Landfall Review Online

The Apotheosis of Theo Schoon

June 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Laurence Simmons

Theo Schoon: A biography by Damian Skinner (Massey University Press, 2018), 336 pp., $59.99

Émigré artist Theo Schoon, whose life intersected with important cultural moments in New Zealand’s art history, made occasionally impressive, dominantly weird and sometimes godawful art. Vainglory and vanity, the hokey and the profound, independence and jealousy combined in Schoon’s character in such unexpected ways that one despairs of sorting them out. In his new biography Damian Skinner has valiantly attempted to do so and has drawn extensively on a rich resource of interviews and archival materials from here and elsewhere. But reading Skinner’s tale of Schoon’s tale of himself, you feel that Skinner has never been able to warm to his subject and there is a certain perversity involved in the undertaking. It is as if Skinner gritted his teeth and said to himself ‘I just have to finish this despite …’ [Read more…]

The Right Stuff

June 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Charlotte Grimshaw

A Mistake by Carl Shuker (Victoria University Press, 2019), 184 pp., $30

In a 2007 article in the New Yorker, surgeon and health researcher Atul Gawande wrote an account of the medical profession’s evolving approach to mistakes. During surgery and afterwards in ICU, a typical patient will require hundreds of procedures, all of which can result in life-threatening complications if not implemented correctly. As medicine advances and the methods for saving patients become more elaborate and numerous, the risks mount up. Avoiding mistakes is an important issue, given that one relatively small error can lead to potentially fatal consequences. [Read more…]

Chance Would Be a Fine Thing

June 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Ray Grover

All This By Chance by Vincent O’Sullivan (Victoria University Press, 2018), 335pp., $35

Readers do not need to finish the first paragraph of this novel before they find themselves succumbing to the authority of an accomplished storyteller. Sinking into Vincent O’Sullivan’s prose is like sliding into a Rotorua pool; once enveloped you become more a participant than a reader, soaking up details rather than heeding them. It is only afterwards, when you begin reflecting, that you wonder what actually happened. Like when life has delivered you an event that you realise is more than the sum of its parts, and you look back to try to discover the nature of those parts and their connections – as, from time to time, O’Sullivan’s characters themselves are compelled to do. This ability to lead readers to involve themselves in the story almost as deeply as the characters contributes immensely towards Vincent O’Sullivan’s achievement. [Read more…]

Suspended Dreamlike

June 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Simone Kaho

The Farewell Tourist by Alison Glenny (Otago University Press, 2018), 77 pp., $27.50; Night Music by Harvey Molloy (Black Giraffe Press, 2018), 88pp., $25

Two collections, two worlds; Alison Glenny’s first book and Harvey Molloy’s third. The books connected by a centering of natural forces, use of a narrative frame and their characters’ attempts to reconcile the cosmic with the real, to grasp at glimmers of divinity with an animal derived mind.

The world Glenny creates in The Farewell Tourist is as complete and consistent as one would expect from a novel, calling to mind proponents of fragmented narrative poetry: Charles Simic, Lynn Jenner and Selima Hill. While the collection sustains a narrative, it is a mysterious and unknowable one, built around the waning love between a nameless ‘she’ and ‘he’. [Read more…]

A Living Response

June 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Ian Wedde, Gregory O’Brien & Bernadette Hall

Joanna Margaret Paul’s The Stations of the Cross, Church of St Mary, Star of the Sea, Port Chalmers

Joanna Paul was living at Port Chalmers in 1971, renting a little yellow house. She made meals for the local parish priest. I was teaching at St Dominic’s College in Dunedin. She was also a staff member there, teaching art. This was the year she married. The year Father Keane invited her to paint her own vision of The Stations of the Cross on the plaster walls of the little Catholic church. The art was celebrated for a while and then it seemed to disappear. [Read more…]