NOW, NOW, LOUISON by Jean Frémon — Reviewed by Thomas

Now, Now, Louison by Jean Frémon (translated from French by Cole Swensen)

Whose is this voice, addressing the artist Louise Bourgeois as ‘you’? It is the voice of Louise Bourgeois as written by Jean Frémon, a gallerist and writer who knew her and has written this insightful, beautifully written little book, which could be classified as a 'second-person ventriloquised autobiographical fiction'. Bourgeois is here, as in her art, both ‘I’ and ‘you’, both present and cast through time, both active and passive, both spectator and actor, both mathematician and instrument of the id, both innocent and knowing, at once both highly connected and aware and utterly separate, both ancient and young; gendered, ungendered, double- and multi-gendered; highly personal and rigorously particular, yet also universal. Bourgeois inhabits a zone that is at once “too complicated and too clear. No need to shed too much light on it,” a zone of vagueness in which the body is the territory of metaphors, though never of signs, the zone from which the formless coalesces into form. Bourgeois’s dreams are as real — and as inscrutable — as actuality: “Let them decipher my dreams — me, I’m fine with the mystery. No need to interpret them. Obscurity has its virtues.” Frémon-Bourgeois captures perfectly the singular intensity and fluidity of awareness that both enables and accesses art like that of Bourgeois, a mode of approach in which the distinction between initiative and surrender is erased. The book explores the key experiences of Bourgeois’s life without converting them into fact — they remain experiences, with all the ambivalences of experiences (though I here list them as facts): her childhood in France, where she would make the representations of leaves and branches with which her mother would replace the genitals cut from old tapestries in her family’s tapestry refurbishment business; her father’s philandering and double standards; her obsessiveness; her sensitivity to trauma, especially childhood trauma; her mother’s death, which prompted Louise to abandon mathematics for art; her departure for New York (“That’s what exile’s like. Apart from here and part from there, apart from everything. … Take an electric adaptor along with you.”); her long obscurity as an artist; her long loneliness following the death of her partner; her immense productivity; her ‘discovery’ in old age; her continued immense productivity; her very old age; her death. Bourgeois strives to understand what Frémon-Bourgeois calls “the survival of the unfit”, the evolutionary counter to the survival of the fittest. Art, perhaps, is a method of survival, as it is for Cyclose and Uloborus spiders, who “sculpt doubles of themselves, and then they place them on the web where they can be easily seen so that predators will attack this bait instead of them.” For Bourgeois only the gauche is beautiful: “Aim for beauty, and you get the vapid, aim for something else — encyclopedic knowledge, systematic inventory, structural analysis, personal obsession, or just a mental itch that responds to scratching — and you end up with beauty. Beauty is only a by-product, unsought, yet available to amateurs and impenitent believers.” And all the time, there is the artist who is indistinguishable from her art yet inaccessible through it (because her art is primarily a point of access to ourselves): “I am what I make and nothing else. I make, I unmake, I remake.”

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas
LUDWIG AND THE RHINOCEROS by Noemi Schneider and Golden Cosmos — Read and reviewed by Stella

Let me introduce you to a wonderful bedtime story. It’s not your usual “goodnight, sleep tight” tale. In fact, it is possible it could you keep awake with thinking or make you dream of elusive blue rhinoceroses. Ludwig and the Rhinoceros: A philosophical bedtime story by Noemi Schneider and Golden Cosmos is an amusing gem of a book. Let’s start with the illustrations. The bold colour palette and drawing style call to mind a combination of 1930s Soviet children’s books and 1960s pop art, but with their own twist the duo who are Golden Cosmos give the book an energetic pulse. Those pinks, yellows, and blues bounce off each other and require action on the part of the characters to search and announce, while the darker blue pages perfectly fit the more reflective nature of the night and the concept at the centre of this book. For this is a story of a rhinoceros who is and isn’t there.  This is a picture book about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and his discussion with Bertrand Russell about the limits of language. There is a nice explainer at the end about their difference of opinion, as well as information about Wittgenstein and a 'What is a philosopher' paragraph. So plenty of room for further discussion. Yet the charm of the book is in the straightforward and lively text. The back and forth of the child Ludwig and his parent as they disagree on whether the rhinoceros is in the room. Enjoyable for children and adults alike. What’s there not to like about a philosophical bedtime story?

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella, Children's books
NEW RELEASES (2.2.24)

New books for a new month!

Thunderclap: A memori of art and life & sudden death by Laura Cumming $75
”We see with everything that we are.” On the morning of 12 October 1654, a gunpowder explosion devastated the Dutch city of Delft. The thunderclap was heard over seventy miles away. Among the fatalities was the painter Carel Fabritius, dead at thirty-two, leaving only his haunting masterpiece ‘The Goldfinch’ and barely a dozen known paintings. For the explosion that killed him also buried his reputation, along with answers to the mysteries of his life and career. What happened to Fabritius before and after this disaster is just one of the discoveries in a book that explores the relationship between art and life, interweaving the lives of Laura Cumming, her Scottish painter father, who also died too young, and the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age. Thunderclap takes the reader from Rembrandt's studio to wartime America and contemporary London; from Fabritius's goldfinch on its perch to de Hooch's blue and white tile and the smallest seed in a loaf by Vermeer. This is a book about what a picture may come to mean: how it can enter your life and change your thinking in a thunderclap. For the explosion of the title speaks not only to the precariousness of our existence, but also to the power of painting: the sudden revelations of sight.
”No one writes art like Laura Cumming.” —Philip Hoare
”I shall never look at any painting in the same way again.” —Polly Morland

