SNOWBALL POETRY COMPETITION. Celebrate 25 years of Aotearoa’s National Poetry Day! Write a 25-line poem. The first line must consist of one letter; the second must consist of two letters; 
the third, three; and so on, adding a letter to the line length every line for 25 lines. Send the poem to us by 19 August. The winner will be announced on 26 August 2022 (and will receive a prize).
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 | A Perfect Wonderful Day with Friends by Philip Waechter {Reviewed by STELLA} In need of a sweet and cheering book? Look no further than A Perfect Wonderful Day with Friends. This delightful book by Philip Waechter is a perfect antidote to our grey skies and rainy days. Raccoon is bored — an exciting book isn’t doing the trick nor some jumping exercises (even though he looks very flexible). And then he has an idea — he’ll bake an apple cake — perfect. But he has no eggs! A quick visit to Fox is on the cards. Fox has hens, so Fox will have eggs. But Fox is busy trying to fix a leak and can’t reach high enough. A ladder is needed! Raccoon knows who will have one. Badger has everything! (When you get to Badger’s house have a look around his sitting room — what a lot of enticing things). Badger is busy with a crossword puzzle and they need someone brainy help. Who to turn to? Bear, of course. Off they go, Raccoon, Fox and Badger, walking together, enjoying the sunny day and the blackberries en route. When they get to the woods, Bear isn’t home, but Crow knows where she is. To the river they all go, to find Bear waiting for the fish to bite. Yet patience isn’t high on the agenda, and it’s hot. Fox thinks she can catch a fish — alas no, but a swim with friends is even better. Suffice to say the puzzle gets solved, the ladder retrieved, the eggs taken home and the cake is baked. Enough for all! I love this semi-circular domino-style storytelling — where one action leads to another and builds a community of characters and interactions. This is doubly good in A Perfect Wonderful Day with Friends because the outcomes are always positive — the solutions to problems are simply resolved through cooperation and goodwill. Charmingly written, this is a good read-aloud with its repetitive structure and snippets of humour and the right amount of text to keep young ones engaged. The beautiful illustrations make it a joy to look at and the more looking you do, the more you will see. In the best tradition of picture books, the pictures and words complement each other perfectly. Waechter’s drawings are delicate and precise (he’s a fan of Jean-Jacques Sempé), capturing the scenes with quiet detail while simultaneously evoking the individuality of his characters with wit and emotive quirks. It’s an evocative style that enriches the story, capturing the wonderfulness of this perfect day with friends. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | The Iliac Crest by Cristina Rivera Garza (translated by Sarah Booker) {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Disappearance is contagious. Everyone knows this.” What is known, what is written, what is uttered, what is achieved immediately begins to be eroded through that onslaught of words, thoughts and experiences that constitutes what we think of as the passage of time. To hold on to one’s identity is, in such circumstances, a neurotic tendency, the invocation of a threat. “We are always prepared for the appearance of fear. We lie in wait for it. We invoke it and reject it with equal stubbornness.” The narrator in The Iliac Crest is a doctor in a hospital, situated on the border of land and sea as it is on the border of life and death, which expedites the deaths of incurables, completing, as thoroughly as possible, their disappearances as individuals. Disappearance is here both a medical and a political condition. After working at the hospital for 25 years, the doctor’s home is effectively colonised, almost simultaneously, by an ex-lover, who immediately falls ill and becomes effectively inaccessible to the doctor for the rest of the novel, and by a woman claiming to be the (actual) Mexican author Amparo Dávila, who is writing 'the story of her disappearance' in a notebook. From the evening of their intrusion upon his previous routine, from the intrusion upon his habitual life of both memory and imagination, the doctor’s world begins to become destabilised, ultimately threatening his identity and sanity. Language is the way in which borders and distinctions are maintained, but language is also the way in which borders may be destabilised and subverted. The book displays constant tension between language and bodies, between the conceptual and the physical, between construction and erosion. There is an emphasis on borders and distinctions, especially spurious borders and distinctions, and on the subversion of these borders and