| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Deeplight by Frances Hardinge {Reviewed by STELLA} Dive into the world of scavenger pirates, deep-sea mythologies, powerful gods and a people who trade for profit and intrigue in found godware. The latest book from the brilliant children's writer Frances Hardinge starts, in the best story-telling tradition, with a tale of wide-eyed wonder and unbelievable strangeness — poetic and mesmerising. Welcome to the world and fierce ocean mysteries of the Myriad. Hardinge poises us perfectly in the prologue to make the perfect dive headfirst, with curiosity and no regrets. The opening chapters, like a tumbling wave, tip over into the everyday world of Lady Crave Island, a rowdy and crowded port town where traders pass through, dealing in godware and seeking treasures, where those who are ‘marked’ carry their heads high — their daring of deep diving a source of pride, and where street urchins may eke out an existence. Here we encounter our hero Hark and his best friend (protector and profiteer) Jelt, playing tricks and turning a coin. It’s swagger and play-acting for two 14-year-olds needing an income and skating trouble. Not that Jelt shies away from trouble or making deals, and he’s not too concerned if Hark is dragged in as well — anything for a bit of godware, money or advantage. When Jelt agrees to a risky job for Captain Rigg — she rules the fiercest of the pirate gangs in Lady Crave — not everything goes to plan. And guess who is taking the rap! Hark is caught and ends up on the wrong side of the law and facing The Appraisal — he’s about to be auctioned. Only his silver tongue might save him from a surefire early death in the bowels of a hulking ship or submarine. He’ll never survive as a galley minion rowing endlessly in pursuit of godware. And a story he does spin, landing him a three-year indenture to the mysterious Dr Vyne, scientist — not as an assistant, but as her spy. He’s sent to the Sanctuary — a home for aged priests — to tease out their stories and their knowledge of the watery depths of the Myriad. The priests hold secrets that could unlock the power of the gods. As the stories of the old world unfold — tales of monstrous beasts in the Undersea, of the Cataclysm, of the mysteries of the Undersea godware — secrets creep to the surface. Driven by fascination, fear and the desire to harness the power of the Undersea gods, the League and the Governors are dabbling in ‘science’ and magic, yet they are not the only ones that are on a reckless journey. Jelt tracks Hark to his new home on the far-flung island of Nest to convince him that their fortunes can be made with a quick dip in a stolen Bathysphere. But the sea is unpredictable and unforgiving, and Jelt finds himself a treasure which is both pleasure and hindrance. What starts as a wild adventure, and what Jelt sees as the best of his deals so far, may just sink him further in the mysteries of the Undersea than he bargained for — and Hark along with him. Crossing Rigg wasn’t the greatest idea, but crossing her stubborn and ferocious daughter, Selphin, will take them all on a dangerous journey to the Undersea, a journey that will test their friendship, bravery and ethics. Will they make the right decision? Will they have any choice? Hardinge is an excellent story-teller. Her worlds are vivid and beautiful, her characters complex and engaging, and the plot is fascinatingly satisfying. Author of the Costa prize-winning The Lie Tree and the equally absorbing A Skinful of Shadows, Like Pullman and Ness she leaves you with plenty to think about and the desire to dive right back in. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | We Are Made of Diamond Stuff by Isabel Waidner {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Where’s reality, I want to change it.” Up against it in the Isle of Wight, a fender shoved between Britain and Europe, an island with more than its share, if there can be such a thing as a share of such things, of fortifications and prisons, if a distinction can be made between fortifications and prisons, and, according to the Trip Advisor reviews that, appropriately, comprise the final chapter of this remarkable book, home, if home is not the wrong word, of surely Britain’s saddest zoo, the narrator and Shae, their companion or alter-ego, if a distinction can be made between a companion and an alter-ego, work, or at least spend time in what might be loosely termed employment, at a zero-star hotel, or boarding house, as the narrator awaits the results of their application for resident status in a Britain seemingly bent on becoming more stridently a fortress, otherwise known as a prison (a bad sentence for no good