BOOKS @ VOLUME #66 (17.3.18)
Read our latest NEWSLETTER of reviews, news and new releases.
Sunday, 18 March 2018
>> Read Thomas's review.
>> Read an extract.
>> Hear an extract read.
>> The book is short-listed for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
>> A review by Eimear McBride in The Guardian.
>> "An intelligent woman is supposed to raise herself above these anxieties."
>> Arnold Schoenberg's Blue Self-Portrait.
>> The book is published by the exemplary Les Fugitives, a press that publishes only books written by award-winning, female, francophone writers who have previously not been translated into English. Visit their website.
>> Other titles from Les Fugitives at VOLUME:
Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger (read Thomas's review)
Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi (read Thomas's review)
Translation as Transhumance by Mireille Gansel (just arrived!)
 | My Cat Yugoslavia by Pajtim Statovci {Reviewed by STELLA} Pajtim Statovci explores entrapment, isolation and dislocation through the two main characters in his debut novel, My Cat Yugoslavia. We meet Bekim - a disenchanted, lonely young man - as he surfs a gay chat room looking for a hook-up. His life as an immigrant - he came to Finland from Kosovo with his parents - is a series of incidents in which he tries not to be noticed and denies his past. At thirty he is living alone, estranged from his family, his closest relationship is with his pet, a boa constrictor, until he meets the audacious and, so Bekim thinks, irresistibly attractive Cat at a gay bar. The Cat, a highly unlikable fellow - arrogant, obnoxious, abusive -moves into Bekim’s flat and invades his controlled life. The second voice in this novel is Emine. The story travels back to 1980 rural Kosovo. Emine at sixteen dreams about a life devoid of the boredom and drudgery of her parents. She seems happy until the day it dawns on her that she isn’t a brilliant student, that she won’t be an actress and is unlikely to have any future apart from the dutiful wife. That this future comes so quickly in her life - she is spotted by the dashing Bajram and an arranged wedding is soon underway - is instantly beguiling (a whirlwind of rituals and gold jewellery) and ultimately terrifying. Bajram is the wolf in lamb’s clothing. Yet more violence is to come - the war, homelessness and the fleeing from Kosovo to Finland. Statovci splices the absurd, the comic and the tragic through these chapters and the voices of son and mother. The idea of a sleek, well-dressed Cat as an abusive interloper shouldn’t really work but it does, as an allegorical agent for aggression - racial and homophobic. The Cat is a tidy parallel to Emine’s husband Bajram - both are forceful, violent and righteous. While Bajram is controlling enough within the confines of his own culture and country, as a refugee the associated humiliations, lack of power and sense of belonging fuel the worst in his behaviour for both Emine and Bekim. Interestingly, the lives and loves of both mother and son run the same gauntlet - similar emotional minefields: they both crave a romantic love relationship based on an ideal, yet find themselves victims of abusive and controlling partners. Statovci like Bekim is Kosovo-born and lives in Finland and, unsurprisingly, his first novel draws on this fractured past. My Cat Yugoslavia draws away from other novels I’ve read set during the Yugoslav War, which have tended to focus on the chaos of the crisis and the abject behaviour of humanity. This novel focuses on the repercussions of war through generations: violence which impacts on the ability to form relationships. Bekim is a gay immigrant unable and unwilling to fit in. He is socially isolated, neither a Kosovar Albanian nor Finnish, not a Muslim yet fingered as different, bereft of a family. It is not surprising that he feels closest to a reptile, his boa constrictor. Emine's story is just as captivating - from her rural, naive beginning to her new life as a wife, and to the unexpected consequences of war - the spirited sixteen-year-old eventually rises again. Statovci writes with a light touch, curling intense emotion into crisp sentences and using the absurd to lead us through disarray. |
 | Gaudy Bauble by Isabel Waidner {Reviewed by THOMAS} It is overwhelmingly, facetiously tempting to call Gaudy Bauble a detective novel, principally because it is one (a fake detective novel is just as much a detective novel as a non-fake one, if there can be such a thing as a non-fake detective novel). In Gaudy Bauble the detectives, so to call them, never actually detect anything, they never leave their flats (except for dental repairs, &c), they are effectively ineffectual, placebos, and, when the lost budgerigar that triggered the investigation, so to call it, returns, it is not due to any detecting on their part. “Is not detective work labelling work?” states a voice, presumably that of P.I. Belahg, a writer mainly not writing the script for a television series seemingly entitled Querbird, being filmed by Blulip, Belahg’s lesbian Gilbert-and-George-like double, a film-maker whose ideas change faster than they can be realised. The investigation gains no traction not because there is a lack of evidence but because there is too much. Everything is evidence of something (or of everything). The investigation gains no