 

The Singularity by Balsam Karam (traslated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel) $38

In an unnamed coastal city filled with refugees, the mother of a displaced family calls out her daughter's name as she wanders the cliffside road where the child once worked. The mother searches and searches until, spent from grief, she throws herself into the sea, leaving her other children behind. Bearing witness to the suicide is another woman — on a business trip, with a swollen belly that later gives birth to a stillborn baby. In the wake of her pain, the second woman remembers other losses — of a language, a country, an identity--when once, her family fled a distant war. Balsam Karam weaves between both narratives in this formally ambitious novel and offers a fresh approach to language and aesthetic as she decenters a white European gaze.
”Lyrical, devastating and completely original, The Singularity is a work of extraordinary vision and heart. Balsam Karam's writing is formally inventive and stylistically breathtaking, and Saskia Vogel's translation does shining justice to its poetic precision and depths.” —Preti Taneja
”Balsam Karam writes at the limits of narrative, limning the boundary of loss where ‘no space remains between bodies in the singularity’. With a lucid intimacy, Karam braids a story of witness and motherhood that fractures from within only to rebuild memory and home on its own terms. The Singularity is a book of conviction where those who have been made to disappear find light and keep their secrets too.” —Shazia Hafiz Ramji

 

The Bridge by Eva Lindström $38

A pig drives by looking for a bridge but ends up the houseguest of two wolves in the woods. Who are they? What do they want? And where is the pig rushing off to, anyway? Written and illustrated in Lindström's laconic, razor-sharp, and darkly comical style, The Bridge is a droll, fast-paced, and ever-so-slightly-sinister story in which, as in a classic fairy tale, an ordinary chance encounter suddenly morphs into an adventure that feels both wildly improbable and true to life.
"The Bridge is so many things at once. It is very funny, it is very mysterious, it is very beautiful, and it is like no book I've ever seen. I love it very much." —Jon Klassen

 

Shame by Annie Ernaux (translated from French by Tanya Leslie) $28

"My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon," begins Shame, the probing story of the 12-year-old girl who will become the author herself, and the single traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life. With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the diamond-sharp analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the power of violent memory to endure through time, to determine the course of a life.
”Shame and The Young Man deserve to be read widely. Her work is self-revealing, a series of pitiless auto-autopsies. Their disparate achievements work together to illuminate something perennially fascinating about Ernaux: her relationship to revelation and visibility. These are deeply intimate books, but in another way, Ernaux brings a disquieting impersonality to her project.” —Megan Nolan, The Times
”Exceptionally deft and precise, the very epitome of all that language can do…a surprisingly tender evocation of a bright, passionate and self-aware young girl growing up in her parents’ ‘cafe-haberdashery-grocery’ in a small town in Normandy.” —Julie Myerson, Observer

 

The Young Man by Annie Ernaux (translated from French by Alison L. Strayer) $20

In her latest work, Annie Ernaux recounts a relationship with a student thirty years her junior — an experience that transforms her, briefly, back into the ‘scandalous girl’ of her youth. When she is with him, she replays scenes she has already lived through, feeling both ageless and closer to death. Laid like a palimpsest on the present, the past’s immediacy pushes her to take a decisive step in her writing — producing, in turn, the need to expunge her lover. At once stark and tender, The Young Man is a taut encapsulation of Ernaux’s relationship to time, memory and writing.
”Annie Ernaux’s work is proof of how expertly autobiography can be done. The Young Man does offer a taste of what’s so unique and astonishing about her honesty, her intelligence, the deceptive simplicity of her narratives. And for those who have been reading her for decades, it adds invaluable information to what we have already learned about the sources of her energy and courage, about the complex connections between her life and her work, her lived experience and the grace with which she transforms memory into art.” —Francine Prose, Guardian
”Annie Ernaux is one of my favourite contemporary writers, original and true. Always after reading one of her books, I walk around in her world for months.” —Sheila Heti

 

Ludwig and the Rhinoceros: A philosophical bedtime story by Noemi Schneider, illustrated by Golden Cosmos $38

"There's a rhinoceros in my room!" Ludwig claims. His father doesn't think so. He looks for the huge pachyderm in every corner, but he just can't find it. There CANNOT be a rhinoceros in Ludwig's room. It's way too small for a rhinoceros. But Ludwig shows his father that it is impossible to be certain that something isn’t there. This enjoyable picture book replicates the 1911 argument between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell on whether knowability is a property of the actual world or of the set of epistemological propositions we make about it.

