Standing Heavy by GauZ’ (translated by Frank Wynne) $38
”Initially a little intrigued, all babies eventually return the security guard's smile. The security guard adores babies. Perhaps because babies do not shoplift. Babies adore the security guard. Perhaps because he does not drag babies to the sales.”
The 1960s — Ferdinand arrives in Paris from Côte d'Ivoire, ready to take on the world and become a big somebody. The 1990s — It is the Golden Age of immigration, and Ossiri and Kassoum navigate a Paris on the brink of momentous change. The 2010s — In a Sephora on the Champs-Élysées, the all-seeing eyes of a security guard observes the habits of those who come to worship at this church to consumerism. Amidst the political bickering of the inhabitants of the Residence for Students from Côte d'Ivoire and the ever-changing landscape of French immigration policy, Ferdinand, Ossiri and Kassoum, two generations of Ivoirians, attempt to make their way as undocumented workers, taking shifts as security at a flour mill. Sharply satirical, political and poignant, Standing Heavy is a searingly witty deconstruction of colonial legacies and capitalist consumption, an unprecedented and unforgettable account of everything that passes under a security guard's gaze. There are fresh ideas and observations of the human condition (so to call it) on every page of this remarkable book, expressed with a concision and humour that may well change the way you think.
Short-listed for the 2023 International Booker Prize.
”A sharp and satirical take on the legacies of French colonial history and life in Paris today. Told in a fast-paced, and fluently translated, style of shifting perspectives, Standing Heavy carries us through the decades.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
>>A succession of fictions.
>>Read an extract.
>>The most powerful way of fostering empathy.

May the Tigris Grieve for You by Emilienne Malfatto (translated by Lorna Fox Scott) $34
Rural Iraq, during the war against the Islamic State. A pregnancy out of wedlock. The young woman knows her fate is sealed. In crystalline prose May the Tigris Grieve for You enters the minds of all protagonists, before and after death; fragments of the legend of Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian hero who carries along the memory of the country and its people, punctuate the family members' short monologues, spaced with the mythical voice of the Tigris River, who has seen it all. Inspired by her experience of Iraq's complex reality and brutal wars, Malfatto delivers an uncompromising yet compassionate insight into a rigid society ruled by fathers and sons, a world in which life matters less than honour.
”A prose poem of devastating power, conveyed in simple devastating prose. It’s about war and loss, conformity and obligation, but most importantly about misogyny, femicide, power, vulnerability, and the injustice of it all. A poignant and thought-provoking novella, that will take you an hour to read, but the inequity at its heart will stay with you for a very, very long time.” —Paul Burke
>>Read the first chapter.

Look at the Lights, My Love by Annie Ernaux (translated by Alison L. Strayer) $35
For half a century, French writer Annie Ernaux (the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate) has explored stories and subjects often considered unworthy of artistic reflection. In this exquisite meditation, Ernaux turns her attention to the phenomenon of the big-box superstore, a ubiquitous feature of modern life that has received scant attention in literature. Recording her visits to a single superstore in Paris for over a year, Ernaux captures the world that exists within its massive walls. Culture, class, and capitalism converge, reinscribing the individual's role and rank within society while absorbing individuality into the machine of mass consumerism. Through Ernaux's eyes, the superstore emerges as a "great human meeting place, a spectacle," a space where we come into direct contact with difference. She notes the unexpectedly intimate encounters between customers; how our collective desires are dictated by the daily, seasonal, and annual rhythms of the marketplace; and the ways that the built environment reveals the contours of gender and race in contemporary society. With her relentless powers of observation, Annie Ernaux takes the measure of a place we thought we knew, calling us to question the experiences we overlook and to gaze more deeply into ordinary life. 
"Translated from the French with great intelligence and sensitivity by Alison Strayer. Ernaux's diary is a provocation: to accept these life scenes as worthy of our time and attention." —Kate Briggs, Washington Post
"The subject at the heart of Look at the Lights, My Love is what we reveal of ourselves in the strange sterility of the store. Ernaux's singular style conveys both the soullessness and the dreamlike charm of the place." —Tess Little, Literary Review
>>Alone together.
>>”I don’t see writing as liberation.”
>>Both comfort and alienation.

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett $32
A deceptively slender volume, Pond captures with utterly mesmerizing virtuosity the interior reality of its unnamed protagonist, a young woman living a singular and mostly solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village. Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, it focuses on the details of her daily experience—from the best way to eat porridge or bananas to an encounter with cows—rendered sometimes in story-length, story-like stretches of narrative, sometimes in fragments no longer than a page, but always suffused with the hypersaturated, almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world that we remember from childhood. The effect is of character refracted and ventriloquized by environment, catching as it bounces her longings, frustrations, and disappointments—the ending of an affair, or the ambivalent beginning with a new lover. As the narrator's persona emerges in all its eccentricity, sometimes painfully and often hilariously, we cannot help but see mirrored there our own fraught desires and limitations, and our own fugitive desire, despite everything, to be known. New edition.
”Claire-Louise Bennett sets the conventions of literary fiction ablaze in this ferociously intelligent and funny debut. Don't be fooled by Pond’s small size. It contains multitudes.” —Jenny Offill
”Claire-Louise Bennett is a major writer to be discovered and treasured.” —Deborah Levy
>>Read Thomas’s review.
>>The mind in solitude.
>>Modes of solitude.

Pathogenesis: How germs made history by Jonathan Kennedy $75
Humans did not make history — we were its host. This humbling and revelatory book shows how infectious disease has shaped humanity at every stage, from the first success of Homo sapiens over the equally intelligent Neanderthals to the fall of Rome, and the rise of Islam. How did the Black Death lead to the birth of capitalism? And how did the Industrial Revolution lead to the birth of the welfare state? Infectious diseases are not just something that happens to us, but a part of who we are. The only reason humans don't lay eggs is that a virus long ago inserted itself into our DNA. In fact, 8% of the human genome was put there by viruses. We have been thinking about the survival of the fittest all wrong- human evolution is not simply about our strength and intelligence, but about what viruses can and can't use for their benefit.
”Pathogenesis doesn't only cover thousands of years of history - it seeks radically to alter the way the reader views many of the (often very well-known) events it describes.” —Rachel Cooke, Observer
>>A golden age for microbes.

The Long Form by Kate Briggs $38
It’s early morning and there’s a whole new day ahead. How will it unfold? The baby will feed, hopefully she’ll sleep; Helen looks out of the window. The Long Form is the story of two people composing a day together. It is a day of movements and improvisations, common and uncommon rhythms, stopping and starting again. As the morning progresses, a book – The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding – gets delivered, and the scope of the day widens further. Matters of care-work share ground with matters of friendship, housing, translation, aesthetics and creativity. Small incidents of the day revive some of the oldest preoccupations of the novel: the force of social circumstance, the power of names, the meaning of duration and the work of love. With lightness and precision, Kate Briggs renews Henry Fielding’s proposition for what a novel can be, combining fiction and essay to write an extraordinary domestic novel of far-reaching ideas.
”The Long Form is an absorbing and profound novel in which Kate Briggs breathes extraordinary life into the quiet moments of a young woman: one who is also a new mother, a reader, a daughter, a friend. With every carefully weighted sentence, action and thought, one is immersed in the radical generosity of this writing, its principles of collectivity and its feminist commitment to making the smallest, most everyday act worthy of consideration within a literary canon. A beautifully written book about the art of reading, of criticism, and of surviving through the strangest yet most normal of times.” —Preti Taneja
”Ostensibly about a single day in the lives of a new mother and her infant, The Long Form – with its recursive structure, its subtle connections and reverberations, its attentiveness to physical and social life, and its animated conversation with other works of fiction and theory – presents the novel form as the most elastic of containers. Kate Briggs is a brilliant writer and thinker.” —Kathryn Scanlan
”Briggs is a fantastic writer: that is clear by the end of this eminently strange novel. Briggs has written a work that will constantly reward a re-reading, with a voice that combines a deep complexity with moments of piercing clarity. It is an intelligent and well-read book: but it is also emphatically convincing and moving.” —Patrick Maxwell, The Big Issue

Resilience: A story of persecution, escape, survival, and triumph by Inge Woolf $35
Resilience is a Holocaust story and a New Zealand story. Born to a prosperous Jewish family, Inge Woolf witnessed the Nazis marching into Vienna in March 1938. To escape certain death, the family audaciously boarded a train to the heart of Nazi Germany – Berlin – and from there caught a plane to England, pretending they were going on holiday. Hiding their Jewish identity until after World War II, Inge and her family began a new life as impoverished refugees. A move to New Zealand signalled new beginnings. Inge met the love of her life, Ronald Woolf, and together they created the country's pre-eminent photographic studio. They settled in Wellington, raising two children when tragedy struck again with Ron killed at age 57 in a helicopter crash in 1987. Resilience is ultimately the story of a woman who harnessed her past and used it to encourage a more cohesive, inclusive society. In her later years, Inge was pivotal in establishing the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand and was its founding director. She educated thousands on the Holocaust and the dangers of antisemitism, racism and prejudice, often observing that hate starts small. She was often called on by the media to comment about antisemitism and would speak freely about the need to remember the lessons learned from the Nazi genocide.
>>Woolf’s daughter speaks about the book.

