| STELLA | >> Read all Stella's reviews. |
 | The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel {Reviewed by STELLA} Hilary Mantel’s timing couldn’t have been better. Waiting eight years for the final instalment of her Cromwell trilogy has been worth it and it is the perfect lock-down read. (I'm wondering how many people are reading this world-wide at this moment!) So we know about Thomas Cromwell and the machinations of the court. Mantel does not deviate from the history but breathes life into these long-dead players with such vigour, cleverness and expert writing that you will be completely immersed for days, if not weeks. The opens where Bring Up the Bodies left off, with Anne Boleyn’s beheading. Cromwell has rid his prince of the marriage he no longer wanted and is now even further ensconced in the royal’s favour. Yet this is a favour held with great difficulty. Henry is temperamental, fixated on producing a male heir and increasing England’s wealth and influence — alliances and enemies abound, not helped by the rejection of Rome. Thomas Cromwell, now a wealthy and influential man, once a blacksmith's son (as some often remind him) is envied and openly despised by many of the aristocratic families and between these families are both alliance and divisions, petty grievances and bloody back-stabbing. It’s a rich and colourful tapestry which Mantel stitches with perfection. As with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the author’s ability to get under the skin of these historical figures enables the reader to walk the halls of the Court, to sense the tension and anticipate the danger that awaits players in an ever-changing game, and to be an observer in Cromwell’s house, heart and mind. As Cromwell rises in esteem with Henry, his jeopardy also increases, and what comes after can only be a fall. There is so much happening in this massive tome (800+ pages) that it is hard to describe all the ins and outs — suffice to say that the pages turn out a larger and greater world than its mere 882 pages. Split into six parts with a very helpful family tree for the royals and a list of characters and their relationships to each other (indispensable — I constantly referred back to this to keep track of everyone), it is easy to navigate your way through the book as it focuses our attention on particular aspects and issues affecting Cromwell’s life. There are also excellent philosophical conjectures on religion, power, and how your past will haunt your future (eg. Cromwell and the Cardinal). It lays open the hypocrisy of the church and the state, and the ability to hold sway and keep influence in a time where a false step, a fickle mood, or doing nothing when more is expected (or just bad luck) may just take your head off. The Mirror and The Light shines brightly and brilliantly. |
| THOMAS | >> Read all Thomas's reviews. |
 | Blue Self-Portrait by Noémi Lefebvre {Reviewed by THOMAS} Just how many lawnmowers, how many compressors, chainsaws, air-brooms, skill-saws, mulchers, belt-sanders and water-blasters can you fit into one valley, he wondered. Who could have suspected the amount of equipment crammed into the valley, crammed into sheds, garages and houses, or kept under tarpaulins, until this unexpected month of Sundays, this sudden horrible month of stored-up home improvements, stored-up garden improvements and general therapeutic machine-use. All machine-use is primarily therapeutic, he thought, no matter what else it might achieve, all machine-use is primarily a therapy for anxiety, especially now, especially in this national or global anxiety, he thought. He must try to be generous towards the residents of the valley whose anxiety is being discharged by this therapeutic machine-use, he thought, for without this therapeutic machine-use how else could the anxiety in the valley be discharged, quite understandable levels of anxiety, probably undischargeabale without therapeutic machine-use, or dischargeable only in unfortunate ways. All machines are therapy machines, worst luck, he thought. Soon, though, he thought, all the lawns in the valley will be mown away, all the trees will be cut down and mulched, all the paint will be removed from the houses, all the windowsills will be sanded completely away, all the timber will be cut into offcuts and all the offcuts cut into finger-lengths, tossed away and abandoned. I will be patient, he thought, I will be patient, then we’ll have silence, then I will be able to write my review of the book for which I must have a review written by Friday. He had been reading, re-reading in fact, a book that he particularly liked, Noémi Lefebvre’s Blue self-Portrait, from Les Fugitives, a publisher that he also particularly liked, largely because they published books that he particularly liked, such as this one. It would not be true to say that he had not been experiencing anxiety himself on account of the pandemic which, for all he knew, already had its finger upon him and he had chosen to read, when he was thinking of what to read in the lock-down, first of all Blue Self-Portrait, which he remembered as being wonderfully well-written and translated, funny and painful and claustrophobic, all the qualities he wanted in a book, and, he thought, if my survival is uncertain, it would be a pity to read anything other than what I most would like to read, even if I have already read it and written a review of it also. That was a while ago, he thought, perhaps not a long while but a while long enough for me to re-use my review without anyone noticing that I have re-used my review, not that anyone reads my reviews anyway, he thought, if they don’t read them the won’t