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An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges Perec (translated by Marc Lowenthal)  {Reviewed by THOMAS}
You’re soaking in it, he thought, not for the first time. Could he quote David Hume, he wondered, and say, All there is is detail and anything else is conjecture, no, he could not quote Hume, at least not accurately, with that particular sequence of words, though of course he could not be certain that Hume did not say or think such a thing. The thought stands though, he thought, or the words that seemed at least to him to convey the thought, not that anyone reading the words would be in a position to judge the distance, if any distance is possible, between the thought and the words he wrote, but this is a whole other story and already he had come unfortunately quite far from that about which he purposed to write, he carefully wrote. All there is is detail, actually, he qualified deliberately, and we use these details to construct the sad narratives of our lives, or happy narratives, why not, though it would be more accurate to say that the narratives choose the details and not the other way round, neurology will back me up on this, he thought, no footnotes forthcoming, the narratives choose the details and not the other way round, he wrote, living and reading are not so different after all, the damage or whatever to the brain is the same whatever other harms may be avoided. Reality is produced by our failure to reach the actual, he wrote, but who he wondered could he pin this quote on. Anybody’s guess. A novel is more or less full of details, if there’s such a thing as more than full, in fact literature is all detail of one sort or another, supposedly all relevant and chosen by the authority, the reader has no business to think that there’s anything more, but also, he thought, no business to think that there isn’t anything more, in any case in the world of detail that we’re soaking in we assume there is more than those morsels of which we are aware, though in fact there may not be and no experiment can relieve us of this possibility, how claustrophobic, but let us assume for the sake of argument, if you want an argument, or for the sake of the opposite of claustrophobia, whatever that is, agoraphobia perhaps, the terrifying infinitude of possibility from which we protect ourselves with stories, to not be overwhelmed, that if we could let down our stories just for a moment we could expose ourselves to other details, unstoried or unstoried-as-yet, which could support quite other stories and all that attaches to those, or whatever. For three days in October in 1974 Georges Perec challenged himself to merely observe whatever passed before him in Saint-Sulpice, recording his observations as fast as he could write, except for when he was ordering coffee or Vichy water or Bourgueil. Observing without presupposing a story gives an equivalence to all details, the ordinary and what Perec calls the infraordinary are full participants in a thoroughly democratic ontology, every detail shines with significance even if it signifies nothing beyond its own existence. Almost it is as hard a discipline to stop a story suggesting itself as it is to suspend the stories we bring, although, I suppose, he thought, any story that suggests itself is in fact a story I have somehow brought with me even if I was unaware that I had it on board, which is interesting, he thought, in itself. No conjectures! Of course Perec cannot write fast enough, time, whatever that is, moves on or whatever it is that it does, the moment is torn away before he can catch much of it, the limits of his capacities affect his ability to observe, he is overwhelmed by his task but not destroyed so not in fact overwhelmed, so many details are suppressed by practicality, there must be some story taking place, the story of the observing I, of the capacities and the limitations that make up Georges Perec perhaps. Why these details and not other details given that we generally assume there to be a limitless amount of details out there, are we to conclude that every attempt at objectivity is autobiography, someone’s story, by necessity, at best. Subjectivity is a product of time, he thought, or produces time, whatever that is, the progression of our attention through a certain set of details, the constraining force that suppresses all but the supporting details, the readable details or at least the ones that we read, in either literature or life, the subjectivity that burdens us with personhood and other what we could call spectres of the temporal. He couldn’t get all the infraordinary down, he wrote, referring to Perec, Perec made an attempt at exhausting a place in Paris but his attempt was doomed to fail, just as it was revealing possibilities which made it a success it failed, due to time, due to the particular set of limitations that passes in this instance for Perec, he couldn’t get more of the infraordinary down without stopping time, without removing himself or at least seeming to, without taking a place, a small place, perhaps of necessity a fictional place but I’m not sure of this, without taking a place and truly exhausting it, stopping time, recording every infraordinary detail and watching them vibrate with the potential for unrealised story, without in other words sitting down and writing, soon after writing this book, his masterwork of detail, Life, A User’s Manual, he wrote.
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 

In a world in which we are blown from place to place like dandelion seeds, what does it mean to belong? Where or what is home? Where are we from? Are these things up to us to decide, or are they dictated to us by culture and politics? In DANDELIONS, this week's Book of the Week, Thea Lenarduzzi pieces together four generations of her family's migrations between Italy and England, and finds that seemingly unremarkable lives are full of information that provides deep insight into our endless struggle to reconcile our individual and collective lives. 
>>Where do we come from? What ae we? Where are we going? 
>>Migration, cooking, living. 
VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 NEW RELEASES

