in what we are meant to think of as her ‘actual life’ (what the reviewer might think someone might call ‘memoir), largely dealing with the ambivalences of parenthood, the deflationary potentials of relationships, both between adults and between adults and children, on rudeness, driving, and on domestic space as a zone of contention between its inhabitant’s internal and external worlds and between her individual and communal worlds; secondly, a few essays on the phenomenon or pseudophenomenon of so-called ‘women’s writing’, on the benefits or pseudobenefits of so-called ‘creative writing’ courses, and on St. Francis of Assisi’s ‘father problems’ (that led him to postulate, according to Cusk, a God as a “projection of himself, a kind of universal victim ravaged by the world’s misunderstanding and neglect. Perhaps his spirit had been crushed after all, for like a child his sympathies ever after lay with dumb creatures.”); and thirdly, a set or pseudoset of reviews or rereadings (how, the reviewer will have to determine, do reviews and rereadings differ from views and readings?) of various novels and authors, from D.H. Lawrence to Olivia Manning to Kazuo Ishiguro to Natalia Ginzburg, providing a degree of insight into Cusk’s own approach to the writing of fiction (or whatever) by sympathetic resonance and observation (for instance, in what also exists as an introduction to Natalia Ginzburg’s collection Little Virtues, Cusk writes of Ginzburg's "unusual objectivity, achieved by a careful use of distance that is never allowed to become detachment," and observes that Ginzburg "separates the concept of storytelling from the concept of the self and in doing so takes a great stride towards a more truthful representation of reality,” which observations might well also be made of Cusk’s work); should the reviewer point out that this tripartite grouping is in itself no more unifying than the compartments of a cutlery drawer are unifying of knives that will be used at various times and for various purposes and never all at once? If the essays are to be treated severally, does it make sense for the reviewer to review them collectively, or even to address them separately in one review (the cutlery drawer metaphor notwithstanding)? If the reviewer were to proclaim that the first essay in the collection, ‘Driving as Metaphor’, is his favourite, that it has a clarity, detachment and lucidity that at times reminds him of Calvino in applying to the minutiae of quotidian life the depth of anthropological or psychological or philosophical or anthropopsychophilosophical consideration that is usually squandered on the unfamiliar, the aberrant and the rare, and if the reviewer were to pad out his review with extensive quotes, or with a large number of inextensive quotes, from the essay (which would not be difficult to do, prime candidates being such observations as, when observing a traffic jam, that of “the sight of rows of human faces trapped behind and frames by their windscreens can be especially striking, as though a portrait-painter had drawn them,” or that “the difference between a car and a person is not entirely clear. Moments earlier the car was the disguise for and the enlargement of, the driver’s will. Shortly, when the traffic stops, it will become his burden and his prison,” and, most frighteningly, that “the true danger of driving might be in its capacity for subjectivity, and in the weapons it puts at subjectivity’s disposal”), would the reviewer run the risk that, if a reader of his review (or view), if there was one, happened to read this first essay and did not like it, though the reviewer cannot see why they would not, would the fact that he had told them that he thought it the best of the essays prevent them from carrying on to read essays in the collection that they may well find, personally, better? Will he attempt to convey in his review that Cusk’s rigour and restlessness and astringency, when applied to common generalisations such as those of gender roles, or of the phenomenon or pseudophenomenon of ‘women’s writing’, destabilise those generalisations to a larger extent than they acknowledge them, regardless, perhaps, of Cusk’s intentions, but in a way entirely appropriate to her privileging of honesty over acceptability or ease? Will he have space to explore some of Cusk’s sometimes dubious but nevertheless fascinating and therefore valuable assertions, such as the suggestion that “war might almost be said to embody the narrative principle itself. In war, there is no point of view; war is the end of point of view, where violence is welcomed as the final means of arriving at a common version of events,” pointing out that “the generation of narrative entails a lot of waste”? Will the reviewer succeed in conveying something of Coventry in such a way that a possible reader of his review might like to read Coventry themselves, without the intervening presence of said reviewer? Is this to be desired? Or are there too many unanswerable questions interposing themselves between the reviewer and his task for him to have any hope at all of approaching its fulfilment?
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 | The Divers' Game by Jesse Ball {Reviewed by STELLA} Lethe and Lois burst off the page in the first part of Jesse Ball’s The Divers’ Game. Such frenetic energy can’t be contained. Lethe and Lois are Pads — school girls that are part of the community of privilege. They have no fears, carry gas masks with them and know the creed. One day their teacher, the depressive alcoholic Mandred, offers to take them to the zoo. The zoo is a fair distance from the city. On the train the girls, who are fast friends, sit close together with their intense and seemingly secret language of glances and touches. They feel inseparable. However, when they get to the zoo only one student can be the teacher’s assistant. Lois accompanies Mandred into the zoo of stuffed animals — in this world no creatures live, apart from a lone hare near the end of its life. What does the hare symbolise — a last hope? The final gasp of the old world? A world before Quads. Or the suffering of all living creatures? While Lois is entranced by the zoo, Lethe is left outside and left to her own devices. She lies on the grass in the park until it is dark and when her companions do not return, she decides to return to the city. On the train back she is startled by a man and gets off at an unknown station. In her panic, she finds herself at a large clearing on the edge of a Quad territory. In this world, there are two distinct groups, the Pads and the Quads — the Quads are the aliens, the refugees, allowed to stay, but disenfranchised, physically — branded on their checks and a thumb removed (replaced by a prosthetic) — and economically — they live in the worse neighbourhoods in caged communities — guarded by Pad security, and are the workers at the lowest end of society. At any time a Pad can end the life of a Quad if they feel under threat. A gas canister can be released for an immediate or painful or slow death. This is a world of black and white, unequal, full of tension and threat. The novel arches over a day or so. When Lethe and Lois are on the train they are contemplating the coming of Ogia’s Day — a ceremony that rarely occurs, a day in which all debts (financial and emotion) are wiped. There is high anticipation and the girls are discussing their outfits. In another part of the city the Quads are rehearsing for their own ceremony — a macabre parade with a young child — the Infanta — at its centre, a child jollied into deciding wrong-doers’ fate. Are they guilty? Wave the red-sleeved arm. Not guilty — let them go. We join the crowd and are swept forward in the horror. Lethe flows like a river along her path — a journey which lands her on the outskirts of a group of Quads gathered around a bonfire. The young Infanta is borne along in a frenzy, unaware of the power of her position. As the reader, you know the inevitable is just around the corner. Will she be treated mercifully if the crowds are happy or thrown to the lions if not? Her papier-mache look-alike awaits. And then there are the children playing out the adult world of jealously and hierarchy through 'the divers' game' — a game which pushes contestants to their limits. Jesse Ball’s writing, as in Census, is sparse and compelling, There is intrigue, confusion and pre-ordained destiny. You are up close, alongside the characters, but then suddenly pulled out to a god’s eye view — witnessing and looking around the corners to where Lethe, Lois and the other children can not see. The world feels dystopic and yet all too real — an allegory of crisis, prejudice and confusion, a world that feels out of control. The final section of the book, a letter from Mandred’s wife pulls, us out of this confusion and fear or hate. Her words, even in despair, are compassionate and remind us of what humanity can be. |