Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

A Quality of Light, a Way of Seeing

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Genevieve Scanlan

the moment, taken by Jennifer Compton (Recent Work Press, 2021), 72pp, AUD$19.95; Sleeping with Stones by Serie Barford (Anahera Press, 2021), 77pp, $25; Rejoice Instead: The collected poems of Peter Hooper edited by Pat White (Cold Hub Press, 2021), 224pp, $42.50

the moment, taken is Jennifer Compton’s eleventh collection of poetry. The back cover tells us these are poems drawn from eidetic memory—that is, ‘relating to or denoting mental images having unusual vividness and detail, as if actually visible’. The titular poem is a fine example of this, providing both the vivid detail and the surreal quality of an individual childhood memory: ‘then that once, i was waylaid / by a green lure / a staircase / up into a wilderness […] (when i got to school / i told a lie / with eyes averted)’. [Read more…]

Variations on a Theme

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Wendy Parkins

The Piano Girls by Elizabeth Smither (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021), 246pp, $35

Elizabeth Smither’s collection of short stories, The Piano Girls, is the latest addition to a list of publications any writer might envy that includes six novels and eighteen collections of poetry, as well as glittering prizes like the 2002 Te Mata Poet Laureate, the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2008 and the Ockham’s Poetry Award in 2018. This collection suggests that Smither is not done yet. Its twenty stories examine the lives of girls and women, from adolescent angst and ambition to the renegotiations and relinquishments of later life. [Read more…]

Immersive Learning

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Emma Gattey

Where We Swim by Ingrid Horrocks (Victoria University Press, 2021), 224pp., $35

A textual act of immersion—or rather, repeated languid textual acts of immersion—Ingrid Horrocks’ Where We Swim submerges us in glorious and inglorious waters across the globe, albeit in a thin (which is to say, privileged) cross-section of human swimming sites. From Days Bay and Waiheke, whale-bonding in Wellington Harbour and contracting UTIs in the Mōkau estuary, to the gilded pools of gated communities in Medellín, Columbia, the artificially azure waters of Hilton hotel pools, the brisk North Sea and even a closed-off, piranha-less section of the Amazon River, these swimming holes are largely for the global elite. This watery stratification does not, however, lessen the impact of the writing, the project (‘to remember why we swam in the first place’) or Horrocks’ voice, which is ever-alert to her family’s privilege: a pleasurable burr in her side that Horrocks is constantly questioning, grappling with—sometimes even squirming in discomfort. [Read more…]

An Unstoppable Force

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Helen Watson White 

Kate Edger: The life of a pioneering feminist by Diana Morrow (Otago University Press, 2021), 276pp, $39.99

When Kate Edger (1857–1935) won a scholarship to enter university, her studies took the form of night classes in a building that was part of Auckland College and Grammar, described by the chairman of the local Education Board as ‘a disused military hut, the floor of which is not quite safe to tread on, the roof of which is open to the sky’. 

Diana Morrow’s richly textured biography of Edger reveals how a few holes in the roof, like notions of male superiority and other forms of bigotry, were never going to deter this young woman from the journey she purposed through higher education and beyond. It is a tale of hopes nurtured, words wielded, values tenaciously held and obstacles overcome. Kate Edger was an unstoppable force, it seems—optimistic, prodigiously hardworking and deeply principled: an evangelical version of the ‘New Woman’, as the liberated female was called in the late nineteenth century. [Read more…]

Alone as the Daisies in the Field

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Catherine Robertson

Fake Baby by Amy McDaid (Penguin, 2020), 304 pp, $36

Last year was a good one for New Zealand novels that used humour to deepen our understanding of mental health. They included Pip Adam’s Nothing to See, Eamonn Marra’s 2000ft Above Worry Level (both VUP), and Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss (Harper Collins). And from Penguin Random House in June came Amy McDaid’s debut, Fake Baby. 

An early draft of this novel won the Sir James Wallace prize, awarded to the top student in the creative writing master’s programme at the University of Auckland. This is a hugely ambitious novel for a debut writer, and instinct says that first draft underwent numerous rounds of editing on its way to becoming the final version. The effort was worth it. With Fake Baby, McDaid pulls off a bravura balancing act of near-farcical comic delivery and intensely moving content. Occasionally it teeters but mostly it holds, its primary support being McDaid’s compassion and empathy for her three main characters, Stephen, Jaanvi and Lucas, who are all in varying states of mental distress. [Read more…]

No Light in the Woods 

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This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 241

Rachel O’Connor

Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidgey (Victoria University Press, 2020), 528pp, $35

Even in the idle days of early January I struggled to finish Catherine Chidgey’s Remote Sympathy. It is 528 pages long, and I was unable to read it at night; sleep afterwards proved impossible. The novel is set almost entirely in Buchenwald, one of Germany’s largest and most infamous concentration camps of the Second World War. Accordingly, even the most ignorant reader must know they will enter a world of unmitigated horror. The early optimism offered by protagonist Doktor Lenard Weber’s joyful marriage to Jewess Anna, and his invention of the Sympathetic Vitaliser, a machine he hopes will cure cancer through electrotherapy, is necessarily short-lived. There can be no happy ending to a Holocaust story, even if it is fiction, even if the hero, by some miracle, survives.  [Read more…]