Friday 25 August is National Poetry Day. Make some resolutions now as to how you will mark this day with your friends and family. We will be announcing the winner of our Poetry Spam competition (you will be able to read the winning poem in next week's newsletter). Thank you for all the entries! 
Nelson-resident poet David Kārena-Holmes is Bluff-resident poet Cilla McQueen's chosen poet. We have a range of David's work in stock, and editions by him and others from his tiny peripatetic Maungatua Press.  Reviewed by STELLA |
Tess by Kirsten McDougall is a finely crafted novel that hooks you from the moment you meet the young woman hitch-hiking her way into small-town New Zealand. Tess is uneasy, troubled by something and wary of anyone that tries to help her. When Lewis, a middle-aged dentist, picks her up, he is distinctly wary too - he doesn’t wish to be seen as predatory. It’s raining and the young woman on the side of the road is soaked and reminds him of his daughter who he’s recently had a falling out with. Lewis is also dealing with his own grief and loneliness. His mother is in an old folks' home and doesn’t recognise him, although occasionally asking after his pretty wife, unknowingly rubbing salt into a wound. Lewis’s wife was the victim of an accidental death, one we learn later in the book has disrupted his family and made their lives unbearable for several years with secrets, blame and guilt. When Lewis ends up inadvertently looking after Tess, who becomes briefly ill with a fever, each of their lives is affected by the other. Both are lost and running from pain in their own way. Lewis needs to find a way back to his adult children, to rebuild his relationships with them, ease his way back into life rather than an alcohol-dulled semblance of one. Tess needs to face herself and her own secrets and fears. The novel is described as a "gothic love story", and there is an unusual element to this tale of relationships. Tess has an inherited supernatural power which she finds a curse as well as a curiosity. In the hands of a less able writer, this would have felt forced or unbelievable, but McDougall weaves this aspect into the novel convincingly and without guile. As Lewis and Tess muddle along, we are drawn into their stories, each revealed piece by piece through the conversation between the characters, flashbacks and observation. Life moves into a calm pattern, one in which Tess gardens and rights the neglected home and Lewis is relieved of his loneliness. There are times when the relationship is almost derailed, yet somehow they find the companionship or safety they need. So, just as everything seems to be running smoothly until Lewis’s tumultuous daughter, Jean, arrives on the scene and all turns on its head. Confrontations on various levels arise, between daughter and father; between the guest, Tess, and Jean; and Tess’s past catches up with her. This a novel about vulnerability, about women and power (or lack of it), about how anger can take you in the wrong direction yet also empower you to make the right choices and be courageous. McDougall writes convincingly, edging you closer to the truth: here is an observation of love, of surviving and of letting go of hurt. It’s also a novel of surprises - definitely worth delving into.
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 | One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in a Small Box by Deb Olin Unferth, Sarah Manguso and Dave Eggers {Reveiwed by STELLA} McSweeney’s know how to make intriguing and innovative books. One Hundred and Forty-Five Stories in a Small Box is just that. The box with artwork by American artist Jacob Magraw-Mickelson draws your attention before you even notice the three small cloth-covered hardback books sitting within. In green, cream and puce, each volume contains a collection of short-short stories from three authors. All have a gift for this form, and pull in the absurd, the very funny and the affecting to great cumulative effect. The writing is pungent yet also sparse, nuanced yet light - breathless and meaningful in their single gulps. The authors Dave Eggers, Sarah Manguso and Deb Olin Unferth each have their particular style, and these writings butt up against each, as well as spring off each other successfully. (I've been reading them a volume at a time, but I'm curious to go back and intersperse the authors' writings). The volumes are titled Minor Robberies (Unferth), Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape(Manguso) and How the Water Feels to the Fishes (Eggers). After picking up the Manguso volume in the bookshop and reading a few, this collection of 145 stories quickly convinced me that it had a place on our home bookshelf, and I’ve been enjoying exploring these short-shorts ever since. |
 | The Hideout by Egon Hostovský {Reviewed by THOMAS} “All the love I am able to wring out of my desolate heart, all the feeling and devotion I may be putting into these lines, is released in me only because I know that I shall soon die.” The Hideout takes the form of a long valedictory letter by a Czech engineer to his wife from the cellar in France in which he has been hiding in an attempt to wait out the Second World War. The engineer confesses to his wife that, out of boredom of family life, in 1939 he followed a young Jewish widow, Madame Olga, to Paris, and that he dared not return to Czechoslovakia after the German invasion as he believed that the Germans would be hunting for him because he had destroyed the blueprints for an anti-aircraft gun-sight he had invented. When the Germans then invade France, he accepts the offer of a Dr Aubin, a man of indeterminate taste and ambivalent personality, to