notice that I have re-used my review. It made little sense, he thought, to think that if his survival is uncertain he should therefore fill such time as he has with good literature as opposed to less-good literature, it is hard to see what difference this would make, but to do the opposite would make even less sense, and it is impossible not to consider what to read without reference to what must therefore be his anxiety about survival. He had not realised he was so attached to his survival. Some days previously someone had remarked to him that we were living through interesting times and he had replied that yes, we were, but not interesting times that he had particularly wanted to live through. No, he had corrected himself, I do quite want to live through them. He did want to live, which was something, he supposed, and he had chosen to read, in the lock-down, first of all, Blue Self-Portrait. It had been many decades, he thought, since the precarity of survival had imparted such meaning to everyday life, and to all the tiny decisions that comprise it, at least for us who live in the West, who live on our reserves and on the reserves of others. Elsewhere, and in the past, and for others depending on their circumstances, and now everywhere, it is the proximity of death that gives life, and all the tiny choices that comprise it, meaning, or at least what passes for meaning, whatever that may be, he wasn’t sure. He had been reading, or re-reading, if he needs to make a distinction, Blue Self-Portrait on the verandah at home. The trees, the clouds, the autumn sun, even he could not say that the day was not beautiful, but the fact that what is beautiful is so beautiful, he thought, only makes what is horrible more horrible. The beautiful is part of the horrible, the part of the horrible that makes the horrible most horrible, the worst part. If it wasn’t for the virus, he thought, this forced isolation would be ideal. It was easier for him, he thought, to spend four weeks in forced isolation than to spend four weeks in forced socialisation, his usual life in other words, easier but less healthy. I know, he thought, that to return to forced socialisation, my usual life, open-ended forced socialisation at that, when this period of forced isolation, however long, comes to an end, as it will eventually come to an end, will not be easy for me. Socialisation, or my commitment to socialisation, or at least my commitment to an effort towards socialisation, will be hard to regrasp once I have relinquished as I have in this period, however long, of forced isolation, he thought. Isolation is my natural state, he thought, my natural state but not a healthy state, at least not for me, the natural is not always healthy, whatever they say, but to resist a natural state, to strive always for the opposite of my inclinations, to commit myself to the forced socialisation that I call my normal life, he thought, that is not a healthy state either, that is an unhealthy state but at least a sustainable unhealthy state, which I’m not sure can be said of my natural inclinations. My natural state is a self-destructive state, he thought. He found himself, he found himself thinking, in the words of Lefebvre’s narrator in Blue Self-Portrait, in other words of Lefebvre herself, “choosing not extinction but exit, saying yes to say no and not no for no, no for yes but not yes for yes, the extinguisher is no for no the exit yes for no.” Lefebvre could write sentences that he wished that he had written himself, which, for someone who prized a good sentence above all other prizes, earned her his devotion as a reader and perhaps as a writer as well. If a sentence was well enough written, he thought, he could read about anything, but he had less and less time for sentences that were less than excellent, if excellent was the right word, no matter what other qualities they might have, if there are other qualities worth having or qualities to have. All is vacuity, he declared, all is vacuity but the way that vacuity is structured gives meaning. Meaning exists only in grammar if meaning exists at all, he thought, now there’s an aphorism for a calendar. Beyond the sentences there was a musical patterning to the book Blue Self-Portrait, he thought, he recognised a musical grammar of repetitions and variations and motifs probably related to the serialism of Arnold Schoenberg, not something he knew enough about to enlarge upon though probably the case since Schoenberg, both the music of Schoenberg and the painting of Schoenberg, is mentioned often in the book, Schoenberg being the painter of the ‘Blue Self-Portrait’ of the title and the book recognisably musically structured, as opposed to employing the range of mundane structural conventions usually forced upon a novel. In any case, he thought, I shall re-use my review for the book I have re-read, there is nothing wrong with that, because the afternoon has worn on, it is growing cool, there is dinner to be made, there are mosquitoes about, I am boring myself. The world will not be worse off for not having a new review from me this week, the world will be better off. Better off without my blather. When all I can write is an aphorism for a calendar it is better not to write, he thought. If anyone wants a review of what I have been reading they can read my old review, the book hasn’t changed. I have changed and my reading has changed, he supposed, but no-one should care about that, if they want a review let them read my old review, but it would be much better if they just read the book, they don’t need me for that. |
>>Lucy Jones on why this forgotten feminist nature writer deserves to be celebrated.