Complete Poems by James K. Baxter, edited and with an introduction by John Weir            $200
Stunning and unsurpassable, this monumental 4-volume slip-cased edition contains over 3000 poems, half of which have not been previously published. Weir, a poet, friend and confidant of Baxter, has achieved the Herculean task of sorting these into a coherent order, noting where poems have been reworked or repurposed, their possible inspirations and influences, and Baxter’s own thoughts about his work. Baxter’s poetry is rich with imagery and mythology, with themes of nature, religion, social commentary and human frailty. It ranges from the spiritual to the obscene, from simple children’s rhymes and witty epigrams to epic ballads and sophisticated modernist works. He claimed the purpose of art was ‘to provide a healthy and permanent element of rebellion’, and that ‘poetry should contain moral truth’. Especially in his later years, many of his poems railed against injustice and oppression, and gave voice to the destitute and downtrodden. He was well aware of his many human failings, and explored these within his poems as well.
The Longcut by Emily Hall            $30
The narrator is an artist who doesn't know what her art is. As she gets lost on her way to a meeting in an art gallery, walking around in circles in a city she knows perfectly well, she finds herself endlessly sidetracked and distracted by the question of what her work is and how she'll know it when she sees it. Her mental peregrinations take her through the elements that make up her life: her dull office job where she spends the day moving items into a 'completed' column, insomniac nights in her so-called studio (also known as her tiny apartment), encounters with an enigmatic friend who may or may not know her better than she knows herself. But wherever she looks she finds only more questions—what is the difference between the world and the photographed world, why do objects wither in different contexts, what is Cambridge blue—that lead her further away from the one thing that really matters. An extraordinary feat of syntactical dexterity and comic ingenuity, The Longcut is ultimately a story of resistance to easy answers and the place of art and the artist in the world.
"Emily Hall's The Longcut has produced its own inimitable effect. I think of a mayor I read about who advocated digging a hole so big there's no alternative to filling it. Emily Hall's digging (for art) is bedraggled and ecstatic. It makes its mark and I am helplessly subsumed in it still. Her Longcut is like an Artist's Way for bad kids." —Eileen Myles
Remainders of the Day: More diaries from The Bookshop, Wigtown by Shaun Bythell            $33
The third of Bythell's hilarious and almost-too-incisive volumes of the diaries he compiles from behind the counter in his now-famous second-hand bookshop. Every entry rings true, from unforgettable customers and their unforgettable comments, to unusual volumes, to the difficulties and joys of running your own bookshop in an increasingly corporatised and impersonal world. 
Boulder by Eva Baltasar (translated by Julia Sanches)           $33
Working as a cook on a merchant ship, a woman comes to know and love Samsa, a woman who gives her the nickname 'Boulder'. When Samsa gets a job in Reykjavik and the couple decides to move there together, Samsa decides that she wants to have a child. She is already forty and can't bear to let the opportunity pass her by. Boulder is less enthused, but doesn't know how to say no—and so finds herself dragged along on a journey that feels as thankless as it is alien. With motherhood changing Samsa into a stranger, Boulder must decide where her priorities lie, and whether her yearning for freedom can truly trump her yearning for love.
"Exquisite, dark and unconventional, Eva Baltasar turns intimacy into a wild adventure." —Fernanda Melchor
Invasion of the Spirit People by Juan Pablo Villalobos (translated by Rosalind Harvey)          $35
Juan Pablo Villalobos's fifth novel adopts a gentle, fable-like tone, approaching the problem of racism from the perspective that any position as idiotic as xenophobia can only be fought with sheer absurdity. In an unnamed city, occupied by an unnamed world power, an immigrant named Gastón makes his living selling exotic vegetables to eateries around the city. He has a dog called Kitten, who's been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and a good friend called Max, who's in a deep depression after being forced to close his restaurant. Meanwhile, Max's son, Pol, a scientist away on a scientific expedition into the Arctic, can offer little support. Gastón begins a quest, or rather three: he must search for someone to put his dog to sleep humanely; he must find a space in which to open a new restaurant with Max; and he must look into the truth behind the news being sent back by Pol: that human life may be the by-product of an ancient alien attempt at colonization . . . and those aliens might intend to make a return visit.
"This is a book about xenophobia and racism and the conflicted tug between isolation and community. It makes a fine - and deliciously strange - addition to Villalobos's already grand personal canon. Wrought with tenderness, wit, and a wonderful sense of absurdity, Villalobos' latest novel is a triumph." —Kirkus
Take a Bite! Eat your way around the world by Aleksandra and Daniel Mizielinski         $50
"Food glorious food! Eat your way around the world in this tasty, giant-sized book which explores the food, recipes and cultural traditions from twenty-six different countries. Take a Bite is the work of talented graphic artists Aleksandra and Daniel Mizielinski, the creative married couple behind the bestselling Maps, and its 116 pages of food of every taste and description are guaranteed to make mouths water and tummies rumble. Packed full of fascinating facts, recipes and cultural traditions, this cornucopia of deliciousness takes youngsters (and their parents!) on an entertaining and feast-filled adventure full of delectable food and cookery marvels. Where do corn, wheat and potatoes come from? What have people in Turkey been eating for centuries? Learn how to make Polish pancakes, Vietnamese pancakes, Brazilian pralines and Hungarian lecso. Be a guest at a Moroccan feast, sail along a Vietnamese floating market and indulge in the haute cuisine of France's master chefs. As well as discovering a host of new delicacies, readers will also learn about their remarkable history and cultural roots along the way. Lavishly and colourfully illustrated throughout, designed in an easy-to-read format, and with a text translated by Agnes Monod-Gayraud, this beautiful bonanza book will capture children's imaginations and is the perfect gift for food lovers of any age." —Lancaster Guardian 
From Dinaz Aunty's incredible tamarind and coconut fish curry, lamb stewed with cinnamon and Hunza apricots, to baked custards infused with saffron and cardamom, Parsi cuisine is a rich fusion of Persian and Indian influences: unique and utterly delicious. Farokh Talati gathers together a selection of classic Parsi recipes from his travels through India and time spent in the kitchen with family, revealing them here for you to discover and enjoy at home. Recipes include: Parsi omelette Charred sweetcorn and paneer salad Persian scorched rice Parsi kheema Kedgeree - a Parsi version Prawn Patio Mango poached in jaggery and saffron Cardamom doughnuts.
