VOLUME FOCUS : Katherine Mansfield
A selection of books from our shelves.
Strange Bliss: Essential Stories
The Garden Party: And Other Stories
Our Book of the Week is the much-anticipated new novel from Eleanor Catton, the author of the Booker-winning The Luminaries. BIRNAM WOOD is an eco-thriller that holds a mirror to our current political and environmental predicaments and the range of forces — personal, societal, global — that complicate our positions in and responses to those circumstances and to each other. A landslide in a small South Island community collides a group of guerrilla gardeners with an American billionaire in circumstances of increasing existential threat in this gripping novel that echoes Macbeth in its exposure of the darker workings of the human psyche and the corrosivity of power.
"I wanted the novel to explore the contemporary political moment without being itself partisan or propagandistic. I wanted it to be fateful but never fatalistic, and satirical, but not in a way that served the status quo. Most of all, though, I wanted it to be a thriller, a book of action and seduction and surprise and possibility, a book where people make choices and mistakes that have deadly consequences, not just for themselves, but for other people, too. I hope that it’s a gripping book, a book that confides in you and makes you laugh and – crucially, in a time of global existential threat – that makes you want to know what happens next." – Eleanor Catton
"Birnam Wood is electric: a spectacular book. It has the pace and bite of a thriller. It has an iron-willed morality. It feels like the product of astonishing skill, and formidable love. It’s literally, physically breathtaking." – Katherine Rundell
"What I admired most in Birnam Wood was the way that the rapid violence of the climax rises, all of it, out of the deep, patient, infinitely nuanced character-work that comes before. If George Eliot had written a thriller, it might have been a bit like this." — Francis Spufford
"Birnam Wood is terrific. As a multilayered, character-driven thriller, it's as good as it gets. Ruth Rendell would have loved it. A beautifully textured work—what a treat." — Stephen King
"Mysterious and marvelously unpredictable, Birnam Wood had me reading the way I used to as a kid―curiously, desperately and as if it was the whole world. Catton connects to the natural and unnatural ways in which we try to control our environments, our impulses and one another. A spectacular novel, conjured by a virtuoso." — Rivka Galchen
>>Precise entanglement.
>>"A great book."
>>Plotted novels and psychological immersion.
>>Every good novel is a warning.
>>"A great book."
>>Plotted novels and psychological immersion.
>>Every good novel is a warning.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
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| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | One-Way Street by Walter Benjamin (translated from German by Edmund Jephcott) {Reviewed by THOMAS} What form would literature take if it was the expression of the organising principles of an urban street rather than those of literary tradition? Between 1923 and 1926, Walter Benjamin wrote a series of unconventional prose pieces in which “script - after having found, in the book, a refuge in which it can lead an autonomous existence - is pitilessly dragged out into the street by advertisement and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos.” On the street, text, long used to being organised on the horizontal plane in a book, is hoisted upon the vertical plane, and, having been long used to a temporal arrangement like sediment, layer upon layer, page upon page, text is spread upon a single plane, requiring movement from instance to instance, walking or, ultimately, scrolling across a single temporal surface, a surface whose elements are contiguous or continuous or referential by leaps, footnotes perhaps to a text that does not exist, rather than a structure in three dimensions. Even though Benjamin did not live to see a scroll bar or a touch screen or a hyperlink he was acutely aware of the changes in the relationship between persons and texts that would arrive at these developments.“Without exception the great writers perform their combinations in a world that comes after them,” he wrote, not ostensibly of himself. As we move through a text, through time, along such one-way streets, our attention is drawn away from the horizontal, from the dirt (the dirt made by ourselves and others), away from where we stand and walk, and towards the vertical, the plane of desire, of advertising, towards the front (in all the meanings of that word), towards what is not yet. It is not for nothing that our eyes are near the top of our bodies and directed towards the front, and naturally see where we wish to be more easily than where we are (which would require us to bend our bodies forwards and undo our structural evolution). In the one-way street of urban text delineated by Benjamin, all detail has an equivalence of value, “all things, by an irreversible process of mingling and contamination, are losing their intrinsic character, while ambiguity displaces authenticity.” The elitism of ‘the artwork’ is supplanted by the vigour of ‘the document’: “Artworks are remote from each other in the perfection [but] all documents communicate through their subject matter. In the artwork, subject matter is ballast jettisoned by contemplation [but] the more one loses oneself in a document, the denser the subject matter grows. In the artwork, the formal law is central [but] forms are merely dispersed in documents.” What sort of document is Benjamin’s street? It is a place where detail overwhelms form, a place where the totality is subdued by the fragment, where the walker is drawn to detritus over the crafted, to the fumbled over the competent, to the ephemeral over the permanent. The street is the locus of the personalisation and privatisation of experience, its particularisation no longer communal or mediated by tradition but haphazard, aspirational, transitory, improvised. Each moment is a montage. Writing is assembled from the fragments of other writing. Residue finds new value, the stain records meaning, detritus becomes text. In the one-way street, particularities are grouped by type and by association, not by hierarchy or by value. The here and now of the street is filled with referents to other times and other places. The overlooked, the mislaid, the abandoned object is a point of access to overlooked or mislaid or abandoned mental material, often distant in both time and space, memories or dreams. Objects are hyperlinked to memories but are also representatives of the force that drives those experiences into the past, towards forgetting. But the street is the interface of detritus and commerce. Money, too, enables contact with objects and mediates their meaning. New objects promise the opportunity of connection but also, through multiplication, abrade the particularity of that connection. Benjamin’s sixty short texts are playful or mock-playful, ambivalent or mock-ambivalent, tentative or mock-tentative, analytic or mock-analytic, each springing from a sign or poster or inscription in the street, skidding or mock-skidding through the associations, mock-associations, responses and mock-responses they provoke, eschewing the false progress of narrative and other such novelistic artificialities, compiling a sort of archive of ways both of reading a street as text and of writing text as a street, a text describing a person who walks there. |
NEW RELEASES
The much-anticipated new novel from the author of the Booker-winning The Luminaries is an eco-thriller that holds a mirror to our current political and environmental predicaments and the range of forces — personal, societal, global — that complicate our positions in and responses to those circumstances and to each other. A landslide in a small South Island community collides a group of guerrilla gardeners with an American billionaire in circumstances of increasing existential threat in this gripping novel that echoes Macbeth in its exposure of the darker workings of the human psyche and the corrosivity of power.