 

Not a River by Selva Almada (translated by Annie McDermott) $38

Three men go out fishing, returning to a favourite spot on the river despite their memories of a terrible accident there years earlier. As a long, sultry day passes, they drink and cook and talk and dance, and try to overcome the ghosts of their past. But they are outsiders, and this intimate, peculiar moment also puts them at odds with the inhabitants of this watery universe, both human and otherwise. The forest presses close, and violence seems inevitable, but can another tragedy be avoided? Rippling across time like the river that runs through it, Selva Almada’s latest novel is the finest expression yet of her compelling style and singular vision of rural Argentina.
"A virtuoso literary work. Flashbacks and side scenes deepen the story which curls and twines like a thrusting tropical vine through the past, roping in sisters, wives, old lovers, boyhood adventures, and jealousies." —Annie Proulx
”Told with the hallucinatory atmosphere of a dream, this astonishing, stark novel doesn't turn away from the hypnotic and disturbing effects of violence. Not a River plunges us straight into the depths of its silences, bracingly so — the longer the quiet goes, the more terrible the rupture." —Manuel Munoz

 

Corner by Zo-O $38

A crow finds itself in an empty corner and begins to make the space its own. First, it furnishes the corner with a bed, a bookshelf, a rug, even a potted plant. In the newly decorated space, the crow reads and eats, listens to music and waters the plant, but something's missing. What is it? The crow decides to decorate more, drawing geometric patterns on the walls in yellow. The corner is filled with colour and shapes, but something is still missing. The crow adds a window, and finally discovers what it needed all along — a way to connect with the world outside and to make a new friend. This highly original, almost-wordless picture book cleverly uses the gutter of the book to make the crow’s corner. Soft, detailed illustrations of the cosy corner will inspire children to express themselves in their own spaces, and the crow's problem-solving skills encourage readers to think about how they can comfortably step outside of their comfort zone.

 

Opinions: A decade of arguments, criticism, and minding other people’s business by Roxane Gay $38

Outstanding non-fiction pieces from The New York Times and elsewhere on politics, feminism, the culture wars, gender, sexuality, and equality.
”Gay has a gift for clean, well-ordered prose, and strong feelings on matters of race, gender, and sexuality. Most important, she possesses a fearlessness essential to doing the job right; though she can observe an issue from various angles, she never wrings her hands or delivers milquetoast commentaries. She comes to her opinions more out of empathy than ideology.” Fierce and informed riffs on current events and enduring challenges.” —Kirkus

 

Can I Sit in the Middle? by Susanne Strasser $19

It’s story time, but first everyone needs to arrive and everyone needs to find their place on the sofa. Just when everyone seems ready, a clumsy and very real rhinoceros comes looking for its slippers. How will the story ever be read? Board book.

 

Marilyn Webb: Folded in the Hills edited by Lauren Gutsell, Lucy Hammonds and Bridget Reweti $70

Featuring over 80 colour plates from throughout Webb’s career, from 1968 to 2005, this impressive monograph includes essays by curators Lucy Hammonds, Lauren Gutsell, and Bridget Reweti, extant poems by Cilla McQueen and Hone Tuwhare and two new ekphrastic poems by Essa May Ranapiri and Ruby Solly.

 

Poor Things by Alasdair Gray $25

A life without freedom to choose is not worth having. In Alasdair Gray’s postmodern metaphysical lampoon of Frankenstein, Godwin Baxter's scientific ambition to create the perfect companion is realised when he finds the drowned body of the beautiful Bella, who he brings back to life in a Frankenstein-esque feat, and with the brain of an infant. His dream is thwarted by Dr. Archibald McCandless's jealous love for his ‘creation’. But what does Bella think? Gray’s novel, with its dual narratives by Bella and McCandless, is an unsparing but hilarious exploration of traditional power imbalances between the sexes and the ways in which women are crushed both by men’s imposed notions of ‘propriety’ and by their projected fantasies of ‘impropriety’. How can true liberation and fulfillment be achieved?
”A magnificently brisk, funny, dirty, brainy book.” —London Review of Books

 
VOLUME BooksNew releases
Book of the Week: THE ENGLISH TEXT OF THE TREATY OF WAITANGI by Ned Fletcher

How was the English text of the Treaty of Waitangi understood by the British in 1840? That is the question addressed by historian and lawyer Ned Fletcher, in this extensive work. With one exception, the Treaty sheets signed by rangatira and British officials were in te reo Maori. The Maori text, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, was a translation by the missionary Henry Williams of a draft in English provided by William Hobson, the Consul sent by the British government to negotiate with Maori. Despite considerable scholarly attention to the Treaty, the English text has been little studied. In part, this is because the original English draft exists only in fragments in the archive; it has long been regarded as lost or 'unknowable', and in any event superseded by the authoritative Maori text. Now, through careful archival research, Fletcher has been able to set out the continuing relevance of the English text. The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi enriches our understanding of the original purpose and vision of Te Tiriti o Waitangi/The Treaty of Waitangi and its foundational role in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Find out more:

VOLUME BooksBook of the week
FORGOTTEN MANUSCRIPT by Sergio Chejfec — reviewed by Thomas

Forgotten Manuscript by Sergio Chejfec (translated by Jeffrey Lawrence)