distinctions. On a conceptual field there is more distance within a category than between one category and another, but the distance within categories is invisible to those intent upon borders between them. But all borders are arbitrary and therefore spurious: male/female, reality/fiction, desire/fear, fascination/repulsion, eros/abjection - these pairings are not dichotomies but overlays, more similar than they are different. Maintaining these distinctions is a compulsive act that reveals the neurotic bases of language. Rivera Garza has a lot of fun undermining distinctions, dragging the contents of her novel over them in one direction or another, or, especially, leaving them suspended on the polyvalent point of maximum ambiguity, “this threshold where one state ended and the next is unable to begin.” The characters show themselves to be, and discover themselves to be, copies, false copies, copies separated from their originals by time or by the meanings attributed to them by others. Amparo Dávila, transgressing the border between fiction and actuality, is forced to defend her authenticity and authorship when made aware of another, older, ‘truer’ Amparo Dávila (who eventually reveals herself to be dead, to be Disappearance itself). The narrator is told by the women who are staying in his house that they know his secret: that he too is a woman. He strenuously denies this but is compelled to keep checking his genitals to reassure himself, increasingly unconvincingly he tries and fails to defend his masculinity, and eventually ceases to deny her femaleness. The narrator is pushed by the events of the novel into an ambiguous zone in which distinctions do not apply, a zone which is both hazardous and liberating. “We lived on terrain that bore only a very remote resemblance to life. Our irreality and our lack of evidence not only constituted a prison but also a radical form of freedom.” |
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 | The Dominant Animal by Kathryn Scanlan {Reviewed by THOMAS}
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| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Notes from an Island by Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä {Reviewed by STELLA} Every summer Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä escaped to Klovharun, their island. In Notes From an Island, Jansson gathers memories, notes, snippets of writing about the place and their antics on this barren remote skerry, and Pietilä’s atmospheric illustrations contrast with the seaman Brunström’s no-nonsense diary entries. This is a lovely book, from its attractive cover which features a delightfully drawn map by Jansson’s mother, to the paper stock and layout. It’s enticing in all its tactile qualities as well as its content. Jansson had been heading to the Finnish archipelago most of her life with her family. They would year-on-year visit a small island with charming beaches and a small wood, but each year the number of guests increased as they invited more friends and family to share in this summer pleasure. In her late 40s, Tove craved an island of her own. Somewhere she and Tuulikki could be alone to focus on their creative work, away from interruption and the pressures of life back on the mainland. Klovharun was rocky and inhospitable — just right for being away from it all, and for the two women an invigorating environment with the sea in all directions. Arriving on Klovharun they pitched a tent and, shortly after, met Brunström — a taciturn seaman — who would help them build the cabin. The initial step — finding a suitable flat space. A flat space that needed to be carved out by dynamiting a massive boulder. A dynamic action for a dynamic landscape. Yet Tove and Tuulikki liked their yellow tent so much that they continued to sleep in it and reserved the cabin for work and for guests. How do you claim an island in the Finnish Gulf? You place a notice on the door of a shop at the nearest local settlement stating your intention to lease the land and hope that most people will place a tick in the Yes column rather than the No. And hence a quarter-century relationship with the island began. In Jansson’s writing you get a sense of refuge, but not idle respite. Living on the island between April and October required stamina and industry — fishing, maintenance of the cabin and boat, keeping the various machines ticking over, collecting driftwood from the sea as well as the surrounding islands and rolling rocks. These were productive times — the women would work on their respective art and writing projects, and sometimes collaborate on a project. Pietilä recorded their experiences in this natural wilderness on Super8 film which was later made into a documentary. This book provides a thoughtful exploration of their island life and their relationship with nature. Tove Jansson’s writing is both philosophical and straightforward (it is never lyrical or florid). giving the land, the sea and the weather their primacy. Pietilä's 24 illustrations — some etchings, others watercolour washes — are muted in their ochre monotones, but hold the power of the sky and water in them as though at any moment these elements might cast away the moment and shrug off these human interventions. |