Mala’s Cat by Mala Kacenberg $26
Alone in a forest with only a cat for company, this is the true story of a little girl's remarkable survival in the shadow of the Holocaust. Growing up in the Polish village of Tarnogrod on the fringes of a deep pine forest has given twelve-year-old Mala Szorer the happiest childhood she could have hoped for. But, as the German invasion begins, her beloved village becomes a ghetto and her family and friends reduced to starvation, she takes matters into her own hands, bravely removes her yellow star and sneaks out to the surrounding villages to barter for food. It is on her way back that she sees her loved ones rounded up for deportation, and receives a smuggled letter from her sister warning her to stay away. With only her cat, Malach, and the strength of the stories taught by her family, she walks away from her village and everything she holds dear into the dangerous unknown. Malach becomes her family, her protector, her only respite from painful loneliness, and a reminder to stay hopeful even when faced with unfathomable darkness.
”Fresh, unsentimental and utterly unpredictable, this memoir, rescued from obscurity by the efforts of Mala Kacenberg's five children, should be read and cherished as a new, vital document of a history that must never be allowed to vanish.” —The New York Times
>>Mounting horrors.

Questions I am Asked about the holocaust (young readers’ edition) by Hédi Fried (translated by Alice E. Olsson) $30
Hedi Fried was nineteen when the Nazis arrested her family and transported them to Auschwitz. While there, apart from enduring the daily horrors at the concentration camp, she and her sister were forced into hard labour before being released at the end of the war. After settling in Sweden, Hedi devoted her life to educating young people about the Holocaust. In her 90s, she decided to take the most common questions (such as: "Why did you not fight back?"; "What helped you to survive?"; "Are you able to forgive?"), and her answers, and turn them into a book so that children all over the world could understand what had happened. This is an excellent illustrated edition for young readers.
>>Look inside.

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad $38
After years away from her family's homeland, and healing from an affair with an established director, stage actress Sonia Nasir returns to Palestine to visit her older sister Haneen. Though the siblings grew up spending summers at their family home in Haifa, Sonia hasn't been back since the second intifada and the deaths of her grandparents. While Haneen stayed and made a life commuting to Tel Aviv to teach at the university, Sonia remained in London to focus on her burgeoning acting career and now dissolute marriage. On her return, she finds her relationship to Palestine is fragile, both bone-deep and new. Once at Haneen's, Sonia meets the charismatic and candid Mariam, a local director, and finds herself roped into a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Soon, Sonia is rehearsing Gertude's lines in classical Arabic and spending more time in Ramallah than in Haifa with a dedicated group of men who, in spite of competing egos and priorities, each want to bring Shakespeare to that side of the wall. As opening night draws closer it becomes clear just how many invasive and violent obstacles stand before a troupe of Palestinian actors. Amidst it all, the life Sonia once knew starts to give way to the daunting, exhilarating possibility of finding a new self in her ancestral home.
”Outstanding. Aesthetically, intellectually, emotionally and culturally satisfying. It is astonishing but true that Isabella Hammad is incapable of striking a false note. She immerses her heroine in volatile territory with the accuracy, compassion and coolness of a surgical knife sliding into a diseased body. The result is a stunning beauty — an eye-opening, uplifting novel that grants its vulnerable cast and their endeavors a rare and graceful dignity.” —Leila Aboulela

Aftermath: Colonialism, violence and memory in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific edited by Angela Wanhalla, Lyndall Ryan and Camille Nurka $50
”What we choose to remember and what we choose to forget about the violent past tell us something about the society we live in now. Whether we like it or not, we’re part of each other’s story. So how do we talk about the past?“ —Joanna Kidman and Vincent O’Malley
Aftermaths explores the life-changing intergenerational effects of colonial violence in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific. The settings of these accessible, illustrated short essays range from Ōrākau pā in the Waikato to the Kimberleys in northwest Australia, from orphanages in Fiji to the ancestral lands of the Wiyot Tribe in Northern California. Contributors include: Tony Ballantyne, Rachel Burgess, Penelope Edmonds, Anaru Eketone, Stephanie Gilbert, Victoria Haskins, Anna Johnston, Joanna Kidman, Shino Konishi, Jane Lydon, Caitlin Lynch, Keri Mills, Kirstine Moffat, Grace Moore, Amanda Nettelbeck, Erica Newman, Camille Nurka, Patricia O’Brien, Vincent O’Malley, Lachy Paterson, Lyndall Ryan, Sian Smith, Kate Stevens and Angela Wanhalla.
“Story by story, this collection powerfully reveals the living legacy of historical events, showing how they have been remembered (and misremembered) within families and communities into the present day.
'It is a rare publication that can cross the difficult divide between academic history and accessible reading. Every chapter is well-written and evocative. Aftermaths will open eyes. Aftermaths makes a powerful case for ending our historical ignorance. It forces readers to confront the violence embedded in our collective colonial past and it reveals the many reverberations of that violence in our present. It also asks us to unbury the skeletons in our own closets and fairly carry our share of this ‘emotional freight’ and trauma. It asks us to be brave and unchain our dragons.” —Maartje Abbenhuis, Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books

Laughing in the Dark by Barbara Else $40
By the time Barbara Else was in her forties, she was married to a globally recognised academic physician, had two beautiful teenage daughters and a house in Karori. Gradually she realised her husband didn't want her to have a career of her own or do anything outside his orbit. He refused to acknowledge there was a problem. In the end, the man who became her second husband offered a way out. It was a huge risk. But she fled, with a laundry basket of oddments, two suitcases, and her little Mac Plus and dot matrix printer. The result was best-selling books and literary honours. With her wit and humour, Barbara describes her transformation from a shy but stubborn child into a fulfilled and successful adult.
”I laughed and laughed, and I cried and cried. It's got everything in it except a murder.” —Lesley Graham, soprano (and totally unbiased sister)
>>It’s been quite a ride.

Abigail and the Making of the Moon by Matthew Cunningham and Sarah Wilkins $21
One clear day, Abigail thinks of a question and knows that she won't be able to do anything else if she doesn't have an answer to it. "Daddy," she asked, "where did the Moon come from?""From the Earth, Abigail," replied Daddy. "The Moon was once a part of the Earth.""It was?" Abigail asked. "But how did it get in the sky? And how does it stay in the sky? And why do we only ever see one side of the Moon?" What follows is an evocatively simple story within a story explaining how the newborn Earth collided with another planet, and how gravity acts like invisible hands reaching out and keeping the Moon spinning around the Earth, the Earth spinning around the Sun, and the Sun spinning around the galaxy. And of course by dinner time, Abigail has thought of a new big question...

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way. I haven’t yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things.” Always hinting at experience just beyond the reach of language, Bennett's remarkable book is impelled by the rigours of noticing. Encounters with persons and with the infraordinary are treated with equivalence: acute, highly acute, overly acute, observations immediately plunge the narrator’s awareness into the depths of her response (“My head is turned by imagined elsewheres and hardly at all by present circumstances.”), far from the surface at which outward contact may be made, or may be being made, a process that is both deeply isolating, terrifying and protective. Bennett’s unsparingly acute observations of the usually unacknowledged or unacknowledgeable motivations, urges and responses that underlie human interaction and quotidian existence seem here induced by an acceptance or a resignation that is enabled by despair, or is indistinguishable from despair, both a resignation and a panic, perhaps, a panic on the edge of self-dissolution which is perhaps our last resistance to self-dissolution and therefore fundamental to individual existence: the anxiety which all human activity is designed to conceal. Bennett’s is a very individual voice (click here to hear her read a sample), resonating at times with other works of irredeemably isolated interiority, such David Markson’s superb Wittgenstein’s Mistress or the suppressed hysteria of Thomas Bernhard’s narrators, but tracking entirely her own patterns of thought (I have perhaps made an error here of conflating the author with the narrator, but, if this is an error, it is one hard to avoid in the book in which style and content are inseparable) with an immediacy that precludes the artificially patterning, pseudo-assimilable explanation of a ‘story’. In one excellent section, ‘Control Knobs’, the narrator describes the gradual disintegration of the three knobs that control her cooker and speculates a coming time when the last interchangeable knob breaks and the cooker will become unusable. This reminds her of the counted matches in Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall (another novel of irredeemably isolated interiority), which mark the time to the point at which that narrator will no longer be able to light a fire to cook and warm herself. Following a discussion of Bennett’s narrator’s reading and misreading of that book, she returns to an account of the ultimate hopelessness of her attempts to procure new knobs for her cooker. “I feel at a loss for about ten minutes and it’s a sensation, I realise, not dissimilar to indifference. So, naturally, I handle it rather well.”

A selection of books from our shelves.
(Click through to find out more)

Dr.No

Nothing To See Here

Void Studies

Absence

The King of Nothing

Nothing To See

No Document

NEW BOOKS AND BOOK NEWS

(21.4.23)

Read our 326th NEWSLETTER and find out what we’ve been reading and recommending.