Chejfec considers his sturdy green notebook essential to his writing, even though he doesn’t often write in it. The notebook represents to him all the things that he has not written and it preserves the possibility of writing them. “The notebook becomes the evidence of what one has failed to write rather than of what one has already written,” he says, or, rather, writes, not in the notebook but in Forgotten Manuscript, a printed book, though it was not yet printed when he wrote it. What is the process by which text comes into being, and how do its various states affect its meaning? The sturdy green notebook is Chejfec’s most precious object, he is a writer after all, and uses the notebook, somewhat talismanicly, if that’s a word, to make contact, somehow, with the “quiet textual mass that lurks behind the whiteness” of its pages. Anything that he writes upon the pages of the notebook is by definition unfinished, embryonic, tentative. This is what Chejfec likes most about being a writer and this is why the sturdy green notebook is his most precious object. “Does this mean that the things we cherish most are the things that are most indeterminate?” he asks. The printed book entitled Forgotten Manuscript is full of speculations by Chejfec on the contrasting merits or functions, or propensities perhaps, of the various states, as we have called them, somewhat presumptively, of literature, so to call it, or text, rather, perhaps, if that makes any sense (the book perhaps makes sense where the review perhaps does not (we can only hope)). Why is it that a manuscript has “come to represent the auratic and irreplaceable source of the work”, when it is inherently incomplete, fluid and tentative? The manuscript is seen as the quintessential expression of the author’s intention, but really the author intends to be relieved of the words, which happens only when they are made immutable and printed (however much they may then be regretted). Nothing otherwise is ever finished and we can be relieved of nothing. Maybe I take a negative view of writing that is not shared by Chejfec, but there is much good thought to be had when reading Chejfec and much further reading or thought that can lead outwards from that reading. Sometimes I was not sure whether the ideas I had when reading Forgotten Manuscript were Chejfec’s or my own, and this is how it should be, this is what reading should lead to, the reader immersed in the work finds themselves subject to and the generator of ideas (so to call them), what more could you want? Chejfec has several things of interest to say of the differing functions of printed (material) and digital (immaterial) texts, their effect upon both reading and writing, what we could call the writing-reading complex if we wished to be obtuse) and on the kinds of literature (or literary experiences, perhaps) that they enable or constrain. “Immaterial writing (represented paradigmatically by the computer screen) encodes a friction between immutability (the promise of perpetual presence and the absence of material degradation) and fragility (the risk of a sudden collapse that would destroy the archive, and the constant danger of variation). There is an afterlife suggested by immaterial writing that is different from the afterlife suggested by material writing. Material writing persists as an inscription upon reality, on actual objects, and therefore it exhibits or prefigures its eventual death.”

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas
THE GLUTTON by A.K. Blakemore — reviewed by Stella

How dangerous is a sad man? Sister Perpetue is on the night shift. She is under strict instructions to watch the patient (or is he prisoner shackled to the bed?) — to never let her eyes or mind wander. Yet when he talks, she listens and is caught up in his tale. His horrific story. For is he merely unfortunate or is he a monster? In The Glutton, A.K. Blakemore turns from witches (her previous award-winning novel captured the puritanical fervour of England, 1643) to the infamy of The Great Tarare — The Glutton of Lyon. A man so perverse, so tortured by his insatiable hunger that he will eat anything. The Glutton is a glorious novel. Glorious in its writing: Blakemore paints with her words a world alive with visceral undertakings, both beautiful and appalling. Glorious in its depiction of depravity and desire: the futile attempts to capture love or meaning in a maelstrom of corruption and ignorance. Glorious in its observations of time: this turbulent history of dissatisfaction, desperation, and rebellion. The revolution calls all men to its reckoning, and a boy-man like Tarare turns the heads of more powerful men — men that will command him to perform and then spit him out like gristle that irritates the tooth. And then there are his fellows who will not claim him — who prefer him a spectacle. For what are they, but curious? Hardened and bored by the grind of their days and the poverty of their hearth and heart. In all this, can Tarare be anything other than the monstrous man with his jaws wide open, his throat slack as he ingests mountains of offal, eats small animals alive, and takes in copious buttons, belts, and other fancies as the crowd demands? Grotesque, exhilarating, and strangely beautiful, Blakemore’s The Glutton is a delectable dish. Gobble it up!

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella
Book of the Week: THE GLUTTON by A.K. Blakemore

A novel of desire and destruction, The Glutton is worth every mouthful. Here is the story of The Great Tarare, a man who could never satisfy his appetite, made famous in revolutionary France by his horrific ability to eat anything! Golden forks, raw offal, live animals and worse. A marvel, a freak, unwanted and jeered, but a source of endless fascination to the peasants who ‘feed’ him with the abject and to the medical profession who poke and prod to unpick his mystery.

VOLUME BooksBook of the week
NEW RELEASES (26.1.24)

The following books seek a home on your shelf, or on your bedside table.