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 | Down from Upland by Murdoch Stephens {Reviewed by STELLA} It’s Wellington — Upland Road to be precise. It’s the civil service with all its quirks, and it’s a magnifying glass on a millennial couple. Yes, this will make you squirm, especially if you are on the cusp of forty, a public servant with a teen at Wellington High, feeling a bit like a cog in the wheel, looking for a little excitement but not too much drama. The geographic parameters may be set, but the relationship map is all over the place in Murdoch Stephens’s satire about a millennial couple, Jacqui and Scott, with a teenage son. Said teenage son, Axle, has recently transferred from Wellington Boys to High after a miserable couple of years and is hoping for a kinder reception. Happily, he strikes up a friendship with Pete which gets him a foot in the door of that much-wanted teen accessory — a group. And the group’s okay — the kids are fine — some drinking, a science experiment with low-alcohol beer (hilariously supplied by Dad, Scott), budding relationships (wonderfully innocent), a scrap, and a general shrugging off of their various parents and adult authority — especially the heart-to-hearts and the morality tales. So far, so normal. But watch out for his ever-so-liberal parents. They are having a spell of relationship dullness, and when Jacqui’s friend gifts her a ‘hot’ young Brazilian, Joāo, it’s all on for a try at an 'open relationship'. Scott is keen — he’s got a slight wandering eye and tends to the obsessive in his infatuations. There’s a colleague at work who he’s keen on. His instrument is blunt though, and it is with a cringing inevitability that his attempt at striking up a relationship with this young woman will be a disaster and a tad creepy. Stephens handles this harassment with the right balance — such an awkward encounter at the bar, it's blackly funny — yet Scott’s not off the hook with his inappropriate behaviour. HR has something to say about it, and it’s not what you might expect. The satire keeps rolling and the new guy on the scene is keeping Scott occupied. He’s not the only one being bedded. Jacqui’s quite pleased with her Brazilian lover, although you get the impression that there’s not too much else that interests her. Asking no questions of the lovely Joāo will deliver her no lies. And why is she looking at Rothman, her boss, in that way? As things heat up in the bedroom and at work, both Jacqui and Scott find themselves in various pickles — some of their own making. Axle takes the various visits from his parents’ love interests in his stride — he’s got better things to fixate on. Down from Upland is excellent satire, it clips along at a fine pace. You will like the teens, but you might find the adults a little empty-headed. Uncomfortably microscopic and very funny. |
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 | The Weak Spot by Lucie Elven {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Even on a blue day you could tell this sky had a knack for breaking into storms,” she writes, she someone, she the pharmacist-to-be, as she arrives in the Alpine town, a town anyway that seems like an Alpine town, high up, reached only by funicular railway, there’s a certain steepness involved, the town is depopulating, certainly you have the feeling that the only people living there are those you are aware of at any given time and that soon they too may be gone. When the narrator arrives she remembers visiting the town as a child in the company of her uncle and her mother at a time when her mother was ill but her uncle did not yet know that she was ill. From what has she run away to come here this time, or what has she otherwise left if it is not the case that she has run away? She takes a job as a pharmacist at the pharmacy owned by a Mr Malone, it seems she was a pharmacy student before she came here, though the main tasks of a pharmacist, at least in Mr Malone’s pharmacy, are not the main tasks of a pharmacist as we know them although certainly allied to those tasks. Mr Malone “believed that a pharmacist’s role was to enhance the locals’ potential by listening carefully,” to allow others to tell their stories, to reduce one’s presence to that of a listener only, to abnegate oneself, “the more absent I seemed, the more they talked,” she says, having a natural talent for the work of disappearing, a natural talent for undoing what we ordinarily think of as existing. “It