traction because it is too thorough. The details are too much evidence to amount to anything in particular, only to everything. Every detail, every association, every etymological permutation, every taxonomy, every history, every identity is interrogated and dissolved, every distinction is ruptured, the narrative, so to call it, constantly derailed by detail and by the refusal of detail to retain a fixed identity. In total flux, attributions and prescribed identities function as little more than costumes (clothes have more stable identities than persons), everything mentioned becomes activated by that mentioning, becomes a protagonist, pulls the plot, so to call it, towards it, off course, if it could be said ever to have had a course, or to be a plot. The world, after all, consists not of plot, which is always a fictive result of arbitrary interpretation of an unjustifiably normative kind, but of details, details about which little of certainty can be said without making similarly normative transgressions against their true nature, which lies not in identity but in momentum. In flux, in the tohubohu which is the natural state of all entities and from which entities become exiled at the moment they become entities, the state to which all entities long to return, the only certainty that can be maintained is that of momentum, if a certainty can be maintained at all. Gaudy Bauble retains all the excitement and pace and rigour of a detective novel. More and more characters appear, change names, blur their distinctions, overwhelm the narrative from locations in its margins or beyond: “There can never be too many crackpot agents. There could never be too much hyperactive riffraff interfering with events.” The dichotomy between the performative and the authentic is constantly ruptured, as if this dichotomy were a wall set to measure and constrain us, against which it is our nature to rebel, to seek release into illimitable inclusivity. The conflation of the performative and the authentic manifests in a doubling of entities, not only of P.I. Belahg and Blulip, but of the actual and the representation: budgerigar and statuette, tooth and denture, the characters and their appearances on the TV show Querbird. All categories are in flux. There may be a lost budgerigar, a broken tooth, statuettes, and so forth, but these categories are not exclusive of other categories, and tend always, by ontological clinamen, towards these categories. This ontology, since something must be said, or since the author, in choosing to write the novel, has put it about that something must be said in order for the novel to be written, makes language the territory in which this clinamen, this queerness in the nature of the particles, will in this instance be traced. All presences, all absences, all substances, all entities, all dissolutions, all metamorphoses, all wounds and all healing of wounds, are exercises of language, are both problems of language and solutions to these problems of language. Waidner, with nothing more constrained than hyperactive brilliance, somehow combines the register of Janet & John or the Teletubbies with that of specialist academic obscurantism without being anywhere between these poles, for only the extremes are worth conflating. At times there are similarities of rhythm with texts written under lipogrammatic or other artificial constraints, or with the lyric style of Mark E. Smith, or with impromptu dramatic performances using only the text of foreign-language phrasebooks (recommended). “Might sea urchin odontogenesis, fully understood, provide the biochemical tools to transform mainstream prosthodontics?” But, really, the book is quite unlike anything else, and is an exemplar of the sort of enjoyable and uncompromising queering experiment at the edge of literature and with the substance of literature itselfthat literature so desperately needs if it is to open new potentials within itself. When the novel comes to a (sort-of) end, new, more fluid entities have been achieved in a game of ‘real-life’ Exquisite Corpse, the budgerigar has returned, the momentum of the investigation has been expended. “The truth is the only thing left now. The truth ate everyone else alive.” |
The long list for the 2018 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE was announced this week. There are some excellent books included. Click through to find out more, and to read our reviews of several of them. 
Take a virtual tour of VOLUME. Click on the lenses to change your vantage point and to go outside (we are hiding behind the counter).
Friday, 16 March 2018
NEW RELEASES
Release these books and, with them, yourself.
At once an avant-garde linguistic experiment, a thrilling police procedural, a philosophical meditation on liberty, and a counter-culture bildungsroman, The Fountain in the Forest takes a traditional crime narrative and undermines its every preconception, resulting in a head-spinning multi-leveled metaphysical wonder that loses none of the pace and intrigue of the pulp form upon which it is based.
>> Chat.
Taking its cue from the arrest and legally enforced chemical castration of the mathematician Alan Turing, Murmur is the account of a man who responds to intolerable physical and mental stress with love, honour and a rigorous, unsentimental curiosity about the ways in which we perceive ourselves and the world.