reason). Britishness cannot be separated from imperialism, according to the current British Prime Minister [I advise you not to click that link], who, in the context of this book, and in any other context you might like, we can refer to as B...S... Johnson so as to distinguish him from his in-some-ways opposite Johnson, the working-class experimental author B.S. Johnson, whose novel House Mother Normal (of which, >read my review here<) lends its eponymous antiheroine to be the proprietor of the said no-star hotel or boarding house (I should be using nested brackets instead of nested commas) in Waidner’s novel (of their previous novel, Gaudy Bauble, >read my review here< (but why mention that here)), the difference between Empire 1.0 and what Waidner calls Empire 2.0, or Brexit, is that the thinking, if you can call it that, of the new empire, unable to reach beyond its shores, is turned in upon itself, it is an empire of exclusion not one of inclusion, it is an empire, how long can I keep calling it an empire with a straight face, frustrated in its incapacity to do anything other than tread down difference, both by the organs of state, not that organs usually tread, unless a foot is some sort of organ of treading, and by the acts of the mob, the least accountable organ of the state (considerations of treading and so forth notwithstanding), it is an empire of suffocation. The iniquities of class, race, gender, queerness, employment, poverty, migrancy (if that is a word) are weaponised by Brexit, and the narrator and Shae are well positioned to be at the non-handle end of most of those weapons: “They use words as weapons, they use weapons as weapons, and sometimes both come together like in the Boeing CH-47 Chinook.” But, says the narrator, “I have talents, I’ll use them.” Diamond Stuff is a point of infinite mutability, a shrugging off of forms, both literary and social, a word-gurdy, an uncontainable core exuding a shiny slipperiness, or a slippery shine, that repels both boredom and Boris (if a distinction can be made between them). Where all forms are performative, which is etymologically sensible, everything is both a metaphor and at the same time only itself, the banal assumes the trappings of the mythological, this is Britain after all, and probably vice-versa, if we can conceive of such a thing, descriptions, metaphors, clothes, even, and shoes, peel off and become something equivalent of persons, participating independently in the narrative-as-non-narrative and play assumes the place vacated by sensible activity. The Isle of Wight is also the locale of Britain’s one-time rocket programme, connected with both the military and the nuclear industries: “British nature is so interconnected with military and empire, I say. No beach without Sellafield. No garden without Dungeness. … My sense of beauty is brutal, I’m already British like that,” says the narrator. But is there hope? Can there be freedom within increasingly constraining structures? “The scaffolding is a permanent fixture, this is England, the scaffolding will outstand us all,” observes the narrator, but “at best, your resistance defines you.” This novel, short-listed for the Goldsmiths Prize, is a pin-sharp, very enjoyable piece of literary resistance. |
>>Read Stella's review.
>>Read an extract.
>>Preview the book.
>>"We labour under tyrants."
>>"Formal mysteriousness and neon moral clarity."
>>"Empathy eroded at every level."
>>Click and collect.
>>Read our reviews of Ball's previous book, Census.
>>Other books by Jesse Ball.
NEW RELEASES
A linguistically and formally inventive novel taking issue with constraining concepts of Britishness, class, power and genderisation.
Short-listed for the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize.
>>Read an extract.
>>Read Thomas's review.
>>Read Thomas's review of Isabel Waidner's Gaudy Bauble.
"Penman summons the lives and times of several extravagantly damaged musical geniuses and near-geniuses in (mainly) the brutal context of mid-century America – its racial atrocities, its venality, its murderous conformities. Penman writes an exact, evocative prose as surprising as improvised jazz in its fluid progress from music criticism to social commentary to biography and back. He’s found a way to be erudite without pedantry, entertaining without pandering. His ear for mesmerizing nuance is unmatched by any music critic alive." —Gary Indiana
"Ian Penman is popular music’s Hazlitt – its chief stylist – and his sound is often equal to what he writes about. Each of his essays is an event, so this book is indispensable." —Andrew O’Hagan
"Written with love and joy and squirt gunner’s accuracy with the adjective." —Nicholson Baker
>>Read an extract.