August Blue by Deborah Levy {Reviewed by STELLA}
August Blue is an enigmatic novel. It’s sparsely written, with evocative sentences, yet crisp ideas. Elsa, a famous concert pianist, has walked off the stage in humiliation and is now traveling Europe teaching music to anyone who will have her. Her downfall extremely public; her inner world in turmoil. From the outset, Elsa would like you to believe she has a devil-may-care attitude towards her crisis, but it doesn’t take too much picking at a wound to see her hurt and confusion. But let’s put aside her parentage (or rather abandonment), let’s put aside her recently dyed blue hair, let’s put aside her craving to be free of expectation; for Levy does something from the outset — she sets a perpetual question mark at the centre of this story which underscores each page. Who is the woman in the Athens marketplace? Someone so familiar that the viewer and the viewed are compelled to see each other, to be drawn inexplicably to each other in spite of an enticing rivalry. Doppelganger or mirror image? Familiar or stranger? The same, but different, or not really there at all? A desire, all-consuming. Elsa is drawn to the woman who steals the mechanical horses from under her nose; whose acquisition sends her on an obsessive quest to have the horses as her right, and, when she can’t have them, stealing the woman’s hat is the next best thing to possess, as if possessing this hat binds the two strangers to each other. And maybe it does. Elsa’s flagrant wearing of the trilby is a flag to wave in provocation: Here I am, and you better not forget it — I’m coming for my horses. It’s 2020 and the pandemic is set to lock in. Elsa, back in London, finds a different pattern to live by — an enforced schedule, or non-schedule that will ring familiar to many. That strange time/non-time, of lengthening and shortening; a strange mix of frustration and contentment somehow co-existing, spiked with uncertainty. In August Blue, Levy uses this out-of-time moment in history to best effect in her novel about a woman in limbo. Moving between Greece, Paris, London, and Sardinia (where Elsa visits her maestro in his final months), Levy uses this movement to jointly discombobulate — reflecting Elsa’s fractured state as well as giving us, the reader, mere episodic moments with Elsa, as though we are allowed only glances into her life. In this novel, readers of Levy’s other novels will recognise the themes of mothers and daughters (Hot Milk), of heat as an oppressor as well as an escape (Swimming Home), and enigmatic actions (The Man Who Saw Everything) but will see a change in the telling. Levy seems to draw her memoir style (from her 'Living Autobiography' trilogy) into this novel, creating a fiction that has few boundaries — that impregnates itself into the reader with an ease that is beguiling, so that you are continually entering and re-entering the story, learning a little more each time, but nothing at all — yet paradoxically knowing everything, as if starting again is the only option towards understanding, if that is possible when facing oneself. 

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (translated by Elisabeth Jacquette) {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Sand absorbs water poured upon it just as it absorbs blood spilt upon it and the actions committed upon it. Where does this water, this blood, and where do these actions go? Can they be recovered? How do they return? Adania Shibli’s remarkable novel is comprised of two parts. The first, told in the third person, describes with elegant impassivity and equivalence the actions and movements of an officer in the Israeli army in the Naqab/Negev desert during the 1948-49 Naqba/War of Independence. Although we gain no access to his thoughts (how could we gain access to his thoughts, after all?), we are witness to his obsessive washing routines, his watchfulness for spiders and insects within his hut and his destruction of them, his tending of a festering spider bite on his thigh, his journeys into the surrounding desert either in vehicles with his soldiers, using maps, searching for Arab ‘insurgents’, or alone, on foot around the camp, following the topography. The other soldiers have no reachable dimension other than being soldiers because any such dimensions would be irrelevant. The officer is the only one who speaks, and that hardly at all except for a long lecture expressing the view that the desert is a wasteland that can be made fertile when cleansed of its current inhabitants. As the rituals of army life are repeated and repeated, the tension builds beneath the narrative. The soldiers come across a group of unarmed Bedouin at an oasis and kill them and their camels, taking a dog and a young woman back to the camp. Their mistreatment of her, culminating in gang rape and later her murder and burial near the camp, can be felt in the narrative long before they occur. The howling dog witness shifts the first section of the book to the second, where a howling dog keeps the first-person narrator awake at night in her house in contemporary Ramallah. She has become obsessed with the fate of the young woman, which she has read about in a newspaper article, and by “the conviction that I can uncover details about the rape and murder as the girl experienced it, not relying on what the soldiers who committed it disclosed.” What happens to those who have no agency in their own story? The narrator cannot accept that the young woman is “a nobody who will forever remain a nobody whose voice nobody will hear,” and, with a borrowed ID, which will help her to enter different areas, and a rented car, one weekend she sets out to see if she can find out more. She takes a pile of maps: the official Israeli maps that show the roads, checkpoints, settlements and army zones in the Negev but do not mark even still-existing Palestinian settlements, and maps of the Naqab before 1948, which give information possibly relevant to her search. Maps are a way in which power imprints itself on territory, and Shibli spends a great deal of careful attention in both parts of the novel to the movements of her main characters over the land, contrasting the movement associated with maps with that concerned with and guided by the terrain. These different ways of moving have, for each of them, quite different results. The movements of the officer in the first section imprints power upon a territory, a pattern traced by the woman in the second section over land that holds the trace of violence in itself. The past is never left behind though it can never be recovered, either. In the first part, the officer has complete ease of movement, heading wherever he wishes, inside or out; in the second part the narrator has her movement checked and restricted wherever she goes (until she reaches the Naqab). “The borders imposed between things here are many. One must pay attention to them, and navigate them, which ultimately protects everyone from perilous consequences,” she notes, waiting at the checkpoints in the wall that divides the territory. “There are some who consider focusing on minor details as the only way to arrive at the truth, and therefore proof of its existence, to reconstruct an incident one has never witnessed simply by noticing little details that everyone else finds to be insignificant,” she says, as a reason for her search. This may be true, but if such minor details exist their significance may also be unrecognised by the searcher. In the military museum that she visits, the only ‘evidence’ is the soap, the jerrycans, the uniforms, the vehicles and the weapons mentioned in the first part. Intention leaves no residue. Also these objects constitute the majority of the soldiers’ experience, given how little the woman meant to them. Part of the narrator’s and Shibli’s project is to uncover the particular from the general, the experience from the history. Although both she and the author bewail injustice, the narrator shows no enmity towards any of the people she meets, all are treated with sympathy; harm arises only from structures of power. Power withdraws the evidence of its actions, hides its victims, disappears into the understructure of everyday life. There is no residue unless the land holds a residue. The second half of the book is lightly told, in keeping with the personality of its narrator, and often funny (she describes a film rewinding in a museum and the settlers dismantling their houses). She visits the settlement with the name of the place where the crime occurred and learns that the actual place is near by, she visits the place and finds nothing of interest, she walks through the surrounding plantations where the desert has been made fertile, but is frightened back by a dog. “I am here in vain,” she says. “I haven’t found anything I’ve been looking for, and this journey hasn’t added anything to what I knew about the incident when I started out.” Reluctant to return to Ramallah, she drives back and forth in the desert, gives a ride to an old woman, and then decides to follow her through a military zone, where she comes across an oasis. The land has drawn her to the core of her quest, but she has no way of recognising it as such, and she does not expect that her quest will be, still unknowingly, fulfilled in the last sentence of the book. 

In Shy, Max Porter again shows an incredible ability to get completely inside the head of his narrator, his spare and unconventionally effective prose delivering us an experience that enlarges our empathy and understanding. Shy is a young man who is both damaged and damaging, troubled and troubling, inmate of the residential institution Last Chance but also creature of a pervasive trope of masculinity. Shy is suffering; people want to help him, but can he be helped? What can he find inside him that can help him find his footing? An affecting and humane short novel, presented as a beautiful hardback. 
>>Absolute horror at the political present. 
>>Men and masculinity.
>>Lucky.
>>Entering the hinterland. 
>>His father’s voice.
>>Are novels miniature villages?
>>Pebbles.
>>Read our reviews of Lanny.
>>Read Thomas's review of The Death of Francis Bacon. 
>>Grief Is the Thing With Feathers. 
>>Your copy of Shy.

A selection of books from our shelves. Click on the titles to find out more.

• The Museum of the Wood Age

• Barkskins

• Woodcut Postcard Book (>>notecards also available)

• The Axeman’s Carnival

• Norwegian Wood: Chopping, stacking and drying wood the Scandinavian way

• Woodcutters

• Buchanan Smith’s Axe Handbook

• Carve! A book on wood, knives and axes

Greek Lessons by Han Kang (translated from Korean by Emily Yae Woon and Deborah Smith) $40
In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages. Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish - the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity — their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to expression.
>>How language misses the mark.
>>Losing language.

Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright $45
The much-anticipated new novel from one of Australia’s outstanding authors. Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned. In a small town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in following the dance of butterflies and scouring the internet to find out how she can seek repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family to China. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide after being labelled a paedophile. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful. When the town is overrun by donkeys, the residents and their strange religious sects react with anger, led by the Mayor, the albino Aboriginal named Ice Pick, and his outlandishly dressed groupie women. This is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.
”I’m awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of Alexis Wright’s work, from fiction such as Carpentaria and The Swan Book, to her ‘collective memoir’ of an Aboriginal elder in Tracker. As essayist, activist, novelist and oral historian she is vital on the subject of land and people.” — Robert Macfarlane, New York Times Book Review
>>Sovereignty of the imagination.