>>Lucy Jones on Losing Eden: Why our minds need the wild (due soon).
>>A woman in the polar museum.
>>Visit Svalbard.
>>We will get your copy to you and soon as the lock-down has been lifted.
Our thoughts are with you as the whole country is in isolation as the best way to reduce the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Please stay home, read books and save lives.
Needless to say, our shop is shut until further notice. You can order books from our website (www.volume.nz) at any time. We will have these delivered to your door as soon as the emergency has been downgraded. We are available for queries, orders and advice via e-mail (books@volume.nz), and by telephone (039700073) and text (0211970002) from the VOLUME isolation hub at home (pictured), Monday—Friday, 10 AM—2 PM; and present on FaceBook and instagram. Book orders coming from overseas are currently very uncertain due to flight disruptions, but we will get your books to you as soon as circumstances allow. Stay safe and stay in touch! Kia ora! Kia kaha!
We will be compiling a bulletin of book-related links, articles and amusements for you twice a week during the Level Four isolation period. You can read the first issue here. If you would like each issue to appear in your e-mail box as soon as it is published, subscribe here. And do send us links you think others may like! | Dead People I Have Known by Shane Carter {Reviewed by STELLA}From the first lines in Shayne Carter’s music memoir, Dead People I Have Known, you are hooked. You are immediately asked to come along for the ride — no preamble or polite introduction. Carter draws you in with his writing — the words leap off the page. Carter, frontman for well-known bands Bored Games, Double Happys, Straight Jacket Fits and Dimmer, takes us on a revealing tour from his childhood in Dunedin, through his musical development and various bands, to his later creative obsessions. Expecting a band-to-band, blow-by-blow account, it is a pleasant surprise to find a mix of chronological autobiography, commentary and creative contemplation. The music industry Carter talks about revolves around the Flying Nun phenomena and the branches that grew from this. The scene that circled around this was one of remarkable change and this memoir gives us a very personal view of this — a window — a wonderfully narrow frame that reveals a personal creative journey and reverberates something about growing up and pushing out in New Zealand, and into the world. While the book is particular in its look at a corner (a rather large corner, mind you) of the New Zealand music scene, and for fans this will be delightful, it is also many other things. It’s about growing up in small-town New Zealand — an experience which many of us share. Carter’s childhood was not a walk in the park. Here is the rough edge of precarity and the burden of alcohol and aggression — and also the flawed but human love and connection between family. Here you also see the results of cultural alienation and loss of language and connection with community. It reveals, through Carter’s own life and attitudes, the changing nature of our culture — what was relevant and okay in the 1970s, and how we have matured in our behaviours in regard to race and gender (although saying that, I did notice that the male musician colleagues are mentioned in full while some of the female band colleagues are quite often only ‘Jane’ — so still a way to go). It is also a fascinating look at what it means and feels like to be a creative obsessive — pushing towards perfection despite — and because of — addiction, oblivion, isolation and just plain pissing people off. For Shayne Carter has what many lead men have — an ego. Carter has an incredible belief in himself and also on the flip side, a doubtfulness or some such emotion, borne out of his rise up and his ride to the bottom. A bottom that is precarious and feels like it still beckons. Carter has a passion for his creative practice and he has applied this passion to Dead People I have Known. It feels like there are no brakes, but in fact, it is a well thought-out and superbly reflective book. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | Falling Awake by Alice Oswald {Reviewed by THOMAS} “find a leaf and fasten the known to the unknown / with a quick cufflink / and then unfasten” The images of nature in Falling Awake act not so much as metaphors for contents of the human mind but rather are points at which nature presses so hard upon the surface of the human that it ruptures that surface and breaks through, or, rather, nature wears away that surface and flows through, subsuming the human, the reverse flow of what is usual in that performance of language that we call metaphor. To observe is to become that which is observed, or, rather, to surrender oneself to the observed, to lose the idea of oneself, at least for that moment, but a moment from which there is in fact no return, and, similarly, in the reading of good poetry there is no defined border between interpretation and one’s own underlying thinking, so to call it, brought to the poem and brought away again altered in some way, not so much by the forces in the poem itself but by its own forces, catalysed in some way by the poem. In Oswald’s poems, water is language is life. Gravity pulls on all, and to surrender to falling, to the earthward pull, is the tendency of water towards the sea, of language towards silence, of life towards death. To resist this pull, to be some thing, to take names, to speak, is to weary and age oneself, to repeat oneself, to erase oneself by seeking to avoid erasure (“the eye is a white eraser rubbing them away”), to bring forward that point at which surrender is inevitable, even though the only alternative to struggle is surrender. And what remains after form has gone? How soon the pull-to-flow, ever present, however resisted, after a moment, a crucial reverse moment, “as if in a broken jug for one backwards moment / water might keep its shape”, tends everything towards its goal. In ‘Alongside Beans’, Oswald shows the vegetal profusion of the beans underscoring the human passage through illness towards death by travelling the path in reverse, progressing from the grave to ominous swellings, to vague symptoms, to widespread growth and profusion. This is time moving backwards, this is not resurrection or rebirth but their opposite, the compensatory movement of vegetal time to that which pulls always at us. It is possible, with great effort, to resist this gravity, this tendency towards death, but only with great effort. ‘Dunt: A poem for a dried-up river’ describes the repeated efforts of a lifeless Roman figurine to (re)produce water from dry rock, “try again”, “try again”, which not only enlivens her, into the groans and pains that are the symptom of enlivenment, but produces a trickle, “go on”, “yes go on”, then a stream, at least a mucky liquid flow, a “fish path with nearly no fish in”, an image of the poeting process of effort and release, some sort of release after some sort of effort. Is the effort to take a name, to make a word, to struggle, only of any sense when seen in the context of the release that succeeds it, the release into namelessness and into silence? Oswald allows her poems to tend towards that silence. She senses an affinity with the cooling, increasingly clumsy and stupid flies, losing, through the increasing cold of the season, their capacity to speak. But what would they say? “what dirt shall we visit today? / what shall we re-visit?” Meaning is worn away by repetition, but this wearing away is its own meaning. We are caught, it seems, in a moment of vertigo, a conflict between free will and gravity, being and release, words and silence. As we are thus disabled, or thus enabled, nature reaches its strangeness towards us more than we can push our ordinariness towards it, at these moments nature takes our humanness from us even to the extent of appropriating our human capacity for speech, though it be our speech, like Oswald’s eldritch image of the vixen who speaks, “it’s midnight / and my life / is laid beneath my children / like gold leaf”, a statement impervious to rational approach, yet somehow right and somehow essential. Nature is not so much wonderful or beautiful, not a reassurance but a threat, always seeking our erasure, to undo us, to bring time to bear upon us, although perhaps this is not something we should feel as a threat, this perhaps is what we long for, our release, our rest, our cessation, and we could perhaps welcome, and even seek, that moment “when something not quite anything changes its mind like me / and begins to fall”. The final, extended sequence, ‘Tithonus’, is marked out in seconds for the 46 minutes before dawn in midsummer, the sounds observed and voiced really more a patterning of silence, the words more a patterning of their absence, the meaninglessness that crumbles away the edges of words at all times, this onward pull of time. The poem is not a progress towards dawn as a moment of birth or rebirth, rather a progression into decrepitude, beyond decrepitude, beyond imbecility, losing the idea of the self, “very nearly anonymous now, to the point where dawn is a longed-for release, heralded with the final words, “may I stop please”. |
>>Read Thomas's review.