The Variations by Patrick Langley $37

Selda Heddle, a famously reclusive composer, is found dead in a snowy field near her Cornish home. She was educated at Agnes’s Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children, which for centuries has offered its young wards a grounding in the gift – an inherited ability to tune into the voices and sounds of the past. When she dies, Selda’s gift passes down to her grandson Wolf, who must make sense of her legacy, and learn to live with the newly unleashed voices in his head. Ambitious and exhilarating, The Variations is a novel of startling originality about music and the difficulty – or impossibility – of living with the past.
‘Ecstasy is a word I’d happily associate with Patrick Langley’s lyrical and looping novel The Variations, a work with a similarly thrilling Nabokovian intrigue in the relationship between patterning, form and meaning.... The novel’s epigraph – “Variation is among the oldest and most basic devices in music. It originates in an inherent tendency to modify identical recurrence” – is a quote from the American composer Leon Stein, and almost laughably banal when held up against Langley’s humming prose. But its message is clear: it is Nabokov’s magic carpet, that age-old human impulse that – like music – wants to modify, edit, exceed, transcend itself. With The Variations, Langley appears to be weaving a carpet of his own.’ — Matthew Janney, Guardian
‘For all The Variations’ unusual elements, Langley handles traditional storytelling modes expertly. He can nail a character in a few lines… He can do action. And he has a knack for ending chapters with the expertise of a theatrical director ramping up the tension and then — curtain! — dropping into silence. The Variations, in other words, is a book whose oddness stretches the reader without estranging us. It asks more questions than it answers, but provides plenty of delight to compensate. It’s a novel where, as Selda reflects, “something about the world is revealed, though she can’t say what it is”.’ — John Self, Financial Times
‘The Variations is a wonderfully mysterious novel suffused with a Lynchian eeriness. I was totally under Langley's spell and under the thrall of the eerie rhythms governing The Variations. Simply unforgettable.’ — Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans
‘If Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black were written by John Banville channelling M. John Harrison, the result would look something like this. And yet Langley has made something new and unexpected about how the present is, necessarily and always, an echo corridor of the past. Beautifully written, powered by a wonderfully intelligent conceptual dynamo, and deftly sprung with surprises, The Variations is an utterly original book about haunting. It is strange, resonant, and, yes, haunting.’ — Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others
‘The Variations is a passionate meditation on how past and present meet and annihilate one another in the flare of individual human experience. Music is presented as a kind of weather, blustery and changeable, unlimited by its own time. It takes you up, puts you down, whirls you away. Langley’s prose, lyrical and accurate, enlivens and illuminates. A tremendous, seriously ambitious novel.’ — M. John Harrison, author of Wish I Was Here

 

I Need Art: Reality Isn’t Enough, An illustrated memoir by Henn Kim $33
Depression and creativity, love and family, books and music: this personal and vulnerable memoir by the iconic South Korean illustrator explores her life from the ages of seventeen to thirty-three through image, text and poetry. From what nearly broke her to what saved her, everyone will find something to comfort them in Henn Kim's world.

 

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan $40

Beginning at a love hotel by Japan's Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, Question 7 is about the choices we make about love and the chain reaction that follows. By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West's affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this genre-defying daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die. At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, literature, place and memory is about how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.

 

Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran $28

Welcome to Cinnamon Gardens, a home for those who are lost and the stories they treasure. Cinnamon Gardens Nursing Home is nestled in the quiet suburb of Westgrove — populated with residents with colourful histories, each with their own secrets, triumphs and failings. This is their safe place, an oasis of familiar delights — a beautiful garden, a busy kitchen and a bountiful recreation schedule. But this ordinary neighbourhood is not without its prejudices. The serenity of Cinnamon Gardens is threatened by malignant forces more interested in what makes this refuge different rather than embracing the calm companionship that makes this place home to so many. As those who challenge the residents' existence make their stand against the nursing home with devastating consequences, our characters are forced to reckon with a country divided. Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is about family and memory, community and race, but is ultimately a love letter to storytelling and how our stories shape who we are.
Winner of the 2023 Miles Franklin Award.
'This is an engaging story that feels both urgent and necessary. It is also a terrific read.' —The Daily Telegraph
'This story burns with anger and sings with optimism, sprinkled through with moments of levity and humour.' —The Canberra Times

 

What You Need to Be Warm by Neil Gaiman (and various artists) $23
Troubled by the treatment of refugees around the world, Neil Gaiman asked his social media followers what makes them that they belong and are wanted. He collected the answers, and the resulting book reveals our shared desire to feel safe, welcome and warm in a world that can often feel frightening and lonely. What You Need to Be Warm is an exploration of displacement and flight from conflict through the objects and memories that represent warmth. It is about our right to feel safe, whoever we are and wherever we are from. It is about holding out a hand to welcome those who find themselves far from home. Featuring original illustrations from Chris Riddell, Benji Davies, Yuliya Gwilym, Nadine Kaadan, Daniel Egnéus, Pam Smy, Petr Horácek, Beth Suzanna, Bagram Ibatoulline, Marie-Alice Harel, Majid Adin and Richard Jones, with a thought-provoking cover from Oliver Jeffers.
Sales of every copy of this book will help support the work of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, which helps forcibly displaced communities and stateless people across the world.

 

The Greatest Invention: A history of the world in nine mysterious scripts by Silvia Ferrara $28
The invention of writing allowed humans to create a record of their lives and to persist past the limits of their lifetimes. In the shadows and swirls of ancient inscriptions, we can decipher the stories they sought to record, but we can also tease out the timeless truths of human nature, of our ceaseless drive to connect, create and be remembered. The Greatest Invention chronicles an uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research and the faint, fleeting echo of writing's future. Now in paperback!
”Brisk, simple to follow and unfussy — though the author has a way with a helpful metaphor, for which we non-experts are grateful — Ferrara's book is an introduction to writing as a process of revelation, but it's also a celebration of these things still undeciphered, and many other tantalising mysteries besides.” —Daniel Hahn, Spectator

 

