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).
Saturday, 9 February 2019
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? |
Friday, 8 February 2019
NEW RELEASES
"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?
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Shows how architects use thew physical sketch as a way of developing their ideas.
Makes the case that the development and spread of civilisation was dependent upon, and demonstrative of, exploitation of the ocean's resources.
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.
Beautifully illustrated. Includes ropes, gulls and mermaids.
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.
What is happening in our atoms and our cosmos?
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.
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.
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...
An honest and insightful account of the year following Wells's cancer diagnosis, and the reassessment of his identity and priorities that ensued.
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.
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.
Sunday, 3 February 2019
"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?” |
Friday, 1 February 2019
Saturday, 26 January 2019
BOOKS @ VOLUME #112 (26.1.19)
Read our latest newsletter and find out what we've been reading and recommending, about the latest new releases and our Book of the Week, and about upcoming events and writing courses.
This book is comprised of 50 'literary' postcards, drawn from Gauld's book-related contributions to The Guardian over the last decade. Funny, serious, and often poignant, Gauld's cartoons are endlessly inventive and thoughtful.
>> We will be posting a daily image this week our instagram page.
>> Preview here.
>> Tom Gauld's website.
>> Drawing as language.
>> Other books by Tom Gauld.
 | Kingdom by Jon McNaught Heading away for a family holiday is a recipe for both anticipation and disappointment. In Jon McNaught’s Kingdom, Suzie, Andy and Mum are driving to the summer holiday caravan park on the English coast. Mum’s excited - she remembers it from her own childhood and has fond memories of it being the best place ever. Filled with memories of discovering mermaids’ caves, giant sand dunes and crashing waves, she can’t wait to share it with her children. In this graphic novel, we start en route, GPS on, traffic jams and boredom. With Suzie’s keen eye, we are given the view from the back seat. Each frame is a blink of the eye, like viewing the world through the shutter of an old-fashioned Viewfinder. It’s eerily reminiscent of your own memories of long-distance car trips, - an ever changing view as you move towards your destination, but where, because you are sitting still and not moving actively through the landscape, you slow down in your observations. McNaught gives us half-views of signs, the backs of vehicles, trucks with advertising, birds whirling overhead, sounds that infiltrate the capsule of the car, the inane conversation and the games, both verbal and visual, that attempt to speed up the journey. On the way, there’s the traditional stop for junk food and the anticipation of arriving, but the slightly uncomfortable sense of being nowhere - in limbo - where you are strangely anonymous and self-contained but a unit outside of itself and its familiar stomping ground. And finally, you arrive, all the necessary unpacking is done, yet you are not quite there yet - your emotional self is still somewhere in the ‘old world’, trying to find the internet reception above one bar. As Suzie heads off for walks to the caves with her mother, Andy fools around on his laptop until he is bored and wanders through the caravan park and up the hill. And here the story starts to hum - being alone has its upside: no tales of yesteryear, no-one telling you what to do. Yet there’s also the tedium of rain, of the rundown museum (which has its own charm, but maybe not to two bored children more accustomed to digital overload), of a parent reminding you about school, and a kid sister who is always tagging along. When Suzie and Mum go to visit Aunt Lizzie, Andy refuses to go along, preferring to be left alone. This is a story of discovery, of starting to see and sense how a place makes one behave differently. In this very subtly illustrated graphic novel, McNaught captures the mundane and the exceptional without any change in palette, tone or texture - images of the landscape, of the natural world and the strangely prescribed human world - the manicured caravan park and the images on the digital devices that are ever present - are juxtaposed playfully. The sense of doing something, but also very little - that ‘holiday feeling’ - creates a meditative quality and as a reader you too slow down, sharpen your senses (re-read and look more closely) and engage in the quiet, yet profound moments that make us look at the world, ourselves and our place in that world anew - experiences that change us incrementally. |
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All the Devils are Here by David Seabrook (Reviewed by THOMAS}
