>> Read all Thomas's reviews. 











































 

Not to Read by Alejandro Zambra (translated by Megan McDowell) {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“I am writing with a great deal of ease and fluidity. One must distrust that,” wrote Clarice Lispector, quoted by the Chilean Alejandro Zambra in one of the essays in this highly enjoyable collection of literary observations on, ostensibly, some of the more interesting largely (but not exclusively) Latin American literature of the last quarter century, literature that distrusts, as Zambra dismisses, the clichéed fluidity of the ‘Magic Realists’ most readily (and lazily) associated with Latin American literature by Western readers. Zambra instead values literature that is hesitant, inventive, always aware of new possibilities, mentally and linguistically supple, striving always towards new forms. “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one,” wrote Walter Benjamin (not quoted by Alejandro Zambra (at least not in this book)). Because the reviews collected here are often of books the reader of Not to Read has not read and by authors with whom the reader (at least this reader) is unfamiliar, the reader at the outset may think they might skip quite a bit of the book, to make reading faster, but Zambra’s book is too interesting, too nicely written, and too enjoyable. There are indeed considerations of many authors the reader has not heard of, but the essays deliver the same fascination as reading Borges’s studies of nonexistent books (Borges thought it more worthwhile, and faster, to write about books that do not exist than to write the books themselves), with the added benefit that, just possibly, works by these authors may already be, or may one day be, available in English. At the very least, one reads to read about the writing and reading of texts, which is, after all, the most interesting thing to read about. The reader might have thought that skipping might save time, but the text runs so lightly and so sprightlyly that the reader is in any case carried forward more rapidly by following the text than they would have proceeded had it been possible to skip. The essays and reviews included in Not to Read also function as a sort of literary autobiography of Zambra himself, his concerns, approaches, influences and motivations, and provide a greater appreciation of his other work, direct yet subtle, playful yet poignant, personal yet politically and socially acute, compact yet wonderfully expansive. Zambra recommends books we are sure that we will like, even though we may never get to read them, but, more importantly, the reasons for his recommendations, his observations on and his responses to these books, provide a portrait of a reader we come quickly to admire, and who we as readers may well wish to be more like, as well as of a writer alert to the possibilities of writing. Zambra is frequently very funny, as he is in the title essay ‘Not to Read’, which starts out as a review of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Have Not Read, which Zambra has himself not read, and carries on to become a deliciously prickly lampoon of opinions formed of books without reading them, intercut with seemingly very valid reasons not to read some writers’ books. Zambra’s concision and lightness (Zambra is an exemplar of the literary qualities Italo Calvino thought most important in his Six Memos for a New Millennium) can produce beautiful sentences, such as this one on Santiago, quivering with a sensitivity that undercuts ease and fluidity and leaves us utterly aware: “It’s the city that we know, the city that would follow us if we wanted to flee from it (from ourselves), with its permanent architectural eclecticism, with the dirty river, almost always a mere trickle, cutting the landscape in half, with the most beautiful sky imaginable in those few days of autumn or winter after it rains, when we rediscover the mountains.” 

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

  

This week we are featuring the work of the superb Chilean author, Alejandro Zambra. Growing up under the Pinochet dictatorship, Zambra became acutely aware of the power of words to both reveal and conceal, to both save and condemn. His work is deeply humane, wryly playful, and fired by an underlying anger at injustice and oppression.
>>Each book suggests its own form.
>>Signs of hope. 
>>Author and translator present Chilean Poet.  
>>Chatting with Megan and Daniel. 
>>'Skyscrapers'. >>Omitted characters. 
>>Read Bonsai, Zambra's breakthrough novel. 
>>Read Thomas's review of My Documents. 
>>Read Thomas's review of Multiple Choice. 
>>Read Thomas's review of the essay collection Not To Read. 
>>Read Zambra's most recent novel Chilean Poet. 
VOLUME BooksBook of the week

  


>> Read all Stella's reviews.



