Who gets to shape the narrative of our times? The current moment is a battle royale over that foundational power, one in which women, people of colour, non-straight people are telling other versions, and white people and men and particularly white men are trying to hang onto the old versions and their own centrality.
A Wānanga with Patricia Grace and Anahera Gildea; new fiction, poetry and essays by Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor, Hana Pera Aoake, Tusiata Avia, Airini Beautrais, Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle, Vanessa Crofskey, Alayne Dick, Sam Duckor Jones, Anahera Gildea, Eliana Gray, Isabel Haarhaus, Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Nicole Titihuia Hawkins, Emma Hislop, Joy Holley, Patrick Hunn, Nadine Anne Hura, Ash Davida Jane, Claudia Jardine, Erik Kennedy, Catarina de Peters Leitão, Talia Marshall, Anna McAllister, Eleanor Rose King Merton, Fardowsa Mohamed, Mikaela Nyman, Rebecca Tobo Olul, Rachel O’Neill, Sinead Overbye, Aiwa Pooamorn, Meg Prasad, Michelle Rahurahu Scott, essa may ranapiri, Amanda Jane Robinson, Freya Daly Sadgrove, Charlotte Simmonds, Carin Smeaton, Ruby Solly, Michelle Tayler, Anne Marie Te Whiu, Chris Tse, Oscar Upperton, Faith Wilson, Eefa Yasir Jauhary; cover by Miriama Grace-Smith.
Barnes brings his novelist's perspicacity and his deep interest in French history to the fore in this rich and rewarding portrait of Belle Epoque, its artists, libertines and narcissists, focused on the life of pioneering surgeon and free-thinker Samuel Pozzi.
Four stories exemplary of Bernhard's literary approaches: the undermining of all statements (including the narrators' own), the resentment of traditional and reactionary powers, the ultimately harmful tendency of human thought and all other endeavour — and (not least) wonderful sentences.
>>Read Thomas's review.
Following the death of her son, Mieko Toganō takes an increasing interest in the personal affairs of her widowed daughter-in-law, Yasuko. Devastated by her loss, she skillfully manipulates the relationships between Yasuko and the two men who are in love with her, encouraging a dalliance that will have terrible consequences. Meanwhile, hidden in the shadows, is Mieko’s mentally-handicapped daughter, who has her own role to play in her mother’s bizarre schemes. The novel is split into three sections, each named for a particular noh mask: Ryō no Onna, Masugami and Fukai, and the whole draws on elements of The Tale of Genji.
Curator Justin Paton talks us through over 200 works from the full span of McCahon's production, explaining the development of both his themes and his techniques.
>>Come to Peter Simpson's illustrated lecture on Colin McCahon's Nelson years at The Suter: Wednesday 13 November, 6 PM. >>Find out more.
After finishing The Return, Matar, seeking solace, travelled to Siena, Italy. Always finding comfort and clarity in art, Matar immersed himself in eight significant works from the Sienese School of painting, which flourished from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Artists whom he had admired throughout his life, such as Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, evoke earlier engagements he has had with works by Caravaggio and Poussin, and the personal experiences that surrounded those moments. Complete with full-colour reproductions of the artworks, A Month in Siena is about what occurred between Matar, those paintings, and the city. That month would be an extraordinary period in Matar's life: an exploration of how art can console and disturb in equal measure.
>>"Writing is both the easiest and the most difficult thing."
Noma away from homa. Feeling stuck in his work and home life, writer Jeff Gordinier happened into a fateful meeting with Danish chef René Redzepi, whose restaurant, Noma, has been called the best in the world. A restless perfectionist, Redzepi was at the top of his game but was looking to tear it all down, to shutter his restaurant and set out for new places, flavours, and recipes. This is the story of the subsequent four years of globe-trotting culinary adventure, with Gordinier joining Redzepi as his Sancho Panza.
"Gordinier takes us into the fabulously obsessive realm of the world's most fascinating chef—and he does it with the voice of a poet." —Ruth Reichl
A superbly illustrated history of 250 years of resistance and persistence in New Zealand as told through artefacts created to further a variety of causes.
>>Look inside!