Jackdaw by Tade Thompson           $33
In this shocking and at times darkly comic novel, a psychiatrist hired to write a short piece on Francis Bacon becomes obsessed with the artist, his life, and the characters who surrounded him. As he becomes consumed with the need to understand Bacon, and to create his own art, his grip on reality becomes increasingly tenuous, and he is haunted by disturbing figures. This short novel explores how the passion needed to create art can also destroy the artist.
"By turns disturbing and hilarious, Jackdaw gets closer to Bacon's appalling truths about humanity and the treacherous flesh that embodies it than any non-fictional work could do ... Thompson's prose, contaminated by Bacon's unflinching view of the human animal, makes for vital, unsettling reading." —Will Maclean
Exposed: The Greek and Roman body by Caroline Vout          $55
The popular conception of the perfection of Classical bodies eptomised in white marble is entirely a modern myth. Not only were Classical sculptures highly coloured, this remarkable book shows that Greek and Roman bodies were ailing, imperfect, diverse, and responsible for a legacy as lasting as their statues. Vout taps into the questions that those in the Greek and Roman worlds asked about their bodies: Where do we come from? What makes us different from gods and animals? What happens to our bodies, and the forces that govern them, when we die? She also reveals the surprising actions people often took to transform their bodies — from sophisticated surgery and contraception to body oils, cosmetics and early gym memberships.
"An extraordinary book that stopped me in my tracks again and again. Filled with insights, surprises and asides that draw on a breath-taking array of sources from the distant past to the present day. A triumph from start to finish." —Peter Frankopan
Capitalism has come, in the twenty-first century, to dominate nearly every sphere of life, from ecology and race to the organisation of care and the practice of politics. In this urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, and from the devaluing of care work to racial injustice. These crisis points all come to a head in the perfect storm of Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the kind of resistance we must build to stop capital from cannibalising our whole world. What we need, she argues, is a broad and wide-ranging socialist movement that can recognise capital’s appetite—and starve it to death.
"Nancy Fraser has produced the most elegant theory yet of capitalism in our age - capitalism not in the narrow economic sense, but capitalism in the sense of a total omnivore, a system that cannot stop devouring everything around it, destroying the lives of people and nature. This is Marxist theory for our age of crisis - and, we shall hope, of reckoning." —Andreas Malm
The Foghorn's Lament: The vanishing music of the coast by Jennifer Lucy Allan           $30
What does the foghorn sound like? It sounds huge. It rattles. It rattles you. It is a booming, lonely sound echoing into the vastness of the sea. When Jennifer Lucy Allan hears the foghorn's colossal bellow for the first time, it marks the beginning of an obsession and a journey deep into the history of a sound that has carved out the identity and the landscape of coastlines around the world, from Scotland to San Francisco. Within its sound is a maritime history of shipwrecks and lighthouse keepers, the story and science of our industrial past, and urban myths relaying tales of foghorns in speaker stacks, blasting out for coastal raves. An odyssey told through the people who battled the sea and the sound, who lived with it and loathed it, and one woman's intrepid voyage through the howling loneliness of nature.
"A truly unusual and strangely revealing lens through which to view music and history and the dark life of the sea." —Brian Eno
"Now that so many things can be - and are - recorded, I had forgotten that sound could also become extinct. The massive melancholic sound of the foghorn - the sound of safety and loss - is one of these and this colorful and detailed requiem tells the many interlocking stories of people who love it and try to preserve it. This has become one of my favorite books." —Laurie Anderson
"A wonderful way to get up close and very personal with the foghorn - a perfect example of the power and beauty of industrial music." —Cosey FanniTutti
Chathams Resurgent: How the Islanders overcame 150 years of misrule by Hugh Rennie             $60
In 1990 those living on Chatham Islands/ Rekohu/ Wharekauri faced crisis. Annexed to New Zealand by a London proclamation, the Islands had experienced 150 years of New Zealand control. Years of muddlement, some good intentions, financial waste, exploitation and theft, and failure to deliver democratic rights and basic infrastructure. The after-effects of Rogernomics had produced a government decision to 'walk away'. Such infrastructure as existed would be abandoned, with the Islanders left to save themselves, or fail and leave. How could it have come to this? The first part of this book details the improbable constitutional history of the Islands to 1990. It includes gunship visits to enforce rule; support of Maori for Tohu, Te Whiti, and Parihaka pacifism; a revolt where the magistrate’s authority crumbled to nothing; and many more remarkable events. In 1990, Islanders rose to the challenge of their new independence from Wellington. Their independent community co-operative, the Chatham Islands Enterprise Trust, soon flourished. Today it operates electricity, ports, shipping, and other companies; uses a portfolio of fishing quota to support on-Island fishers, and supports private Island businesses.
Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A—Z of literary persuasion by Louise Willder         $33
It's good to judge a book by its cover. Drawing on her 25 years writing blurbs for Penguin books, Louise Willder explores the art, anecdote and history of the words that only take a few seconds to read but can determine a book's fate. This illuminating and joyful compendium is about blurbs at their very best and worst. It is also about cover design, movie taglines, adverts, quotes, puns, the creative process, writers from Austen to Orwell and much more. It answers questions such as: Why should adjectives generally be murdered? Which author hated blurbs? Is it ever okay to give away the ending? Why should you never start a blurb with 'When'? Can blurbs be sexist? The story of blurbs is the story of our needs and desires as readers; about who we are and want to be.
The Museum of the Wood Age by Max Adams           $65
Beginning with an investigation of the material properties of various species of wood, The Museum of the Wood Age investigates the influence of six basic devices - wedge, inclined plane, screw, lever, wheel, axle and pulley - and in so doing reveals the myriad ways in which wood has been worked throughout human history. From the simple bivouacs of hunter-gatherers to sophisticated wooden buildings such as stave churches; from the decorative arts to the humble woodworking of rustic furniture; Max Adams fashions a lattice of interconnected stories and objects that trace a path of human ingenuity across half a million years of history.