>>Offill on "the subtraction of weight" and other interesting matters.
>>Writing the perfect worry novel.
>>Writing Weather turned Offill into an activist.
>>"I no longer felt that it wasn't my fight."
>>Have we chosen to be a fearful society?
>>Order your copy. We'll get this to you as soon as the emergency has been downgraded.
>>Read Thomas's review of Offill's previous novel, Dept. of Speculation.
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The shop is shut until further notice.
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During the Level Four isolation period we will be at home but AVAILABLE FOR QUERIES, ORDERS, RECOMMENDATIONS AND ADVICE VIA E-
Visit us on FaceBook and instagram. Anticipate our newsletter.
Kia ora! Kia kaha!
Interesting times
Our thoughts are with you in the rapidly developing Covid-19 situation. We encourage you to avoid non-essential travel and public contact; consider the well-being of yourself, your family and your friends; wash your hands; and enjoy your books. Reading is absolutely recommended whatever your situation. Next week (from Monday 23 March) we will be OPEN ONLINE (www.volume.nz) at all times, we will be AVAILABLE FOR QUERIES, SALES AND ADVICE VIA E-MAIL (books@volume.nz), and by TELEPHONE (039700073) and TEXT (0211970002) during normal shop hours, and present on FaceBook and instagram.
Let us help you choose your books and have them delivered to your door. Not only will we dispatch by courier daily, we will also be trialling free bicycle delivery to inner Nelson city on the flat. We will NOT be admitting customers to the shop until further notice (we will constantly be reassessing this until the situation becomes clearer) BUT we will be there daily between 9 AM and 11 AM, packing orders and receiving deliveries. Paid orders may be collected from the door during those hours. Contact us for all other arrangements. We are committed to continuing to provide you with good books in difficult times. Kia ora! Kia kaha!
 | Nicotine by Nell Zink {Reviewed by Stella} I had recently read Mislaid by Nell Zink, the story of Peggy who assumes a new identity for herself and her daughter after her very unsuitable marriage breaks apart. Moving to an abandoned hut on the fringe of a small community Peggy, now Meg, plays out her new role in life without a misfire until it all implodes. Mislaid explored what makes a family, what constitutes a relationship and what is real and what is pretentious. Zink’s writing, with its overtones and undertones (plenty of sly digs at cultural norms and hilarious metaphors about relationships), was appealing, fresh and surprising. And I’ve also read Nicotine. Again, here, she explores family and relationships in her own surprising way putting her characters through the paces, not letting up on them and playing with society’s concepts of capitalism, pragmatism and ‘spirituality’. Enter Penny, the unemployed business school graduate, daughter of Norm, the Jewish shaman who is famous for his healing clinics and extreme spiritualism, and Amalia, a Kogi, the young second wife rescued from the poverty of South America, who has become a very successful corporate banker. With parents like this, you know from the beginning that Penny carries some baggage. When her aged father dies, Penny is distraught and is left with more questions than answers about her family. Needing distraction, her family decide that she needs something to do and send her to rescue her grandparents’ long-abandoned home in a dodgy suburb of New Jersey. So, we enter Nicotine, the home of squatter activists whose common cause is the right to smoke. Penny is intrigued by the squatters and attracted to Rob, the very good-looking bicycle mechanic. Rather than throw them out of the house, she finds herself part of their group, developing relationships with all the home dwellers that will change not only her life, but theirs too. Penny, despite her seeming uselessness, becomes the catalyst for change for all, with many hilarious machinations and sly digs at social conformity on all sides along the way. Zink is a ‘naughty’ writer – toying with her reader and her characters, constantly making fun of both in a very appealing and clever way. If you like to look at life a bit sideways then you’ll enjoy her style, playfulness and reflections on people – their gullibility, as well as their backbone. |