Kent juts out from the rest of England like an elbow. In David Seabrook’s stumbling psychogeographic tour of this elbow’s tip (Margate, Broadstairs, Deal), he portrays it as teeming (although ‘teeming’ seems perhaps too energetic a word) with people elbowed to the margins of English society, margins at which, paradoxically, this sense of Englishness is most defined: mad persons, alcoholics, louche millionaires, well-connected fascists, octogenarian ex-rentboys, spent eccentrics, writers either unacknowledged or forgotten. “Hell is empty and all the devils are here,” wrote Shakespeare in The Tempest of (ostensibly) another haunted paradise and ‘isle of noises’, and Seabrook is at his best when nailing a persistent cultural misery in a single sentence: “Staccato laughter strafing the Casino Rooms just off the High Street, where audiences are entertained by comedians such as ‘X-Rated’ Jimmy Jones or Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown, big men who tour England ceaselessly like lardy takes on the Ancient Mariner, bringing none of the poetry and all of the guilt.” Seabrook’s position is not lofty, however: he lived almost all his life on this elbow, never more than an hour’s bus-ride from the locations mentioned, an outsider himself, culturally irritable, full of sympathies but excluded from involvement by his own uncertainty of motive and by his insecure role as second-hand witness to pasts of which only decrepit and partial residues remain. Although Seabrook ostensibly seeks and relays facts, albeit fragmented second-hand facts, these facts seldom reach any conclusion other than their enervation. Knowledge will not save us from that which we do not understand. “I can connect / Nothing with nothing,” wrote T.S. Eliot in ‘The Waste Land’ while recuperating from a mental breakdown in Margate. On visiting Chatham, Seabrook gives a discursive account of the painter Richard Dadd, his experiences accompanying Sir Thomas Phillips on the “cultural commando course” of a Grand Tour, his murder of his father and subsequent confinement to Bedlam, concluding his account of a visit to the now-neglected park in which the murder took place with the observation that “it’s a place that won’t quite fit on the heritage map. Kent police exercise their dogs here.” Seabrook is to Sebald what a queasy stomach is to a headache. Whether analysing literature or exposing the private lives of third-rung celebrities, Seabrook is always an intruder, his observations always gossip, with the ambivalences of fascination and repulsion always inherent in gossip. Seabrook’s mind is desperate to make connections between the details he observes, but he seems aware all along that there will be no overall shape to, or conclusion to be drawn from, these details. Towards the end of the book he spends an uncomfortable number of pages recounting the details in an unsolved series of murders with which he has evidently become obsessed before returning to his interview with the faded rent-boy which forms the connecting thread of the final part of the book, entitled ‘Tombatism’, a word coined by a character in Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood from a combination of ‘tomb’ and ‘rheumatism’. Edwin Drood was never finished, its mysteries irresolvable, inevitable consequences, in Seabrook’s cosmology, of being set and written in the elbow of Kent. David Seabrook was found dead in his flat in Kent in 2009. Most of his writings are lost.
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Friday, 25 January 2019
NEW RELEASES
Dirt is an experimental cookbook that digs into the relationship between food and words. Twelve earthy recipes from chef Gemma Walsh are accompanied by a collection of stories, poems and conversations from some of New Zealand’s contemporary writers. Contributors include Courtney Sina Meredith, Lana Lopesi, Rosabel Tan, Dominic Huey, Vanessa Crofskey, Natasha Matila-Smith, Owen Connors, Liam Jacobson, Amy Weng, Reem Musa, Gabi Lardies and Sam Walsh.
>>Preview here.
Inspired by a series of domestic still lifes by photographer Laura Letinsky, Dutton (author of Margaret the First and Dorothy Project publisher) creates her own trenchant series of tableaux, attentive to the surfaces of the suburbs and the ways in which life there is willfully, almost desperately, on display. In locating the language of sprawl itself—engrossing, unremitting, ever expansive—Dutton has written a work of fiction that takes us deep into the familiar and to its very edge: nothing is ever the same under such close inspection.
"Reads as if Gertrude Stein channelled Alice B. Toklas writing an Arcades Project set in contemporary suburbia." - The Believer
Two novellas that revisit the question of "doubles" (famously explored by Stevenson, Dostoyevsky and others), and how an individual is perpetually caught between their own beliefs and those imposed on them by society. `Arthur and Isabella' is a story of the relationship between two elderly people who meet on New Year's Eve - a romantic encounter which turns into a grotesque portrayal of the loneliness of old age. The second story, `Pupi' - a strange mirror of the first - centres on the life of a man who ends up on the street.
"The capacity to see the bricolage of a reticent, morally compromised, elegiac past - and, more unsettlingly, how that past might see us - is a central feature of the work of the Croatian writer Dasa Drndic." - Paris Review
Listed for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
When a friend dies, a woman inherits his Great Dane. As she gets to know this dog, so large, so inconvenient, so representative of her grief, she comes to understand the dog's grief, too, and their lives begin to change in subtle ways.
"Nunez's prose itself comforts us. Her confident and direct style uplifts--the music in her sentences, her deep and varied intelligence." - The New York Times
2018 (US) National Book Award winner.