hide in the cellar of his house in Normandy until the war ends. Ominously, when they meet, Dr Aubin tells the engineer of a ‘cousin’ who was kept in the cellar as he slowly went mad: “he didn’t last long.” The book goes on to chart the disintegration of the engineer’s mental and physical capacities, describing his killing of a German soldier and ending with his consent to blow up a ship on behalf of the Resistance with the cost of his own life. It becomes clear that, by the time of writing, the engineer lives in a world that has for a long time had little resemblance to actuality, but it is unclear exactly when this divergence became established. I would contend that the insanity overwhelmed him quite early in his narrative, and his particular dangers are entirely delusional. There is no evidence that the Germans were in fact at all interested in his destruction of the blueprints, and they would hardly recognise him or be looking for him in France in any case. His whole flight and secretion is perhaps a sublimation of his guilt about his infidelity, his lack of specific danger contrasting with the real danger faced by the Jewish widow Madame Olga, whom he abandons as soon as the Germans invade France. The engineer tells of his years hiding in the cellar of the house of the Mephistophelian Dr Aubin, the delineation of whom may or may not be in reference to an actual person. He tells of the torment he suffers when Dr Aubin has a German soldier boarding in the house above his head, a man who peers into the cellar, noseless and demonic. Clearly by this time Dr Aubin and the boarder are little more than projections of the engineer’s paranoia, serving to reinforce the ‘necessity’ of his self-incarceration. When Dr Aubin suggests that the Germans “aren’t fighting against people but against nature,” he affronts the engineer’s certainty that the Germans are interested in his ‘crime’ against them, and his suggestion that the the Germans may not in fact be interested in his anti-aircraft gun-sight merely makes the engineer deeply suspicious of Dr Aubin and strengthens his insane resolve. “My memories and my visions were like blocks which I could use to built infinite structures.” Isolated in his own head, the engineer so misconstrues his own history that he cannot experience his present surroundings as anything beyond his delusions. He sees from his cellar window his “little double,” a child playing with an imaginary dog, and when he finally sees a German soldier (a “German soldier”), it is, implausibly, his only German school-mate (in SS uniform), and the engineer immediately tells him all his secrets. When Fischer offers the engineer safe passage in return for his anti-aircraft gun-sight, a way out of the cellar, the engineer kills him with a spade and hides the body under his bed until Dr Aubin eventually returns and disposes of it. Clearly, by this time, the Fischer figure is as real as the child’s ‘dog’, evidence that the engineer’s mental deterioration is reaching a critical point. The Hideout is such a good depiction of delusional paranoia and attendant claustrophobia partly because we have only the narrator’s own words with which to grapple with his reality, and partly because delusional dangers often convincingly clad themselves in the semblance of real dangers in times when everyone’s version of reality is distorted by fear. |
 | Nobody is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey {Reviewed by THOMAS} For reasons she is never quite able to formulate, Elyria flees her marriage and New York and runs away to New Zealand, where she wanders about, seemingly incapable of either achieving or escaping personhood (the closest she achieves to a self-nullifying stability is when working in the garden of an aging poet, who eventually frees himself of her with the necessarily blunt observation, “You are a sad person, and I’m not a person who can tolerate other people’s sadness”). Elyria is caught in a tourniquet of self-observation which borders at times on the hysterical (perhaps the ultimate result of all self-observation). She thinks back to the early period of life with the person who became with her husband, when “I was not an observer of myself, but a be-er of myself, a person who just was instead of a person who was almost”, but we know that this relationship, with a man Elyria met because he was the last person her sister talked to before her suicide, was both formed and deformed by a trauma Elyria could not face, a trauma which the relationship is unable to either heal or address. Although Elyria recognises she has a problem with authenticity (“A rational person would feel upset instead of just knowing she was upset.”), this appears to be incurable, existential, as she is manifestly incapable of relaxing the vigilance that keeps her ‘inner wildebeests’ hidden and thus prevents her escape into authenticity: “I was not a person but just some evidence of myself”. Only at the end of the book, when she has returned and been rejected by her husband and is walking through New York in torrential rain, does she perhaps (but only perhaps) exhibit an awareness of her surroundings that is not distorted by self-obsession, but this clarity (possibly fleeting, possibly terminal) is predicated on a relinquishment that is uncertain in its implications. |
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The New Zealand Project by Max Harris (Reviewed by STELLA}