The te reo Māori edition of The Noisy Book is even more fun than the English-language version!
Every evening Lampie the lighthouse keeper’s daughter must light a lantern to warn ships away from the rocks. But one stormy night disaster strikes. The lantern goes out, a ship is wrecked and an adventure begins. In disgrace, Lampie is sent to work as a maid at the Admiral’s Black House, where rumour has it that a monster lurks in the tower. But what she finds there is stranger and more beautiful than any monster. Soon Lampie is drawn into a fairytale adventure in a world of mermaids and pirates, where she must fight with all her might for friendship, freedom and the right to be different.
From the author of The History of Bees comes another remarkable novel dealing with environmental catastrophe, this time a global shortage of water. Parallel narratives in 2019 and 2041 chart depths of human resilience, and reveal a love story, too.
The story of the body of Bwana Daudi, 'the Doctor', the explorer David Livingstone — and the sixty-nine men and women who carried his remains for 1,500 miles so that he could be borne across the sea and buried in his own country. In Petina Gappah's novel, it is those in the shadows of history — those who saved a white man's bones; his faithful retinue on an epic funeral march — whose voices are conjured.
"Engrossing, beautiful and deeply imaginative." —Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing
Unbelieveably, this is the first time that the work of Urzidil, a friend of Kafka's whose work has been long acclaimed in Czechoslovakia, has appeared in English. These stories chart the insurmountable ethical upheavals resulting from unexpected events or the forces of history.
>>Immortalised in an asteroid.
An unflinching depiction of contemporary Traveller culture from the Gordon Burn Prize-winning author of The Gallows Pole.
"His poetic vitality brims with that quality most sadly lost — humanity." —Guardian
Records the craft practices of Maori, Pakeha and the peoples of the Pacific.
Mesmerising, morbid and melancholy short stories: a young girl receives letters from her lost doll; a cat falls madly in love with her human neighbour; a bored office worker escapes his monotonous life by travelling on his grandfather's model train; a man gives all of himself to the woman he loves, piece by piece.
Come on a journey and visit the dark forest, the deep ocean, and the shadows of the city, and discover everything that glows, glitters, and shines in the night.
Shusterman brings his gripping and thoughtful YA series to a stunning conclusion. It’s been three years since Rowan and Citra disappeared, since Scythe Goddard came into power, since the Thunderhead closed itself off to everyone but Grayson Tolliver. Will the algorithm that governs society be subverted? Will this be a good or a bad thing?
>>Read the whole series!
In the early 1990s, hopes for the eastward spread of liberal democracy were high. And yet the transformation of Eastern European countries gave rise to a bitter repudiation of liberalism itself, not only there but also back in the heartland of the West.
"The most original explanation I've read of the self-destruction of the liberal West as universal utopia. Its analysis is rooted in an unparalleled understanding of the resentment fuelled revolt (and revolting resentment) of political elites who sought to ape the West, and ended up loathing it for that very reason. Scathing but fair." —Peter Pomerantsev
"We don't need your whataboutery and moral prevarication. It's time to stand up and own your own culpability, complicity and . . . but I joke. Sit thee down. Hoist up that unethical hamburger and deploy your face into it. Some people are part of the solution and the rest of us find the people who are part of the solution to be annoying. We are the problem. We will not be moved. We will be moved if you shout at us, but we're not going to like it. These poems whistle while Rome burns. They whistle with words in a language plump with shoulds and oughts and sorries and shouldn't'ves. They whistle Beethoven so badly the old man's bones are transformed into a sustainable turbine. They only stop whistling to consider whether cheap comic cynicism is the kind of wry and arch whimsy no one needs, least of all this doomed world of human apologists. The poems lift their chins with pride. The poems remain unapologetic. No. I am mistaken. They are desperate, sickening, in their apology."
A strange old book in the library stacks sends its finder on a perplexing quest, including to a subterranean library. From the author of The Night Circus.
Strout's new novel follows the lovably blunt Olive Kitteridge through the second half of her life, as she responds to changes both in her own life and in the wider community of Crosby, Maine.