>> Also available as a lovely hardback.
Ten stories from this unsparing and deeply perceptive Japanese author whose characters are moved by unacknowledgeable but wholly convincing desires.
"Disturbing and exceptional." - Publishers Weekly
"A completely individual writer, who described the intricacies of sexual relationships boldly, committedly, utterly fearlessly. And yet her writing is writing that doesn't actually 'bare all', but rather hints at what lies underneath - at things deep, quiet, and mysterious." - Yoko Tawada
"Kono should be an electrifying discovery for English-speaking lovers of short fiction. Each story unburies something that feels both thrillingly specific and surprisingly contemporary." —Kirkus
Here is the body turned inside out, its members set free, its humours released upon the world. Hearts bigger than planets devour light and warp the space around them. The city of London has a menstrual flow that gushes through its underground pipes. Gobs of phlegm cement friendships and sexual relationships. A floating fetus larger than a human becomes the new town pastor. In these stories, Shelley Jackson rewrites our private passages and translates the dumb show of the body into prose as gorgeous as it is unhygienic.
“Wilson’s Odyssey feels like a restoration of an old, familiar building that had over the years been encrusted with too much gilt. She scrapes away at old encrusted layers, until she exposes what lies beneath.” - Financial Times
"This translation will change the way the poem is read in English." - The Guardian
"Wilson's project is basically a progressive one: to scrape away all the centuries of verbal and ideological buildup — the Christianising (Homer predates Christianity), the nostalgia, the added sexism (the epics are sexist enough as they are), and the Victorian euphemisms — to reveal something fresh and clean." - NPR
Zeran uses the three characters in her novel to demonstrate the way in which the trauma of the Pinochet regime continues to distort the lives and memories of a second generation of Chileans.
"The Remainder controls a remarkable range of registers (it is, by turns, lyrical, elegiac, sensual, funny, tragic). The author, like her characters, is obsessed with words, those`cracks in language' that house our particular ways of understanding things. Thanks, among other things, to the meticulous, obsessive attention to detail of her language, this novel is sure to endure." - Edmundo Paz Soldan
In prewar Budapest three families live side by side on gracious Katalin Street, their lives closely intertwined. A game is played by the four children in which Bálint, the promising son of the Major, invariably chooses Irén Elekes, the headmaster's dutiful elder daughter, over her younger sister, the scatterbrained Blanka, and little Henriette Held, the daughter of the Jewish dentist. Their lives are torn apart in 1944 by the German occupation, which only the Elekes family survives intact. The postwar regime relocates them to a cramped Soviet-style apartment and they struggle to come to terms with social and political change, personal loss, and unstated feelings of guilt over the deportation of the Held parents and the death of little Henriette, who had been left in their protection.
Winner of the 2018 Pen Translation Prize.
"To read Power's stories is to take a journey through a landscape familiar enough to console, yet strange enough to unsettle. The thrills and dangers of such a journey lie with the unexpectedness of life's undercurrents and our uncertain, unknowable selves. Chris Power's quiet yet compelling touch is reminiscent of Alice Munro and Peter Stamm." - Yiyun Li
In 1946, one-time world chess champion Alexander Alekhine was found dead in his hotel room in Portugal. His death is usually explained as a heart attack or from choking on poorly-chewed meat, but speculation abounds that his collaboration with the Nazis during World War 2 made him a target for the Soviet or French secret services. With the pace of a thriller and the acuity of a chess match, this novel brings to life this 'sadist of the chess world', both on the board and in the most unusual circumstances of his life.
>> Ruthless Alekhine dispatched the elegant Capablanca to become World Chess Champion in 1927.
A funny and sharp graphic novel about how women's bodies have been a battleground for power throughout history.
"How I loved reading Liv Strömquist’s Fruit of Knowledge. Mostly, this was down to its sheer, punchy brilliance. Strömquist’s strips are clever, angry, funny and righteous, they’re also informative to an eye-popping degree. Every page is fantastically acute." - Rachel Cooke, The Guardian
As surreal and "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella" (to use words written in anticipation by le Comte de Lautréamont (with particular emphasis with reference to this collection upon the sewing machine)), Grodova's stories, full of baroque detail worn via patina to a thinness that makes them dangerously sharp to handle, take place in a world governed by strange customs, where significance is found in odd conjunctions, where obsessions assume the fatal ordinariness of custom, where only misfits approach normal, and where childhood is the conduit of immense threat, to children, parents and to wider society. All that is riven will henceforth continue to diverge, but Grodova's stories, lying on an axis of mitteleuropean flavour somewhere between Grimm's tales and accounts of Soviet privations, and on another axis somewhere between the stories of Angela Carter (pleasantly close to these) and those of Ben Marcus, have as much delight (and even hope) in them as they do despair, for, after all, with an imagination as fertile (and a hand as steady) as Grudova's, anything could happen (not only the dreadful).