At a time when we face unprecedented challenges - climate change, rising inequality, economic uncertainties, a rapidly changing concept of ‘work', just to mention a few - we are also seeing an increased disillusionment and more pointedly a dissociation with politics and a lack of discourse (even in an election year). Why is it that many don’t vote, and why is it that political conversation doesn’t happen around every dining room table? We have seen a gradual decline in involvement in politics on either a small, local scale or a grander scale in recent decades, particularly in the face of neoliberalism over the last 40 years or so, accelerated by the accusation of governments being more in cahoots with big business and their own social groupings than with people they claim to represent. There are exceptions, for instance Obama’s successful presidential campaign (yet once in ‘power’, it’s debatable whether much really changed) that harnessed swathes of America and gained the attention worldwide.The economic collapses of 2007-8 could have made a difference in the way that people viewed and made use of political tools, yet, despite the 1% movement and other similar protest movements, the banks were rescued, a few figureheads went to jail and the world carried on in that boom/crash manner of capitalism. The phenomena of Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK have given us a glimpse, though, of what might be achieved when people feel engaged with the political system. But sitting right along side this is Brexit (a vote which harnessed the will of disgruntled and disenfranchised) and likewise Trump for similar reasons. Max Harris’s book, The New Zealand Project, isn’t looking at what has been, so much as at what can be: an optimistic discussion about where we are, and a suggestion of new way forward. Harris is an Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and this Project is part of his work on political systems and the need to change the principles at the core of these systems. In The New Zealand Project, Harris is interested in values, a ‘politics of love’, and how the ideas of community, care and creativity can make a difference in building a better society. These three elements are the anchor stones for talking about inequality, economic structures, foreign policy, decolonisation, social infrastructure (health, education and housing), climate change and a politics that engages people and their power to play a positive role in their political lives. Harris is unashamedly idealistic, something which I also noted in Chloe Swarbrick’s address at a recent event in Nelson, and this positivity has also grabbed the attention of the public in the rise of Jacinda Ardern. It’s refreshing and, while I probably fall into the cynic camp when it comes to politics, I can’t help but feel buoyed by the fact that there are new ideas and energy on the horizon, ideas that don’t necessarily come from traditional left/right paradigm. Talking in terms of positivity and values or 'love politics' might give you the wrong impression. The New Zealand Project is a serious, intelligent and thoughtful vision that challenges our preconceptions, tackles the tough questions, and gives us a framework on which to think about New Zealand’s political future and how changes in political concepts are vital to creating a better society for all. It is incredibly detailed, given the breadth of its content, and while reading it I wanted my post-it notes handy so I could come back to intriguing ideas, questions raised and thoughts triggered. Max Harris wants a discussion - he wants people to ask questions and debate concepts. This is a book that should be read, absorbed and discussed. And you can find out more from the author himself - Max will be in Nelson on Thursday 17th (see above). |
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{The 'Lockwood & Co.' series, reviewed by STELLA}
I started reading Jonathan Stroud’s 'Bartimaeus Trilogy' when I should have been reading something else this week! (I’m blaming this in my son’s exclamation “I can’t believe you haven’t read this yet. You have to.”) - a hazard when there are so many excellent books to read and always new titles arriving on my pile. Reading Stroud took me right back to my first encounter with his writing for children and teens, The Screaming Staircase, the first in the 'Lockwood & Co.' series. For fifty years, London has been haunted by ghosts, and the only people how can quell these beings are young, talented agents. There are several Psychic Investigations Agencies, but none are quite like Lockwood & Co. For a start they are a small team of three, they don’t have an adult ruling the roost and they do have a reputation for getting into quite a fix every once and so often. They are also extremely good at their job: Lockwood himself is brave, unflappable (you could definitely say he enjoys danger - maybe too much!) and highly skilled; George is the brains of the organisation - the one who will delve into the puzzles behind the ghostly problems finding the key that may quite often save their lives; and Lucy is smart, brave, and has an unwavering ability to tune into ghosts, especially the disaffected and trickiest ones. All in all, it’s dangerous, scary and filled with wonderful details and excellent characters. As the series continues the world of Lockwood & Co. becomes increasingly complex, the ghosts more malign, the apparitions more startling and the machinations and jealousies of the agencies increasingly mysterious. With titles like The Screaming Staircase,The Whispering Skull, The Hollow Boy and The Creeping Shadow, these are not for the faint-hearted. Yet Stroud isn’t all about scares; he uses humour excellently and draws out the relationship between our three heroes with pithy dialogue and the epic values of loyalty, courage and compassion. The fifth and final book, The Empty Grave, is due in September!