 


Pure Colour by Sheila Heti {Reviewed by STELLA}

Curious and more curious, in Pure Colour Shelia Heti takes us further than she has before. If you’re a Heti fan, you will be used to her turn of phrase and oblique references as well as her wry absurdist touch. In her earlier novels, How Should A Person Be? Heti gave us a wild and wonderful exploration of a young person dipping her feet in the world, with all the bravado you would expect as well as the doubt; while Motherhood explored that moment in life when you ask the big questions about art, relationships and parenthood. In Pure Colour, Heti makes another jump and then plunges sideways. It’s more existential and probing, and flat bang in the middle the main character becomes a leaf. Seriously. Mira leaves home for college and studies art criticism, she works in a lamp shop and has fallen for the woman who works in the bookshop. She’s piecing together information and coming up with her own interpretations. People are either birds, fish or bears and respond according. Birds look down and see the world from above in an abstract fashion, thinking their way around it. Fish, being one of many, is more concerned with the collective whole, while Bear is particularly loyal to only a few or even one, and those in their ambit are completely secure in the Bear’s love. God’s got a lot to answer for in what Mira sees as God’s 'first draft', and there are some hilarious interludes about what God thinks/does: God “doesn’t want the criticism of the most dynamic parts of culture coming from someone in the middle of life… God doesn’t care what you think about a band”, and when Mira muses on why God didn’t make every face the same “A person can waste their whole life, without even meaning to, all because another person has a really great face.” The first draft is also real and scary — it’s too hot and much of life is pointless. Mira wanders through her life as though she is sleepwalking, and when her father dies she is pulled into a vortex of grief and an intense sense of her life as a leaf. She does emerge from the leaf, but life has moved on. Annie, the woman she is obsessed with, has moved on, the lamp store has gone and art critics who have been trained on paper are no longer as valid. She’s become one of the precariat and when she finally decides to up sticks and track down Annie, it’s too late. It was always too late — it was a mistake. Where is Shelia Heti going with this? Is she gently nudging us towards the inevitable second draft with Mira as our not-so-great-but-okay guide or is she simply playing another game in abstraction? Mira wonders “why she spent so much of her life… looking at websites, when just outside the window there was a sky”. Maybe Heti felt the same way. Pure Colour is intriguing and full of ideas that trigger more ideas, and you can decide whether you’re a bird, fish or bear if you play along.


VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 NEW RELEASES

Losing the Plot by Derek Owusu            $33
Driven by a deep-seated desire to understand his mother's life before he was born, Derek Owusu offers a powerful imagining of her journey. As she moves from Ghana to the UK and navigates parenthood in a strange and often lonely environment, the effects of displacement are felt across generations. Told through the eyes of both mother and son, Losing the Plot is at once emotionally raw and playful as Owusu experiments with form to piece together the immigrant experience and explore how the stories we share and tell ourselves are just as vital as the ones we don't.
"Derek Owusu is a writer of rare empathy, intensity and allure. This brief verse novel, in untranslated Twi and various registers of English, observes the inner life of an exhausted immigrant mother, notions of cultural disinheritance, and mutable identities." —Paul Mendez
"I write from the heart, first." 
What Have You Left Behind? by Bushra al-Maqtari          $38

In 2015, Bushra al-Maqtari decided to document the suffering of civilians in the Yemeni civil war, which has killed over 200,000 people according to the UN. Inspired by the work of Svetlana Alexievich, she spent two years visiting different parts of the country, putting her life at risk by speaking with her compatriots, and gathered over 400 testimonies, a selection of which appear in What Have You Left Behind? Purposefully alternating between accounts from the victims of the Houthi militia and those of the Saudi-led coalition, al-Maqtari highlights the disillusionment and anguish felt by civilians trapped in a war outside of their own making. As difficult to read as it is to put down, Bushra al-Maqtari's unvarnished chronicle of the conflict in Yemen serves as a vital reminder of the scale of the human tragedy behind the headlines, and offers a searing condemnation of the international community's complicity in the war's continuation.
"This is an extraordinary collection of testimonies. It’s almost unbearable to read, but averting your eyes from the suffering to which the book bears witness feels craven. Brave, painful, necessary and harrowing, Bushra al-Maqtari’s work confronts the reader with the devastation of the war in Yemen and gives a voice to those whose lives have been destroyed by it." —Marcel Theroux
"Bushra al-Maqtari's boundlessly humane project of collecting firsthand accounts to document the nearly decade-long Yemeni civil war – and the West's complicity in it – is unblinking in its moral gaze. Every single voice collected in these pages is a blow to the heart. By the time I finished this book, I was consumed by sorrow and rage. This is an act of witnessing, and of making us engage in the witnessing of a disgraceful, criminal war that will shake your soul." —Neel Mukherjee
>>"They robbed me of my children."
>>A locked room for loss. 