occurred to me,” she says, “that there was something reassuring about the obviously dangerous Mr Malone to someone like me who worried all the time.” He is corrosive to her idea of herself; she wants to be corroded. Mr Malone eventually leaves the pharmacy to her and stands for mayor, though he hardly leaves, she supports his campaign, there hardly seems to be another candidate, Mr Malone becomes mayor, still he is the centre of his coterie of occupationally defined men, he is the centre of some void sucking at her always. Was there really a wolf-beast once in the town that ate little girls? Somehow it’s a fable but not exactly a fable, more a dream, everything is described with the same degree of portentious detail and the same lack of overall shape as an account of a dream, a dream in this case from which the dreamer, the young pharmacist, cannot awaken, from which waking will never be possible. Within this dream that the dreamer does not realise is a dream, the dreamer struggles to differentiate the actual from her reveries, the stories get away from her, “I was easy to derail,” she says. “I derailed myself on my own. Unless I was busy I was distracted by daydreams,” though she and we struggle and fail to tell what is actually the case and what is dreamed, the same residue remains in either case, the same damage done. “After I articulated this sort of reverie I felt a sense of revulsion,” she says. “I had started to feel as though I wouldn’t wake up, was scared I would disappear.” All stories are told stories, but the compounding of detail here erodes knowledge rather than constructs it, all detail is a subtraction, a relinquishment, written and rid of, the shape of things is lost, the self annulled. “I experimented with how little I could let pass over my face,” she says. All memory and identity are stripped away by iteration, vacancy expands, pushing everything out of sight and into non-existence, if there is such a place to be pushed. Even the descriptions eventually become descriptions primarily of absence: “The room had no decoration, nothing personal, no photographs of strict-looking characters standing in front of wrought-iron gates,” the narrator nothing more than a mirror: “I also was a reflective surface,” no longer sure even how to present herself before the customers of the pharmacy, “walking around in a long pause, an ellipsis,” her escape from herself complete, she has become the phantom she has unconsciously always sought to become. “All feelings would pass if I didn’t engage with them,” she says. “I have a weak spot, I had taken to telling people, a magic phrase that I used to trick my way out of an emotional hole,” out of existing, now ready to leave even this, the town of her attenuation. When her uncle comes to collect her he remembers nothing, he is a stranger to the town, he too has lost his history, he too has become nothing more than a label on an absence. And we are left with nothing, nothing that is except an oddly-shaped void, mountain air, sublime sentences, surprising details, words, phrases, oddness coming at us like something beautiful, sharp and cold. On the iterative level, Elven’s book has something of the disconcerting clarity of the work of Fleur Jaeggy, but more as if a work of brilliance had been translated a little awkwardly and inaccurately and somehow enhanced by the process no matter what was lost, though if this is a translated work, and perhaps all works are translated works in the way in which this work is a translated work, it is not a work translated between languages but between minds if there are such things as minds. Elven describes a new employee at the pharmacy as “perching his opinions at the end of pointed lips,” and how, during a storm, the storm promised perhaps by blue skies mentioned earlier, “we saw slanted people walking along the grass, trees gesticulating like conjurors, the wind throwing water off the river.” We may forget the sentences but we are left with the strange effect upon us of these sentences, just as we may forget a dream but still be left strangely affected. |
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When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà (translated by Mara Faye Lethem) $33
When Domenec — mountain-dweller, father, poet, dreamer — dies suddenly, struck by lightning, he leaves behind two small children, Mia and Hilari, to grow up wild among the looming summits of the Pyrenees and the ghosts of the Spanish civil war. But then Hilari dies too, and his sister is forced to face life's struggles and joys alone. As the years tumble by, the inhabitants of the mountain — human, animal and other — come together in a chorus of voices to bear witness to the sorrows of one family, and to the savage beauty of the landscape. This remarkable book is lyrical, mythical, elemental, and ferociously imaginative.