"I wanted the novel to explore the contemporary political moment without being itself partisan or propagandistic. I wanted it to be fateful but never fatalistic, and satirical, but not in a way that served the status quo. Most of all, though, I wanted it to be a thriller, a book of action and seduction and surprise and possibility, a book where people make choices and mistakes that have deadly consequences, not just for themselves, but for other people, too. I hope that it’s a gripping book, a book that confides in you and makes you laugh and – crucially, in a time of global existential threat – that makes you want to know what happens next." – Eleanor Catton
Memorial, 29 June by Tine Høeg (translated from Danish by Misha Hoekstra) $40
"I wanted the novel to explore the contemporary political moment without being itself partisan or propagandistic. I wanted it to be fateful but never fatalistic, and satirical, but not in a way that served the status quo. Most of all, though, I wanted it to be a thriller, a book of action and seduction and surprise and possibility, a book where people make choices and mistakes that have deadly consequences, not just for themselves, but for other people, too. I hope that it’s a gripping book, a book that confides in you and makes you laugh and – crucially, in a time of global existential threat – that makes you want to know what happens next." – Eleanor Catton
"Birnam Wood is electric: a spectacular book. It has the pace and bite of a thriller. It has an iron-willed morality. It feels like the product of astonishing skill, and formidable love. It’s literally, physically breathtaking." – Katherine Rundell
"What I admired most in Birnam Wood was the way that the rapid violence of the climax rises, all of it, out of the deep, patient, infinitely nuanced character-work that comes before. If George Eliot had written a thriller, it might have been a bit like this." — Francis Spufford
"Birnam Wood is terrific. As a multilayered, character-driven thriller, it's as good as it gets. Ruth Rendell would have loved it. A beautifully textured work — what a treat." — Stephen King
"Mysterious and marvelously unpredictable, Birnam Wood had me reading the way I used to as a kid―curiously, desperately and as if it was the whole world. Catton connects to the natural and unnatural ways in which we try to control our environments, our impulses and one another. A spectacular novel, conjured by a virtuoso." — Rivka Galchen
>>Precise entanglement.
>>"A great book."
>>Plotted novels and psychological immersion.
>>Every good novel is a warning.
>>"A great book."
>>Plotted novels and psychological immersion.
>>Every good novel is a warning.
Asta is invited to a memorial. It’s been ten years since her university friend August died. The invitation disrupts everything – the novel she is working on and her friendship with Mai and her two-year-old son – reanimating longings, doubts, and the ghosts of parties past. Soon a new story begins to take shape. Not of the obscure Polish sculptor Asta wanted to write about, but of what really happened the night of August’s death, and in the stolen, exuberant days leading up to it. The story she has never dared reveal to Mai. Moving between Asta’s past and present, Memorial, 29 June is a novel about who we really are, and who we thought we would become. It’s a novel about the intensity with which we experience the world in our twenties, and how our ambitions, anxieties, and memories from that time never relinquish their grasp on how we encounter our future.
>>Read an extract.
>>On translating the book.
A memoir of a turbulent time — and a chess game that broke all the rules. In 1989, two married women met by chance. They instantly hit it off, but little did they know that their new relationship would turn their lives upside-down. This is the true story of that relationship, which threatened to cost them their children, families and friends and forced them to reassess their sexuality, identity and heritage. Along the way, one — an acclaimed biographer — was to explore the power of objects, while the other — a painter — was to follow her whakapapa back to the first Maori king, Te Wherowhero. Against the odds, the couple’s new life together became rich in laughter, travel, unusual encounters, investigations into Viking raids, the Kingitanga movement, the death of a New Zealand artist, chicken claws, ghosts, eccentrics and much more.
Renato Cisneros's great-great-grandmother Nicolasa bore seven children by her long-term secret love, who was also her priest, raising them alone in nineteenth century Peru. More than a century later, Renato, the descendent of that clandestine affair, struggles to wring information about his origins out of recalcitrant relatives, whose foibles match the adventures and dalliances of their ancestors. As buried secrets are brought into the light, the story of Nicolasa's progeny unfolds, bound up with key moments in the development of the Republic of Peru since its independence.