"Writing of this quality comes from an attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue." —Hilary Mantel
A sampler of New Zealand cultural life and opinion from the NZ Website of the Year. Also features a few non-Tobies.
BOOKS @ VOLUME # 151 (2.11.19)
Read our latest newsletter and find out what we've been reading and recommending.
 | Jellyfish by Janice Galloway {Reviewed by STELLA} Short story collections are appealing for many reasons. I am always surprised by some readers’ resistance to the short story form. What I like about a short story is the bite-size clarity that comes with a small moment that often has a profound or deeper layer; the sharpness of language as every sentence is and should be taut — necessary; and when it is a cohesive collection, how the characters and themes overlay each other, building resonance and subtle interlinked play that often surprisingly and suddenly take your breath away. It’s also a great way to be introduced to a new author without the commitment of a novel. At the conclusion of Janice Galloway’s collection Jellyfish, I realised I had been struck by all these elements. And I am pleased to note there are more fictions as well as memoir and art collaborations to investigate. The stories in Jellyfish deal with relationships: romantic — sex, love and commitment and discovery; parental — motherhood in particular; and internal — psychological machinations and mental health. The opening story, 'Jellyfish', is an ironic ode to motherhood on the eve of a young boy’s first day at school. It has all the tenderness and contradictions that parents feel when a child reaches a ‘milestone’. Galloway cleverly reveals the menace of change through the mother’s view of a day trip to the beach, a menace that is all to do with the parent’s internal world rather than any real external threat — other than change and abandonment of past structures and controls. These tensions between a mother and a child surface throughout the collection, either directly between child and parent or played out between parents. Most affecting in this regard is 'Distance' — a mother, to cope with her own paranoia, separates herself from her partner and child and over the years the distance between mother and child widens. When a health crisis emerges she must put her house in order and here her own past childhood comes to catch her — and the underbelly of her inability to cope is revealed, the curtain is pulled away. Several of Galloway’s stories deal with the need for women to hold back, to protect themselves from their own past parental histories, their interactions with their children and with their partners. There is a quiet unease in many of the women as they navigate life — somewhat remote — seemingly disconnected from their interactions with others due to fear, loss or the desire remain unfettered despite the contradictory impulse in seeking meaningful emotional connection. 'Gold' is powerful and memorable — about taking a chance and unwittingly creating risk. Grace as a teen is abandoned by her mother, smart and tough enough to cope. And she does, gets herself through school, further education and a sound job — always sensible and competent, her life has a predictable path as long as she does not swerve from it, but she is completely alone. A stalwart to all, but nobody to everyone. Yet a painting changes her life, like a flip of a coin — a new side is revealed with all its possibilities. Galloway writes tautly with black humour that lifts the words from the doldrums, using illuminating metaphors which give richness and depth to the text, and with a visceral passion and a lightness of touch that complement the more cerebral moments. |
 |
Armand V.: Footnotes to an unexcavated novel by Dag Solstad {Reviewed by THOMAS}
1] Wishing to write a review of the novel Armand V. by the Norwegian author Dag Solstad, I’ve decided the best way to realise this is not by writing a review of the novel but by allowing it instead to appear in an outpouring of footnotes to a review that will not be or can not be written. The sum of the footnotes, therefore, is my review of the novel Armand V.
1 B ] Although admittedly ludic, possibly to the point of irritation, some attempt to justify this approach could be made on the basis that it corresponds to the approach of the author Dag Solstad in this writing of his novel comprised entirely of footnotes to a novel that the author considers in some way pre-existing but which he has determined will remain “unexcavated”, a novel that he refuses to write, or feels himself incapable of writing, or a novel that is unable to be written, or that, if written, would be of no interest to the writer (and therefore unable, presumably, to be written). Solstad writes, “Wishing to write a novel about the Norwegian diplomat Armand V., I’ve decided the best way to realise this is not by writing a novel about him but by allowing him instead to appear in an outpouring of footnotes to this novel. The sum of the footnotes, therefore, is the novel about Armand V.”