"Murmur is a profound meditation on what machine consciousness might mean, the implications of AI, where it will all lead. It’s one of the big stories of our time, though no one else has treated it with such depth and originality." – Peter Blegvad
>> You can enthuse about this book in the snow.
>> Thomas reviews Will Eaves' The Absent Therapist.
A hugely enjoyable, unstoppable and unconstrained excitation both of language itself and of its referents, social mores and particularities.
"I'm besotted with this beguiling, hilarious, rollocking, language-metamorphosing novel. The future of the queer avant-garde is safe with Isabel Waidner." - Olivia Laing
Short-listed for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
>> The author reads an extract.
>> Read an extract yourself.
>> Interview.
"In the Dark Room is a wonderfully controlled yet passionate meditation on memory and the things of the past, those that are lost and those, fewer, that remain: on what, in a late work, Beckett beautifully reduced to 'time and grief and self, so-called'. Retracing his steps through his own life and the lives of the family in the midst of which he grew up, Brian Dillon takes for guides some of the great connoisseurs of melancholy, from St Augustine to W. G. Sebald, by way of Sir Thomas Browne and Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin. The result is a deeply moving testament, free of sentimentality and evasion, to life's intricacies and the pleasures and the inevitable pains they entail. In defiance of so much that is ephemeral, this is a book that will live." - John Banville,
Can relationships be understood in terms of set theory? How do you draw an affair? A family? Can a Venn diagram show the ways overlaps turn into absences? Can tree rings tell us what happens when mothers leave? Can we fall in love according to the hop and skip of an acrostic? Empty Set is a novel of patterns, its young narrator's attempt at making sense of inevitable loss, tracing her way forward in loops, triangles, and broken lines.
"Bicecci's experimental novel takes a unique approach to topics like debilitating loneliness, political repression, and epistemological crises." - Publisher's Weekly
>> "A visual artist who also writes."
>> The author's website.
"In this memoir of a translator’s adventures, Mireille Gansel shows us what it means to enter another language through its culture, and to enter the life of another culture through its language. A sensitive and insightful book, which illuminates the difficult, and often underestimated task of translation—and the role of literature in making for a more interconnected and humane world." – Eva Hoffman
"A history not just of twentieth century poetry but of that dark century itself, from the rise of the Nazis to the American bombing of North Vietnam, and yields too a rare insight into the nature of language and the splendours and limitations of translation." – Gabriel Josipovici
"It is impossible for me to write about the imagination; it is like asking a fish to describe the sea." Ruefle, despite this, provides an most approachable primer to her natural element.
After reading only Beckett for three years, Coffey splices together his ruminations on the writer and his works with media accounts of torture and terrorism, occurrences in his own life and speculations on the nature of literary fame to create a fractured but prismatic work in which casts light in all directions and demonstrates how Beckett's work continues to be a useful thinking tool for the ailments of modern life. The work is structured according to a sequence laid out by Beckett in his notes to the unpublished 'The Long Observation of the Ray'.
"Coffey’s book speaks to how contemporary writers might stage an unmaking and remaking of form, serving as an ethical reminder of authorial limitations and of the porousness between the worlds we create and the political reality in which we live. By breaking rules of genre and narrative, by embracing experimental form, Coffey’s work raises questions about how contemporary artists might work to resist the status quo through a subversive, fragmentary style that makes it impossible for us to look away from our political reality. Now, more than ever, we have much to learn from Beckett." - Los Angeles Review of Books
"All the slipshod magnificence and crazy wonder of the late, venerated American writer are present in this posthumous collection of short stories." - Observer
A lively novel exploring the complex interplay of grief, race and gender, national and individual identities, and the struggle to personhood in a society whose currency is labels.
"Penetratingly good and written in vivid still life - wonderfully chromatic, transfixing and bursting with emotion. Zinzi Clemmons's novel signals the emergence of a voice that refuses to be ignored." - Paul Beatty
"Luminescent. Sometimes fierce and angry, other times quiet and tender." - Independent
Written in one virtuosic 73-page sentence which exerts enormous pressure on language to make it more closely resemble thought and which makes form the primary content of this novella, The Last Wolf tells of an academic who is commissioned to travel to Extremadura in Spain where he seeks to determine the fate of the last wolves in that barren area. We read his relation to a Hungarian bartender in Berlin of the accounts of Extremadurans made to him via a translator (and usually based in any case on further hearsay), nesting the subject of the story in several layers of reportage, rumour and translation, the performative complexity of which is repeatedly punctured by the offhand comments of the bartender. Krasznahorkai, as usual, succeeds in being both comic and morose, this hopeless tale of human destruction and the frustrating impassivity of nature is one in which meaning is both invoked and withheld much like the presence of the last elusive wolf (or, rather, much like the story of the last wolf, for it is narrative that is the true quarry for the hunter). Herman, the other novella in this book, was written earlier in Krasznahorkai’s career, yet deals with many of the same themes. The two versions, reminiscent at times of Kafka, tell of a master trapper whose disgust at his calling is turned upon his own species as the compounding of his exterminations creates a momentum from which neither he nor others can be released. What remains but the consequential force of past actions when their rationale has proven spurious?