Julio and Emilia, two Chilean students, seek truth in great literature but find each other instead. Like all young couples, they lie to each other, revise themselves, and try new identities on for size, observing and analysing their love story as if it's one of the great novels they both pretend to have read. As they shadow each other throughout their young adulthoods, falling together and drifting apart, Zambra spins a formally innovative, metafictional tale that brilliantly explores the relationship among love,art, and memory.
"The 'last truly great book' I read has to be Alejandro Zambra's Bonsai. A subtle, eerie, ultimately wrenching account of failed young love in Chile among the kind of smartypant set who pillow-talk about the importance of Proust. A total knockout.' —Junot Diaz
"Every beat and pattern of being alive becomes revelatory and bright when narrated by Alejandro Zambra. He is a modern wonder." —Rivka Galchen
Belgium has long forged a distinctive culinary identity through its seasonal feasts and festivals. In this follow-up to her internationally lauded Pride and Pudding and Oats in the North, Wheat from the South, Regula Ysewijn turns her attention to the baking traditions of this unique country — the place of her birth. Regula uses history and art to guide the reader through a fascinating period, and introduces us — through her stunning photography and recipes — to the region's rich baking culture. There are waffles and winter breads for the 12 days of Christmas, pancakes for Candlemas and Carnival, pretzels for Lent, vlaai and fried dough for Kermis and all the special sweet treats that make up Saint Nicholas and Saint Martin. With this beautifully presented collection of timeless recipes, Ysewijn reveals the origins of her country's food culture and brings a little Belgian baking into every home.
>>Look inside.
>>Look inside.
A book about romantic love, Eros the Bittersweet is Anne Carson's exploration of the concept of eros in both classical philosophy and literature. Beginning with, It was Sappho who first called eros 'bittersweet.' No one who has been in love disputes her. Carson examines her subject from numerous points of view, creating a lyrical meditation in the tradition of William Carlos Williams's Spring and All and William H. Gass's On Being Blue. Epigrammatic, witty, ironic, and endlessly entertaining, Eros is an utterly original book.
"What we learn from Eros the Bittersweet while being spun alive by its brilliance is that its author is a philosopher of much cunning and an agile reader, a scholar with a mind as fresh as a spring meadow, no dust anywhere on her." —Guy Davenport
There is a line that stretches from the northernmost tip of Denmark to where the Wadden Sea meets Holland in the south-west. Dorthe Nors, one of Denmark's most acclaimed contemporary writers, grew up on this line; a native Jutlander, her childhood was spent among the storm-battered trees and wind-blasted beaches of the North Sea coast. In A Line in the World, her first book of non-fiction, she recounts a lifetime spent in thrall to this coastline — both as a child, and as an adult returning to live in this mysterious, shifting landscape. This is the story of the violent collisions between the people who settled in these wild landscapes and the vagaries of the natural world. It is a story of storm surges and shipwrecks, sand dunes that engulf houses and power stations leaching chemicals into the water, of sun-creased mothers and children playing on shingle beaches. Nicely written.
"A beautiful, melancholy account of finding home on a restless coast. In Dorthe Nors's deft hands, the sea is no longer a negative space, but a character in its own right. I loved it." —Katherine May, author of Wintering
In 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbours. The Black Death was a human tragedy that abruptly halved entire populations and caused untold suffering, but it also brought about a cultural and economic renewal on a scale never before witnessed. The World the Plague Made is a panoramic history of how the bubonic plague revolutionised labour, trade, and technology and set the stage for Europe's global expansion. James Belich takes readers across centuries and continents to shed new light on one of history's greatest paradoxes. Why did Europe's dramatic rise begin in the wake of the Black Death? Belich shows how plague doubled the per capita endowment of everything even as it decimated the population. Many more people had disposable incomes. Demand grew for silks, sugar, spices, furs, gold, and slaves. Europe expanded to satisfy that demand—and plague provided the means. Labour scarcity drove more use of waterpower, wind power, and gunpowder. Technologies like water-powered blast furnaces, heavily gunned galleons, and musketry were fast-tracked by plague. A new 'crew culture' of 'disposable males' emerged to man the guns and galleons. Setting the rise of Western Europe in global context, Belich demonstrates how the mighty empires of the Middle East and Russia also flourished after the plague, and how European expansion was deeply entangled with the Chinese and other peoples throughout the world.
In the historic tradition of calendar stories and calendar illustrations, author and film director Alexander Kluge and visual artist Gerhard Richter have composed a collection of thirty-nine stories and thirty-nine snow-swept photographs for the darkest Northern month of the year. In stories drawn from modern history and the contemporary moment, from mythology, and even from meteorology, Kluge toys as readily with time and space as he does with his characters. In the narrative entry for December 1931, Adolf Hitler avoids a car crash by inches. In another, we relive Greek financial crises. There are stories where time accelerates, and others in which it seems to slow to the pace of falling snow. In Kluge's work, power seems only to erode and decay, never grow, and circumstances always seem to elude human control. Accompanied by the ghostly and wintry forest scenes captured in Gerhard Richter's photographs, these stories have an alarming density, one that gives way at unexpected moments to open vistas and narrative clarity.
A couple travel to a strange, snowy European city to adopt a baby, who they hope will resurrect their failing marriage. Their difficult journey leaves the wife desperately weak, and her husband worries that her apparent illness will prevent the orphanage from releasing their child. The couple check into the cavernous and eerily deserted Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel where they are both helped and hampered by the people they encounter: an ancient, flamboyant chanteuse, a debauched businessman, an enigmatic faith healer, and a stoical bartender who dispenses an addictive, lichen-flavoured schnapps. Nothing is as it seems in this baffling, frozen world, and the longer the couple endure the punishing cold the less they seem to know about their marriage, themselves, and even life itself.