1 C ] Solstad is aware of at least some of the problems inherent in this approach, but it is problems such as these that allow him to explore problems inherent in the writing of novels per se, and in the relationship of an author to her or his material. “But who wrote the novel originally, if I’m simply the one who discovered and excavated it? … It is indisputable that this novel, the sum of the footnotes of the original novel, which is invisible because the author refused to delve into it and make it his own, is about Armand V. … It is by no means certain that the theme of the novel is the same as that of the original novel. … Why this avowal? Why does the author refuse to enter into the original novel? Put more directly: why don’t I do it, since I’m the one who’s writing this?”
1 D ] The air of a footnote hangs over Solstad’s entries, if a footnote can be said to have an ‘air’, giving them a greater perspective and distance from their subjects, but a greater alienation, or perhaps a resignation, also, a feeling that a narrative continues upon which we (and the author) have no control, and of which we (and the author) are only very incompletely aware. This said, we can safely say that the footnotes also provide less perspective, concentrating often, as footnotes often do, on matters of detailed fact, with a topography very different from the text to which the footnote ostensible refers. The author from time to time notes his relief from the expectations of the received novel form, comparing the unwritten novel ‘up there’ with his work in the footnotes to that novel: “Of course, the novel up there attempts to explain why their marriage failed. But not here. Here it is simply over. No comment.” The novel-as-footnotes form allows Solstad to explore aspects of the life of Armand V. (including a very long exploration of the contented blandness of a one-time school-mate, which is implicitly contrasted with the angst-ridden nullity of Armand V.’s life (about which see the footnote below)) without subjecting these explorations to an overall schema or narrative that would restrict the usefulness of these explorations.
1 E ] Some of the footnotes are very long.
1 F ] Perhaps our awareness of our life has always and only the relationship to our actual life that a footnote has to the text to which it refers. Plot and purpose are as artificial when applied to our lives as they are when used as novelistic crutches to make stories, and for much the same reasons.
1 G ] “All these footnotes seem to be suffering from one thing or another. The footnotes are suffering. The unwritten novel appears as heaven.”
2 ] Armand V. is a diplomat nearing retirement. He has “mastered the game” of concealing his personal opinions and performing his role to perfection. “He assumed that his bold way of behaving helped to divert attention from what might have been perceived as more suspect qualities that he possessed, whatever they might be.” So perfect is his performance that at no time does he act in a personal way or express his beliefs in any way that could risk their having any effect. The visible and invisible aspects of Armand V.’s life share little but his name. He is, in effect, a non-person.
2 B ] Complete separation between the invisible and the visible aspects of one’s life, or, we might say, between the inner and outer aspects of one’s life, is impossible to sustain indefinitely, but the resolution of such separation, whether this be metaphorised as lightning or as rot, is seldom satisfactory. For instance, Armand’s deep-seated hatred of the United States for its death penalty, and for the war that disabled his son (see the footnote below) is expressed in no practical way, but releases its pressure in disturbing misperception and an embarrassing slip of the tongue during an otherwise bland conversation with the American ambassador in the toilets during an official dinner.
2 C ] “Armand V. knew that he lived in a linguistic prison, and he knew that he could do nothing else but live in a linguistic prison.”
3 ] The unbridgeability of the schism between his inner life, so to call it, and his outer circumstances, so to call them, has led to an unsatisfactory personal life, so to call it, for Armand V. He was married to N, the mother of his son, but only felt close to her when he thought of her twin sister, thinking of N. as “the twin sister’s twin sister.” Other examples abound.
4 ] The novel is particularly concerned with the relationship of Armand V. with his son, who is first a student and then becomes a soldier, much to the disapproval of the father, and loses his eyesight during the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. The novel is particularly concerned with the alienation of Armand V. from his son.
4 B ] Armand goes regularly to pay his son’s rent, both when his son is a student and when he is a soldier and mostly absent, and is reluctant to stop doing so even when his son can easily afford it and asks his father to stop.