The Waste Land: A biography of a poem by Matthew Hollis            $50
T.S. Eliot's 1922 poem 'The Waste Land' has been said to describe the moral decay of a world after war and the search for meaning in a meaningless era. It has been labeled the most truthful poem of its time; it has been branded a masterful fake. Hollis reconstructs the intellectual creation of the poem and brings its charged times to life. Presenting a mosaic of historical fragments, diaries, dynamic literary criticism, and new research, he reveals the cultural and personal trauma that forged 'The Waste Land' through the lives of those involved in its genesis: Ezra Pound, who edited it; Vivien Eliot, who sustained it; and T.S. Eliot himself, whose private torment is woven into the seams of the work. "Deeply and brilliant concerned with the tendrils of unhappiness and Eliot's triumphant creative response to it." —Guardian
>>Animated sand.
>>Words heard and seen.
>>Death by water. 

Trilogy by Jon Fosse (translated by May-Brit Akerholt)          $35
Trilogy is Jon Fosse's critically acclaimed, luminous love story about Asle and Alida, two lovers trying to find their place in this world. Homeless and sleepless, they wander around Bergen in the rain, trying to make a life for themselves and the child they expect. Through a rich web of historical, cultural, and theological allusions, Fosse constructs a modern parable of injustice, resistance, crime, and redemption. Consisting of three novellas (Wakefulness, Olav's Dreams, and Weariness), Trilogy is a haunting, mysterious, and poignant evocation of love.
"It is easy to see Fosse's work as Ibsen stripped down to its emotional essentials. But it is much more." —New York Times
>>Read Thomas's review of Fosse's (later) Septology. 
The Fallen by Carlos Manuel Álvarez        $23
Diego, the son, is disillusioned and bitter about the limited freedoms his country offers him. Mariana, the mother, is unwell and forced to relinquish her control over the home to her daughter, Maria, who has left school and is working as a chambermaid in one of the state-owned tourist hotels. The father, Armando, is a committed revolutionary who is sickened by the corruption he perceives all around him. In meticulously charting the disintegration of a family, The Fallen offers a poignant reflection on contemporary Cuba and the clash of the ardent idealism of the old guard with the jaded pragmatism of the young.
"A beautiful and painful novel that demonstrates the power of fiction to pursue the unutterable." —Alejandro Zambra

"Álvarez does a neat job in this very short but nutritious novel of establishing the personalities of his characters firmly enough that it comes as a real shock when he upends our expectations of how they might behave." —Jake Kerridge
"A war foretold that never takes place. A death foretold that never takes place. And in the middle of this is the inevitable collapse of a family and a country. The Fallen is a subtle, intelligent and profoundly moving novel which sketches, in elegant and thoughtful prose, a rarely seen Cuban landscape." —Alia Trabucco Zerán

My First Popsicle: An anthology of food and feelings edited by Zosia Mamet           $37
Food is a portal to culture, to times past, to disgust, to comfort, to love: no matter one's feelings about a particular dish, they are hardly ever neutral. Mamet has curated some of the most prominent voices in art and culture to tackle the topic of food in its elegance, its profundity and its incidental charm. With contributions from David Sedaris on the joy of a hot dog, Jia Tolentino on the chicken dish she makes to escape reality, Patti Smith on memories of her mother's Poor Man's Cake, Busy Philipps on the struggle to escape the patterns of childhood favourites and more, My First Popsicle is an ode to food and emotion.