"Like a Kafka story and a Wes Anderson movie combined." —Literary Hub
Keith Gessen had always assumed that he would have kids, but couldn't imagine what parenthood would be like, nor what kind of parent he would be. Then, one Tuesday night in early June, Raffi was born, a child as real and complex and demanding of his parents' energy as he was singularly magical. Fatherhood is another country: a place where the old concerns are swept away, where the ordering of time is reconstituted, where days unfold according to a child's needs. Like all parents, Gessen wants to do what is best for his child. But he has no idea what that is. Written over the first five years of Raffi's life, Raising Raffi examines the profound, overwhelming, often maddening experience of being a father. How do you instil in your child a sense of his heritage without passing on that history's darker sides? Is parental anger normal, possibly useful, or is it inevitably destructive? And what do you do, in a pandemic, when the whole world seems to fall apart? By turns hilarious and poignant, Raising Raffi is a story of what it means to invent the world anew.
The Collection | Te Kohinga edited by Julia Waite $45
We Don't Serve Maori Here: A recent history of Māori racism in New Zealand by Robert Bartholomew $30
Endless Flight: The life of Joseph Roth by Keiron Pim $55
A Short History of Queer Women by Kirst Loehr $25
No, they weren't 'just friends'! Female same-sex desire has been written out of history. From Anne Bonny and Mary Read who sailed the seas together disguised as pirates, to US football captain Megan Rapinoe declaring 'You can't win a championship without gays on your team', via countless literary salons and tuxedos, A Short History of Queer Women sets the record straight on women who have loved other women through the ages.
"I absolutely adored it, quite literally couldn't put it down once I started and devoured it in one sitting. It was heartfelt and hilarious, and full of so much love for, not just all lesbians, but all walks of the LGBT+ community. A real witty sucker-punch of lesbian history — reading it is like uncovering a secret; it's shocking, romantic, infuriating, and all of it clawing at the pages with a need to finally be heard." —Connie Glyn
The High Desert. Black. Punk. Nowhere. A memoir by James Spooner $53
A formative coming-of-age graphic memoir by the creator of Afro-punk: a young man’s immersive reckoning with identity, racism, clumsy teen love and belonging in an isolated California desert, and a search for salvation and community through punk.
"My brother wrote a book about my nephew, and this book made me laugh and tear up. It's a book about love: the love of a father for his child, of course, and also the love of an adult son for his parents (our parents), the love an emigre feels for the language (Russian) and culture (Soviet Jewish emigre) of his home. It's a book about the way love makes us feel powerless one minute and strong the next." —Masha Gessen
The Collection Te Kohinga presents Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki’s rich and diverse art holdings, providing a frame through which we can view and understand the past while looking forward to imagine the future. With illustrations of more than 220 New Zealand and international artworks in the Gallery’s permanent and loan collections, this book includes a detailed history of how the collection, numbering some 17,000 works, was built. The introductory essay, by curator and art historian Julia Waite, shows how turning points in the Gallery’s history reflect New Zealand’s cultural and political shifts over the past 135 years and demonstrates the power art has to speak cross-culturally.
>>Have a look inside.
>>Have a look inside.
Based on historical archives and firsthand interviews, this book reveals a history of racism against Māori that — until now — has not been taught in our schools. While students usually learn about the Treaty of Waitangi and early encounters with the first European settlers, more needs to be taught on recent cases of discrimination during the 20th and 21st centuries. Examples of discrimination in housing, employment and education are provided from across the country. The book also looks at controversies today such as the continued use of Golliwog dolls, and fanciful but ultimately racist claims that a group of Celts settled the country before Māori. From the author of No Maori Allowed, this book reveals how deeply racism is ingrained in our culture.
Endless Flight travels with Roth from his childhood in the town of Brody on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to an unsettled life spent roaming Europe between the wars, including spells in Vienna, Paris and Berlin. His decline mirrored the collapse of civilized Europe: in his last peripatetic decade, he opposed Nazism in exile from Germany, his wife succumbed to schizophrenia and he died an alcoholic on the eve of WWII. Exploring the role of Roth's absent father in his imaginings, his attitude to his Jewishness and his restless search for home, Keiron Pim's gripping account of Roth's chaotic life speaks to us in our era of uncertainty, refugee crises and rising ethno-nationalism.
"A superb biography — fascinating, shrewd, insightful. Finally, Joseph Roth's extraordinary life is recounted for his multitude of English readers in compelling detail." —William Boyd
"Utterly engrossing. Endless Flight is a biography of deep humanity, one that captures the individual, the place and the times with acute and affecting brilliance. I loved it." —Philippe Sands
No, they weren't 'just friends'! Female same-sex desire has been written out of history. From Anne Bonny and Mary Read who sailed the seas together disguised as pirates, to US football captain Megan Rapinoe declaring 'You can't win a championship without gays on your team', via countless literary salons and tuxedos, A Short History of Queer Women sets the record straight on women who have loved other women through the ages.