>> Also available: lovely hardback.
Slipping between verse and prose but maintaining perfect cadence, Jenner's poems are steeped in the ethos of the Classical Greece of which he is a scholar, but address the contemporary, the personal and the particular with a tenderness and an intimacy from which pathos and tragedy are never far distant.
"It is a labyrinthine house of language with many rooms that Jenner inhabits and what he finds there is never less than (ordinarily) surprising and provocative." - Michael Harlow
Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner, Virginia Woolf: 'outsiders', 'outlaws', 'outcasts'. A woman's reputation was her security and each of these five lost it (to the benefit of posterity).
"Cooking plants is a uniquely different art from cooking meat or fish - it requires not only a solid grounding in traditional cooking techniques, but also a deeper understanding of new techniques specific to plant based cookery." Nicely presented.
As children in Calcutta, Ashim and Abhay made a small mistake that split their family forever. Thirty years later, Ashim has re-entered his brother's life, with blame and retribution on his mind. It seems nothing short of smashing Abhay's happy home in New Zealand will make good the damage from the past. At least, this is what Abhay and his wife Lena are certain is happening.
"In his fifth novel, Indian-born, New Zealand-based author Rajorshi Chakraborti skilfully amps up the tension, showing how easily fear can shove reason out the window, even in smart, seemingly self-aware people.It's an absorbing, gripping read that is ultimately about the importance of family and the emotional labour required to create deep, honest connections." - New Zealand Listener
"A compelling book about the dislocation of belonging, geography, culture and, ultimately, memory." - Dominion Post
>> Read an extract.
>> An interview with the author.
Psychoanalysis: The impossible profession by Janet Malcolm $25
What is psychoanalysis? Why do people become analysts? Why do people visit analysts? Can psychoanalysis help anyone? What risks does it pose to both patient and analyst?
My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum-Cleaner, A family memoir by Meir Shalev $30
A charming tale of family ties, over-the-top housekeeping, and the sport of storytelling in Nahalal, the village of Meir Shalev's birth, where her Jewish grandmother settled when moving from Russia to Palestine in 1923.
The King is Always Above the People by Daniel Alarcón $23
An affecting collection of stories, all concerning the results of forced migration and the convergence of fates in New York.
Rāwāhi by Briar Wood $25
Short-listed for the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (poetry section).
The Telescope in the Ice: Inventing a new astronomy at the South Pole by Mark Bowen $37
Since 2010, at the geographic South Pole, 'IceCube', a cubic kilometer of clear ice a couple of kilometers below the surface has been used to detect extraterrestrial high-energy neutrinos and provide new data about the universe. Neutrino astronomy is an exciting field, still in its infancy.
Trajectory by Richard Russo $37
A collection of short stories, extending the range of the author of Everybody's Fool (and, indeed, Nobody's Fool).
"Thoughtful and soulful. Trajectory will abruptly break your heart. That's what Richard Russo does, without pretension or fuss, time and time again." - New York Times
Sky Song by Abi Elphinstone $20
A story about an eagle huntress, an inventor and an organ made of icicles, but also a story about belonging, even at the very edges of our world.
Flora Magnifica: The art of flowers in four seasons by Makoto Azuma and Shunsuke Shiinoki $70
A stunning, luscious book of unusual flower arrangements, a collaboration between a flower artist and a botanical photographer. Come and see this book.
Peonies by Jane Eastoe $45
We like peonies. There are over 50 varieties photographed and described in this book.
Look What You Made Me Do by Helen Walmsley-Johnson $38
A book that will do much to raise awareness of psychological abuse within relationships.
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg $28
First published in 1824, this novel is not only a savage psychological portrayal of religious hypocrisy and fanaticism but, in its exploration of identity-supplanting doubles, unreliable narrators and embedded narratives, prefigured many of the concerns of the post-modern novel. Memorable.