Hothouse Earth: An inhabitant's guide by Bill McGuire            $25
Bill McGuire, Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards, explains the science behind the climate crisis, painting a blunt but authentic picture of the sort of world our children will grow old in, and our grandchildren grow up in; a world that we catch only glimpses of in today's blistering heatwaves, calamitous wildfires and ruinous floods and droughts. Bleak though it is, the picture is one we must all face up to, if only to spur genuine action- even at this late stage - to stop a harrowing future becoming a truly cataclysmic one.

The Po: An elegy for Italy's longest river by Tobias Jones             $43
Jones travels the length of the river gathering its stories: its battles, crimes, characters, cuisines, histories, industries and inventions. He visits towns made famous for their sporting legacy, birthplaces of the greatest Italian writers and composers and rediscovers Italy's unusual industries and agricultures; from the marble mines of Paesana that provided the raw materials for the Renaissance to the paddy fields of risotto rice at Chivasso. At the Po's delta is an astonishing nature reserve: a wetland swamp of 380 square kilometres and 450 different lakes.

Clouds Over Paris: The wartime notebooks of Felix Hartlaub, 1940—41 by Felix Hartlaub (translated by Simon Beattie)             $33
The writer Felix Hartlaub died in obscurity at just 31, vanishing from Berlin in 1945. He left behind a small oeuvre of private writings from the Second World War: fragments and observations of life from the midst of catastrophe that, with their evocative power and precision, would make a permanent place for him in German letters. Posted to Paris in 1940 to conduct archival research, Hartlaub recorded his impressions of the unfamiliar city in notebooks that document with unparalleled immediacy the daily realities of occupation. With a painter's eye for detail, Hartlaub writes of the bustle of civilians and soldiers in cafes, of half-seen trysts during blackout hours and the sublime light of Paris in spring. Appearing in English for the first time, Clouds Over Paris is a unique testament to the persistence of ordinary life through disaster.



VOLUME BooksNew releases

We wish you a relaxing and enjoyable holiday period, good health and good books. 

Read our latest newsletter: BOOKS @ VOLUME #310 (23.12.22)

Order from our website or send us an e-mail anytime — we will be back on board from the 4th of January and will dispatch your orders and reply to your e-mails then.   

VOLUME BooksNewsletter

 

THE VOLUME GIFT SELECTOR — THE PERFECT BOOKS FOR BOOK-LOVERS
If you're not sure what to give this season, choose from our 100 recommendations! If the perfect gift isn't there, browse the rest of our website (we have thousands of interesting titles) — or just e-mail us or phone us and we will help you choose. If you like, just send us a list of recipients and we will find the perfect books. Let us know if you'd like them gift-wrapped (and choose a card!). We will courier them anywhere. There's still time!

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[Not a review by STELLA.]

Anticipation is a good thing. I’m currently reading Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, but you’ll have to wait for the review as I’m still mid-stride. When the craziness of the next week is over, I’ll be looking to my stack of books — the ones I didn’t quite get to in 2022 — as well as some fresh tomes.
On the pile and waiting: 
Roni Horn’s Island Zombie: Iceland writings. This was a gift back in March — it’s too good to rush, so hence it’s been waiting for a few days of uninterrupted reading.
Anne Carson’s H of H Playbook. Ditto.
Books I’ve had my eye on and will be adding to my pile:
Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao, and The Mirror and The Palette by Jennifer Higgie.
And fiction! There’s always so many to choose from, but here are two that will make good summer companions: Harrow by Joy Williams and Dark Earth by Rebecca Stott.
If, like many, you found yourself bereft of reading time this year, here are some titles that you might have missed and should be finding their way to your reading pile tout suite:
The amazing Ali Smith — read anything and everything by her! — Companion Piece is her latest. Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House — so on-target, Worn: A people's history of clothing by Sofi Thanhauser — is fascinating, and Olga Ravn's The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century — inventive and thought-provoking.


VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


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99 Interruptions by Charles Boyle  {Reviewed by THOMAS}

1.   I sit down to write a review of Charles Boyle’s 99 Interruptions, but I no sooner put finger to keyboard than I urgently need the right word to describe the book’s appealing smallness. Is it a duodecimo or a sextodecimo, I wonder. I count the leaves, check the binding, trawl the internet. This is an out-of-date question, I realise eventually, and not really an interesting question anyway.
2.   To any given task the potential interruptions are infinite, but they do seem to fall into two categories: interruptions with an external source (family members, a cat fight in the back garden, a caller from Porlock) and interruptions with an internal source (useless questions about book format, random alerts from some malfunctioning mental appointments calendar, concerns about the underlying cause of various pains, the endless rephrasing of an imperfect conversation). Not that I really think there is a distinction between an internal and an external, I don’t believe in either after all, but it helps to halve infinity sometimes. 
3.   I will just interrupt the practical demands of my life to read this book, I thought, but the practical demands of my life, so to call them and so to call it, repeatedly interrupt my reading, even though the book is short. Two sets of interruptions grapple with each other over my attention. There are perhaps only interruptions (and interruptions to the interruptions).
4.   Sometimes the interruptions come even before whatever it is that they interrupt, in which case they are perhaps not interruptions to that activity but interruptions to the preconditions of that activity, to the preparations that are I suppose themselves some sort of activity but not identifiable as any activity in particular. Is most of my life these days lived in this state of velleity? 
5.   The first time I sat down to read read this book, 99 Interruptions, I was interrupted by finding a surprising quotation on the first page I came to, and then by finding that I had to check the source and context of that quotation.
6.   Without interruptions there is no story, Boyle shows. The interruptions are the story. An interruption disrupts the natural tendency to oversimplification (which is indistinguishable from nonexistence). 
7.   An interruption is the assertion of the particular against the pull of the general and the abstract. It is the prime quality of fiction. 
8.   An interruption breaks a continuum and causes two realities to mingle. I frequently find this irritating but at least my irritation is real irritation.  
9.   Is the fragment the only authentic contemporary literary form?
10.   Boyle remarks that, although most fiction is written in the past tense, a reader or critic invariably relates the narrative to someone else as happening in the present, “as if everything … is still happening and there’s no end in sight.” I hadn’t thought about this before, and thinking about it now is interrupting my progress through the book. 
11.   Fiction interrupts time by the introduction of a completely other thread of time, allowing the reader to jump between the two as inclination or interruption dictates. Before it is anything else, fiction is a sin against time, an interruption or eruption.
12.   In most situations I tend to feel that my presence is an interruption of whatever would otherwise be the case. This is probably not a very healthy way to think, but I cannot find a way in which it is not true. 
13.   I am actually writing a review, if you can call it that, but I am interrupted by that little repeated stifled sound coming from the headphones that S is wearing so that I am not interrupted by the music she is listening to. I won’t interrupt what she is busy doing over there on account of this; it is about time I accepted that the membrane between writing and real life (so to call it) is always entirely permeable. No wonder I never get anything done. 
14.   Would it be possible to welcome every interruption into the work itself? To create a work entirely of interruptions? (Like Boyle’s!)
15.   Be that as it may (does this construction even make sense?), the work is ultimately interrupted by its deadline. 

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 NEW RELEASES

Spadework for a Palace by László Krasznahorkai (translated by John Batki)            $38

Spadework for a Palace bears the subtitle 'Entering the Madness of Others' and offers an epigraph: "Reality is no obstacle." Indeed. This high-octane obsessive rant vaults over all obstacles, fueled by the idées fixes of a "gray little librarian" with fallen arches whose name—mr herman melvill—is merely one of the coincidences binding him to his lodestar Herman Melville ("I too resided on East 26th Street...I, too, had worked for a while at the Customs Office"), which itself is just one aspect of his also being "constantly conscious of his connectedness" to Lebbeus Woods, to the rock that is Manhattan, to the "drunkard Cowley" and his Lunar Caustic, to Bartok. And with this consciousness of connection he is not only gaining true knowledge of Melville but also tracing the paths to "a Serene Paradise of Knowledge." Driven to save that palace (a higher library he also serves), he loses his job and his wife leaves him, but "people must be told the truth" THERE IS NO DUALISM IN EXISTENCE. And his dream, in fact, will be "realized, for I am not giving up: I am merely a day-laborer, a spade-worker on this dream, a herman melvill, a librarian from the lending desk, currently an inmate at Bellevue, but at the same time—may I say this?—actually a Keeper of the Palace."
"Krasznahorkai establishes his own rules and rides a wave of exhilarating energy. Apocalyptic, visionary, and mad, it flies off the page and stays lodged intractably wherever it lands." —Publishers Weekly
"Breathtaking and hypnotic, this unorthodox novella boldly merges fiction, travelogue and literary criticism into one 96-page sentence." —Thúy Ðinh, NPR
>>A Box built in the abyss. 