The Passenger: Space                  $37
'Night, Sleep, Death and the Stars' by Lauren Groff; 'The Universe Underground' by Paolo Giordano; 'We All Hated Each Other So Much' by Frank Westermann; Plus: discovering new planets and destroying satellites; returning to the Moon (this time to stay); the Mars delusion. In the 1960s, the rivalry between the superpowers brought us into space, adding a whole new dimension to human life. The last frontier was open: between 1969 and 1972 twelve men (but no women) walked on the moon. No one has since. The space race revealed itself for what it really was: a political and military competition. Space agencies, however, have not been idle and the exploration of the solar system has continued with probes and robots. Without politics, science has thrived. But the lack of government funding has opened space exploration to the forces of capitalism: the race has started again, with different rules and different players. Colonising Mars might not be the solution to humanity's problems, but the promise of space - whether expressed in a tweet by Elon Musk or a photo taken by a NASA rover on Mars - keeps proving irresistible (as does this illustrated miscellany).
>>What is it about space? 
Wanderlust: A history of walking by Rebecca Solnit          $28
What does it mean to be out walking in the world? From pilgrimages to protest marches, mountaineering to meandering, this modern classic weaves together numerous histories to trace a range of possibilities for this most basic act. Touching on the philosophers of Ancient Greece, the Romantic poets, Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennett, Andre Breton's Nadja, and more, Rebecca Solnit considers what forms of pleasure and freedom walkers have sought at different times. Wanderlust invites us to look afresh at the rich, varied, often radical interplay of the body, the imagination, and the world when walking. New edition.
"Radical, humane, witty, sometimes wonderfully dandyish, at other times, impassioned and serious." —Alain de Botton
Mercia's Take by Daniel Wiles          $25
1870s, the Black Country. Michael is a miner. But it's no life. Michael exhausts himself working two jobs, to send his son Luke to school, so he won't have to be a miner too. Down the pit one day, he finds a seam of gold. If he gets it out, he can save his own life, and Luke's. But his workmate has other ideas. Mercia's Take summons an England in the heat of the industrial revolution, and the lives it took to make it.

"Energy and passion fuels this harsh and beautiful first novel; Daniel Wiles connects us viscerally to the past we have buried, the history we choose to ignore." —Hilary Mantel
"Read this novel and marvel at its language, dark and gleaming as obsidian. Daniel Wiles channels the Southern Gothic into the vernacular of the Black Country and unearths from the past a tale of desperation that speaks to our current damnation. A striking debut." —Paul Lynch

Elderflora: A story of ancient trees by Jared Farmer           $40
Humans have always revered long-lived trees. Our veneration took a modern turn in the eighteenth century, when naturalists embarked on a quest to locate and precisely date the oldest living things on earth. The new science of tree time prompted travellers to visit ancient specimens and conservationists to protect sacred groves. Exploitation accompanied sanctification, as old-growth forests succumbed to imperial expansion and the industrial revolution.Taking us from Lebanon to New Zealand to California, Farmer surveys the complex history of the world's oldest trees, including voices of Indigenous peoples, religious figures, and contemporary scientists who study elderflora in crisis. In a changing climate, a long future is still possible, Farmer shows, but only if we give care to young things that might grow old.Combining rigorous scholarship with lyrical writing, Elderflora chronicles the complex roles ancient trees have played in the modern world and illuminates how we might need old trees now more than ever.
>>The tree whisperer. 
The Darkness Manifesto by Johan Eklöf        $40
In our era of 24/7 illumination, an excess of light is a pressing problem. Just about every creature on earth, humans included, operates according to the circadian rhythm. The world's flora and fauna have evolved to operate in the natural cycle of day and night, but now light pollution has become a major issue. This challenges our instinctual fear of the dark and urges us to cherish the darkness, its creatures, and its unique beauties. 