"I absolutely adored it, quite literally couldn't put it down once I started and devoured it in one sitting. It was heartfelt and hilarious, and full of so much love for, not just all lesbians, but all walks of the LGBT+ community. A real witty sucker-punch of lesbian history — reading it is like uncovering a secret; it's shocking, romantic, infuriating, and all of it clawing at the pages with a need to finally be heard." —Connie Glyn
A formative coming-of-age graphic memoir by the creator of Afro-punk: a young man’s immersive reckoning with identity, racism, clumsy teen love and belonging in an isolated California desert, and a search for salvation and community through punk.
VOLUME FOCUS : Ghosts
A selection of books from our shelves.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
VOLUME FOCUS : Ghosts
A selection of books from our shelves.
New books and book news!
Read our 315th NEWSLETTER (3.2.23)
We are pleased to announce the launch of our annual VISUAL CULTURE SALE
. This is your opportunity to pile up a selection of superb books on art, architecture, photography, design, theory, illustration, film, textiles, craft, and graphic novels, from both Aotearoa and overseas — all at satisfyingly reduced prices. Judging from previous years, our advice is: be quick — there are single copies only of most titles and many of them cannot be reordered (even at full price). >>
Click through to start choosing
.
>>A box built in the abyss.
>>Krasznahorkai on the trail of Melville.
>>Archive fever.
>>The narrator becomes obsessed with the apocalyptic architecture of Lebbeus Woods...
>>And with the work of Bela Bartók...
>>And with Malcolm Lowry's drunken stalking of Melville's ghost to the point of madness, as described in Lunar Caustic.
>>The real windowless building (with a sinister use) where the narrator would like to house his locked library.
>>Obsession and goodwill.
>>Other books by Krasznahorkai.
>>The excellent 'Storybook ND' series.
>>Your copy of Spadework for a Palace.
>>And with Malcolm Lowry's drunken stalking of Melville's ghost to the point of madness, as described in Lunar Caustic.
>>The real windowless building (with a sinister use) where the narrator would like to house his locked library.
>>Obsession and goodwill.
>>Other books by Krasznahorkai.
>>The excellent 'Storybook ND' series.
>>Your copy of Spadework for a Palace.
| STELLA | >> Read all Stella's reviews. |
 |
Booth walked the length of mainland Japan from its most northern tip Cape Soya to the southern Cape Sata in 1977. After living in Japan for seven years, in Tokyo, initially, to study theatre, and then writing for various newspapers and magazines, he felt he wanted to better understand the country he lived in, and had married into. First published in 1985, recently reissued, The Roads to Sata is a wonderful account of the ordinary and surprising. Eloquent and witty, Booth is keenly observant of the landscape, the culture and the people. His descriptions are vivid and honest, revealing the best, worst and curious of this time. 1970s Japan is moving fast—new highways, big industry, expanding cities—but retains a slower pace in the byways, on the old tracks, and in the villages that Booth passes through. Within a few pages, you will be hooked. By the landscape descriptions: “The mist lay so thick on the hills that it hid them, and the rain continued to flatten the sea.” “In the silent gardens of the old houses in Kakunodate the tops of the stone lanterns are lumpy and green, the stone wells drip with dark water that congeal in the summer heat. The moss is black-green and thick as a poultice.” By his hilarious and at times frustrating encounters: So many offers of a ride to the gaijin who wants to walk! “On the road into the city I was twice greeted in English. At a drive-in a young truck driver jumped out of his cab and said, ‘You, foot, yes, and good for walk, but sun day—rain day, oh, Jesus Christ!’ Further on, a businessman stopped his car to offer me a lift and, clearly, puzzled by my refusal, said, ‘Then what mode of transportation are you embarking?’ Japanese slipped out: ’Aruki desu.’ ‘Aruki?’ 'Aruki’. A digestive pause. ‘Do you mean to intend that you have pedestrianised?’ I nodded. He drove away, shaking his head.” By Booth’s observations of culture, both ancient and modern, of history and folklore: “But at the village of Kanagawa that night they were dancing. Four red demons with clubs made of baseball bats, a snow queen covered in silver cooking foil, a black nylon crow, three coal miners with lamps, a robot with a body of cardboard boxes—all danced in the small school playground, round the car whose battery powered the microphone into which a bent old woman was singing. Her only accompaniment was one taiko drum and the scattered clapping of the dancers.” With laugh out loud passages, his encounters with oddities on the road and in the ryokans (tradition inns) he stays in, as well as haunting and searingly honest moments as he meets ordinary people who reveal their personal histories, Booth relates his conversations with humility and insight. All this taken together with both the grind and beauty of walking for 128 days over 3300 km, makes The Roads to Sata an illuminating travelogue, vivid and rich—and all the more so for Alan Booth’s turns of phrase, superb language and witty style. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | ||
 | Walks with Walser by Carl Seelig (translated by Anne Posten) {Reviewed by THOMAS}
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VOLUME FOCUS : Walking
A selection of books from our shelves.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #314 (27.1.23)
For new books and book news, read our latest NEWSLETTER.
SUMMER READING. Choose any of these 100 books and fill the rest of your summer with experiences that will make this reading season a memorable one. >>Click through to browse and make your choices.
The Ape Star by Frida Nilsson {Reviewed by STELLA}
Would you like a gorilla to adopt you? Would you like to live in a junkyard in the middle of an abandoned industrial area? And how does a hammock slung up behind a wall suit you for a new bedroom? If you answered yes to all three questions maybe you would like to change places with Jonna.