 | Gargoyles by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“The catastrophe begins with getting out of bed.” Gargoyles (first published in 1967 as Verstörung (“Disturbance”)) is the book in which Bernhard laid claim both thematically and stylistically to the particular literary territory developed in all his subsequent novels. In the first part of the book, set entirely within one day, the narrator, a somewhat vapid student accompanying his father, a country doctor, on his rounds, tells us of the sufferings of various patients due to their mental and physical isolation: the wealthy industrialist withdrawn to his dungeon-like hunting lodge to write a book he will never achieve (“'Even though I have destroyed everything I have written up to now,’ he said, ‘I have still made enormous progress.’”), and his sister-companion, the passive victim of his obsessions whom he is obviously and obliviously destroying; the workers systematically strangling the birds in an aviary following the death of their owner; the musical prodigy suffering from a degenerative condition and kept in a cage, tended by his long-suffering sister. The oppressive landscape mirrors the isolation and despair of its inhabitants: we feel isolated, we reach out, we fail to reach others in a meaningful way, our isolation is made more acute. “No human being could continue to exist in such total isolation without doing severe damage to his intellect and psyche.” Bernhard’s nihilistic survey of the inescapable harm suffered and inflicted by continuing to exist is, however, threaded onto the doctor’s round: although the doctor is incapable of ‘saving’ his patients, his compassion as a witness to their anguish mirrors that of the author (whose role is similar). In the second half of the novel, the doctor’s son narrates their arrival at Hochgobernitz, the castle of Prince Saurau, whose breathlessly neurotic rant blots out everything else, delays the doctor’s return home and fills the rest of the book. This desperate monologue is Bernhard suddenly discovering (and swept off his feet by) his full capacities: an obsessively looping railing against existence and all its particulars. At one stage, when the son reports the prince reporting his dream of discovering a manuscript in which his son expresses his intention to destroy the vast Hochgobernitz estate by neglect after his father’s death, the ventriloquism is many layers deep, paranoid and claustrophobic to the point of panic. The prince’s monologue, like so much of Bernhard’s best writing, is riven by ambivalence, undermined (or underscored) by projection and transference, and structured by crazed but irrefutable logic: “‘Among the special abilities I was early able to observe in myself,’ he said, ‘is the ruthlessness to lead anyone through his own brain until he is nauseated by this cerebral mechanism.’” Although the prince’s monologue is stated to be (and clearly is) the position of someone insane, this does not exactly invalidate it: “Inside every human head is the human catastrophe corresponding to this particular head, the prince said. It is not necessary to open up men’s heads in order to know that there is nothing inside them but a human catastrophe. ‘Without this human catastrophe, man does not exist at all.'”
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>>Hear Sophy Roberts talk about the book and how she came to write it.
>>'Another Siberia.'
>>Listen to the author's collaboration with Mongolian pianist Odgerel Sampilnorov.
>>The book has a website (with a short film by Michael Turek).
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>>More about Sophy Roberts.
>>Your copy of The Lost Pianos of Siberia: softcover or hardback.
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Eberhardt shows that unconscious bias affects the behaviour even of those who consider themselves fair-minded, and show us how to rectify these prejudices.
"A critically important book." —David Olusoga
For centuries, doctors have struggled to define mental illness. In the 1970s a Stanford psychologist named David Rosenhan and seven other people — sane, normal, well-adjusted members of society — went undercover into asylums around America to test the legitimacy of psychiatry's labels. Forced to remain inside until they'd 'proven' themselves sane, all eight emerged with alarming diagnoses and even more troubling stories of their treatment. Rosenhan's watershed study broke open the field of psychiatry, closing down institutions and changing mental health diagnosis practices. But, as Cahalan's new research shows, very little in this saga is exactly as it seems. What really happened behind those closed asylum doors, and what does it mean for our understanding of mental illness today?