Tiggy Thistle and the Lost Guardians by Chris Riddell           $30
Zam, Phoebe and Bathsheba, the three guardians of magic, disappeared with no warning nearly ten years ago, leaving the Kingdom of Thrynne in the icy grip of a powerful sorceress. Most people have fled in desperate search of warmer lands, escaping the snow monsters that roam the streets. Meanwhile, nine-year-old Tiggy Thistle lives hidden and safe with a kindly Badger — until the day she meets the elf Crumple Stiltskin, one of the crafty Stiltskin brothers, she suddenly has to run from her happy home. So begins Tiggy's quest to find Zam, Phoebe and Bathsheba - the lost guardians and their beautiful cloud horses - the only people, she believes, who can save Thrynne from the curse of endless winter. Tiggy Thistle and the Lost Guardians is the second and final title in 'The Cloud Horse Chronicles'. Illustrated throughout in two colours by Riddell at his best, and presented as a handsome hardback. 
>>Drawing and reading. 
Once Upon a Fever by Angharad Walker            $22
Since the world fell sick with fantastical illnesses, sisters Payton and Ani have grown up in the hospital of King Jude's. Payton wants to be a methic like her father, working on a cure for her mother's sleeping fever. Ani, however, thinks the remedy for all illness might be found in the green wilderness beyond the hospital walls. When Ani stumbles upon an imprisoned boy who turns everything he touches to gold, her world is turned upside-down. The girls find themselves outside the hospital for the first time, a dark mystery unravelling.
Tumbleglass by Kate Constable            $20
Thirteen-year-old Rowan is helping her older sister Ash paint her bedroom when she discovers a mysterious ring that transports them both back in time to 1999. To a party being held in the very same house! While Ash dances, Rowan unwittingly disrupts the laws of time, and when she wakes up back in the present day, her sister is missing, and - even worse - everyone in their family seems to be forgetting she ever existed. With the help of her magical neighbour Verity, Rowan must find the courage to travel back through the history of the house. But can she find everything she needs to rescue Ash before her sister disappears forever? 

The Future is Degrowth: A guide to a world beyond Capitalism edited by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan          $35
Offering a counter-history of how economic growth emerged in the context of colonialism, fossil-fueled industrialisation, and capitalist modernity, The Future Is Degrowth argues that the ideology of growth conceals the rising inequalities and ecological destructions associated with capitalism, and points to desirable alternatives to it.
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The true story of the woman at the heart of the German resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner            $28
Born and raised in America, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six and living in Germany where she witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. She began holding secret meetings in her apartment, forming a small band of political activists set on helping Jews escape, denouncing Hitler and calling for revolution. When the Second World War began, she became a spy, couriering top-secret intelligence to the Allies. Now in paperback. 
"While never less than scrupulously researched, this biography explodes the genre of 'biography': experimental but achieved, Donner's story reads with the speed of a thriller, the depth of a novel and the urgency of an essay, like some deeply compelling blend of Alan Furst and W.G. Sebald'." —James Wood
The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, revolution and resilience; 500 years of women's self-portraits by Jennifer Higgie          $30
"A bewitching, invigorating history of women artists, the work they've made and the impossibly hard conditions in which it was produced. I can't think of a more satisfying riposte to anyone who asks why there have been no great women artists than to present them with this incandescent book." —Olivia Laing
"Brilliant, reveals an until-now hidden history of women's self-portraiture. A gift that keeps on giving." —Ali Smith
Now in paperback. >>Also available in hardback. 
Freeman's: The best new writing on Animals edited by John Freeman          $28
Over a century ago, Rilke went to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where he watched a pair of flamingos. A flock of other birds screeched by, and, as he describes in a poem, the great red-pink birds sauntered on, unphased, then 'stretched amazed and singly march into the imaginary.' This encounter - so strange, so typical of flamingos with their fabulous posture - is also still typical of how we interact with animals. Even as our actions threaten their very survival, they are still symbolic, captivating and captive, caught in a drama of our framing. This issue of Freeman's tells the story of that interaction, its costs, its tendernesses, the mythological flex of it. From lovers in a Chiara Barzini story, falling apart as a group of wild boars roams in their Roman neighbourhood, to the soppen emergency birth of a cow on a Wales farm, stunningly described by Cynan Jones, no one has the moral high ground here. Nor is this a piece of mourning. There's wonder, humour, rage and relief, too. Featuring pigeons, calves, stray dogs, mascots, stolen cats, and bears, to the captive, tortured animals who make up our food supply, powerfully described in Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk's essay, this wide-ranging issue of Freeman's will stimulate discussion and dreams alike.