There are 51 children at the orphanage and the inspector is due. He’ll be counting heads and there better be 50 of them. (The inspector, Tord Fjordmark, is also on the local Council and he’s keen to get his hands on the junkyard for a money-making venture (more on this later!) and Gorilla is holding them up.) The manager, Gerd, is in a flap. The drive is raked, the sheets are spotless, the gardens perfect and the floor shiny, but she’s one too many. Just as she’s berating Jonna, again, for her dirty hands, a solution arrives in the nick of time. Luckily a car (if you could call it that) speeds in. Unluckily it undoes the meticulous gravel work. Luckily the driver wishes to adopt. Unluckily for Jonna, she’s Gorilla’s choice. Everyone is gobsmacked, and poor Jonna, despite her desire to leave Renfanan and her belief that no one would ever choose her, wishes she wasn’t now rushing headlong down the road in a vehicle pieced together out of scrap, driven outrageously by a Gorilla in baggy pants and big boots. She has the uncomfortable feeling that she might be eaten. (Warning: don’t always believe your fellow orphans.)
In fact, the only dinner on the table when they get home is fried egg sandwiches and they are pretty good. Gorilla is odd though, and Jonna makes a move as soon as she can to run away. It fails, and then she’s under Gorilla’s watchful eye and has to work out in the yard. After a few weeks, Jonna starts to like the scrap yard, the customers that come by for a bargain, and grows accustomed to Gorilla’s ways, although going to town isn’t high on Jonna’s list — it's embarrassing! She’s not surprised that Gorilla attracts stares and dismay. How could she not? There’s a silver lining though — the second-hand bookshop. Gorilla loves her books, and Jonna will learn to enjoy them too. Jonna’s getting into the groove of Gorilla’s lifestyle and coming up with ideas to make the scrap yards more profitable - some of them not exactly honest. As she gets to know Gorilla, she realises that this is the best kind of family one can have: inventive, imaginative, and caring. Yet life isn’t fair. Tord wants his land and will play dirty to get it. How will Gorilla keep the land and keep Jonna too? And are there better dreams to come if you can find the Ape Star? Read this and you might just find out.
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | The Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy (translated by Gini Alhadeff) {Reviewed by THOMAS} “It feels as if all that is yet to happen is already in the past.” He had been reading Fleur Jaeggy's novella The Water Statues, first published in 1980 and at last beautifully translated by Gini Alhadeff into English, a work, he thought, in which grief and loss are inescapable properties of time, both resisted and enshrined by memory, in which the past is an unstable and unresponsive fantasy that is shedding its certainty grain by grain. Dedicated to Jaeggy’s then recently dead friend Ingeborg Bachmann, this is a book, he thought, in which the inevitability of loss through death or parting suffuses every meeting, both enriching it and reinforcing its evanescence. Relationships are snags to the tendencies of time, he thought, snags inevitably torn away, and longing and memory—especially the retrospective longing of nostalgia—make it unclear whether our lives are populated with statues or with living beings. If I said, he thought, that Beeklam, the protagonist, if that is the right word, is “born into a house filled with boulders”, loses his mother, suffers from the distance of his father, goes to live in a decaying mansion in Amsterdam, fills the flooded basement with a collection of statues which both represent and replace the living, disposes of his collection, and sets out into the world, I would be misrepresenting the book by literalising its tendencies into a plot. It’s not like that. All instants are inanimate, he thought, and memory is, after all, a flooded basement filled with statues (just like a book). This was getting closer. In Jaeggy’s world, the animate and the inanimate have no clear demarcation, they are interchangeable, they cannot be distinguished from each other. Beeklam is both child and adult, an old man even, somehow all at once. Beeklam and his servant at the same time both are Beeklam’s father Reginald and his servant, and their complement or inverse. Friendship is described as “mutual slavery”: the condition of master and servant makes them both an single entity and beings separated by an unbridgeable gap. The contents of this world lack sufficient differentiation to enable points of true contact, and the longing for friendship connects people but the passage of moments, the ceaseless suck of the past, means that true connection is not possible. In a text that is presented in a variety of different forms and registers (as is Bachmann’s Malina), Beeklam speaks of himself sometimes in the first person and sometimes in the third, as does the most elusive of his narrators. “BEEKLAM: A little boy used to live here, he said he wanted to live as someone who’d drowned.” Who speaks and who is spoken of only sometimes coalesce, he thought, nothing is fixed; everything is undercut, the novella is elusive, but full of the most delightful, troublesome and surprising sentences, sentences that each becomes more remarkable when more deeply considered or reread. “By his calm devoid of sweetness he had bypassed every disorder,” writes Jaeggy, as if to illustrate this point, or, “On his face had been spread as though with a spatula, an expression of peace, a sermon painted over a pale complexion.” Jaeggy’s style is at once both austere and excessive, both direct and elusive, both parsimonious and fantastically indulgent. "Aside from rotting, there’s little flowers can do, and in this they are not unlike human beings,” writes Jaeggy. |
NEW RELEASES
Restless outsider, masher-up of form and convention, Katherine Mansfield's short but dazzling career was characterised by struggle, insecurity and sacrifice, alongside a glorious, relentless creative drive and openness. She was the only writer Virginia Woolf admitted being jealous of, yet by the 1950s was, outside New Zealand, almost forgotten. Now, looking back over the hundred years since her death, it is evident how vital Mansfield was to the Modernist movement and how strikingly relevant she is today, helping us to see differently, to savour and to notice things. In this perceptive study, Claire Harman takes a fresh look at Mansfield's life and achievements side by side, through the form she did so much to revolutionise — the short story. Exploring ten pivotal works, we watch how Mansfield's desire to grow as a writer pushed her art into unknown territory, and how illness sharpened her extraordinary vitality.