A trail of Crab Tracks by Patrice Nganang $40
Nganang chronicles the fight for Cameroonian independence through the story of a father’s love for his family and his land and of the long-silenced secrets of his former life. For the first time, Nithap flies across the world to visit his son, Tanou, in the United States. After countless staticky phone calls and transatlantic silences, he has agreed to leave Bangwa: the city in western Cameroon where he has always lived, where he became a doctor and, despite himself, a rebel, where he fell in love, and where his children were born. When illness extends his stay, his son finds an opportunity to unravel the history of the mysterious man who raised him, following the trail of crab tracks to discover the truth of his father and his country. At last, Nithap’s throat clears and his voice rises, and he drifts back in time to tell his son the story that is burned into his memory and into the land he left behind. He speaks about the civil war that tore Cameroon apart, about the great men who lived and died, about his soldiers, his martyrs, and his great loves. As the tale unfolds, Tanou listens to his father tell the history of his family and the prayer of the blood-soaked land. From New Jersey to Bamileke country, voices mingle, the borders of time dissolve, and generations merge.
"For Patrice Nganang . . . reimagining a nation has required reimagining the novel. Each work in [his] trilogy takes aim at the intricacies of history through an equally intricate narrative approach: the novels range back and forth across time, weaving real-world figures amid fictional characters, and shifting rapidly among different voices, registers, and languages . . . A Trail of Crab Tracks becomes a singularly complex interrogation of the relationship between thought and action, between writing and the world." —Kristen Roupenian, The New Yorker

 

The Goodbye Cat by Hiro Arikawa $37

Against changing seasons in Japan, seven cats weave their way through their owners' lives: A needy kitten rescued from the recycling bin teaches a new father how to parent his own human baby; a colony of wild cats on a holiday island shows a young boy not to stand in nature's way; a family is perplexed by their cat's devotion to their charismatic but uncaring father; a woman curses how her cat constantly visits her at night; and an elderly cat, Kota, hatches a plan to pass into the next world as a spirit so that he and his owner may be together for ever. Includes seven cat drawings.

 

Hey There, Stink Bug! by Leslies Bulion nd Evans $12
Witty poems describe how insects capture prey, trick predators, attract mates, and have managed to survive for 400 million years. Scientifically accurate information further explains bug behavior. Eye-catching linoleum-cut illustrations practically crawl across the pages. Includes notes that explain 19 poetic forms and stylistic techniques plus a glossary of entomological terms.

 

The Future by Naomi Alderman $35

The new novel from the author of The Power shows us a future that is very similar to our own. The Future — as the richest people on the planet have discovered — is where the money is. The Future is a few billionaires leading the world to destruction while safeguarding their own survival with secret lavish bunkers. The Future is private weather, technological prophecy and highly deniable weapons. But the Future is a handful of friends — the daughter of a cult leader, a non-binary hacker, an ousted Silicon Valley visionary, the concerned wife of a dangerous CEO, and an internet-famous survivalist — hatching a daring plan. It could be the greatest heist ever. Or the cataclysmic end of civilization. The Future is what you see if you don't look behind you.

 
VOLUME BooksNew releases
THIS IS THE PLACE TO BE by Lara Pawson — reviewed by Thomas

This Is the Place to Be by Lara Pawson

What do you report when you become uncertain of the facts, of the notion of truth and of the purpose of writing? What can you understand of yourself when you are uncertain how or if your memories can be correlated with known 'facts'? Is your idea of yourself anything other than the sum of your memories? Lara Pawson was for some years a journalist for the BBC and other media during the civil wars in Angola, and on the Ivory Coast. In this book, her experiences of societies in trauma, and her idealism for making the 'truth' known, are fragmented (as memory is always fragmented) and mixed with memory fragments of her childhood and of her relationships with the various people she encountered before, during and after the period of heightened awareness provided by war. It is this intermeshing of shared and personal perspectives, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes contradicting each other, always crossing over and back over the rift that separates the individual and her world, that makes this book such a fascinating description of a life. By constantly looking outwards, Pawson has conjured a portrait of the person who looks outwards, and a remarkable depiction of the act of looking outwards. Every word contributes to this self-portrait, and the reader hangs therefore on every word.

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas
What you should buy from our sale — Stella

If you haven't already looked and purchased a book from our Art and Architecture Summer Specials, you'll need to be quick. Some of my favourites have already gone, but here are a few that I would like on my shelves (you can click on the covers to look inside these books):
Kouldelka: Gypsies, documentary photography by Josef Koudelka, captures the Roma communities of Europe in the 1960s. Amazing images of a time and place long gone, but the desire for recognition remains. 

A photographic project closer to home. In Te Ahi Kā, Danish photographer Martin Toft spent six months alongside Māori by the Whanganui River in 1996 as they were in the process of reversing colonisation and returning to their ancestral lands. This stunning book documents this process.

For the sheer pleasure of looking and learning Vitamin D3: Today's best comtemporary drawing. These Phaidon collections are always excellent, and a great way to be introduced to new artists, as well as inspiration for your future projects.

And from the range of architecture books, my pick would beJulia Watson's  Lo-TEK: Design by radical indigenism. An exploration of indigenous philosophy, natural spaces, and resilient infrastructure. Important and urgent.

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella
Publisher Focus: COMPOUND PRESS

This week we are aiming your attention toward a small press based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. Compound Press publishes excellent and unexpected titles, predominantly poetry, from familiar and not-so-familiar authors working in the Pacific region. Their books are beautifully designed (covers and interiors); often short-run, well-produced (sometimes handbound), and made from recycled materials. 