Participation by Anna Moschovakis $35
When the weather revolts, certainties dissolve and binaries blur as members of two reading groups converge at the intersection of theory and practice to reshape their lives, relationships, and reality itself. In Anna Moschovakis’s novel, two reading groups, unofficially called Love and Anti-Love, falter amidst political friction and signs of environmental collapse. Participation offers a prescient look at communication in a time of rupture: anonymous participants exchange fantasies and ruminations, and relationships develop and unravel. As the groups consider—or neglect—their syllabi, and connections between members deepen, a mentor disappears, a translator questions his role, a colleague known as ‘the capitalist’ becomes a point of fixation, and "the news reports" filter through in fragments. With incisive prose and surprising structural shifts, Participation forms an alluring vision of community, and a love story like no other.
”Moschovakis's take on what it means to form community in opposition to the expectations of hierarchy, anticipated outcome, or even narrative feels timely, perhaps even prescient, in an era when the only thing that seems constant is the incontrovertible need for change. Densely intellectual, the novel forces an alert reader to reconsider what it means to participate in the very act of reading.” —Kirkus

Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth (translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund) $30
'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed and back in Oslo after a long absence as she prepares for a retrospective of her art. The subject of her work is motherhood and some of her more controversial paintings have brought about a dramatic rift between parent and child. This new proximity, after decades of acrimonious absence, set both women on edge, and before too long Johanna finds her mother stalking her thoughts, and Johanna starts stalking her mother's house.
Long-listed for the 2021 International Booker Prize.
”A darkly insightful examination of mother-daughter relationships that captivates with the suspense of a thriller. The novel's strength lies in its deft use of psychological analysis as it looks at this relationship through one lens after another.” —Kirkus Reviews
>>”The relationship between mother and child is a never-ending story.”
>>Read an extract.
>>”The better I translate, the more I erase myself.”

How Our Solar System Began: The planets, their moons, and beyond by Aina Bestard $45
We live in an amazing planetary system! From the yawning Valles Marineris on Mars and the ocean hiding beneath the ice crust of Jupiter's moon Europa, to the eerily Earth-like terrain of Saturn's moon Titan and the Sun's blazing corona, our solar system brims with wonders. This beautiful large-format book takes children on a trip across the Solar System with the aid of marvellous illustrations, lift-up flaps and a comprehensive text that helps them understand the amazing variety of landscapes within our planetary system. Lift up the layers to discover how the Sun was formed and explore the amazing landscapes of our neighbouring planets. Readers will find out which moons are the most like the Earth, what Saturn's rings are made of, where comets come from, and what lies in the Kuiper Belt, outside the very edge of the solar system.
>>Look inside!

The West: A new history of an old idea by Naoise Mac Sweeney $40
Many assume ‘Western Civilisation’ derives from a cultural inheritance that stretches back to classical antiquity, a golden thread that binds us from Plato to NATO. But what if all this is wrong? What if the Western world does not have its ultimate origins in a single cultural bloodline but rather a messy bramble of ancestors and influences? What if ‘The West’ is just an idea that has been invented, co-opted, and mythologised to serve different purposes through history? As battles over privilege, identity and prejudice rock the cultural wars, it's never been more important to understand how the concept of The West came to be. This book shows how the idea of the West was created, how it has been used to justify imperialism and racism, and also why it's still a powerful ideological tool to understand our world. Told through the lives of fourteen fascinating historical figures — from a powerful Roman matriarch to an Islamic scholar, from a crusading Greek soldier to a founding father of the United States, from a slave girl in the new Americas to a British prime minister — it casts a new light on how ‘The West’ was invented, embraced, rejected and re-imagined to shape our world today.
”One by one she takes on hoary old myths, explodes them with panache, and leaves us instead with a richer, fuller understanding of epochs, worldviews and fascinating individuals from the past. Lots of people will enjoy this clever and thought-provoking account.” —Guardian
”A bold, sweeping bird's-eye view of thousands of years of history that provides a truly global perspective of the past. A fantastic achievement.” —Peter Frankopan
>>Disjunctions between fact and fiction.

Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh $37
In 1951, the small French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit succumbed to a mass poisoning. The poison induced hysteria, violent and euphoric hallucinations, and many deaths. In the years before the disaster, there lived in the town a woman named Elodie. She was the baker's wife — a plain, unremarkable person who yearned to transcend her dull existence. So when a charismatic new couple arrived in town, Elodie quickly fell under their glamorous spell. Thus began a dangerous game of cat and mouse, the intoxication of the chase slowly seeping into everything — but who was the predator and on whom did they prey?
”A shimmering fever-dream of a novel, teasing the reader while finding a fresh narrative framework for the relationship between monotonous small-town life and repressed female desire. Cursed Bread contains more riches than many a novel twice its length.” —Telegraph
”A quietly rich maturation of Mackintosh's skill. This is a book about the power desire and greed exert over reality and memory. Mackintosh has entered a brilliant new stage of writing.” —Guardian
>>The town that went insane.

Mushroom (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Sara Rich $23
They are the things we step on without noticing and the largest organisms on Earth. They are symbols of inexplicable growth and excruciating misery. They are grouped with plants, but they behave more like animals. In their inscrutability, mushrooms are wondrous organisms. The mushroom is an ordinary object whose encounters with humans are usually limited to a couple of species prepackaged at the grocery store. This book offers mushrooms as much more than a pasta ingredient or trendy coffee alternative. It presents these objects as the firmament for life as we know it, enablers of mystical traditions, menders of minds lost to depression. But it acknowledges, too, that this firmament only exists because of death and rot. Rummaging through philosophical, literary, medical, ecological, and anthropological texts only serves to confirm what the average forager already knows: that mushrooms are to be regarded with a reverence deserving of only the most powerful entities: those who create and destroy, and thrive on both.
>>Other books in the excellent ‘Object Lessons’ series.

Saving Time: Discovering a life beyond the clock by Jenny Odell $40
In her first book, How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell wrote about the importance of disconnecting from the ‘attention economy’ to spend time in quiet contemplation. But what if you don’t have time to spend? In order to answer this seemingly simple question, Odell took a deep dive into the fundamental structure of our society and found that the clock we live by was built for profit, not people. This is why our lives, even in leisure, have come to seem like a series of moments to be bought, sold, and processed ever more efficiently. Odell shows us how our painful relationship to time is inextricably connected not only to persisting social inequities but to the climate crisis, existential dread, and a lethal fatalism. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding; the stretchy quality of waiting and desire; the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory; the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy; the time it takes to heal from injuries. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life in which time is not reducible to standardised units and instead forms the very medium of possibility.
>>A radical act.

Still Life With Bones: Field notes on forensics and loss by Alexa Hagerty $38
An anthropologist working with forensic teams and victims' families to investigate crimes against humanity in Latin America explores what science can tell us about the lives of the dead in this haunting account of grief, the power of ritual, and a quest for justice. "Exhumation can divide brothers and restore fathers, open old wounds and open the possibility of regeneration-of building something new with the pile of broken mirrors that is loss and mourning." Over the course of Guatemala's thirty-year armed conflict -the longest ever in Central America-over 200,000 people were killed. During Argentina's military dictatorship in the seventies, over 30,000 people were disappeared. Today, forensic anthropologists in each country are gathering evidence to prove atrocities and seek justice. But these teams do more than just study skeletons—they work to repair families and countries torn apart by violence.
”When Hagerty talks about ‘lives being violently made into bones’, I defy you not to be moved. The text is unflinching, but then the crimes and the victims deserve nothing less. I guarantee this will make you think long and hard about cruelty and human rights and the dedication and humanity of the forensic scientist." — Sue Black

Abolition. Feminism. Now. by Angela Davis, Erica Meiners, Beth Ritchie, and Gina Dent $28
Abolitionism and feminism stand shoulder-to-shoulder in fighting a common cause—the end of the carceral state, with its key role in perpetuating violence, both public and private, in prisons, in police forces, and in people's homes. As these four scholars assert, abolitionist theories and practices are at their most compelling when they are feminist; and a feminism that is also abolitionist is the most inclusive and persuasive version of feminism for these times.

Blue Jeans (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Carolyn Purnell $23
Few clothing items are as ubiquitous or casual as blue jeans. Yet, their simplicity is deceptive. Blue jeans are nothing if not an exercise in opposites. Americans have accepted jeans as a symbol of their culture, but today jeans are a global consumer product category. Levi Strauss made blue jeans in the 1870s to withstand the hard work of mining, but denim has since become the epitome of leisure. In the 1950s, celebrities like Marlon Brando transformed the utilitarian clothing of industrial labor into a glamorous statement of youthful rebellion, and now, you can find jeans on chic fashion runways. For some, indigo blue might be the color of freedom, but for workers who have produced the dye, it has often been a color of oppression and tyranny. Blue Jeans considers the versatility of this iconic garment and investigates what makes denim a universal signifier, ready to fit any context, meaning, and body.
>>Other books in the excellent ‘Object Lessons’ series.

The Real Work: On the mystery of mastery by Adam Gopnik $38
For decades, Adam Gopnik has been a perceptive critic of art, food, France, and more. But recently, he became obsessed by a fundamental matter: How did the people he was writing about learn their outlandish skill, whether it was drawing a nude or baking a sourdough loaf? In The Real Work—his title the term magicians use for the accumulated craft that makes for a great trick—Gopnik apprentices himself to an artist, a dancer, a boxer, and even a driving instructor (from the DMV), among others, trying his late-middle-age hand at things he assumed were beyond him. He finds that mastering a skill is a process of methodically breaking down and building up, piece by piece—and that true mastery, in any field, requires mastering other people's minds.
”Among the uplifting pleasures of Gopnik's writing is the range and ardour of his enthusiasms. If his only truly fanatical pursuit is making sentences, he seems to intuit that his best ones — his truest — are those that are unselfconsciously committed to their subject, and vitalised by the passionate curiosity that also reins them in.” —New Statesman
”A springboard for a discussion of art, family, empathy, mortality. Via memoir, analysis and criticism he assembles a celebration of the flaws that make us human. Gopnik is at his most moving when addressing the limited time we have on Earth.” —Guardian
>>How we gain new skills.