Stream Light by William Direen, with seven artworks by Scott Flanagan             $20
Bill Direen's latest book of poems begins with his life in Dunedin after his shift there from the small rural town of Middlemarch (described in companion volume Seasons. He then takes us on a read through the suburbs and CBD of Dunedin ('Skirting'), with visits to regional Otago and Canterbury (Oamaru, Tekapo, Cave and Pukaki). But behind much of the book lies the city both Direen and artist Scott Flanagan once called home — Christchurch. Flanagan's strangely vivid domestic artworks were completed after his recovery from cancer and its treatment. Both Direen and Flanagan have more than estrangement from their home cities to deal with. Their works deal with grief and the steady accumulation of bereavement the longer one lives, the passage of time, illness and treatment, not forgetting health and, as with Seasons, rhythms of nature and the effects of local light.
>>Christchurch, 1982. 
3 Streets by YokoTawada (translated by Margaret Mitsutani)        $37
Yoko Tawada takes a walk on the supernatural side of the street in these three stories. In 'Kollwitzstrasse', as the narrator muses on former East Berlin's new bourgeois health food stores, so popular with wealthy young people, a ghost boy begs her to buy him the old-fashioned sweets he craves. She worries that sugar's still sugar--but why lecture him, since he's already dead? Pure white kittens and a great Russian poet haunt 'Majakowskiring': the narrator who reveres Mayakovsky's work is delighted to meet his ghost. And finally, in 'Pushkin Allee', a huge Soviet-era memorial of soldiers comes to life. Each of these stories opens up into new dimensions the work of this writer.
"Tawada's stories agitate the mind like songs half-remembered or treasure boxes whose keys are locked within." —The New York Times
"Tawada is reminiscent of Nikolai Gogol, for whom the natural situation for a ghost story was a minor government employee saving up to buy a fancy coat, the natural destiny of a nose to haunt its owner as an overbearing nobleman." —Rivka Galchen
Architecture at Home: Houses for New Zealanders to live, work and play by Debra Smith             $80
Permanent homes and occasional retreats, small houses on compact urban sites and larger ones in remote landscapes, new builds and extensive alterations are captured by New Zealand's leading architectural photographers and written about in a thought-provoking way.
Blood on the River: A chronicle of mutiny and freedom on the Wild Coast by Marjoleine Kars            $45
On February 27, 1763, thousands of slaves in the Dutch colony of Berbice (in present-day Guyana) launched a massive rebellion. Surrounded by jungle and savannah, the revolutionaries fought for an entire year, and came very close to succeeding. Kars reconstructs this pivotal event, drawing on over nine hundred interrogation transcripts and other documents collected by the Dutch when the rebellion finally collapsed, which were subsequently buried in archives. Blood on the River provides a rare in-depth look at the political vision of enslaved people at the dawn of the Age of Revolution.
One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset by Shimon Adaf (translated by Yardenne Greenspan)          $35
At age thirty, Elish Ben Zaken has found himself in a life he never imagined. As a university student, Elish was an esteemed rock-music critic for local newspapers; now, disenchanted with an increasingly commercialised music scene, he has joined a private investigation agency where he is content to be a "clerk of small human sins"—a finder of stolen cars and wayward husbands. But when a disconcertingly amiable detective asks him to look into the suicide of an infamous philosophy professor—and the police file contains unexpected information about the already-solved murder of Dalia Shushan, a celebrated singer and songwriter—Elish's curiosity is piqued. And when violence begins to dog the steps of his investigation, he knows that dangerous secrets are at hand. Haunted by the ghost of Dalia, a true artist with a transformative voice whose dark brilliance Elish was one of the first to recognize, he must face the long-buried trauma of his own past in order to unravel the intertwining threads of two lives, and their ends.
Diary of an Invasion by Andrey Kurkov                $37
A collection of Andrey Kurkov's writings and broadcasts from Kyiv. Kurkov has been a consistent satirical commentator on his adopted country of Ukraine. His most recent work, Grey Bees, is a dark foreshadowing of the devastation in the eastern part of Ukraine in which only two villagers remain in a village bombed to smithereens. The author has lived in Kyiv and in the remote countryside of Ukraine throughout the Russian invasion. 

What Is History, Now? How the past the the present speak to each other edited by Suzannah Lipscomb and Helen Carr           $30
What stories are told, and by whom, who should be celebrated, and what rewritten, are questions that have been asked recently not just within the history world, but by all of us. Featuring a diverse mix of writers, this book covers topics such as the history of racism and anti-racism, queer history, the history of faith, the history of disability, environmental history, escaping imperial nostalgia, hearing women's voices and 'rewriting' the past. 