VOLUME BooksNew releases

  


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


VOLUME BooksBook of the week

  


>> Read all Stella's reviews.



























 


Harrow by Joy Williams   {Reviewed by STELLA}
How do you get geriatric eco-terrorists into a book and make it sound believable, ironic, outrageous, and compelling? When your main protagonist is a ten-year-old with a jaundiced view of the world, but also a surprising innocence, how are we convinced that this could be a future reality? Joy Williams makes us believe because she’s a genius. Harrow, her recent novel, is a sideways dystopia, very strange and difficult to follow — not because it’s pretentious or overly literary but because the end of the world (as we know it) will be confusing, blindingly obvious, and surprisingly full of unexpected consequences. As you read this review, you will notice the inconsistencies — how can it be this, but also that? How can you have a 10-year-old protagonist surviving crossing America alone but somehow be okay —  picked up and harnessed by the goodwill of others — even if this is fleeting? How can, and why, do terminally ill geriatrics who can’t seem to get along (there are plenty of petty squabbles at the abandoned conference centre/resort) have a plan (of destruction — we will get to that later) that forces them to be bound together by a mutual ideology? Well, it works because Joy Williams is a brilliant writer and she’s angry, even as she darkly exploits us humans and uses our foibles to create characters who will stick on you. And that’s how it is — Harrow gets under your skin and just when you’re confused the lightbulb clicks on and it’s so bright, you hope you’ll be in the dark again. Darkness may be preferable to the future. This world is destructive — or was. Williams layers out all the issues under this veneer of fictional telling. There’s consumption, capitalism (hyper), deforestation, extinction (there are no more animals), and, really, just collapse. The world has given up and humans are swaddled by what’s left — entertainment and distraction. The rebellion has been overcome, aside from the geriatrics with their inconsequential acts — small violences do not a change make. Especially when the worst excesses of capitalism and environmental destruction have rebooted full throttle. And this is the world that Khristen at ten has the job of navigating. After her boarding school closes and the rich kids have been collected in their SUVs and other vehicles of a survival nature, the teachers take off and deposit Khristen at the train station. It’s not too much later that the end of the line approaches, i.e. the trains stop and K has to walk on in search of her mother, who she last heard (a few years back) was headed to the aforementioned resort. No surprise, she doesn’t find her there. Yet, the matriarch of this outfit takes her in for a bit and we get a front-row seat as witness to the shenanigans of the motley crew, as well as a paying guest, a mother with her precocious 10-year-old son, who’s determined to be a judge — he spends his days quoting legal jargon. They have their own side hustle story which involves murder, family dispute, alcohol, and expectation. Yet they are on holiday, so standing in the putrid lake, known as Big Girl, fishing is how Khristen first encounters her future judge. 

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

  


 >> 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. 

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

  NEW RELEASES

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton        $38
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
"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
Memorial, 29 June by Tine Høeg (translated from Danish by Misha Hoekstra)        $40

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. 

The Queen's Wife by Joanne Drayton              $40
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.
You Shall Leave Your Land by Renato Cisneros (translated from Spanish by Fionn Petch)             $38
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. 

Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra (translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell)         $25
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
Dark Rye and Honey Cake: Festival baking from the heart of the Low Countries by Regula Ysewijn               $65
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.

Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson             $33
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
A Line in the World: A year on the North Sea coast by Dorthe Nors (translated from Danish by Caroline Waight)               $40
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
The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the rise of Europe by James Belich            $70

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.

December by Alexander Kluge and Gerhard Richter (translated from German by Martin Chalmers)          $30
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. 
What Happens at Night by Peter Cameron            $25
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
Raising Raffi: A book about fatherhood (for people who would never read such a book) by Keith Gessen              $40
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.
"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 edited by Julia Waite        $45
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. 
We Don't Serve Maori Here: A recent history of Māori racism in New Zealand by Robert Bartholomew              $30
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: The life of Joseph Roth by Keiron Pim          $55
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
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.





VOLUME BooksNew releases

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

. 