Andaza: A memoir of food, flavour and freedom in the Pakistani kitchen by Sumayya Usmani $50
Usmani conjures a story of what it was like growing up in Pakistan and how the women in her life inspired her to trust her instincts in the kitchen. From a young age, food was Sumayya's portal to nurturing, love and self-expression. She spent the first eight years of her life at sea, with a father who captained merchant ships and a mother who preferred to cook for the family herself on a tiny electric stove in their cabin rather than eat in the officer's mess. When the family moved to Karachi, Sumayya grew up torn between the social expectations of life as a young girl in Pakistan, and the inspiration she felt in the kitchen, watching her mother, and her Nani Mummy (maternal grandmother) and Dadi's (paternal grandmother) confidence, intuition and effortless ability to build complex, layered flavours in their cooking. This food memoir — which includes the most meaningful recipes of Sumayya's childhood — tells the story of how Sumayya's self-belief grew throughout her young life, allowing her to trust her instincts and find her own path between the expectations of following in her father's footsteps as a lawyer and the pressures of a Pakistani woman's presumed place in the household.
”Sumayya Usmani is a brilliant storyteller. She transports us with her delicious descriptions of the smells and flavours of the kitchen.” —Jay Rayner
>>Look inside.
>>When spice hits the oil.

What’s That, Jack? by Cédric Ramadier and Vincent Bourgeau $30
Jack and George are resting quietly when BOOM! A huge and strange ball lands beside them. "What's that, Jack?" "I don't know, George. Maybe it's a rock?" No—too soft. But it rolls. Fast! Jack, George and the ball roll right off the cliff and now it's a parachute. But watch out, they're going to land in the river! Jack and George have a brilliant day full of adventure with this object that changes with the landscape, then turns into a blanket to keep them warm.

BOOKS@VOLUME #325 (14.4.23)

Read our latest NEWSLETTER and find out what we've been reading and recommending — and publishing!

Blue Self-Portrait by Noémi Lefebvre (translated from French by Sophie Lewis)  {Reviewed by THOMAS}
It takes approximately an hour and a half to fly from Berlin to Paris. Upon that hour and a half, a human memory, especially one working at neurotically obsessive speed, can loop a very large amount of time indeed, an hour and a half is plenty of time to go over and go over the things, or several of the things, the unassimilable things, that happened in Berlin, in an attempt to assimilate those things, although they are not assimilable, in an attempt, rather, albeit an involuntary attempt, an unconscious attempt, if that can be called an attempt, to damage oneself by the exercise of one’s memories, to draw self-blame and self-disgust from a situation the hopelessness of which cannot be attributed to anything worthy of self-blame or self-disgust but which is sufficiently involved to exercise the self-blame and self-disgust that seethe always beneath their veneer of not-caring, of niceness, the veneer that preserves self-blame and self-disgust from resolution into anything other than self-blame and self-disgust. Upon this hour and a half can be looped, such is the efficacy of human memory, not only, obsessively, the unassimilable things that happened in Berlin but also much else that happened even into the distant past, but, largely speaking, the more recent things that have bearing upon, or occupy the same memory-pocket, not the best metaphor, as the unassimilable things that happened in Berlin, for disappointment and failure seldom happen in a vacuum but resonate with, even if they are not the direct result of, disappointments and failures reaching back even into the distant past, perhaps especially into the distant past, self-blame and self-disgust having the benefit, or detriment, if a difference can be told between benefit and detriment, of binding experiences, or clumping them, to form an identity, and, not only this, upon that hour and a half can be looped also an endless amount of speculation and projection as to what may be occurring in the minds of others, or in the mind of, in this case, a specific other, a German-American pianist and composer with whom the narrator, who has been visiting Berlin with her sister, has had some manner of romantic encounter, so to call it, the extent of which is unclear, both, seemingly, to the narrator and, certainly, to the reader, the reader being necessarily confined to the mental claustrophobia of the narrator, on account of the obsessive speculation and projection and also the inescapable escapist and self-abnegating fantasising on the part of the narrator, together with the comet-like attraction-and-avoidance of her endless mental orbit around the most unassimilable things that happened in Berlin, or that might have happened in Berlin, or that did not happen in Berlin but are extrapolative fantasies unavoidably attendant upon what happened in Berlin, untrue but just as real as truth, for all thoughts, regardless of actuality, do the same damage to the brain. Lefebvre’s exquisitely pedantic, fugue-like sentences, their structure perfectly indistinguishable from their content, bestow upon her the mantle of Thomas Bernhard, which, after all, does not fall upon just any hem-plucker but, in this case, fully upon someone who, not looking skyward, has crawled far enough into its shadow when looking for something else. Where Bernhard’s narrators tend to direct their loathing outwards until the reader realises that all loathing is in fact self-loathing, Lefebvre’s narrator acknowledges her self-loathing and self-disgust, abnegating herself, rather, for circumstances in which self-abnegation is neither appropriate nor inappropriate, her self-abnegation arising from the circumstances, from her connection with the circumstances, from her rather than from the circumstances, her self-abnegation not, despite her certainty, having, really, any effect upon the circumstances. Not at all not-funny, pitch-perfect in both voice and structure, full of sly commentary on history and modernity, and on the frailties of human personality and desire, providing for the reader simultaneous resistance and release, Lefebvre shares many of Bernhard’s strengths and qualities, and the book contains memorable and affecting passages such as that in which the narrator recalls playing tennis with her mother-in-law, now her ex-mother-in-law, and finding she is not the type for ‘collective happiness’, or her hilariously scathing descriptions of Berlin’s Sony Centre or of the restaurant in what was Brecht's house, or of the narrator's inability to acknowledge the German-American pianist-composer's wife as anything but 'the accompaniment' — or, indeed, many other passages — but the excellence of the book is perhaps less in the passages than in the book as a whole. 

The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman {Reviewed by STELLA}

You will know Philip Pullman’s 'His Dark Materials' trilogy and you may be a fan awaiting the third installment of 'The Book of Dust' — fingers crossed for later this year. In the meantime, you can always delve backward. Pullman's excellent 'Sally Lockhart' series is worth seeking out. Sally Lockhart’s father has drowned at sea. Orphaned sixteen-year-old Sally doesn’t wait around to be rescued from her plight. Marriage? No thanks. She’s ready to head into the world and is spurred on by a letter of anonymous origin. The letter contains a warning of dire consequences and adds fuel to the strangeness of her father’s death. Sally sets out to unpick the mystery. Not an easy task. It’s Victorian England and young women are not meant to be independent, let alone smart or feisty. That won’t hold Sally Lockhart, Detective back, and with a little help from some new acquaintances including the young photographer Frederick (rather hapless yet brave and quick-witted), Jim (the sharp office lad), and an assortment of useful but not necessarily trustworthy characters, Sally Lockhart delves into the underbelly of London. It’s a risky business of cutthroat villains, aspirant investors, the pull of the opium den, poverty, and the allure of wealth; and at the heart of it all is a jewel with a bloody history. Fortunately, Sally’s father has equipped her for a life of independence, schooling her in accounting and marksmanship — useful; even if her French and embroidery are lacking. The Ruby in the Smoke is the first in the series and it’s a rip-roarer — gripping drama, daring escapades, an excellent heroine, humour laced through, and a bit of romance thrown in for good measure; as well as some spiky history (the dark side of the Victorian era) and intriguing social commentary. Great for 12+ and appealing to older teens as well.

 NEW RELEASES

Shy by Max Porter            $28
Things keep slipping up for Shy. All he wants is sex, spliffs and his own turntables, and for all the red noise in his mind to disappear. But again and again he spirals past his senses and ends up with his head in his hands and carnage around him. You mustn't do that to yourself Shy. You mustn't hurt yourself like that. He's been kicked out of two schools, been cautioned, arrested, stabbed his stepdad in the finger and bottled a former Tumble Tots playmate, but it's the taunts and teasing of his new schoolmates that haunt Shy. Shy's got no armpit hair / Shy needs fake ID to buy fags / Got your special meds, nutcase? At Last Chance — a home for 'very disturbed young men' — he is surrounded by people who want to help him, but his night terrors aren't getting any better. The night is huge and it hurts. So tonight he's stepping into it, with the haunted beginnings of a plan. Again, Porter shows an incredible ability to get completely inside the head of his narrator, his spare and unconventionally effective prose delivering us an experience that enlarges our empathy and understanding. A beautiful hardback. 

"An act of humanity and grace, heightened by its distinctive form and artistry." —Telegraph

"Shy is the strangest, most beguiling and affecting of all his books." —Ian Rankin

>>Absolute horror at the political present. 
>>Men and masculinity.
>>Entering the hinterland. 
>>Read our reviews of Lanny.
>>Read Thomas's review of The Death of Francis Bacon. 
>>Grief Is the Thing With Feathers. 