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 | True Stories by Sophie Calle {Reviewed by THOMAS} Any idea that we have of ourselves, and it is difficult to avoid forming an an idea of ourselves even though we have nothing but functional reasons to do so, not that functional reasons for this, or for anything else for that matter, are not sufficient, or, in fact, the only possible, reasons, is a fiction, depending on what we understand as a fiction, constructed around, or, more accurately, by, the evidence, so to call it, that presents itself, or is sought, in the phenomenon known generally as memory. How does the past, given that it is convenient for us to consider, for the purposes of this rumination at least, that there is an actual progression through states of what, for want of a better word, we might call, lazily, the universe, or, lazily and sloppily, reality, or vaguely but pedantically, if it is possible to be vague and pedantic simultaneously, actuality, persist into the present in order to provide us with sufficient evidence, the word used cautiously but inverted commas resisted, for these fictions that pass, for us and/or for others, as identities, personalities and other such trappings and conveniences, that enable, or enable the illusion of, or the belief in, our agency as entities at once immersed in and in opposition to the other agglutinations of our existence, so to call them, vaguely, those entities that are not us but which are necessary for us to define ourselves against by the relations of action or perception? It is precisely to avoid such nested clauses and to save excessive wear to the comma keys on our computer keyboards that by convention we eschew the pedantic compulsion, if we can, to apply the rigours of uncertainty to the basic functional fictions such as that of the persistence of entities through time, despite whatever changes to these entities occur. Indeed we seem seldom to be uncertain of the persistence of an entity despite such changes, often more seldom the greater or more transforming these changes, as with the changes expressed by the entities we think of as ourselves, given that we have the idea of ourselves as entities. In any case, given that we deceive ourselves and others merely for the sake of functional convenience, which is only reprehensible in an abstract sense, if indeed reprehensibility can be anything other than abstract, we construct our fictions around the evidence of moments, thought of as in the past, persisting as images, in whatever way we may think of images, the meaning of a word tailored always to the demands of its application, to the present. Photographs, despite whatever other meanings we may impute upon them, seem to demand from us a response such as that expected by a moment of the past persisting to the present, very like, in many ways, the images and fragments from which the fictions, the not untrue fictions, or at least the not necessarily untrue fictions, or what we perhaps may term our functionally true fictions, we think of as our memories. Sophie Calle’s excellent True Stories is a series of images related to what we are encouraged to think of, and have no reason not to think of, as her life, images with, to me at least, and, presumably, also to Calle, and, reasonably, perhaps, to most people, the resonance and texture of the fragments to which we pin, or from which we construct, the memories so described and undercut above. Each is accompanied by a brief memory-text by Calle, which gives the resonance of the image a responding or corresponding context in the story of her life. These texts, funny, sad, tragic, empowering, unsparing of herself and others, or merely straightforward, if such a thing is possible, describe, in the most efficient manner, what we may think of as the character of Calle. The images and the texts have equal weight, and the rigours of the process of recording are sufficiently evident to induce in the reader/viewer of this book the complementary rigours of reception that make the project of awareness concommitant to existence so rewarding. |
 | The Boy Who Stole Attila's Horse by Ivan Repila {Reviewed by THOMAS} "'It looks impossible to get out,' he says. And also: 'But we’ll get out.'” This is a compellingly unpleasant little book. Two brothers, Big and Small, are trapped down a well in the forest. Calling, climbing and leaping are to no avail. As the days pass (the chapters are numbered with a sequence of prime numbers), we witness (and are spared no detail of) the brothers’ desperation, their physical and mental decline, their diet of worms and maggots (they will not touch the bag of food belonging to their mother), their suffering from both thirst and flooding, the cruelty and tenderness that constitute their deformed relationship. “Life is wonderful, but living is unbearable.” Repila never softens the violence of his language or assuages the discomfort we feel reading of the brothers’ dismal life. When the brothers catch a bird, they fear their shrunken stomachs may not be able to cope with the meat and so let it putrefy as a breeding ground for maggots. Big eats most of the food and deforms his muscles with a sequence of exercises, forcing Small to grow still lighter. At the point of giving up and dying, the brothers enact the revenge they have been preparing - it is not by accident that they are trapped down the well - but it is a revenge that comes at a horrible cost. The book is allegorical on a number of levels, and the epigraphs from Bertold Brecht and Margaret Thatcher (!) underscore the reading of the physical, mental and social harm of economic inequality, especially for those stuck at the bottom (dependent on the ‘trickle down effect' perhaps), and of the mutually destructive revenge that will be enacted when the effects of inequality ultimately become desperate. |