VOLUME BooksBook lists


"Realty is no obstacle," reads the epigraph to our Book of the Week, Spadework for a Palace: Entering the madness of others by László Krasznahorkai (translated by John Batki), a single, book-length, wonderfully hysterical sentence pouring from the mind of a seemingly unremarkable librarian obsessed with his near-namesake Herman Melville, with the psychogeography of their shared part of New York, and with his dream of building a Permanently Closed Library that would isolate and protect his selective version of the world from the realities and that would otherwise dissolve it.  
>>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... 
VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 

STELLA>> Read all Stella's reviews.
































 


The Roads to Sata: A 2000-mile walk through Japan by Alan Booth  {Reviewed by STELLA}

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.

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella


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Walks with Walser by Carl Seelig (translated by Anne Posten)  {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“When what is distant disappears, what is near tenderly draws nearer,” said Robert Walser, according to Carl Seelig, about walking in the fog. Walser’s collar is crooked, or worn, or both, he carries his furled umbrella under his arm along the mountain path, his hat is battered, the band torn, he is wearing a suit, somewhat raffish, somewhat the worse for wear, but he has no overcoat. Walser does not feel the cold, says Seelig. He enjoys the clouds, the rain. He distrusts clarity. Walser enjoys his walks with Seelig but asks Seelig not to call for him on any day but Sunday, so as not to disturb the routine of the asylum, in Herisau. There he assembles paper bags with glue, sorts beans and lentils, cleans the rooms. “It suits me to disappear,” says Walser, according to Seelig, “as inconspicuously as possible.” Even from his early days, according to Seelig, who did not know Walser in his early days and so must have had this information from Walser, or possibly another source, though no other source suggests itself, Walser took long walks to overcome the effects of nightmares. Or anxiety. Or the panic that results from the inability to engage. Not that Walser suffers from the inability to engage, exactly, though he seldom talks without prompting, not even to Seelig, says Seelig. Seelig spends little time with Walser in the asylum, but instead on the mountain paths, walking in the cloud, and in the rain, the best weather, to the small village inns where they enjoy this wine or that, or beer, or cider, and cutlets, or fried eggs, or dumplings, or cheese pies, whatever they are, or meatloaf, and pommes frites, or cabbage, or mashed potatoes and peas and white beans. Seelig records it all, afterwards, each detail of the walk and of the food and the drink and the waitresses, and every word that Walser speaks, we suppose, or, anyway, at least the essentials. With great equivalence. Off they walk again together, over the ridge, around the base of the mountain, Switzerland has many ridges and many bases of mountains, to clear their heads after the wine, and then to catch the train that will return Walser to the asylum and Seelig to wherever Seelig lives. Walser “harbours a deep suspicion of the doctors, the nurses, and his fellow patients, which he nonetheless skilfully tries to hide behind ceremonial politeness,” says Seelig, who either observes Walser more frequently than is recorded or has this information from the doctors. Seelig becomes, after all, Walser’s guardian after the deaths of Walser’s brother Karl and his sister Lisa. He republishes Walser’s work. To no avail. But Seelig is invisible to us, through making Walser visible when Walser doesn’t want to be visible. Seelig is Walser’s Boswell. Seelig is the narrator of Walser now that Walser narrates nothing. “Restraint is my only weapon,” says Walser, narrates Seelig. The restraint that made Walser significant as a writer is no different from the restraint that stopped him writing. “The less plot a writer needs, and the more restrained the setting, the more significant his talent,” says Walser, the author of, first, novels, then stories, then feuilletons, then microscripts approximating a millimeter in height in pencil on tiny scraps of paper, hidden about his person, in the Asylum in Waldau, unrecognised as actual writing until after his death, until they were deciphered in the 1990s, then nothing. When he first meets Seelig, because Seelig admires Walser's writing, Walser has already stopped writing. He has written nothing since he left Waldau and entered Herisau. Walser blames Hitler. Or society. Or the new superintendent at Waldau, according the Seelig. Walser blames editors, critics, other writers, according to Seelig. Walser’s work was admired by Kafka. He was admired by Benjamin, Sebald, Bernhard and Handke, according to them. To