"That I cannot say what all these stories are about is a testament to their worth. They have been haunting me for days now. They have their own, highly distinct flavour, and the inevitability of uncomfortable dreams." — Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
>> Read 'Unstitching'.
>> The author's playlist for the book.
>> Posing.
>> An interview with Grudova.
A beautifully written journey through the phenomena (both objective and subjective) and frozen histories of the Arctic an the Antarctic via the holdings of remarkable museums (including the world's northernmost museum at Upernavik in Greenland). A subtle exploration of the relationship between humans and habitats that are both harsh and fragile.
"A wonderful book. Glaciers, Arctic floe, verglas, frost and snow - I can think of no better or warmer guide to the icy ends of the Earth. " - Dan Richards (author of Climbing Days)
As Vivian, a self-described 'changeling', travels around Dublin, following her very own brand of logic, the reader is invited to reconsider their own attitudes towards 'misfits' and to broaden their acceptance of human individuality.
"Inventive, funny and, ultimately, moving." - Guardian
"Wildly funny." - The New York Times
In the 1790s, Britain underwent what the politician Edmund Burke called 'the most important of all revolutions ... a revolution in sentiments'. Inspired by the French Revolution, British radicals concocted new political worlds to enshrine healthier, more productive, human emotions and relationships. The Enlightenment's wildest hopes crested in the utopian projects of such optimists - including the young poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the philosophers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the physician Thomas Beddoes and the first photographer Thomas Wedgwood - who sought to reform sex, education, commerce, politics and medicine by freeing desire from repressive constraints. But by the middle of the decade, the wind had changed. The French Revolution descended into bloody Terror and the British government quashed radical political activities. In the space of one decade, feverish optimism gave way to bleak disappointment, and changed the way we think about human need and longing.
Wynflæd was an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman who owned male slaves and badger-skin gowns; Egeria a Gaulish nun who toured the Holy Land as the Roman Empire was collapsing; Gudrid an Icelandic explorer and the first woman to give birth to a European child on American soil; Mary Astell a philosopher who out-thought John Locke. Max Adam gives considerable breadth to our understanding of women's lives in the so-called Dark and so-called Middle Ages.
Required reading for understanding the relationship between identity politics and the sort of group identity that can either justify atrocity or throw off oppression. How can the will of the people blur into unthinking populism?
A leading astrophysicist clearly and entertainingly discusses the universe, and our place in it, from the basics to the latest research. Does the universe get stranger the more me know about it?
>>Reach for the stars.
For more than two thousand years the people of St Kilda remained remote from the world. Their Hebridean society was viable, utopian even; but in the nineteenth century the islands were discovered by missionaries, do-gooders and tourists, who brought with them money, disease and despotism. In 1930, the few remaining islanders were evacuated, no longer able to support themselves.
Ari has left school and wants to move to another city with his band. Among the applicants to take his place in the family bakery is Hector, who loves baking as much as Ari wants to escape it. The two grow closer, but will their love bloom or be derailed? YA graphic novel.
Mila and her sisters live with their brother Oskar in a small forest cabin in the snow. One night, a fur-clad stranger arrives seeking shelter for himself and his men. But by the next morning, they've gone - taking Oskar with them. Fearful for his safety, Mila and her sisters set out to bring Oskar back - even it means going north, crossing frozen wild-lands to find a way past an eternal winter.
90 plant-based, veganised versions of traditional Asian recipes inspired by the cuisine of India, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan and China.
A attractively presented guide to heroes and heroines of world mythology.
Set in Auckland in 1942, in an area of the city known as Chinatown where the descendants of the Chinese miners and market gardeners gathered together to maintain their culture and provide a sense of community. New Zealand is at war when Silvey starts her diary, but for Silvey this is just a backdrop to the main issues of her world: the closure of her school and the arrival of Chinese-American soldiers.
The ordinary becomes extraordinary in this graphic novel of a journey through the in-between places of the landscape to the bleak coast. Kingdom follows a family on their holiday to a small caravan park, where teenager Andrew explores the dunes, and half-remembered stories from the past are shared.
An alphabet book comprised entirely of words that don't sound as if they start with their initial letter. English is a confusing language - this book celebrates that confusion.
>> Whacky.
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