"When I Sing, Mountains Dance made me swoon. Translated with great musicality and wit, it is rich and ranging, shimmering with human and non-human life, the living and the dead, in our time and deep time; a fable that is utterly universal, deadly funny and profoundly moving." —Max Porter
"This novel about, well, everything, is fine-tuned to a kind of astonished and astonishing connectivity that's an act of revolutionary revitalisation up against the odds of any despairing." —Ali Smith
>>The first crack in the eggshell.
>>Witches, mushrooms, collective voices.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | The Candy House by Jennifer Egan {Reviewed by STELLA} Be careful what you wish for. A catch-cry of our present time is a desire to find meaningful connection, to be part of a community within which we are specific and individual. Yet in reality we are more likely to find ourselves awash in a social media sea. In Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House, the desire for authenticity and connection is high and the clever Bix Bouton has the key. Bix is rich and successful. A fast-thinker graduate, his start-up, Mandala, took off, but now he’s out of ideas and craving something of the magic of his younger self. Infiltrating an academic discussion group where they are prying open the social anthropologist Miranda Kline’s theory Patterns of Affinity, kicks off the lightbulb for Bix. And the beautiful cube, Own Your Unconscious, is born. Get yourself a beautiful cube and download your memory — your every moment and feeling: either just for yourself so you can revisit childhood or recall a moment; or upload for the wider community — to The Collective Consciousness — so memories can be shared and information found (sound familiar?). Now Bix is richer, more successful, a celebrity who’s a regular at The White House and loved by many. Life is good. Yet at the edges there is doubt. And not everyone is a believer. There are eluders, those that wipe themselves to escape — pretty much losing their identity for freedom from the technological behemoth. There is Mondrian, an organisation that sees ethical problems within this set-up and offers a way out for those who feel trapped. This novel has connections to her Pultizer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad. There are characters who exist in both, and actions that are revisited by the curious, in particular the next generation who live with the consequences. There’s the anonymity of the urban and the claustrophobia of suburban landscapes, alongside the openness of the desert and the endless possibilities of the sea. All these landscapes play their role in the interior landscapes (the minds) of the diverse array of characters. This is a novel that does not stay still. There is no straight line in The Candy House. Egan writes explosive short pieces, chapters which connect, disconnect and reconnect (sometimes) in surprising ways. Characters are related in familial and relationship lines, or by deed, or the outsourced memory of deeds. Some we meet once, others on several occasions — they are in turn in all their guises: adults, children, parents, siblings. This may sound disjointed, and at times the narrative may lead you astray, but the thematic pulse runs continuously through. As in her earlier Goon Squad, Egan plays with structure and different narrative styles. There is the 'Lulu the Spy' chapter told in bite-sized dispatch commands — a tensely addictive reading experience; there is a brilliantly cutting e-mail conversation chapter where the narcissistic desires of the correspondents will make you wince; and there is the mathematically genius 'i, Protaganist' in which a man tries to realise his crush through obsessive statistical analysis. Knitted seamlessly into this wonderland of ideas are the concrete desires, fears and concerns of various humans, all achingly searching for authenticity within an illusionary world. An energetically clever novelist, Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House gives you sweet treats, as well as a whirlwind of sugary highs and lows. Put down the cube and pick up The Candy House. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
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Otherlands: A world in the making by Thomas Halliday $40
An exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the Earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours. Travelling back in time to the dawn of complex life, and across all seven continents, Halliday gives us a mesmerizing up close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant. Halliday immerses us in a series of ancient landscapes, from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with its colonies of giant penguins, to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. We visit the birthplace of humanity; we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known; and we watch as life emerges again after the asteroid hits, and the age of the mammal dawns. These lost worlds seem fantastical and yet every description—whether the colour of a beetle's shell, the rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air—is grounded in the fossil record. Otherlands is an imaginative feat: an emotional narrative that underscores the tenacity of life—yet also the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, including our own. To read it is to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous and familiar.
>>Also available as a nice hardback, $54.