The End of Epidemics by Jonathan D. Quick $38
Dr Quick considers looming epidemics to be the greatest current threat to humanity, but he prescribes a way they can be avoided.
Tomorrow by Elisabeth Russell Taylor $23
A Jewish refugee living in London returns every year to the Danish island of Møn where her family once had idyllic holiday homes and where, absorbed in their own happiness, for too long they ignored the gathering storm of antisemitism in their German home town. A subtly affecting and nicely structured novel.
Song of the Dolphin Boy by Elizabeth Laird $20
Finn feels a much stronger affinity with the dolphins off Stromhead than with his fellow humans. Can he help both, and find a place for himself?
A charming tale of family ties, over-the-top housekeeping, and the sport of storytelling in Nahalal, the village of Meir Shalev's birth, where her Jewish grandmother settled when moving from Russia to Palestine in 1923.
An affecting collection of stories, all concerning the results of forced migration and the convergence of fates in New York.
Short-listed for the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (poetry section).
Since 2010, at the geographic South Pole, 'IceCube', a cubic kilometer of clear ice a couple of kilometers below the surface has been used to detect extraterrestrial high-energy neutrinos and provide new data about the universe. Neutrino astronomy is an exciting field, still in its infancy.
A collection of short stories, extending the range of the author of Everybody's Fool (and, indeed, Nobody's Fool).
"Thoughtful and soulful. Trajectory will abruptly break your heart. That's what Richard Russo does, without pretension or fuss, time and time again." - New York Times
A story about an eagle huntress, an inventor and an organ made of icicles, but also a story about belonging, even at the very edges of our world.
A stunning, luscious book of unusual flower arrangements, a collaboration between a flower artist and a botanical photographer. Come and see this book.
We like peonies. There are over 50 varieties photographed and described in this book.
A book that will do much to raise awareness of psychological abuse within relationships.
First published in 1824, this novel is not only a savage psychological portrayal of religious hypocrisy and fanaticism but, in its exploration of identity-supplanting doubles, unreliable narrators and embedded narratives, prefigured many of the concerns of the post-modern novel. Memorable.
Dr Quick considers looming epidemics to be the greatest current threat to humanity, but he prescribes a way they can be avoided.
A Jewish refugee living in London returns every year to the Danish island of Møn where her family once had idyllic holiday homes and where, absorbed in their own happiness, for too long they ignored the gathering storm of antisemitism in their German home town. A subtly affecting and nicely structured novel.
Finn feels a much stronger affinity with the dolphins off Stromhead than with his fellow humans. Can he help both, and find a place for himself?
Albert's life is very constrained and, well, boring, until his Grandmother Z whisks him off on her motorcycle on a wonderful adventure.
The short lists for the OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS have just been announced. The winners will be announced on 15 May.Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize: The New Animals by Pip Adam (VUP);Salt Picnic by Patrick Evans (VUP); Sodden Downstream by Brannavan Gnanalingam (Lawrence & Gibson); Baby by Annaleese Jochems (VUP).
Poetry: Anchor Stone by Tony Beyer (Cold Hub Press); Night Horse by Elizabeth Smither (AUP); Rāwāhi by Briar Wood (Anahera Press); The Yield by Sue Wootton (Otago UP).
Royal Society Te Apārangi Award for General Non-Fiction: Dancing with the King: The rise and fall of the King Country, 1864-1885 by Michael Belgrave (AUP); Tears of Rangi: Experiments across worlds by Anne Salmond (AUP); Drawn Out: A seriously funny memoir by Tom Scott (Allen & Unwin); Driving to Trebrinka: A long search for a lost father by Diana Wichtel (Awa Press).
Illustrated Non-Fiction: Tuai: A traveller in two worlds by Alison Jones and Kuni Kaa Jenkins (Bridget Williams Books); Tōtara: A natural and cultural history by Philip Simpson (AUP); Gordon Walters: New vision by Zara Stanhope et al (Auckland Art Gallery & Dunedin Public Art Gallery); The Face of Nature: An environmental history of the Otago Peninsula by Jonathan West (Otago UP).
The long list for the 2018 Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Baileys Prize) has just been announced. There are some excellent books included. Click through to make your choice.
Monday, 12 March 2018
>> Read Stella's review.
>> Enjoy McSweeney's Internet Tendency.
>> A fuller list of contributors.
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