4 C ] Armand does not speak to his son about what is making the son unhappy but sneaks out of the apartment. When his son later expresses the idea of joining an elite army unit, Armand makes a scornful outburst which cements the son’s intention. Armand V. does not act when action is appropriate, and acts inappropriately when action is unavoidable. Armand V. feels he has sacrificed his son to the US, or God, the two malign forces becoming for Armand almost indistinguishable.
4 D ] When his son returns disabled, Armand returns him to child-like dependency, assuming the suffocating Father-provider role he had not exercised during his son’s childhood due to his separation from N.
4 E ] In the earlier footnotes, when his son is a student, Armand spends a lot of time considering the time, decades ago, when he himself was a student. When his son is blinded and at an institution in London, Armand stays in his son’s flat in Oslo. It would not be unreasonable to see a conflation between father and son, and, after the ‘sacrifice’ of the son by the father, an assumption of the son’s place by the father. This can also be seen, due to the conflation of the two, as a return to the father’s own youth, a trick against time.
5 ] “What does Armand have instead of hope? Don’t know. But: no sense of destiny, a lack of purpose … that makes a novel about him readable, or writable.” Only footnotes, then.
|
>>The importance of dark sky sanctuaries.
>>The Dark Sky Project.
>>Heavens above.
>>Sky light.
>>Visit Naomi Arnold's website.
>>Your copy of the book.
>>Related titles:
Stargazer: A guide to the Southern night skies by Maggie Adern-Pocock
The World at Night by Babak Tafreshi
Dark Skies: A journey into the wild night by Tiffany Francis
An Ode to Darkness by Sigri Sandberg
Mt John: The first 50 years by Alan Gilmore and John Hearnshaw
NEW RELEASES
The gods are dead. Decades ago, they turned on one another and tore each other apart. Nobody knows why. But are they really gone forever? When 15-year-old Hark finds the still-beating heart of a terrifying deity, he risks everything to keep it out of the hands of smugglers, military scientists, and a secret fanatical cult so that he can use it to save the life of his best friend, Jelt. But with the heart, Jelt gradually and eerily transforms. How long should Hark stay loyal to his friend when he's becoming a monster — and what is Hark willing to sacrifice to save him? Another jaw-dropping novel from the author of The Lie Tree and A Skinful of Shadows.
Aotearoa New Zealand was founded on stargazing. It was celestial navigation that brought the first people here, and it was tatai arorangi, Maori astronomy, that helped people survive once they arrived. There is no better place on Earth to view the brilliance of other worlds. Covering eclipses, aurorae, comets and constellations, backyard observatories, traditional stargazers and world-class astrophotographers, this is the unique story of Te Whanau Marama, our family of light - the night sky that glows above us all.
Hat, ribbon, bird, rose. To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed. When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn't forget, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next?
An insightful and well written novel about the impossibility of raising a son well in an age of toxic masculinity, from the author of pleasingly inventive Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04.
"A novel of exhilarating intellectual inquiry, penetrating social insight and deep psychological sensitivity. The future of the novel is here." —Sally Rooney
"The Topeka School is what happens when one of the most discerning, ambitious, innovative, and timely writers of our day writes his most discerning, ambitious, innovative and timely novel to date. It's a complete pleasure to read Lerner experimenting with other minds and times, to watch his already profound talent blooming into new subjects, landscapes, and capacities. This book is a prehistory of a deeply disturbing national moment, but it's written with the kind of intelligence, insight, and searching that makes one feel well-accompanied and, in the final hour, deeply inspired." —Maggie Nelson
"In Ben Lerner's riveting third novel, Midwestern America in the late nineties becomes a powerful allegory of our troubled present. The Topeka School deftly explores how language not only reflects but is at the very center of our country's most insidious crises. In prose both richly textured and many-voiced, we track the inner lives of one white family's interconnected strengths and silences. What's revealed is part tableau of our collective lust for belonging, part diagnosis of our ongoing national violence. This is Lerner's most essential and provocative creation yet." —Claudia Rankine
>>"I think novels are good at showing how each of us is made up of an array of contradictory discourses."