Here's what they say about themselves: "Compound Press was founded in 2012 after hours in the print room of an unnamed law firm with appropriated materials, the name first appearing on an eclectic array of hyperlimited 3-5 run chapbooks. We maintain a particular though non-exclusive commitment to poetry of the Pacific Region while sea-levels still permit."

Help those sea-levels remain steady by adding to your poetry shelf or delving into new waters.

VOLUME BooksBook of the week
NEW RELEASES (19.1.24)

Out of the carton and onto your shelf!

Spent Light by Lara Pawson $38

A woman contemplates her hand-me-down toaster and suddenly the whole world erupts into her kitchen, in all its brutality and loveliness: global networks of resource extraction and forced labour, technologies of industrial murder, histories of genocide, alongside traditions of craft, the pleasures of convenience and dexterity, the giving and receiving of affection and care.    “Everything in this damned world calls for indignation,” the woman says at one point. All of it’s there, all interconnected, and she can’t stop looking. The likeness between a pepper mill and a hand grenade, for example, or the scarcely hidden violence of an egg timer. And what if objects knew their own histories? What if we could allow ourselves to see those weird resonances, echoes, loops, glitches, just as Pawson does so beautifully and unnervingly here? Spent Light asks us to begin the work of de-enchanting all the crap we gather around ourselves to fend off the abyss — because we’ll never manage that anyway, the book warns, the abyss is already in us. But love is too. There might be no home to be found in objects, but there’s one to be made with other people. I think, in the end, this powerful, startling book is a love letter.’ —Jennifer Hodgson
”I’m flabbergasted by the naked determination on show here, not to say the talent. Page by page, image by image, association by association, Lara Pawson develops a picture of the world that you won’t be offered anywhere else: stark, unremitting, brilliantly formed and written.” —M. John Harrison
”A shocking book. Lara Pawson’s merciless and exquisite prose adorns everyday objects with the violence of history – the savage comedy by which living creatures have become broken, petrified things. I will never look at a toaster or a timer, a toenail or a squirrel, the same way again.” —Merve Emre

 

Unwords by Andrew Gallix $40

An enjoyable companion to the best new reading and to intriguing re-readings, this book contains essays on the highest form of intergloss (and everything having already been said), the death of the novel, the death of the author, the unwritten, the unread and unreadable, the International Necronautical Society, fictive realism, Alain Robbe-Grillet's reality hunger, the Oulipo and literary bondage, Rene Girard and mimetic desire, literary prizes, Andy Warhol's answer to Ulysses, the poetics of spam, the literati and digerati, the disappearance of 3:AM Magazine (and literature), umbilical worlds, the melancholy of Guy the Gorilla, the world without me, two interviews with philosopher Simon Critchley, and an after(un)word-cum-writing manifesto made up exclusively of quotations. It also contains reviews of works by Jenn Ashworth, Zygmunt Bauman, Claire-Louise Bennett, Gavin James Bower, Kevin Breathnach, Michel Butor, David Caron, Joshua Cohen, Douglas Coupland, Tim Etchells, Jonathan Franzen, Dan Fox, Paul Gorman, James Greer, Len Gutkin, Isabella Hammad, Jean-Yves Jouan.
”I'm starting to suspect that the last quarter century of literary history has in reality been a projection of the mind of Andrew Gallix, paused in reverie above the blank sheet of a masterpiece so perfect as to be unfeasible. We thought we were writing, reading and debating; in fact, he was daydreaming us all." —Tom McCarthy
"Andrew Gallix is the thinking punk's intellecual, a vital voice at the forefront of literary criticism. He is eminently readable, an alternative national (and international) treasure." —Benjamin Myers
"Andrew Gallix has long been one of our most astute, witty, and suprising critical thinkers. For a start, he understands how a modernist novel is put together. This is not to be taken for granted — it is one of the many reasons to enjoy the spirit of this valuable and intellectually entertaining collection." —Devorah Levy

 

The Good Die Young: The verdict on Henry Kissinger edited by Bhaskar Sunkara, René Rojas, and Jonah Walter $38

 If the American foreign policy establishment is a grand citadel, then Henry Kissinger is the ghoul haunting its hallways. For half a century, he was an omnipresent figure in war rooms and at press briefings, dutifully shepherding the American empire through successive rounds of growing pains. For multiple generations of anti-war activists, Kissinger personified the depravity of the American war machine. The world Kissinger wrought is the world we live in, where ideal investment conditions are generated from the barrel of a gun. Today, global capitalism and United States hegemony are underwritten by the most powerful military ever devised. Any political vision worth fighting for must promise an end to the cycle of never-ending wars afflicting the world in the twenty-first century. This book follows Kissinger's fiery trajectory around the world because he, more than any other public figure, illustrates the links between capitalism, empire, and the feedback loop of endless war-making that plagues us today.

 

The I Wonder Bookstore by Shinsuke Yoshitake $30

At The I Wonder Bookstore, customers come in and ask the owner countless variations on its namesake question ("I wonder if you have any books about...") and he is happy to fill their requests — he has books that play at the edges (and yet somehow are central to) our ideas of books and reading. Readers will discover books that grow on trees, books designed to be read by two (or more) people at once, books that can only be read by moonlight, bookstore weddings, an underwater library, a boot camp for charismatic bookstore attendants, and many more wonders that celebrate, books, and bookshops. Hugely inventive, thoughtful, and fun.