"All Sorts of Lives is a beautiful, fastidiously researched and fascinating exploration of Mansfield's life and work. This is great as an introduction to an unjustly neglected author and a joy for those of us who already love her writing." —A.L. Kennedy
Aorere Gold: The history of the Golden Bay goldfields, 1856—1863 by Mike Johnston $100
Much anticipated and overwhelmingly good, Johnston's unsurpassable history fills a gap not only in the history of goldmining in Aotearoa but in the social history of Golden Bay. Full of meticulously researched detail (both historical and geological) but never losing sight of the overall picture, this well-illustrated 480-page book gives the best possible idea of the Aorere goldrush, which drew gold-seekers from the previous rushes in California and Victoria, local settlers and Māori, and from further afield, and served as a de facto first act to the rushes in Otago and the West Coast that followed.
At first, A Writer's Diary appears to be exactly what it claims to be. It is a daily summary of the events in a person called Toby Litt's life: his thoughts on creating literature, his concerns for his family and the people he teaches, his musings on the various things that catch his attention around his desk and his immediate surroundings. But as it progresses, questions start to arise. Is this fact? Or is it fiction? (And if it's both, which is which?) Is this a book about quotidian daily routines - one person's days as they unspool — or is something more going on? Is there something even larger taking shape? And so, seemingly by magic, an increasingly urgent narrative starts to build — and A Writer's Diary becomes a compulsive page-turner, full of stories, full of characters we have grown to love – and full of questions we need answered. Will Toby find the perfect pencil sharpener? Will everyone he loves make it through the year? And will he be the same person at the end of it?
Youth activism has been a defining feature of Aotearoa's recent political landscape. Amidst these unsettling political times haunted by climate change, colonisation, ongoing inequality and the upheaval of the pandemic, the political actions of young New Zealanders are a source of inspiration, challenge and renewal. Fierce Hope opens the doors on six influential activist groups: ActionStation, Generation Zero (Auckland), InsideOUT, JustSpeak, Protect Ihumatao, and Thursdays in Black (Auckland). Participants from these groups, through interviews, explain vividly what future they want for our country and how we can get there. They address an array of urgent issues, from indigenous rights to the justice system and imprisonment; from climate change to gender and sexual inequalities. In their voices we hear hope, anger, despair and anxiety - emotions which inform and galvanise activism. A connecting thread is how people within these different groups collectively negotiate their visions and strategies to achieve change. Their stories provide important insights into the immense demands of activism and help inform radical new ways of living and being together in Aotearoa.
"My generation has seen the stories of Parihaka and Bastion Point, and has witnessed women’s movements, and has seen Donald Trump get elected and has seen Christchurch terrorism – you know, all of these things, we’ve seen them, plus we have a Western education. Most of us have gone to university and we’re [also] entrenched in our tikanga; we’ve got all of these things that then make us, the people, to go "No!"' – Qiane Matata-Sipu, Protect Ihumātao
Slime is an ambiguous thing. It exists somewhere between a solid and liquid. It inspires revulsion even while it compels our fascination. It is a both a vehicle for pathogens and the strongest weapon in our immune system. Most of us know little about it and yet it is the substance on which our world turns. Slime exists at the interfaces of all things: between the different organs and layers in our bodies, and between the earth, water, and air in the environment. It is often produced in the fatal encounter between predator and prey, and it is a vital presence in the reproductive embrace between female and male. In this ground-breaking and fascinating book, Susanne Wedlich leads us on a scientific journey through the 3 billion year history of slime, from the part it played in the evolution of life on this planet to the way it might feature in the post-human future. She also explores the cultural and emotional significance of slime, from its starring role in the horror genre to its subtle influence on Art Nouveau. Slime is what connects Patricia Highsmith's fondness for snails, John Steinbeck's aversion to hagfish, and Emperor Hirohito's passion for jellyfish, as well as the curious mating practices of underwater gastropods and the miraculous functioning of the human gut. Written with authority, wit and eloquence, Slime brings this most nebulous and neglected of substances to life.
Everyone knows the word "war". But very few understand what it truly means - when you find you have to face it, you feel totally lost, walled in by fright and despair. All of your plans are suddenly interrupted — Until you've been there, you don't know what war is. This is the diary of young Ukrainian refugee Yeva Skalietska. It follows twelve days in Ukraine that changed 12-year-old Yeva's life forever. She was woken in the early hours to the terrifying sounds of shelling. Russia had invaded Ukraine, and her beloved Kharkiv home was no longer the safe haven it should have been. It was while she and her Granny were forced to seek shelter in a damp, cramped basement that Yeva decided to write down her story.
Charlip's deceptively simple illustrations (the first page is blank, bearing only the words 'Here is an empty sky'), slowly building a scene piece by piece, and eventually, a surreal narrative sure to delight readers and expand children's ideas of what a picture book can be.