Kim Jiyoung is a girl born to a mother whose in-laws wanted a boy. Kim Jiyoung is a sister made to share a room while her brother gets one of his own. Kim Jiyoung is a female preyed upon by male teachers at school. Kim Jiyoung is a daughter whose father blames her when she is harassed late at night. Kim Jiyoung is a good student who doesn't get put forward for internships. Kim Jiyoung is a model employee but gets overlooked for promotion. Kim Jiyoung is a wife who gives up her career and independence for a life of domesticity. Kim Jiyoung has started acting strangely. Kim Jiyoung is every woman in South Korea.
Coetzee's unrelenting literary rigour and essential humanity have gained him many admirers, and also quite a few friends, some of whom have contributed essays and stories and poems and images to this anthology. Includes Paul Auster, Mariana Dimopulos, Siri Hustvedt, David Malouf, Carrie Tiffany, Ivan Vladislavic, William Kentridge, and Samanta Schweblin.
Bird loves the towering tree that grows in the jungle, but when the season changes she must say goodbye until next year. Then one day Bird wonders: what happens to the tree when she flies away? Another beautifully drawn picture book from the author of The Fox and the Star and The Worm and the Bird.
Humans' relationship with viruses predated and in many ways resulted in our humanity. But what are viruses, how to they behave, what are their goals?
A close relationship between a father and a son becomes a light on life's meaning following the son's sudden diagnosis of terminal disease.
"Dumont’s rich, somber debut plumbs a father-son relationship to meditate on the fictions people create to endure loss. Dumont offers powerful philosophical insight into questions of what people owe one another and the value of subjective belief." —Publishers Weekly
"Nora's exacting, precise, didactic, tried-and-tested, sophisticated-woman-wearing-all-black wisdom is a comfort and a relief. It's why I give this as a present more than other book. I buy it for people so often that I've been known to give girlfriends two copies, one birthday after another." —Dolly Alderton
In a bid to improve ever worsening relations between our two species, pigeon elder Speck Lee Tailfeather has been elected by his peers to reveal to human beings the truth about pigeons' finer sensibilities. It is already a little known fact that pigeons are amongst some of the most intelligent creatures in the world. However, Speck plans to divulge more. Namely that - far from the perceived pests who plague our buildings - pigeons are in fact great admirers and aficionados of architecture. It is of course for this reason that they can be found in great numbers around the most beautiful and significant buildings in the world.
   | {Reviews by STELLA} The very first books that entice young readers are bright, bold and robust — board books. We all have our favourites and some of the classics endure. The Ahlbergs' Peepo and Mem Fox's and Helen Oxenbury's Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes come to mind. Here are a few new ones. From the wonderful Gecko Press, The Wolf and the Fly by Antje Damm. The wolf is hungry. On each page, he chooses something to eat. Here is the wolf on one side of the page eyeing up the shelf on the facing page. There’s a duck, an apple, a fish, a cactus, a car, a fly, a bird and a cat. What will he choose? Turn the page and there is a gap for what has been devoured. Can you see which creature has been a snack? The wolf is licking his lips and he’s still hungry. He chooses again. Turn the page. Maybe the sleepy cat should have been paying more attention! The story carries on until the food shelves are depleted. Guess what is left at the end. The wolf has a rather odd expression on his face. This is a highly enjoyable and very playful book that will keep a child guessing and looking, with plenty of observations to be made and enough language for a tot who is keen on something a little bit humorous. If you and your child like wordplay, Rhyme Cordial by Antonia Pesenti is superb. With its bold images and interactive pages, it is sure to please. Open the page to see the words ‘Fresh orange juice’ and a picture of a very fresh glass of juice complete with stripy straw and orange slice. Fold out the image page to reveal a goose in the glass ready to eat up that orange slice. Now the words are ‘Fresh orange goose’. This is definitely a read-aloud. And as you read on, the words and images together create a witty and absurd dialogue that is sure to delight your word hungry youngster. If you want to introduce the world of art to a small mind, Art This Way by Tamara Shopsin and Jason Fulford is a great first book of contemporary artists. Produced in conjunction with the Whitney Museum of American Art, it features works by several famous names, including Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman and Christo. This caught my eye because it is published by Phaidon (they produce excellent art books), and one of the contributors is Tamara Shopsin, author of Arbitrary Stupid Goal (which is an excellent family memoir and a portrait of a New York community). There are great examples of artworks (sculpture, painting and photography) that will appeal to children. It features interactive elements, lift-the-flap, look-through shapes and fold-out pages; and clear instructive language — look, look under, look in, and look again. |
 | Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute {Reviewed by THOMAS} In biology, the directional response of a plant’s growth, either towards or away from an external stimulus that either benefits or harms it, is termed tropism. Nathalie Sarraute, in this subtly astounding book, first published in 1939, applies the term to her brief studies of ways in which humans are affected by other humans beneath the level of cognitive thought. In these twenty-four pieces she is interested in describing “certain inner ‘movements’, which are hidden under the commonplace, harmless appearances of every instant of our lives. These movements, of which we are hardly cognisant, slip through us on the frontiers of consciousness, in the form of undefinable, extremely rapid sensations. They hide behind our gestures, beneath the words we speak. They constitute the secret source of our existence.” We are either attracted or repulsed by the presence of others, though attraction and repulsion are indistinguishable at least in the degree of connection they effect, we are either benefitted or harmed by others, or both at once (which is much more harmful), but we cannot act upon or even acknowledge our impulses without making intolerable the life we have striven so hard to make tolerable in order to survive. Neurosis may be a sub-optimal functional mode, but it is a functional mode all the same. We wish to destroy but we fear, rightly, being also destroyed. We sublimate that which would overwhelm us, preferring inaction to action for fear of the reaction that action would attract, but we cannot be cognisant of the extent to which this process forms the basis of our existence for such awareness would be intolerable. We must deceive ourselves if we are to make the intolerable tolerable, and we must not be aware that we so deceive ourselves. Such devices as character and plot, which we both apply to ‘real life’ and practise in the reading and writing of novels, are “nothing but a conventional code that we apply to life” to make it liveable. Sarraute’s brilliance in this book, which is the key to her other novels, and which constitutes an object lesson for any writer, is to observe and convey the impulses “constantly emerging up to the surface of the appearances that both conceal and reveal them.” Subliminal both in its observations and in its effects, the book suggests the urges and responses that form the understructure of relationships, unseen beneath the effectively compulsive conventions, expectations and obligations that comprise our conscious quotidian lives. Many of the pieces suggest how children are subsumed, overwhelmed and harmed by adults: “They had always known how to possess him entirely, without leaving him an inch of breathing space, without a moment’s respite, how to devour him down to the last crumb.” Sarraute is not interested here in character or plot, but in the unacknowledged impulses and responses that underlie our habits, attitudes and actions. Each thing emerges from, or tends towards, its opposite. All that is beautiful moves towards the hideous. Against what is hideous, something inextinguishable moves to rebel, to survive. ‘Tropism’ also suggests the word ‘trop’ in French, in the sense of ‘too much’. The ideas we have of ourselves are flotsam on surging unconscious depths in which there is no individuality, only impulse and response. Sarraute’s tropisms give insight into the patterns, or clustering tendencies, of these impulses and responses, and are written in remarkable, beautiful sentences. “And he sensed, percolating from the kitchen, squalid human thought, shuffling, shuffling in one spot, going round and round, in circles, as if they were dizzy but couldn’t stop, as if they were nauseated but couldn’t stop, the way we bite our nails, the way we tear off dead skin when we’re peeling, the way we scratch ourselves when we have hives, the way we toss in our beds when we can’t sleep, to give ourselves pleasure and to make ourselves suffer, until we are exhausted, until we’ve taken our breath away.” |
>>Read Stella's review.
>>Hear Stella's radio review.
>>"I was practising my typing and wrote my first story by accident."
>>An interview with Bae Suah.
>>"A story is only as fixed as the world around it."
>>The book also responds to Sadeq Hedayat's The Blind Owl.
>>What we talk about when we talk about translation (by the book's translator, Deborah Smith).
>>Literary safari.
>>'The dream of a child before she was set on fire.'
>>Click and collect.
>>Other books by Bae Suah.