Offers an almost seamless commentary on Tove Jansson's life as it unfolded within Helsinki's bohemian circles and her island home. Spanning fifty years between her art studies and the height of Moomin fame, the letters deal with the bleakness of war, the hopes for love that were dashed and renewed, and her determined attempts to establish herself as an artist.
140 authentic yet accessible recipes highlighting the pre-Hispanic indigenous cuisine of the Oaxaca region.
Tsiolkas's new novel continues to explore the themes he treated in The Slap and Barracuda: violence, toxic masculinity, inequality, brutality — but does so 2000 years back in time, when Christianity was just being established in the face of persecution. Tsiolkas's novel may be heretical, but his call to withstand the ills of the world is as urgent as ever.
A very insightful account of four years working with the United Nations emergency team in Gaza. On her last day Garson told her Palestinian colleagues that she is Jewish. New Zealand author.
>>Interview on Breakfast TV.
Fed up with being on the suffering end of the British housing crisis, Davies left Bristol for a shack in the far west of Cornwall. Rebuilding the shack, and spending more time by herself, she found a greater sense of direction and appreciation of nature.
"You will marvel at the beauty of this book, and rage at the injustice it reveals." —George Monbiot
"Incredibly moving. To find peace and a sense of home after a life so profoundly affected by the housing crisis, is truly inspirational." —Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path
"I have been catching moles in gardens and farms for years and I have decided that I am not going to do it any more. Molecatching is a traditional skill that has given me a good life but I am old now and tired of hunting and it has taught me what I needed to learn." Moles are mysterious: their habits are inscrutable, they are anatomically bizarre, and they live completely alone. Marc Hamer has come closer to them than most, both through his long working life out in the Welsh countryside, and his experiences of rural homelessness as a boy, sleeping in hedgerows. Beautifully illustrated with wood engravings, this book is a gem of nature writing.
With inspiration from a community of millers, farmers, bakers, and scientists, this book provides a fascinating look into the way artisan bread baking has evolved and continues to change — from wheat farming practices and advances in milling, to sourdough starters and the mechanics of mixing dough.
Mitchell originally made this compilation of drawings and hand-written lyrics as a gift for friends in 1971.
>>Blue (1971).
Depicting the everyday lives of the country's train conductors, steelworkers, weavers, farmers, scientists, and fishermen, these unique lino-cut and woodblock prints are a fascinating way to explore the culture of this still virtually unknown country.
A lively story of various goings-on told through texts, Instagram posts, emails, fliers, committee minutes, posters, diary entries, blog posts, chatrooms, school homework, raps and the reliably bonkers community noticeboard. Inventive and fun.
"Wildly inventive and a goatload of fun. A surprise triple reverse jackknife to the funny bone. I’ve never read anything like it. Tumeke!" —Toby Morris
>>Look inside!
A novel of the final years of Giuseppe Tomasi, last prince of Lampedusa, as he struggles to complete his novel, The Leopard (published to great acclaim in 1958).
"Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little." —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Kafka, Poe, Rousseau, Mann, Ruskin, Pound, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Stravinsky...
War had meant that Omar must leave Afghanistan with his mother and journey across the sea. When their boat sinks, they are washed ashore and have experiences they never could have imagined. Morpurgo's riff on Gulliver's travels carries important messages in a world beset by displacement and populism.
>>"The world is getting nastier."
From Stonewall to the present. Well illustrated. Includes Georgina Beyer.
Poems charting the changes in Hoey's life due to the development of a chronic illness, and due to the treatments.
>>How to lose money and entertain people.
The anonymous bones found in an Anglo-Saxon graveyard in Northumberland lead us to a better understanding of a violent period of history, where religious fervour and tribal expansion combined to transform Britain.
A novel based on the life of Marie Catherine d'Aulnoy, 'inventor' of the fairy tale at the turn of the seventeenth century.
Is it possible to keep an octopus in a private home? What is the psychological effect of a birthmark on a child? Where can I rent a guillotine? What do you feed a salamander? What is the natural enemy of a duck? Who built the English Channel? A compendium of questions asked of librarians before they invented Google to lighten their load.
>>A few questions, usefully filed.
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. |