On an unnamed archipelago off the east coast of Britain, the impossible has come to pass. Women control the civic institutions. Decide how the islands' money is spent. Run the businesses. Tend to their families. Teach the children hope for a better world. They say that this gynotopia is Eva Levi's life's work, and that now she has disappeared, it will be destroyed. But they don't know about Cwen. Cwen has been here longer than the civilisation she has returned to haunt. The clouds are her children, and the waves. Her name has ancient roots, reaching down into the earth and halfway around the world. The islands she inhabits have always belonged to women. And she will do anything she can to protect them. Now in paperback.
"A clever, strange and wonderful book, which brims with mystery. A group of women recount their past and present stories, revealing their visions of the future." —Xiaolu Guo
"A wild, original, sure-footed feminist reimagining of the present and the past that brushes up against the mythical. Beautiful work." —Neel Mukherjee
Surprisingly, time travel is not forbidden by the laws of physics -— Gribbin argues that if it is not impossible then it must be possible. Gribbin illustrates the possibilities of time travel by comparing familiar themes from science fiction with their real-world scientific counterparts, including Einstein's theories of relativity, black holes, quantum physics, and the multiverse, illuminated by examples from the fictional tales of Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, Carl Sagan and others. The result is an entertaining guide to some deep mysteries of the Universe which may leave you wondering whether time actually passes at all, and if it does, whether we are moving forwards or backwards.
A groundbreaking history of architecture told through the relationship between buildings and energy. Reducing energy use is the single biggest challenge facing architecture today. From the humblest prehistoric hut to the imposing monuments of Rome or Egypt to super-connected modern airports, buildings in every era and place have been shaped by the energy available for their construction and running. This compelling survey tells the story of our buildings from our hunter-gatherer origins to the age of fossil-fuel dependence, and shows how architecture has been influenced by designers, builders and societies adapting to changing energy contexts.
King Charles VI of France — thinking he was made of glass — was terrified he might shatter. After the Emperor met his end at Waterloo, an epidemic of Napoleons piled into France's asylums. Throughout the nineteenth century, dozens of middle-aged women tried to convince their physicians that they were, in fact, dead. For centuries we've dismissed delusions as something for doctors to sort out behind locked doors. But delusions are more than just bizarre quirks — they hold the key to collective anxieties and traumas.
The graphic novel version of Iturbe's account of the true story of fourteen-year-old Dita, one of the many imprisoned by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Taken, along with her mother and father, from the Terezín ghetto in Prague, Dita is adjusting to the constant terror that is life in the camp. When Jewish leader Freddy Hirsch asks Dita to take charge of the eight precious books the prisoners have managed to smuggle past the guards, she agrees. And so Dita becomes the secret librarian of Auschwitz, responsible for the safekeeping of the small collection of titles, as well as the 'living books' — prisoners of Auschwitz who know certain books so well, they too can be 'borrowed' to educate the children in the camp. But books are extremely dangerous. They make people think. And nowhere are they more dangerous than in Block 31 of Auschwitz, the children's block, where the slightest transgression can result in execution, no matter how young the transgressor
The Book of Feeling Blue: Understand and manage depression by Gwendoline Smith $28
How do you know if you're just feeling a bit sad or if you are depressed? What level of sadness is 'normal'? How do you work out what's going on when you feel down? What kinds of treatment are available? How do you help a family member or friend who is depressed? Psychologist Gwendoline Smith answers these questions and many more. In addition she specifically explains post-natal blues and depression; depression in children, teens and older people; depression in relation to gender and sexuality; and Covid blues.
Joan Didion: The Last Interview, And other conversations by Joan Didion with Sheila Heti, Hilton Als, Hari Kunzru, Dave Eggers et al $37
Around the World in 80 Books by David Damrosch $30
How do you know if you're just feeling a bit sad or if you are depressed? What level of sadness is 'normal'? How do you work out what's going on when you feel down? What kinds of treatment are available? How do you help a family member or friend who is depressed? Psychologist Gwendoline Smith answers these questions and many more. In addition she specifically explains post-natal blues and depression; depression in children, teens and older people; depression in relation to gender and sexuality; and Covid blues.
Didion rose to prominence with her nonfiction collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and she quickly became the writer who captured the zeitgeist of the washed-out, acid hangover of the 60s. But as a bicoastal writer of fiction and nonfiction whose writing ranged from personal essays and raw, intimate memoirs to reportage on international affairs and social justice, Didion is much harder to pin down than her reputation might suggest. This collection encompasses it all, in conversations that delve into her underappreciated mid-career works, her influences, the loss of her husband and daughter, and her most infamous essays.
Inspired by Jules Verne's hero Phileas Fogg, David Damrosch, chair of Harvard's department of Comparative Literature and founder of Harvard's Institute for World Literature, set out to counter a pandemic's restrictions on travel by exploring eighty exceptional books from around the globe. Following a literary itinerary from London to Venice, Tehran, and points beyond, and via authors from Woolf and Dante to Nobel prizewinners Orhan Pamuk, Wole Soyinka, Mo Yan, and Olga Tokarczuk, he explores how these works have shaped our idea of the world, and the ways the world bleeds into literature. To chart the expansive landscape of world literature today, Damrosch explores how writers live in two very different worlds- the world of their personal experience, and the world of books that have enabled writers to give shape and meaning to their lives.