Pirate Enlightenment; or, The Real Libertalia by David Graeber        $40
The Enlightenment did not begin in Europe. Its true origins lie thousands of miles away on the island of Madagascar, in the late seventeenth century, when it was home to several thousand pirates. This was the Golden Age of Piracy, a period of violent buccaneering and rollicking legends - but it was also, argues anthropologist David Graeber, a brief window of radical democracy, as the pirate settlers attempted to apply the egalitarian principles of their ships to a new society on land. For Graeber, Madagascar's lost pirate utopia represents some of the first stirrings of Enlightenment political thought. In this jewel of a book, he offers a way to 'decolonise the Enlightenment', demonstrating how this mixed community experimented with an alternative vision of human freedom, far from that being formulated in the salons and coffee houses of Europe. Its actors were Malagasy women, merchants and traders, philosopher kings and escaped slaves, exploring ideas that were ultimately to be put into practice in by Western revolutionary regimes a century later.
>>How enlightened were the pirates? 
>>Other books by David Graeber. 

Fate of the Land | Ko ngā Ākinga a ngā Rangatira: Māori Political Struggle in the Liberal Era, 1891-1912 by Danny Keenan          $65
In the second half of the nineteenth century, settlers poured into Aotearoa demanding land. Millions of acres were acquired by the government or directly by settlers; or confiscated after the Land Wars. By 1891, when the Liberal government came to power, Maori retained only a fraction of their lands. And still the losses continued. For rangatira such as James Carroll, Wiremu Pere, Paora Tuhaere, Te Keepa Te Rangihiwinui, and many others, the challenges were innumerable. To stop further land loss, some rangatira saw parliamentary process as the mechanism; others pursued political independence. For over two decades, Maori men and women of outstanding ability fought hard to protect their people and their land. How those rangatira fared, and how they should be remembered, is the story of Maori political struggle during the Liberal era.
>>Ten questions. 

OK (Object Lessons') by Michelle McSweeney             $23
OK as a word accepts proposals, describes the world as satisfactory (but not good), provides conversational momentum, or even agrees (or disagrees). OK as an object, however, tells a story of how technology writes itself into language, permanently altering communication. OK is a young word, less than 200 years old. It began as an acronym for "all correct" when the steam-powered printing press pushed newspapers into the mainstream. Today it is spoken and written by nearly everyone in the world. Drawing on linguistics, history, and new media studies, Michelle McSweeney traces OK from its birth in the Penny Presses through telephone lines, grammar books, and television signals into the digital age. Nearly ubiquitous and often overlooked, OK illustrates the never-ending dance between language, technology, and culture, and offers lessons for our own techno-historical moment.

Face to the Sky by Michele Leggott           $35

.In her latest collection, Michele Leggott speaks to the art and writings of nineteenth-century New Zealand painter Emily Cumming Harris. Face to the Sky tells stories of love and loss from two woman in the shadow the same mountain, more than a century apart.

"Voices sing from the archive: a choir of breakers on a North Taranaki beach. Two women born more than a hundred years apart tell stories of love and loss in the shadow of the mountain that is always there. One of them becomes a painter of botanically accurate native flora, and writes all her life. The other, now without sight, lives in a world of sounds caught into expanding webs of memory. She listens for the other, tracing the delicate shapes of what she cannot see, taking her cue from the words of others. She listens and travels, picking up connections over time and place. Mothers and fathers come and go, adding their voices to the tumult on the beach, the shadow of the mountain, the hills above Nelson where the first woman comes to rest. The second, living between two small volcanos in a northern city, waits for a miracle that might cure the lymphoma that has been tracking her days. Through it all, the familiar phrases of the weather forecast sound their ever-hopeful, ever-changing predictions." —Michele Leggott

>>Emily Cumming Harris (once resident at 34 Nile Street, Nelson).
>>Waiting for a miracle. 

The Penguin Book of French Short Stories, Volume 1: From Marguerite de Navarre to Marcel Proust edited by Patrick McGuinness          $75

"Impeccably edited by Patrick McGuinness. The first volume stretches from the 16th century to the early 20th century and features classics by Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant. But we also have Charles Perrault's folktale 'Bluebeard', a prose poem by Charles Baudelaire, and a darkly satirical tale by Emile Zola about a man driven insane by advertising. Volume two takes us from there to the early 21st century, featuring more women and non-white authors than the first volume. Treat yourself: buy both." —Tomiwa Owolade, Sunday Times 

A beautiful hardback. 
>>Volume 2 due soon!

Dr. No by Percival Everett             $35

Wala Kitu is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and he does nothing about it. This makes him the perfect partner for the aspiring villain John Sill, who wants to break into Fort Knox to steal, well, not gold bars but a shoebox containing nothing. With the help of the brainy and brainwashed astrophysicist-turned-henchwoman Eigen Vector, our professor tries to foil the villain while remaining in his employ. In the process, Wala Kitu learns that Sill's desire to become a literal Bond villain originated in some real all-American villainy related to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. As Sill says, 'Professor, think of it this way. This country has never given anything to us and it never will. We have given everything to it. I think it's time we gave nothing back.' Dr. No is a caper with teeth, a wildly mischievous novel from one of America's most inventive, provocative, and productive writers. That it is about nothing isn't to say that it's not about anything. In fact, it's about villains. Bond villains. And that's not nothing.

"Everett continues to be an endlessly inventive, genre-devouring creator of thoughtful, tender, provocative, and absolutely unpredictable literary wonders." —Booklist

Courting India: England, Mughal India, and the origins of empire by Nandini Das                $39

When Thomas Roe arrived in India in 1616 as James I's first ambassador to the Mughal Empire, the English barely had a toehold in the subcontinent. Their understanding of South Asian trade and India was sketchy at best, and, to the Mughals, they were minor players on a very large stage. Roe was representing a kingdom that was beset by financial woes and deeply conflicted about its identity as a unified 'Great Britain' under the Stuart monarchy. Meanwhile, the court he entered in India was wealthy and cultured, its dominion widely considered to be one of the greatest and richest empires of the world. In Nandini Das's fascinating history of Roe's four years in India, she offers an insider's view of a Britain in the making, a country whose imperial seeds were just being sown. It is a story of palace intrigue and scandal, lotteries and wagers that unfolds as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice Islands of Indonesia. The book explores the art, literature, sights and sounds of Jacobean London and Imperial India, revealing Thomas Roe's time in the Mughal Empire to be a turning point in history and offering a rich and radical challenge to our understanding of Britain and its early empire.

"A triumph of writing and scholarship. For Das the Roe mission is the lens through which to give sharp focus to a remarkably wide-ranging study that does much to illuminate the bigger story of the unpromising origins of British power — and initial powerlessness — in India. Her style, while nuanced and erudite, is also jaunty and often witty. The book is as full of lovely passages of prose and finely shaded pen portraits as it is of new archival research, of which there is a great deal. It is hard to imagine anyone ever bettering Das's account of this part of the story." —William Dalrymple

A System so Magnificent it is Blinding by Amanda Svensson (translated from Swedish by Nicola Smalley)              $35

In October 1989, triplet babies are born into chaos in a Swedish hospital. Over two decades later, the siblings are scattered around the world, barely speaking. Sebastian is in London working for a mysterious scientific organisation and falling in love. Clara has travelled to Easter Island to join a doomsday cult. And the third triplet, Matilda, is in Sweden, practising being a stepmother. Then something happens that forces them to reunite. Their mother calls with worrying news: their father has gone missing and she has something to tell them, a twenty-five-year secret that will change all their lives. 
"Amanda Svensson’s raucous, sprawling novel takes on the enigmas of our origins, riddles of human consciousness and animal cognition, doomsday cults, and the most bedevilling of mysteries – the minds and choices of our closest intimates." —judges' citation on listing the book for the 2023 International Booker Prize
>>Read an extract.
>>Six years of fun. 
>>A funny book taken seriously. 
>>Other books listed for the 2023 International Booker Prize
>>Where to begin?

The Other Side: A journey into women, art, and the spirit world by Jennifer Higgie           $40

Higgie explores the lives and work of a group of extraordinary women, from the twelfth-century mystic, composer and artist Hildegard of Bingen to the nineteenth-century English spiritualist Georgiana Houghton, whose paintings swirl like a cosmic Jackson Pollock; the early twentieth-century Swedish artist, Hilma af Klint, who painted with the help of her spirit guides and whose recent exhibition at New York's Guggenheim broke all attendance records; the 'Desert Transcendentalist', Agnes Pelton, who painted her visions beneath the vast skies of California; the Swiss healer, Emma Kunz, who used geometric drawings to treat her patients; and the British surrealist and occultist, Ithell Colquhoun, whose estate of more than 5,000 works recently entered the Tate gallery collection. While the individual work of these artists is unique, the women loosely shared the same goal: to communicate with, and learn from, other dimensions. Weaving in and out of these myriad lives, sharing her own memories of otherworldly experiences, Jennifer Higgie discusses the solace of ritual, the gender exclusions of art history, the contemporary relevance of myth, the boom in alternative ways of understanding the world and the impact of spiritualism on feminism and contemporary art.