mention only a few. One critic called The Tanners “nothing more than a collection of footnotes,” according to Walser, according to Seelig. The Assistant was true, which is a surprise, at one time you could visit the advertising clock designed by Tobler, says Walser, says Seelig. Walser wrote the book in six weeks. The world changed. Walser changed, or he failed to change. He was celebrated and then increasingly ignored. He found it hard and then harder to get his work published. Even in the newspapers. “I could not perform for society’s sake,” says Walser, of his failure, according to Seelig, “All the dear, sweet people who think they have the right to criticise me and order me around are fanatical admirers of Herman Hesse. They are extremists in their judgement. That’s the reason I have ended up in this asylum. I simply lacked a halo, and that is the only way to be successful in literature,” says Walser to Seelig, according to Seelig, not without bitterness. Writing can only be done if it is the only thing done. Once, Walser alternated his writing with jobs as a servant or as a clerk, for money, for the time to write. Now he does not write. He wants to disappear. “It is absurd and brutal to expect me to scribble away even in the asylum. The only basis on which a writer can produce is freedom. As long as this condition remains unmet, I will refuse to write ever again,” says Walser, as recorded by Seelig. Walser’s turning away is from writing and from life. Walser's ceremonial politeness is his way of not existing, or of existing in his own absence. He is distant and withdrawn. He likes long walks, alone, we find out later, or with Seelig. He talks with Seelig, a little, when prompted, but not with others. As far as we know. The withdrawal that gives his writing such brilliance is the withdrawal that makes life unlivable, in the end, or at some point some way before the end, when one lets go of something, it is uncertain what, that everyone else grasps, naturally, or, more commonly, desperately, whatever it is, that keeps them clutching their lives. Walser, says Seelig, failed to take his own life, on more than a single occasion. His sister showed him the asylum at Waldau. He could think of no option but to enter. He did what was expected. He is diagnosed, when the term becomes available, as a catatonic schizophrenic, whatever that means, but his enjoyment of the walking, of the scenery, of the food and more especially the drink, and of the waitresses, seems genuine, at least through the eyes of Seelig, who knows him better than anyone, who sought him out because of his work and befriended him in the asylum and who accompanies him on long walks, who records everything and is sympathetic and transparent, at least to us, so that there is no reason to doubt Walser’s small and simple pleasures as they are recorded by Seelig, an affectionate man, on the level of smallness and simplicity at which they are experienced by Walser, who has set about perfecting smallness and simplicity until it resembles so very little it is almost nothing. Who is the sworn enemy of his own individuality. Who shows no emotion when told of the death of his brother, whom he loves, who refuses to break his routine to visit his sister, whom he loves, when she lies dying and asks him to come. “I too am ill,” says Walser, says Seelig. He doesn’t want to do what the other patients in the asylum aren't doing. He has an intestinal ulcer. “Must I be sick?” he asks the doctor, “Are you not satisfied to have me here in good health?” He refuses the operation. Just as well. “Is it true that you destroyed four unpublished novels?” asks Seelig. “That may be,” answers Walser, according to Seelig. Seelig says that Walser’s brother’s wife Fridolina had been told by Walser’s sister Lisa that Walser had destroyed a photograph of himself that had been taken by his brother Karl. “That may be,” answers Walser, records Seelig. Walser is convinced of his failure. At least of his inability to perform as he is expected to perform, to be successful as a writer, though he has an ambivalence towards success, to live even an ordinary life. Everything must be made smaller. “The snow has now turned to hail,” describes Seelig, of the weather. Walser carries steadfastly on. A life is full of details, even when those details are small, or insignificant, if there is such a thing as insignificant. If you wish to disappear you pay attention to the small. You have relinquished everything else and are relinquishing that too, with great care. The doctor says Walser has a disease of the lungs. It affects his heart. He should not leave the asylum grounds, says the doctor, according to Seelig. Walser accompanies Seelig to the train. The next time they walk, Walser does not walk well, says Seelig. He tires and stumbles. It seems there is not much of life left. Almost nothing. One day Walser goes for a walk. They find him later, face-up in the snow.

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas