NEW RELEASES

For the Good Times by David Keenan        $33
Keenan's madcap and brutal novel hinges on the comradery between the members of a Provisional IRA cell in Belfast in the 1970s, whose madcap and brutal activities include kidnap, violence, arguing about the relative merits of Perry Como and Frank Sinatra, and running a comics shop. Interesting to read in comparison with Anna Burns's Milkman, also set in Catholic Belfast in the 1970s. 
>> Probably an interview with Keenan. 

Rag by Maryse Meijer          $25
"These stories are extremely good. I could reference masters of the particular as far-flung as Thomas Bernhard or Lucia Berlin, but the resonance of Maryse Meijer's ultraprecise prose is unique." - Dennis Cooper

Collected Poems by Fleur Adcock         $50
A handsome edition collecting poems from 1960 to the present. 
"Fleur Adcock has written some of the best poems in world literature." - The Spinoff

Everyone Walks Away by Eva Lindström      $30
Frank feels so left out that he goes home and cries into a saucepan. If he makes jam of his tears will everyone come to tea? From the author/illustrator of the also-wonderful My Dog Mouse. 

There Is No Harbour by Dinah Hawkin          $25
"The completion of the poem has not led me to any sense of resolution. It has led to something less measurable, perhaps more valuable-greater clarity, particularly of the depth of injustice Maori have endured in Taranaki. At the same time it has strengthened my attachment and my gratitude to my great and great-great grandparents, whom I know as essentially good people. And it has led me back to Parihaka: to profound respect for Te Whiti and Tohu, the art of leadership, the art of passive resistance, and their refusal of human war." - Dinah Hawken

We Were Strangers: Stories inspired by Unknown Pleasures edited by Richard Hirst         $38
Ten new stories, one inspired by each of the songs on Joy Division's most intense and affecting album. Sophie Mackintosh, David Gaffney, Jessie Greengrass, Toby Litt, Eley Williams, Nicholas Royle, Jen Ashworth, Zoe McLean, Zoe Lambert, Louise Marr and Anne Billson. 
"United by some unleashed kinetic force from long ago, these collected stories are achingly modern and fully embrace contemporary anxieties and preoccupations. They confront us with intense feelings and show us places we may not always wish to be, but – just like Joy Division themselves – they have the collective power to stay firmly rooted in our minds." - The Guardian
>> 'I Remember Nothing.'
>> Sophie Mackintosh on writing her story for the book. 

How to Be a Good Creature: A memoir in thirteen animals by Sy Montgomery, illustrated by Rebecca Green       $45

Understanding someone who belongs to another species can be transformative. To research her books, such as the remarkable The Soul of an Octopus, Montgomery has traveled the world and encountered some of the planet's rarest and most beautiful animals. From tarantulas to tigers, Sy's life continually intersects with and is informed by the creatures she meets. Beautifully, quirkily illustrated. 

Not Working: Why we have to stop by Josh Cohen         $37
In a culture that tacitly coerces us into blind activity, the art of doing nothing is disappearing. Inactivity can induce lethargy and indifference, but is also a condition of imaginative freedom and creativity. Cohen explores the paradoxical pleasures of inactivity, and considers four faces of inertia - the burnout, the slob, the daydreamer and the slacker. Could apathy help us to live more fulfilling lives? 

Passing for Human by Liana Finck          $48
A subtle and perceptive graphic memoir of a young artist struggling against what is expected of her - as an artist, as a woman, and as a human generally. 
"Passing for Human is one of the most extraordinary memoirs I've ever read. It's a story about becoming a person, about creativity, about love, all told with originality and grace. An amazing, amazing book." - Roz Chast
>> Finck in Vogue. 

Something Like Breathing by Angela Readman         $32
It's the 1950s, and Lorrie is unimpressed when her family moves to the remote Scottish island where her grandad runs a whisky distillery. She befriends Sylvie, the shy girl next door. Yet fun-loving Lorrie isn't sure Sylvie's is the friendship she wants to win. As the adults around them struggle to keep their lives on an even keel, the two young women are drawn into a series of events that leave the small town wondering who exactly Sylvie is and what strange gift she is hiding.
"A breath of fresh air." - The Irish Times
>> Read an excerpt. 
>> "I ate a Kit Kat the wrong way once."
>> Read Thomas's review of Don't Try This At Home. 

Edinburgh by Alexander Chee     $22
A Korean-American boy tries to deal with the legacy of abuse in Chee's stunning 2001 debut novel, which begins in Maine when young Aphias Zee joins a boys choir.
"Every word makes me ache. Written with exquisite empathy and grace." - Roxane Gay
"Singularly beautiful and psychologically harrowing. One of the best American novels of this century." - Boston Globe

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee       $25
The author of The Queen of the Night delivers a series of superb essays investigating his development as a person and as a writer and activist, intimating how we form our identities both in life and in art. New edition. 
"Alexander Chee is the very best kind of essayist, a boon companion in good times and bad, whose confiding voice you'd follow anywhere, just for the wonderful feeling of being understood like never before." - Charles D'Ambrosio
"Masterful." - Roxanne Gay

"Wonderful." - Rebecca Solnit

1982, Janine by Alasdair Gray         $23
"An unforgettably challenging book about power and powerlessness, men and women, masters and servants, small countries and big countries, Alasdair Gray’s exploration of the politics of pornography has lost none of its power to shock. 1982, Janine is a searing portrait of male need and inadequacy, as explored via the lonely sexual fantasies of Jock McLeish, failed husband, lover and business man." - Will Self (in the introduction to this new edition)
"This is one of the most underrated, most stupidly unread novels in the world." - LitReactor 
>> "My best novel."

The Photographer at Sixteen: The death and life of a fighter by George Szirtes      $35
In July 1975, George Szirtes' mother, Magda, died in an ambulance on her way to hospital after attempting to take her own life. She was fifty-one years old. This memoir is an attempt to make sense of what came before, to re-construct who Magda Szirtes really was. The book moves from her death, spooling backwards through her years as a mother, through sickness and exile in England, the family's flight from Hungary in 1956, her time in two concentration camps, her girlhood as an ambitious photographer, and her vanished family in Transylvania.

Goliath by Tom Gauld        $34
Goliath of Gath isn't much of a fighter. He would pick admin work over patrolling in a heartbeat, to say nothing of his distaste for engaging in combat. Nonetheless, at the behest of the king, he finds himself issuing a twice-daily challenge to the Israelites: Choose a man. Let him come to me that we may fight. Astounding graphic novel. 

Last Days in Old Europe: Trieste '79, Vienna '85, Prague '89 by Richard Bassett      $55
Mitteleuropa in this period of change still retained the deep impressions of the periods of change that had gone before. 

I Am So Clever by Mario Ramos       $20
Who is cleverer, the Wolf or Little Red Riding Hood? 

Birthday Girl by Haruki Murakami        $6
A short story published to mark Murakami's 70th birthday.

Social Forms: A short history of political art by Christian Viveros-Fauné         $48
Highlighting different moments of crisis and how these are reflected and preserved through fifty crucial artworks, from Francisco de Goya's 'The Disasters of War' (1810-1820) to David Hammons's 'In the Hood' (1993), Social Forms asks how to make art in the age of Brexit, Trump, and the refugee and climate crises. 

Text Me When You Get Home: The evolution and triumph of modern female friendship by Kayleen Schaeffer        $30

Seeing Further: The story of science and the Royal Society edited by Bill Bryson       $25

Since its inception in 1660, the Royal Society has pioneered scientific discovery and exploration. Includes contributions from Richard Dawkins, Margaret Atwood, David Attenborough, Martin Rees and Richard Fortey.

Merchants of Truth: Inside the news revolution by Jill Abramson       $38
What relevance are the journalistic ideals of truth and objectivity in a world increasingly unhinged by changes in the way that people access information (or "information")? Abramson takes us behind the scenes at four media titans during the most volatile years in news history. Two are maverick upstarts: BuzzFeed, the brain-child of virtuoso clickbait scientist Jonah Perretti, and VICE, led by the booze-fuelled anarcho-hipster Shane Smith. The two others are among the world's most venerable news institutions: The New York Times, owned and run for generations by the Sulzberger dynasty, and The Washington Post, also family-owned but soon to be bought by the world's richest merchant of all, Jeff Bezos. 

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, robotics and the future of work by Richard Baldwin        $38
Robotics and virtual work practices will mean a drastic shift in employment structures and wealth distribution. Who will control the changes, and to who will benefit from these changes? 

Impressions of Africa by Raymond Roussel        $23
A carnivalesque travelogue that features the passengers of the Lynceus, a vessel shipwrecked by a hurricane in the fictional land of Ponukele on a journey from Marseilles to Buenos Aires. To entertain themselves while waiting for a release ransom to be paid to the local drag-clad Emperor Talou, the crew of serendipitously skilled performers (including a historian, a ballerina, a fencing champion, a pyrotechnic, and an ichthyologist, among others), known collectively as the 'Incomparables', stage a gala. Readers should be prepared for an Africa unlike any they would likely visit in reality. First published in 1910. Unusual.  

BOOKS @ VOLUME #114 (9.2.19)

Read our latest NEWSLETTER and find out what we've been reading, about our Book of the Week, about new titles that have just arrived, and about a whole swathe of events this week (well, mostly on Thursday).

The Wall by John Lanchester is this week's Book of the Week. 
In a not-too-distant (and, metaphorically, not-too-different) future, Britain is surrounded by a vast wall that keeps out not only the higher seas that are the result of climate change, but also the refugees and other 'Others' who want to get in. In atrocious conditions, the walls are guarded by the young, but if any Others get in, the same number of Defenders are put adrift in the sea. Will Kavanagh and Hifa survive?  
"The Wall is something new: almost an allegory, almost a dystopian-future warning, partly an elegant study of the nature of storytelling itself. I was hugely impressed by it." - Philip Pullman 
>> Read the first chapter. 
>> Hear an extract.
>> And another. 
>> Lanchester talks about the book. 
>> "A dystopian fable for our time."
>> Talking about The Wall.  
>> "Walls were coming down... now they are springing up." 
>> "Some of this feels familiar already." 
>> 20 questions.
>> Is this where our climate crisis is headed? 
>> We will be giving copies of The Wall away (courtesy of Allen & Unwin NZ) to a few randomly selected customers on Thursday 14th (International Book Giving Day). 

The Witches of Benevento, #1: Mischief Season by John Bemelmans Marciano    {Reviewed by STELLA} Mischief Season introduces a charming band of children living in 19th century Italy. Twins Rosa and Emilio awake to the mischief of the Janara (witches by night, villagers by day). Rosa, who is always hungry, has a stomach ache - she’s eaten a whole wheel of cheese during the night - and she has an itchy nose - that her brother claims is caused by Janara sticking straw up her nostrils continuously tickling her while she sleeps. To cover up for her theft of cheese, Rosa naturally blames the Janara. But on this morning her father slams his fist on the table saying, "No more! No more Janara did it!" Rosa has cried wolf once too often and now she is in trouble with Father. As the weeks continue, there are not enough eggs for market, the Janara mess up the barn, spill the wine and throw the tiles from the roof. Emilio and Rosa are determined to stop the Janara and their mischief. Their friend Primo suggests a salt trap but this just makes the Janara angry. So they visit the fortune-teller, Zia Pia, crossing her hand with a silver coin, to get some advice. And the advice? A spell which includes very specific amounts of garlic and chillies along with a blade of grass rubbed on a frog’s back and a goose feather to make a paste, and instructions on how and where to bury this paste while chanting the spell. The result isn’t good for Rosa, who once again finds herself blamed for the mischief that ensues. A night excursion by the village children to the special tree that the Janara flock to doesn’t bring the right result either, only a petty quarrel between Primo and Rosa who both always think they are right!  Emilio, always the thinker, is sure there is an answer to the Janara problem, but where will he find it? The first book hints at more stories to come, so you can join Emilio, Rosa, Primo, Sergio and Maria Beppina to solve more mysteries and have adventures in their village of Benevento. Add to this a Witchonary, a map, historical notes about Benevento and about how children lived in 1820s Italy, and a child reader couldn’t wish for anything more. This is a charming and delightfully illustrated chapter book series for younger children, combining folklore, history and enjoyable mischief-making. ...And in case you are curious about the reality of the Witches of Benevento, click here.

A Hypocritical Reader by Rosie Šnajdr      {Reviewed by THOMAS} Every work of LITERATURE these days comes caparisoned in a ‘Critical Reader’, a volume which elaborates, for the advancement of students and other such intellectual aspirants, upon the text and quietly harnesses the meaning of the work to the culture that currently drives it. How we long for a ‘Hypercritical Reader’ to cut the text loose and let it run. Instead, Šnajdr provides us with its opposite, a ‘Hypocritical Reader’ (who, me?), suggesting that our standards, in literature as in every other sphere, are less lofty that we pretend, that we would rather pick among the ornaments that fall from literature than follow it over the hill. Too right (if you can be too right). Šnajdr shows us how cultural detritus can be reassembled, seriously, into new forms which we enter on a ‘purely fun’ basis, captivated by the surfaces until we find ourselves nauseated by the depths. Vertigo! (And we don’t even know if vertigo is a symptom of depths, or merely of disjunction.) Although the reader spins one way and the text spins the other, we know what a choose-your-own-adventure is, don’t we? “If you want to tell everyone that delusions of exceptionality are unavoidable, go to p.60.” Ha. “Something is occurring,” Šnajdr tells us, helpfully. “Something is taking its course,” wrote Beckett, but the Šnajdr project is restlessly effervescent, Beckett on acid. Objects snatch metaphor and use it to assume agency, language engages the quotidian in a process of defamiliarisation that allows intrusion, inversion and diversion the plausibility they (we!) require to overthrow the given, high register swaps its underclothes with low. “Welcome to the desert of the real.” Any way out, please. The mechanisms of language supplant the sense to which they are usually subservient, and create, perhaps, new meaning. What are the risks? “Thomas is a gingerbread man crossing the Lethe on fox-back. The stream of consciousness deepens and Thomas inches closer to the savage-toothed snout. A crafty style threatens to gobble him up.” For its characters, fiction ceases to resemble real life (so to call it) at the moment that the characters become aware of the reader, or, at least, of their fictionality, which implies a reader and also a writer (beware this realisation, those who take the reality of life for granted). When writing about themselves, how can a writer create an insulating barrier between them and their character to avoid the continual “nauseating déjà vu” that would otherwise result? Will doubling do it? Tripling? The writer is everything they write about, but at what point does a doppelgänger morph into a dreifachgänger? (“He stutters on it, mispronouncing the latter in the mouthshapes of the former.”) What is the relation between the written world and the not-ostensibly-written world? If the surface of a balloon is an expression of the size of the vacuity within it, when it bursts, and the two vacuities - the world and the work (so to call them) - become one, all that is left are shreds of surface. What will we make of these? Was there ever any more meaning than could be found there?

NEW RELEASES

A Hypocritical Reader by Rosie Šnajdr         $22
"Splicing the Choose Your Own Adventure format, sci-fi, metafiction, absurdism and social critique, Rosie Snajdr's A Hypocritical Reader is experimental fiction at its most animated and innovative. This is the future literature we need but haven't seen. You read it here first." - Isabel Waidner 
"A warping, wending, distending, distressing, flaming lightening strike of a book. Snajdr summons forces to be reckoned with." - Eley Williams 
>>Read an excerpt. 
>> Why has the short story evaded the influence of modernist experiment?

The Condition of Secrecy by Inger Christensen       $36
A selection of remarkable, lyrical essays selected from the long oeuvre of this Danish poet, essayist and novelist, dealing with memory, politics, poetry, randomness, and other expressions of the individual's startling place in the universe. 
"Like all Christensen’s writing, The Condition of Secrecy aims to be a history of no less than everything: the origins of the stars and our souls, the beauty of fractals and of third-century Chinese poetry. It is a book about eating strawberries, witch-burning and the challenge that the soft, scumbled sides of clouds pose to geometry. It’s about standing in the garden and watching yellow slugs ‘moving like slow flames’ in sunlight. It’s a hectic kind of erudition that could easily seem showy, but in these essays we experience it as a kind of abundance, an outpouring of love for the world. Susanna Nied’s clean, musical translation helps. There is nothing knotty, nothing strained. The arguments radiate outward with the measured rhythm of ripples in water." —Parul Seghal, The New York Times
"She whispers to me in my own writing, a brilliant, fierce literary mother whom I will read and reread again and again." - Siri Hustvedt

Pearly Gates by Owen Marshall          $38
Pat`Pearly' Gates has achieved a lot in his life and evinces considerable satisfaction in his achievements. He has a reputation as a former Otago rugby player and believes he would have been an All Black but for sporting injuries. He runs a successful real-estate agency in a provincial South Island town, of which he is the second-term mayor. Popular, happily married, well established, he cuts an impressive figure, especially in his own eyes. But will his pride and complacency come before a fall? And if so, how will that come about? Who better than Owen Marshall to skewer South Island small town life? 

The Wall by John Lanchester          $33
In a not-too-distant (and, metaphorically, not-too-different) future, Britain is surrounded by a vast wall that keeps out not only the higher seas that are the result of climate change, but also the refugees and other 'Others' who want to get in. In atrocious conditions, the walls are guarded by the young, but if any Others get in , the same number of Defenders are put adrift in the sea. Will Kavanagh and Hifa survive? 
"The Wall is something new: almost an allegory, almost a dystopian-future warning, partly an elegant study of the nature of storytelling itself. I was hugely impressed by it." - Philip Pullman
>> Talking about The Wall. 

The Ear by Piret Raud       $22
When the artist Vincent van Gogh cuts off his ear, the ear is suddenly left alone and headless. What will become of her? Where should she go? What should she do? Acutely aware of how small and insignificant she is in the big, wide world, the ear experiences something of an identity crisis. Silly.

A Season on Earth by Gerald Murnane         $48
For the first time, all four sections of Murnane's second novel have been published together as the author intended. When A Lifetime on Clouds was published in 1976 it was met with acclaim, but the full extent of Murnane's novel, which instigates his fascination with the relationship between the landscape and what he calls 'the image world', has not been read before. 
>> Read Thomas's review of several of Murnane's novels here.

Amphigorey: Fifteen books by Edward Gorey         $45
An illustrated collection of 15 macabre stories (many now otherwise out of print): "The Unstrung Harp", "The Listing Attic", "The Doubtful Guest", "The Object Lesson", "The Bug Book", "The Fatal Lozenge", "The Hapless Child", "The Curious Sofa", "The Willowdale Handcar", "The Gashlycrumb Tinies", "The Insect God", "The West Wing", "The Wuggly Ump", "The Sinking Spell", "The Remembered Visit".
>> Also available: Born to Be Posthumous: The eccentric life and mysterious genius of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery 

Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James          $38
Marlon James follows his remarkable 2015 Man Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings with this remarkable fusion of African mythology, history and fantasy. 

"Black Leopard, Red Wolf is the kind of novel I never realized I was missing until I read it. A dangerous, hallucinatory, ancient Africa, which becomes a fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made, with language as powerful as Angela Carter's." -  Neil Gaiman

The Life of de'Ath by Majella Cullinane         $35
Theodore de'Ath is fixated on the Underworld. He reads Dante, Milton, and Goethe's Faust. He struggles to express his feelings for Elizabeth Paterson. When he is obliged to leave New Zealand for the trenches in France during World War One, he finds a Hell that is real and without the literary machinery he is used to.
Longlisted for the 2019 Acorn Prize for Fiction in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. 

>> Whisper of a Crow's Wing. 

The Spirit of Science Fiction by Roberto Bolaño      $30
Two young poets, Jan and Remo, find themselves adrift in Mexico City. Obsessed with poetry, and, above all, with science fiction, they are eager to forge a life in the literary world - or sacrifice themselves to it. A precursor to The Savage Detectives. 

Time Flowing Backwards by Graeme Jefferies       $45
Jefferies's memoir gives insight into the New Zealand independent music scene from the 1980s on, through his experiences with Nocturnal Projections, This Kind of Punishment and The Cakekitchen. 
>> This Kind of Punishment. 

Among the Lost by Emiliano Monge         $37
In the desolate wasteland between the sierra and the jungle, under an all-seeing, unforgiving sun, a single day unfolds unfolds in which people are trafficked and brutalised, illegal migrants are cheated of their money, their dreams, their names, as countless others scrabble towards the border, trying to reach a land they call Paraíso. 
"This is a book of unbearable affliction. It is written with the lucidity of someone who has opened his eyes and refused to shut them again. The book's power is not only in what it says. but in the silences that it leaves the reader's conscience to grapple with." - Yuri Herrera
"Among the Lost is masterly. Its rhythm and syntax form an unforgettable, multilayered requiem for our battered region." - Valeria Luiselli

In/Half by Jasmin B. Frelih            $33
It is twenty-five years into the future, and a glitch in the global communications network is ripping a previously united world apart at the seams. The millennials find themselves hardest hit – among them childhood friends Evan, an addict theatre director; Kras, a family patriarch and ex-war-minister; and Zoja, an anarchist poet. As they prepare to celebrate their fiftieth birthdays, the three find themselves hurtling through a disconnected world filled with the debris of past histories, as they desperately try and recapture the magic of their former lives and hold on to some sort of sense of belonging. 
Winner of the debut EU Prize for Literature.  
>> Interview and excerpt.  

Beside Myself by Sasha Miarianna Salzmann         $38
When Anton goes missing and the only clue is a postcard sent from Istanbul, his twin sister Alissa leaves her life in Berlin to find him. Without her twin, the sharer of her memories and the mirror of her own self, Ali is lost. In a city steeped in political and social changes, where you can buy gender-changing drugs on the street, Ali's search - for her missing brother, for her identity - will take her on a journey for connection and belonging. 
"Salzmann thoughtfully and cleverly addresses the themes of memory, identity, and migration, asking if language, nationality, or gender are important for our self-definition." - World of Literature Today

Making Marks: Architects' sketchbooks - The creative process by Will Jones         $65
Shows how architects use thew physical sketch as a way of developing their ideas.

Fishing: How the sea fed civilisation by Brian Fagan      $38
Makes the case that the development and spread of civilisation was dependent upon, and demonstrative of, exploitation of the ocean's resources. 

The Missing Barbegazi by H.S. Norup         $17
Greta sets out to prove that her grandfather was right when he told stories of the Brabegazi, gnome-like creatures who live in the mountains. When she finds Barbegazi and uncovers a plot to capture them, she learns that some secrets are best kept secrets forever. 

ABC Off to Sea by Virginie Morgand    $25
Beautifully illustrated. Includes ropes, gulls and mermaids. 

Aspiring Daybook: The diary of Elsie Winslow by Annabel Wilson        $25
A year in the life of the fictional Elsie Winslow is recorded as poems, photographs, e-mails and notes, detailing her return from Europe to Wanaka to care for her dying brother. As the seasons turn and Elsie observes the minutiae of nature, Elsie begins to think about life and love in new ways. 
Longlisted for the poetry prize in the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. 

The Beginning and the End of Everything: From the Big Bang to the end of the universe by Paul Parsons        $35
What is happening in our atoms and our cosmos?  

Plight of the Living Dead: What real-life zombies reveal about our world, and ourselves by Matt Simon        $30
How do some organisms control other organisms? An intriguing look at parasites, viruses, and zombification, a process that occurs with surprising regularity in the natural world, such as when a jewel wasp “brainwashes” a cockroach into hosting its young, or when a lancet fluke manifests different life cycles in sheep, snails, and ants. 

The Freedom Artist by Ben Okri          $33
Who is the prisoner? When a woman is arrested and disappears for asking this question, her lover begins a search for her that takes him deep into the mechanisms of oppression in a post-truth world. 

Frostfire by Jamie Smith          $19
Chosen for the honour of bonding with a frostsliver - a fragment of the sentient glacier that crests her icy home - Sabira embarks on the dangerous pilgrimage to the top of the mountain. When a huge avalanche traps her on the glacier and destroys the pass, Sabira is determined to find another way home. In order to survive, she must face up to the merciless mountain, but there are dark and fiery secrets hiding in its depths...

Hello Darkness by Peter Wells        $40
An honest and insightful account of the year following Wells's cancer diagnosis, and the reassessment of his identity and priorities that ensued.  

Resistance by Jennifer A. Nielsen          $23
Chaya Lindner is a teenager living in Nazi-occupied Poland who becomes a courier between the Jewish ghettos of Poland, smuggling food, papers, and even people. Soon Chaya joins a resistance cell that runs raids on the Nazis' supplies. But after a mission goes terribly wrong, Chaya's network shatters, and she finds herself on a journey toward an even larger uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Happy Ever After: Escaping the myth of the perfect life by Paul Dolan       $40
How are we tricked into aspiring to prepackaged satisfaction? By freeing ourselves from the myth of the perfect life, could we each find a life worth living?
>> Avoiding wellbeing. 

Our latest NEWSLETTER (2.2.19)

BOOKS @ VOLUME #113

 Is alienation a threat to our personal wellbeing or its safeguard? In My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh, this week's Book of the Week, a young woman, fed up with her vapid and privileged life, decides to spend a year in narcotic hibernation, supervised by a very unsafe psychiatrist. 
"Matter of fact, full of bravado yet always wryly observational. One of the pleasures of reading Moshfegh is her relentless savagery." - The Guardian
>> Read an excerpt. 
>> Another excerpt (with photos!).
>> "She believes that sleep will cleanse her." 
>> "Easily the most interesting contemporary American writer on the subject of being alive when being alive feels terrible."
>> "Am I sick of talking about it?"
>> Where did the idea come from? 
>> "I say too much."
>> "I wish I could have been a singer."
>> What's in Moshfegh's fridge? 
>> Moshfegh's Eileen was short-listed for the Booker Prize. 
>> By the book. 
>> Buy the book. 
>> The provenance of the painting on the cover. 
>> Moshfegh at VOLUME. 

Milkman by Anna Burns  {Reviewed by STELLA} Milkman took out the Man Booker prize in 2018 and has raised eyebrows, created debate about literary fiction (- is it too hard to read?) and divided readers into the 'likes' and the 'nots'. A typical Man Booker winner then? Yet, no: Anna Burns’s novel is refreshingly uncompromising, inventive and compelling. I was drawn in within a few pages - the style of writing is beguiling and the voice of the narrator, Middle Sister, is ever present in the reader’s mind, even when you rest between chapters if you dare to. Our eighteen-year-old has no conception of how her actions, or, more correctly, her inaction, impact the community, family and friends. Preferring to walk and read, an action that sees her attracting harsh criticism from friend and foe alike, to be distracted by the nineteenth century and perhaps even eighteenth-century classics, Middle Sister would like to distance herself from her social environment and, in particular, the politics of that place. There are no named characters and no place names yet we know that this is a place of threat and violence, that she lives in a close-knit community riven by religion, history and paranoia. Petty jealousies, posturing and gossip reinforce these divisions and add fuel to the flames. When the Milkman takes an interest in her - much to her confusion and, at first, annoyance and then, later, fear - she is drawn against her will into a web of threat and violence that she would rather ignore. Though, of course, we can easily see that there is a no way to ignore this politically violent and corrupt world, no matter if you go to French classes, avoid political discussion, or keep your head in the literature of the past. Burns brings us First brother-in-law (and third), Somebody McSomebody, the Wee Sisters, and - my favourite - Maybe-Boyfriend, with effortless conviction. The narrative and descriptions of place mark this as Ireland during the height of the Troubles - more specifically, Belfast of the 1970s. From the beginning, despite some forewarning, there is tension - a tension that has sharp teeth. Threat invades from all sides. Especially frightening are the scenes with the Milkman. Despite this, the novel brims with humour, quirky anecdotes and snappy observations of relationships, both familial and romantic. The politics are expressed in all their seriousness (violence and its real consequences), as well as their ridiculousness (bravado, rules and one-up-manship that borders on the idiotic). The conversations between the characters are laced with irony, hostility and double-speak - Middle Sister is often startled by the actions that take place around her and by the behaviour of others towards her, as though she is at an epicentre of a maelstrom, unable to act, only wishing to remain unnoticed. She is unable to react in any coherent manner, unable to protect herself or others close to her. Anna Burns’ Milkman is unforgettable. With its incredibly powerful narrative style, it will make you laugh out loud, shiver with fear, and strike you with its profundity.

Doppelgänger by Daša Drndić  {Reviewed by THOMAS} “We may speak of the body as an ever-advancing boundary between the future and the past, as the pointed end, which our past is continually driving forward into our future. ... My body is always situated at the very point where my past expires in a deed,” wrote Henri Bergson. For the characters in Doppelganger, two novellas hinged to each other by a barbed contingency, no deed can be satisfactorily discharged due to historical traumas pressing with too great a force upon that boundary. If wars, according to Drndić, are “orgies of forgetting”, memory is the means of undoing, or at least resisting, some of the harm done to personal by collective histories. Her novels are full of archival lists of persons, objects, prices, actions, meticulously researched particulars set as pegs against the process of generalisation that is the first symptom of erasure. Remembering is necessary to existence as an autonomous and continual individual, but what happens to that individual when the the burden of memory overwhelms their ability to withstand the past that presses upon them? Does one’s refusal to become an agent for the perpetuation of a trauma make one instead a victim of that trauma? It is upon the body that the collective presses upon the personal, the external world upon the internal - and vice-versa - but when the pressures cannot be balanced, when one world traumatises the other, when the two cannot mutually converse in deeds, it is with the body that the symptoms of this imbalance are made known. In ‘Artur and Isabella’, the first part of Doppelganger, two elderly people’s lives briefly intersect physically, despite the abjection of their bodies, the centrifugal forces of their respective histories making continued companionship in the present impossible. The story is told in a mixture of verbalisations from one or the other of the characters - though it is not certain whether these verbalisations are actually spoken - and apparently straightforward reportage with the precision and flatness of a detective’s notes, interspersed with police reports and other documents. Isabella’s history of loss, of avoiding the Nazi death camps that claimed the rest of her family, of her marriage to a Jewish shoe-manufacturer in Croatia, and of subsequently fleeing the Axis invasion, intersects with ‘Pupi’, the second part of Doppelganger, the protagonist of which is Printz, the elder son of a Yugoslav chemist and spy who was awarded Isabella’s property in the newly established Socialist Yugoslavia. Printz’s is also a story of loss - of both circumstances and sanity - a story of erasure and of resistance to that erasure. The text proceeds as a sort of double narrative: objective and a subjective, outer and inner, observation and assertion. Both voices belong to Printz - he is his own double. Sometimes the objective and subjective voices are in accord, sometimes they are opposed, bringing suspicion onto both from the reader. Printz is unable to align the collective and personal histories that press upon him, and, as his circumstances diminish and following the deaths first of his mother and then of his father (in whose company he “watches a world disappear, their world, after which comes nothing”), even the most straightforward of observations trigger fugues of memory and association which further alienate Printz from others and from the mores which both enable and police social interaction. “I have temporal blotches in my brain,” states Printz as his hold upon the present becomes more tenuous and he begins to rant more frequently and publicly. “He will talk as long as his thoughts keep coming,” thoughts alternating between Bernhardian invective, actual historical fact, and delicately surreal fantasy. “Maybe none of us has his own life. Is your life unconditionally yours?” he is asked, and it is the weight of trauma in history that distorts the present, even for the beneficiaries of that trauma. Burdened with guilt, Printz attempts to return confiscated silver to Isabella (from the first story), only to find that she has died. When trauma cannot be addressed it is taken upon the body. When the past cannot be expended in a deed it overwhelms the future. Printz’s life becomes precarious. He asks himself, “Where is your strength to refrain from the compulsion to breathe? How can you continue to put up with the dense air that blocks your lungs and oppresses your body?”