"In effervescent and atmospheric prose, Jennifer Higgie explores some of history's most innovative artists and their spiritual investigations into this realm and the next. I was entranced from start to finish, as she takes us on both a personal and artistic journey across time and across the globe. The Other Side is an exhilarating read." —Katy Hessel

Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949—1990 by Katja Hoyer               $40

In 1990, a country disappeared. When the iron curtain fell, East Germany simply ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the GDR presented a radically different German identity to anything that had come before, and anything that exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire — this was a Germany forged on the fault lines of ideology and geopolitics. In Beyond the Wall, historian Katja Hoyer offers a kaleidoscopic new vision of this vanished country. Beginning with the bitter experience of German Marxists exiled by Hitler, she traces the arc of the state they would go on to create, first under the watchful eye of Stalin, and then in an increasingly distinctive German fashion. From the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, to the relative prosperity of the 1970s, and on to the creaking foundations of socialism in the mid-1980s, Hoyer argues that amid oppression and frequent hardship, East Germany was yet home to a rich political, social and cultural landscape, a place far more dynamic than the Cold War caricature often painted in the West.

Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov (translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel)                $33

A 'clinic for the past' offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer's sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time.  An unnamed narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to scents, and even afternoon light. But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a ‘time shelter’, hoping to escape the horrors of modern life — a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present.

"A wide-ranging, thought-provoking, macabre and humorous novel about nationality, identity and ageing, and about the healing and destructive power of memory." —judges' citation, International Booker Prize 2023

:The most exquisite kind of literature. I've put it on a special shelf in my library that I reserve for books that demand to be revisited every now and then." —Olga Tokarczuk

>>Read an extract. 

>>Something awry in the clockworks of time. 

The Moon is a Ball: Stories of Panda and Squirrel by Ed Franck, illustrated by The Tjong-Khing           $30

Panda and Squirrel can't live without each other and do everything together: lie on the rocks to look at the moon, take walks, play games. One of their journeys lasts for only two steps, another day they discover a newly hatched duckling. Sometimes they argue but they always make up again. This a friendship for any day: roaring, quiet, grumbling, snoring . . . always.

>>Look inside!

A Forager's Life: Finding my heart and home in Nature by Helen Lehndorf            $40

A memoir about belonging and motherhood, told through the author's lifelong passion for wild food. When Helen Lehndorf moves to the city after a childhood living off the land in rural Taranaki, she can't help but feel different from her peers and professors - peculiar, poor. She finds solace in long walks foraging weeds and plants along the river, but something inside her still longs for home. Chasing a feeling of ancestral belonging, she travels to England with her new husband. There they learn about nature as the commons, something shared between all who encounter it - a source of delight, food, medicine, and connection with something greater than the forest in which it's found. An unexpected pregnancy in Aotearoa changes everything. Times are tight and motherhood takes over Helen's identity. When her son is diagnosed with autism, foraging becomes a space for selfhood and calm in a chaotic world.

Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery            $33

In the late 1960s, Pop artist Andy Warhol set out to make an unconventional novel by following a cast of his most famous characters around New York, recording their conversations with his tape recorder. The twenty-four one-hour tapes were transcribed by four women — The Velvet Underground's drummer Maureen Tucker, a Barnard student Susan Pile, and two young women. Flattery imagines the lives of those two high school students — precocious and wise beyond their years but still only teenagers, living with their mothers but working all day in the surreal and increasingly dangerous world of Andy Warhol's Factory, and learning to shape and reshape their identities as they navigate between their low-paid, grueling jobs and their lives at home, in a time of social change for girls and women in America. This blistering, mordantly funny debut interrogates the nature of fantasy and reality, voyeurism and language, and celebrity and the construction of identity. Within the framework of Andy Warhol's surreal world, Flattery asks us to consider at what point does the creation, and consumption, of our public selves turn us into something we don't recognise?

>>That's a sheep. 

The Art and Life of Hilma af Klint by Ylva Hillström and Karin Eklund       $35
The first children's picture book on Hilma af Klint. Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) began painting her abstract and highly symbolic images as early as 1906, long before Kandinsky and Malevich arrived at what is generally regarded as the birth of modern abstract art. She was heavily influenced by spiritual ideologies and claimed that she painted on instruction from the spirit world, for the future. Includes reproductions of several of her works.
>>Look inside!
>>Other books on Hilma af Klint.

It's OK To Be Angry About Capitalism by Bernie Sanders         $40

"How can we accept an economic order that allows three billionaires to control more wealth than the bottom half of our society? How can we accept a political system that allows the super-rich to buy elections and politicians? How can we accept an energy system that rewards the fossil fuel corporations causing the climate crisis? How can we let it happen any longer? We must demand fundamental economic and political change. This is where the path forward begins."

Philosophy and Life: Exploring the great questions of how to live by A.C. Grayling           $40

How should I live my life? What values shall I live by? What sort of person should I be? What shall I aim for? Grayling enlists the help of philosophers, writers and other thinkers ancient and modern (and everything in between) to explore what gives life meaning. 

Alarm ('Object Lessons') by Alice Bennett            $23

Alarms are alarming. They wake us up, demand our attention and force us to attend to things we've preferred to ignore. But alarms also allow us to feel secure, to sleep and to retreat from alertness. They take over vigilance on our behalf. From the alarm clock and the air-raid siren to the doorbell and the phone alert, the history of alarms is also the history of work, security, technology and emotion. Alarm responds to culture's most urgent calls to attention by examining all kinds of alarms, from the restless presence of the alarm clock in modernist art to the siren — the sound of the police — in classic hip hop. More than just bells and whistles, alarms are objects that have defined sleeping and waking, safety and danger, and they have fundamentally shaped our understanding of the mind and its capacity for attention.

VOLUME FOCUS: How To Be
A selection of books from our shelves.

How to Be a Good Creature
How To Be You
Living and Dying with Marcel Proust
How Should A Person Be?
How to Live a Good Life
Philosophy and Life
How to Live
How to Be Happy Though Human

I, Object is a collection of short texts by jewellery objects, as told to jeweller Stella Chrysostomou.
In these 38 stories, jewellery objects reflect on their relationship to the world, to each other, and with their human acquaintances (their makers, wearers, viewers, and owners). 
These texts ask us to reconsider our attitudes to, and our thinking about, jewellery, and — the tables turned — to experience jewellery afresh. 

Stella Chrysostomou is a jeweller and writer (and co-owner of VOLUME). As editor of I, Object, she is immensely grateful to the jewellery objects for their co-operation and contributions. Any errors in translation are her own.

Reviews

"What?" — Steve Braunias, NewsRoom

"Whimsical and delightful." — Alyson Baker (>>read the full review here)

Listen to Stella read some of the stories:

>>Also available by Stella Chrysostomou: LIKE: An experiment in interpretation.

NEW BOOKS AND BOOK NEWS

Read our 324th NEWSLETTER

6.4.23

The Apartment by Alexandra Litvina (translated by Antonina Bouis), illustrated by Anna Desnitskaya

I’ve had my eye on this book for a while now, and happily, I can now slip it out from my own shelf to browse whenever I wish. (Luckily for you, we can order you a copy). I like history for its stories as well as the knowledge it can impart about how we live now and how we should behave in the future. It’s always a pleasure to find a book that approaches history in a different and accessible way. This children’s book, just as enjoyable and fascinating for adults, tells the story of a Russian century through one apartment and one family over several generations. The narratives are in the voices of various children and while this gives us a child’s viewpoint and interests, the author Alexandra Litvina manages to tie in major events without shirking from contentious issues of protest, purges, hardships, and dictators. These are cleverly revealed through snippets of conversation, newspaper cuttings, and a succinct yet informative paragraph for each of the years highlighted. We follow the Muromstev family from 1902 to 2002. In 1902, Irina tells us about the new apartment in Moscow. The paint is still fresh, and the floors just polished. The nursery is big, Papa has his own study, and there is plenty of room for everyone. We can look into each room as the family moves in and meet the family as they organise their new home.  Moving forward to 1914, it’s her brother Nikolai’s turn to tell us what is happening in the apartment. It’s Christmas and Papa is on the frontlines tending to the wounded, but everyone thinks that this war will be over soon. The younger sister, Marusya, takes up the story next. 1919 — food, medicine, and fuel are in short supply — revolution has turned the country on its head. Jump to 1927 and the apartment is looking very different. More people live in the same building and the Muromstev family’s lives have changed remarkably over the last three decades, not least the size of their apartment. And so it goes. We meet their friends, enjoy their discussions about politics, dabble in art and literature a little, and follow the ups and downs of this Russian century through the eyes of a family. It’s well told and wonderfully illustrated. Anna Desnitskaya's cut-away apartment illustrations are fascinating on every spread and the intervening pages are filled with details in text and drawings of quotidian culture showing us typical foods, toys, and clothes of each period alongside the more poignant mementos of ration cards, war victims, and propaganda. Here you’ll find Stalin, the Cold War, and father’s bag packed just in case of arrest, as well as family celebrations, the excitement of the race to the moon, and the significance of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Excellent!

>>Look inside the book.

Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard (translated by Ewald Osers)  {Reviewed by THOMAS}

It is very tiring to get everything done properly, he said, it is exhausting and, really, a waste of time to get everything done properly, but it is just as exhausting and just as much a waste of time to get everything done not properly, to do a mediocre job, so to speak, he said. As not doing anything at all does not seem to be an option available to me, despite its attractions, he said, as doing nothing is fraught with its own existential dangers, so to call them, I may as well do everything properly, he said. This is a terrible trap. I will exhaust myself and waste my time whether I do things properly or not, nobody will notice whether I do things properly or not, I am uncertain if I can tell whether I am doing things properly or not myself, but they would notice if I do nothing at all. Perhaps what I call properly is in fact mediocre, I aspire to the mediocre but fall short, or I aspire to excellence and fall short, it makes no difference, I fall to the same point, somewhere below the mediocre, far below excellence, I fall to my place in the order of things whether I aspire to the mediocre or to the excellent, I may as well aspire to excellence, whatever that means, and fail more grandly, he said, though he was unsure if this failure was more grand or more pathetic. He had, he said, entertained the intention, at least briefly, of writing a proper review of Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard, he had been rereading Old Masters not merely but at least partly for the purposes of writing this review, and he had even, while researching this review or this book, discovered what seemed to him to be a video game in which he could move around the  galleries of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, although there were some galleries he could not enter for some reason, perhaps he had to advance to another level or perhaps he was just clumsy, avoiding the gallery attendants, searching for the location in which almost the entire book is set: the bench facing the painting White-Bearded Man by Tintoretto. Using the navigation arrows provided for the purpose by Google, he found, the player of the game can become well acquainted with the endless parquet flooring of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, with the marble staircases and gilded cornices and door-frames of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and with much of what Reger, the dominant voice if not the narrator of Bernhard’s book, dismisses as its collection of “Habsburg-Catholic state art. The Kunsthistorisches Museum is entirely in line with the artistic taste of the Habsburgs, who, at least where painting is concerned, had a revolting, totally brainless Catholic artistic taste,” writes Bernhard as Atzbacher quoting Reger, Atzbacher being the book’s narrator, even though pretty much all he does is quote what Reger has at some time said. He must concentrate on his review, he thought, I am determined to write a proper review, he said aloud, forgetting that he had already reviewed the book with a proper review, or in any case something slightly closer to a proper review than what he felt himself now capable of, not that that is saying much, some years before. Old Masters is an entirely musical book, he wrote, starting at last in a sensible way, despite being set in a painting gallery it is entirely musical both in its phrasing and in its structure, if there is a difference between the two, he thought, drifting from the task, the musical form of the book is what matters, he wondered if he could say the form is all that matters, that form is all that ever matters. Old Masters is narrated in one unbroken paragraph by Atzbacher, about whom we learn little, he wrote, but the voice that reaches us is the voice of Reger, an elderly music reviewer, who has arranged to meet Atzbacher on their regular bench in front of the White-Bearded Man but on an irregular day, they normally meet there on alternate days only. Atzbacher arrives early in order to watch Reger waiting for him from the next room, and the first half of the book consists of Atzbacher telling us what Reger has previously told him, of Reger speaking through Atzbacher, so it seems, just as Reger also speaks, as Atzbacher notes, through the museum attendant Irrsigler: “Irrsigler has, over the years, appropriated verbatim many, if not all, or Reger’s sentences. Irrsigler is Reger’s mouthpiece, nearly everything that Irrsigler says has been said by Reger, for over thirty years Irrsigler has been saying what Reger has said. If I listen attentively I can hear Reger speak through Irrsigler.” As with Irrsigler so with Atzbacher, he thinks, Atzbacher seemingly unaware of the irony. Old Masters is a very funny book, he thinks, Reger’s reported opinions amount to a stream of invective against pretty much everything held in esteem in the society in which Reger lives, and in which Bernhard lived, separated as they are only by tense, admiration, after all, being for Bernhard a form of mental weakness. “There has virtually been no culture in Vienna for a long time, and one day there will really be no culture of any kind left in Vienna, but it will nevertheless be a cultural concept even then. Vienna will always be a cultural concept, it will more stubbornly be a cultural concept the less culture there is in it,” writes Benhard as Atzbacher as Reger and perhaps again as Bernhard. Well, he thought, as with Vienna so with Nelson, though I will not write that down, he thought. Heidegger, Stifter, Bruckner, Vienna’s public lavatories, restaurants, politicians, all are derided in the most amusing fashion and at length, he wrote, in this first section, in the words of Reger as remembered by Atzbacher as he watches Reger waiting for him to arrive. This might even be Bernhard’s funniest book, he thought, the way Reger’s ridicule surges through it, builds and collapses. When Atzbacher keeps his appointment with Reger, Reger’s rants continue via Atzbacher, but at one step less remove, the rants continue but the tone changes, subtly, Old Masters might be Bernhard’s both least and most subtle book, he thought, the least subtle because of Reger’s ranting but the most subtle because of the modulation in that ranting, all in this one paragraph, the rant no longer filtered by Atzbacher’s memory is more extreme, nastier, less enjoyable, clumsier, is the fact that I can go along with Reger’s rants in the first half a mark against me, he wondered, and if so am I redeemed by being put off when we meet Reger himself in the second, so to speak, when we meet Reger in the raw, so to speak, he wondered, and Atzbacher intercuts what Reger says to him at this time in the gallery with recollections of what Reger has said to him previously at the Ambassador cafe, and the depth of Reger’s unhappiness since the death of his wife is expressed in sequences of sentences, each ending “...Reger said at the Ambassador then,” repeated like sobs, and the unhappiness flows through and gives depth to the rest of the book, which principally concerns the difficulties of carrying on living is a world devoid of value, Old Masters is perhaps Bernhard’s funniest book and his saddest. “Oh yes, Reger said, the logical conclusion would invariably be total despair about everything. But I am resisting this total despair about everything, Reger said. I am now eighty-two and I am resisting this total despair about everything tooth and nail, Reger said.” Reger’s vitriol is a survival mechanism, he wrote, to despise is to survive, that is clumsily put, he thought, too clumsily put to write down. “One’s mind has to be a searching mind, a mind searching for mistakes, for the mistakes of humanity, a mind searching for failure. The human mind is a human mind only when it searches for the mistakes of humanity, Reger said. A good mind is a mind that searches for the mistakes of humanity and an exceptional mind is a mind that finds the mistakes of humanity, and a genius’s mind is a mind which, having found these mistakes, points them out and with all the means at its disposal shows up these mistakes.” Reger despises nothing more than old masters, so Reger says, and this is why he has sat on his bench at the Kunsthistorisches Museum every other day for thirty years. “Art altogether is nothing but a survival skill, we should never lose sight of this fact, it is, time and again, just an attempt to cope with this world and its revolting aspects, which, as we know, is invariably possible only by resorting to lies and falsehoods, to hypocrisy and self-deception, Reger said. … All these pictures, moreover, are an expression of man’s absolute helplessness in coping with himself and with what surrounds him all his life. … All these so-called old masters are really failures, without exception they were all doomed to failure.” Our obsession with art, he thought, if we have an obsession with art, or with celebrity, if we have that, or with sport performers, so to call them, or with wealthy people, or actors, or singers, is not with how these apogees of achievement are more successful than us, more skilled, more wonderful, more spiritual even, whatever we mean by that, but with the flaws, the weaknesses, vices and misfortunes that make them like us after all, failures, and we are reassured that not even great success, however that is measured, not even great skill, not even great fame would stop us from being failures, and so we need not therefore even strive for these things, they would not in any case save us, so to speak. When the worst happens, though, we are devastated but it is not true to say that we do not also feel relief, and this is the saddest thing of all, he thought. “Reger was looking at the White Bearded Man and said, the death of my wife has not only been my greatest misfortune, it has also set me free. With the death of my wife I have become free, he said, and when I say free I mean entirely free, wholly free, completely free, if you know, or if at least you surmise, what I mean. I am no longer waiting for death, it will come by itself, it will come without my thinking of it, it does not matter to me when. The death of a beloved person is also an enormous liberation of our whole system, Reger now said. I have lived for some time now with the feeling of being totally free. I can now let anything approach me, really anything, without having to resist, I no longer resist anything, that is it, Reger Said.” Atzbacher accepts the ticket Reger offers him to attend a performance of Kleist’s The Broken Jug, a work also mocking human faillings, at the Bergtheater that evening, but, Atzbacher says, “The performance was terrible,” ending the book with the first opinion he has expressed that might be his own, though, given the formative influence of Reger upon him, can any opinion be his own, can anyone’s opinion anyway be considered their own, he wondered. I will give up on this review, he decided, I cannot write the review properly he realised, whatever could constitute properly, perhaps I could have done so once but I can do so no longer, at least not today, the only day I have to write it, he thought, my mind no longer performs in that way. He had spent a long time playing the Kunsthistorische Museum game but he could not find the painting of the White Bearded Man. 

VOLUME FOCUS : Cats
A selection of books from our shelves.

All My Cats
The Master and Margarita
Lost Cat
Mutzig the Clown Cat
I Like Cats
Kafka on the Shore
Feline Philosophy

Cats for kids:
Gobbolino the Witch's Cat
The Hundred Names for Darkness
Cat and Mouse
Crazy About Cats
Why Do Cats Meow?
Cat Bingo
The Cats We Meet Along the Way

Book of the Week: Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi (translated by Jeremy Tiang) is a memorable, sparely written and often darkly funny set of vignettes based on the author’s experiences during China’s Cultural Revolution, first as a child in Beijing and then as a teenager sent to work in the countryside. The book captures the unseen and usually unrecalled aspects that actually comprise the majority of history, even in dramatic times; the tedium, the uncertainty, the strange acceptance, the perspective limited to the immediate time and place, the eruptions of humanity or brutality into otherwise unresolved and seemingly irresolvable circumstances.
>>”I wrote this book to let go of my childhood.”
>>Read an extract.
>>”Everyone should translate.”
>>Everything is taken for granted.
>>Your copy of Ninth Building.
>>Other books listed for the 2023 International Booker Prize.
>>Which book should you read first?