Over the Rooftops, Under the Moon by JonArno Lawson, illustrated by Nahid Kazemi             $35
Alone with himself, even among his flock, a young bird finds an unexpected connection in the eyes of a little girl. He begins to wonder about the nature of life: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be a bird? Swept up in his exploration of the human world, he doesn't notice that his flock has already migrated south for the season.
>>Look inside!
>>Also by JonArno Lawson: Sidewalk Flowers.
Tiakina te Pā Harakeke: Ancestral knowledge and tamariki wellbeing edited by Leonie Pihama and Jenny Lee-Morgan       $45
This book is a collaboration of knowledge and insight from a wide range of Māori researchers from all over Aotearoa and across multiple disciplines. The authors explore childrearing approaches and models grounded in kaupapa Māori and Māori knowledge that encourage wellbeing outcomes for children and incorporate ancestral knowledge into practices for the contemporary world.
The Passenger: California              $33
A fascinating assemblage of writing, photography and reportage conveying contemporary life and issues in California. 

Home Is an Island: A writer's tribute to New Zealand's islands by Neville Peat         $40
During Peat's fifty-year writing career, he visited many of the islands within Aotearoa’s marine realm, from the tropics to Antarctica. This insightful book, part memoir, part adventure travel, history and nature conservation, is about these islands, including Stewart Island/Rakiura, Anchor Island in Tamatea/Dusky Sound, Kāpiti Island and Tiritiri Matangi in the Hauraki Gulf. Further afield, the book also covers Ross Island in Antarctica, Enderby Island in the subantarctic Auckland Islands, the Chatham Islands and the New Zealand dependency of Tokelau.
Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli (translated by Christian MacSweeney)        $23
 In New Mexico, she is a young mother. Stuck in a marriage that's deteriorating, unable to shake the feeling that her house and belongings are trapping her, she is increasingly drawn to reflect on who she was before: when she worked as an editor in New York, rarely in her own apartment, always seeking new places to call home. As she folds time, seeking to inhabit her past, she begins to encounter ghosts. Time and again, a solitary man appears — Gilberto Owen — a lesser known poet of the Harlem Renaissance, and an obsession of her youth. He is living on the edge of Harlem's social scene at the beginning of the Great Depression, anticipating death, and tracing spectral visions of his own - among them, a young woman, travelling alone, on the subway. A meditation on time, hauntings, and the elusive, transitory identities we assume.
Losing Ourselves: Learning to live without a self by J.L. Garfield           $45
Drawing on Indian and East Asian Buddhism, Daoism, Western philosophy, and cognitive neuroscience, Garfield shows why it is perfectly natural to think you have a self--and why it actually makes no sense at all and is even dangerous. He explains why shedding the illusion that you have a self can make you a better person.

The Book of Roads and Kingdoms by Richard Fidler         $45
When Richard Fidler came across the account of Ibn Fadlan — a tenth-century Arab diplomat who travelled all the way from Baghdad to the cold riverlands of modern-day Russia — he was struck by how modern his voice was, like that of a twenty-first century time-traveller dropped into a medieval wilderness. On further investigation, Fidler discovered this was just one of countless reports from Arab and Persian travellers of their adventures in medieval China, India, Africa and Byzantium. This book tells the story of the medieval wanderers who travelled out to the edges of the known world during Islam's Golden Age; an era when the caliphs of Baghdad presided over a dominion greater than the Roman Empire at its peak, stretching from North Africa to India. Imperial Baghdad, founded as the 'City of Peace', quickly became the biggest and richest metropolis in the world. In a flourishing culture of science, literature and philosophy, the citizens of Baghdad were fascinated by the world and everything in it. Inspired by their Prophet's commandment to seek knowledge all over the world, these traders, diplomats, soldiers and scientists left behind the cosmopolitan pleasures of Baghdad to venture by camel, horse and boat into the unknown. Those who returned from these distant foreign lands wrote accounts of their adventures, both realistic and fantastical.
Classic Paperbacks Jigsaw Puzzle by Richard Baker        $40
A 1,000-piece puzzle featuring favourite editions of modern classics.
>>A closer look. 
>>In the same series: In the Bookstore. 








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Looking, Writing, Reading, Looking edited by Georgi Gospodinov   {Reviewed by STELLA} 


The place where words and art intersect is always interesting. In this collection, writers take on contemporary works at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, and the results are various and wonderfully unexpected. These are not theory-heavy nor filled with art speak. They are critiques of a literary nature — personal responses through the observant eyes of each writer: the looking (and the looking again); and the thoughts, memories or ideas which spring from these observations. Here you will find writers you have read, others you have heard of (but maybe not encountered their writings) and some that haven’t crossed your radar yet. There are memoir pieces, poems, more direct descriptions and interpretations, fictional interviews or reportage, and creative short stories. The writing sometimes takes us further into the particular artwork. Other pieces edge us towards a deeper understanding of elements springing from the work, with cascading ideas that will lead you to future interpretations. Others reveal more about the writer, taking the reader into a more internal world with an experience revealed. Experiences that sit alongside their chosen artwork tell us something about them as well as the power of art to spark this exploration. What draws us to a particular artwork? Why does one painting or sculpture capture us — ask us to stop, to look, to read — while another will hardly leave an imprint: we will see, but merely glide by? Writers are keen observers and this writer/art project at the gallery is refreshing as it does not require us to ‘know’ or have some insider information about the objects, which are interacted with rather than described. Each artwork is photographed and sits alongside the written text, and each author has a portrait taken, in the same place, by the water’s edge, revealing something quite special about each. All 26 writers had been attendees at the museum’s writers’ festival. In this collection, Anne Carson cleverly pulls together an unofficial transcript (with notes) of contemporary philosophers on Ragnar Kjartansson’s 'Me and My Mother'. Colm Toibin explores 'La Double Face' of Asger Jorn with his assured and thoughtful considerations of all that can be held in a face — vulnerability, ambiguity and energy. Domenico Starnone introduces us to 'Museo del Prado 5' by photographer Thomas Struth, expounding on the meta meta nature of this painting/photography/writing exposure. Yoko Tawada quietly, in her storytelling style, asks us to contemplate the role of our lives while viewing Nobuo Sekine’s 'Phases of Nothingness'. Guadalupe Nettel reveals how the 'On Stone Sculptures' by Henry Heerup call to her with a delightful short essay that perfectly embraces the artist’s relationship with stone. And Delphine de Vigan, as she reencounters Louise Bourgeois’s 'Spider Couple', reminds us that our relationship with artworks change, our interpretations are sometimes unintentionally faulty (driven by a desire for an artwork to speak to us of our own experience), and the artist’s intention is not necessarily at the forefront of our understanding — and that is all fine! All the contributions have something to recommend them and there are sharp as well as emotional responses. An interesting collection (handsomely produced), worth having on your shelf for the writing and the selected artworks.

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


 >> Read all Thomas's reviews. 


































































 


The Very Last Interview by David Shields   {"Reviewed" by THOMAS}

So, what makes you want to write a review of David Shields’s new book, The Very Last Interview? 

Then why are you writing one?

Every week? Whose idea was that?   

Surely at your age, you shouldn’t be so bound by obligation or by expectation, or whatever you call it?

Yes, but do you really care what these readers might think, and do you even believe that there are such people? Aren’t you being altogether a bit precious? 

Do you really think that this helps to pay the mortgage, I mean that this makes a direct and measurable contribution towards paying your mortgage? Or even an indirect and unmeasurable but still valuable contribution towards paying your mortgage? 

Well, what else would you be doing?

Surely you’re joking? 

Okay, we’ve got a bit off the track there. I will reframe my first question. What makes you think that you are able to write a review of David Shields’s new book? 

Don’t you think your humility is a bit mannered?

The Very Last Interview is a book consisting entirely of questions that interviewers have asked David Shields over the years, omitting his answers, assuming he will have answered probably at least most of the questions, and your review, if we can call it that, of this book also consists of a series of questions ostensibly directed at you but without your answers, if indeed there were answers, which is less certain in your case than in the case of David Shields. Is this, on your part, a deliberate choice of approach, and, if so, is it justifiable? 

Do you really believe that a review written in imitation of, or in the style of, the work under review inherently reveals something about that work, even if the review is badly written, or should your approach rather be attributed to laziness, stylistic insecurity, or creative bankruptcy? 

Has it ever occurred to you that the supposedly more enjoyable qualities of your writing are actually nothing more than literary tics or affectations, and, furthermore, that it might be these very literary tics and affectations that prevent you from writing anything of real literary worth? 

Do you think that, by removing his input into the original interviews but retaining the questions, David Shields is attempting to remove himself from his own existence, or merely to show that our identities are always imposed from outside us rather than from inside, or that we exist as persons only to the extent that we are seen by others? Is this, in fact, all the same thing? 

What do you mean by that statement, ‘We are defined by the limits we present to the observations of others’?

What do you mean by that statement ‘There is no such thing as writing, only editing,’ and how does that relate to Shields’s work? 

Do you think that David Shields, in this book as in the much-discussed 2010 Reality Hunger, sees the individual as an illusion, a miserable fragment of what is actually a ‘hive mind’ or collective consciousness, and that ‘creativity’, so to call it, is another illusion predicated on this illusion of individuality?

You don’t?

What do you think David Shields would have answered, when asked, as he was, seemingly in this book, “But what is the role of the imagination in this ‘post-literature literature’ that you envision?” and how might this differ from the answer you might give if asked the same question? 

Shields was asked if he had written anything that couldn’t be interpreted as ‘crypto-autobiography’, but don’t you think the salient question is whether it is even possible to write anything that couldn’t be interpreted as crypto-autobiography? 

Is a perfectly delineated absence, such as David Shields approximates in The Very Last Interview, in fact the most perfect portrait of a person, even the best possible definition of a person, as far as this is possible at all? 

But do you actually have a personal opinion on this? 

Do you think then that you, like Shields, like us all perhaps, are, in essence, a ghost?

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

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Former best friends who built their careers writing about a single work of art meet after a decades-long falling-out. One of them, called to the other's deathbed for unknown reasons by a 'relatively short' nine-page email, spends his flight to Berlin reflecting on Dutch Renaissance painter Count Hugo Beckenbauer and his masterpiece, Saint Sebastian's Abyss, the work that established both men as important art critics and also destroyed their relationship. A darkly comic meditation on art, obsession, and the enigmatic power of friendship, Saint Sebastian's Abyss stalks the museum halls of Europe, feverishly seeking salvation, annihilation, and the meaning of belief.
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