 

A History of Queen’s Redoubt and the Invasion of the Waikato by Neville Ritchie and Ian Barton $50

On 12 July 1863, British and colonial troops under the command of Lt. Gen. Duncan Cameron crossed Mangatawhiri stream, Waikato Maori’s northern border, instigating the Waikato War. In order to do so they had amassed a vast infrastructure that included building the Great South Road (the ‘Road to War’), establishing a military supply train capable of providing for the needs of 6,000 soldiers, erecting a telegraph service between Auckland and Pokeno, forming a navy of armoured gunboats on the Waikato River, and constructing the second largest military fort built by the British Army in New Zealand: The Queen’s Redoubt. At the height of the invasion, some 14,000 British and colonial troops contested the Waikato against Maori forces which never exceeded 3000. The Waikato was occupied from July 1863 to April 1864, followed by massive land confiscations. This book tells the story of the Redoubt, and the buildup of military power along the Waikato border, which led directly to the most significant campaign of the New Zealand Wars, the invasion of the Waikato.
”Queen’s Redoubt was the launching pad for the invasion of Waikato in 1863. Ian Barton and Neville Ritchie have produced a valuable account of its place in this defining conflict in New Zealand’s history.” — Vincent O’Malley

 

Mountains of Fire: The secret lives of volcanoes by Clive Oppenheimer $40

olcanoes mean more than threat and calamity. Like our parents, they've led whole lives before we get to know them. They have inspired our imaginations, provoked pioneering explorations and shaped the path of humanity. Volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer has worked at the crater's edge in the wildest places on Earth, from remote peaks in the Sahara to mystical mountains in North Korea. He's faced down AK47s, learned from tribal elders, and watched red hot rocks shoot into the sky. More people have been into space than have set eyes on the fiery depths of Mount Erebus in Antarctica, where he has measured the Earth's powerful forces. In Mountains of Fire, he paints volcanoes as otherworldly, magical places where our history is laid bare, and shows us just how entangled volcanic activity is with our climate, economy, politics, culture and beliefs.
”What the French adventurer Jacques Cousteau was to the hidden world under our seas, Oppenheimer is to the hidden, molten world bubbling under our feet.” —Sunday Times
”Gripping ... reads] like a thriller. Perhaps one final attribute of a volcanologist is that he should be a good storyteller. Oppenheimer is better than good. This is terrific.” —Spectator
”A fantastic account of the power and importance of volcanoes to history. Clive Oppenheimer takes us on a wonderful tour of some of the world's best and least known volcanoes in a book that will make all readers want to become volcanologists.” —Peter Frankopan

 

High: A journey across the Himalayas through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal, and China by Erika Fatland $30

The Himalayas meander for more than two thousand kilometres through many different countries, from Pakistan to Myanmar via Nepal, India, Tibet and Bhutan, where the world religions of Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism are interspersed with ancient shamanic beliefs. Countless languages and vastly different cultures exist in these isolated mountain valleys. Modernity and tradition collide, while the great powers fight for influence.We have read about climbers and adventurers on their way up Mount Everest, and about travellers on a spiritual quest to remote Buddhist monasteries. Here, however, the focus is on the communities of these Himalayan valleys, those who live and work in this extraordinary region. As Erika Fatland introduces us to the people she meets along her journey, and in particular the women, she takes us on a vivid and dizzying expedition at altitude through incredible landscapes and dramatic, unknown histories.

 

Feeling and Knowing by Antonio Damasio $35

In recent decades, many philosophers and cognitive scientists have declared the question of consciousness unsolvable, but Antonio Damasio is convinced that recent findings in neuroscience, psychology and artificial intelligence have given us the necessary tools to solve its mystery. In Feeling & Knowing, Damasio elucidates the myriad aspects of consciousness and presents his analysis and new insights in a way that is faithful to our own intuitive sense of the experience. In forty-eight brief chapters, Damasio helps us understand the relation between consciousness and the mind; why being conscious is not the same as either being awake or sensing; the central role of feeling; and why the brain is essential for the development of consciousness. He synthesises the recent findings of various sciences with the philosophy of consciousness, and, most significantly, presents his original research which has transformed our understanding of the brain and human behaviour. Now in paperback.
“Damasio has succeeded brilliantly in narrowing the gap between body and mind.” —The New York Times Book Review

 

Sylvie and the Wolf by Andrea Debbink, illustrated by Merce Lopez $38

Sylvie has a secret. She's seen a wolf in the woods and is afraid to tell anyone about it. She thinks people won't believe her or will make fun of her. As her fear begins to control her life, she stops going to the woods, spending time with friends, and doing the things she loves. Eventually, with the encouragement of a loving aunt, Sylvie is able to confront her fear. She learns that instead of running or hiding, she can live alongside her anxiety. She also learns that everyone is dealing with something that scares them — even the wolf.

 

In the Museum — 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle by Tomi Um $35

Familiar faces and delightful discoveries abound in this menagerie of art gallery visitors, from inquisitive art students, to selfie-snapping divas, and aspiring artists who happen to be mice. Each gallery offers new details to discover and allusions to art movement across time and history.

 
VOLUME BooksNew releases