Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Flaxroots Theatre Made By All 

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David Eggleton 

Bus Stops on the Moon: Red Mole days 1974–1980 by Martin Edmond (Otago University Press, 2020), 274pp, $39.95

On the book’s cover they have the stance of a rock band; they bristle like hip young gunslingers tuned into the New Wave zeitgeist. They are the Red Mole theatre troupe, the magnificent inner core of seven, photographed in black and white at Coney Island, New York, during an 18-month sojourn performing overseas towards the end of the 1970s. In Bus Stops on the Moon, Martin Edmond remembers, celebrates and eulogises a generation, an era, a mood—and in the main chronicles a few hectic years, the glory days, to tell us what it was like to be part of New Zealand’s foremost avant-garde theatre group that was itself the product of a particular historic moment. [Read more…]

The Fragility of Being

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Catherine Robertson

The Strength of Eggshells by Kirsty Powell (Cloud Ink Press, 2019), 320pp. $29.99; Sprigs by Brannavan Gnanalingam (Lawrence & Gibson, 2020), 438pp, $30

The thread that binds these two novels is one of gender expectations within New Zealand society, and the dark side of conforming to the narrowest definitions of the roles of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. Both novels show that going against these expectations is never easy because they are most often enforced by peers, friends and family. It is one thing to be rejected by a wider faceless society, and quite another to be shunned by those you love and look up to. [Read more…]

Garden of Unearthly Delights

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Tim Jones

Monsters in the Garden: An anthology of Aotearoa New Zealand science fiction and fantasy, edited by Elizabeth Knox and David Larsen (Victoria University Press, 2020), 607pp, $35

Editing anthologies is hard work. Editing speculative anthologies—those covering some combination of science fiction, fantasy, horror and related genres—is even harder work. Having co-edited two anthologies of speculative poetry, I’ve bumped up against the type of decisions that have to be taken both before the project starts and as it develops. What genres, what types of work, do and don’t qualify for inclusion? Do we take a narrow definition of the field or a wide one? Do we include only published work, only original work, or a mixture? [Read more…]

A Beautiful World Has Gone 

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Robert McLean

Letters of Denis Glover, selected and edited by Sarah Shieff(Otago University Press, 2020), 800pp, $79.95

Letters are perhaps the least likely genre to produce good enduring writing. Unlike writers’ diaries, that most self-conscious genre so memorably manipulated by a Pepys or a Woolf, letters, especially those written in long-hand, are transactional, at once spontaneous and habitual, and seldom submitted to revision. They are the medium most likely to induce regret in the writer and discomfort in the reader given that they often seem to induce writers to show off and parade themselves at their unbuttoned worst, such as the epistolary bawdiness, hokum and spleen of T.S. Eliot or Phillip Larkin addressing their pet-named pals. But for readers who manage to find writers’ lives interesting, collections of letters are frequently read as a substitute for an unwritten autobiography, albeit one that is even less reliable than the latter’s self-curated disclosures, given the myriad manners literary letterists assume for their various recipients. [Read more…]

Kaleidoscopic Ethnography

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Emma Gattey

Refocusing Ethnographic Museums Through Oceanic Lenses by Philipp Schorch, with Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu, Sean Mallon, Cristián Moreno Pakarati, Mara Mulrooney, Nina Tonga and Ty P. Kāwika Tengan (Otago University Press, 2020), 299pp, $49.95

A deep-dive into museum work across Te Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa, Refocusing Ethnographic Museums Through Oceanic Lenses presents ‘a collaborative ethnographic investigation of Indigenous museum practices in three Pacific museums’: Hawai`i’s Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, New Zealand’s Te Papa Tongarewa, and Rapa Nui’s (Easter Island) Museo Antropológico Padre Sebastián Englert. The text’s key contribution is, according to lead author Philipp Schorch, to provide ‘historically informed ethnographic insights’ into regional museology, ‘grounded in Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies’. Like Nicholas Thomas’ compelling work, The Return of Curiosity: What museums are good for in the twenty-first century, this multi-authored text reanimates its three museums for readers, revealing their histories as well as their recent attempts at recalibrating and decolonising their practices, and their creative potential in decades to come. [Read more…]