Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

They Fuck You Up, Your Mum and Dad

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Rajorshi Chakraborti
The Crazed Wind by Nod Ghosh (Truth Serum Press, 2018), 140 pp., $12.00; Swim by Avi Duckor-Jones (Seizure by Brio Books, 2018), 172 pp., $20

In an essay from his 1995 collection Testaments Betrayed, Milan Kundera dreams eloquently about novelists freeing themselves from orthodox expectations of plotting, scene-setting and chronology:

That is what delighted me about [Rabelais] and … about other early novelists: they talk about what fascinates them and they stop when the fascination stops. Their freedom of composition set me dreaming: of writing without fabricating suspense, without constructing a plot and working up its plausibility, of writing without describing a period, a milieu, a city; of abandoning all that and holding on to only the essential; that is to say: creating a work in which … the novelist would never be forced – for the sake of form and its dictates – to stray by even a single line from what [she] cares about, what fascinates [her]. (Kundera, 157–58) [Read more…]

Rescuing Sex Work from Stigma

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Barbara Brookes

My Body, My Business: New Zealand sex workers in an era of change by Caren Wilton, (Otago University Press, 2018), 286 pp., $45

Oral history took off from the 1970s as a way of recording the lives of those who were absent from the written record. Prostitution has, in fact, never been absent from the written record: in nineteenth-century Britain there was an explosion of interest in the subject, particularly aroused by W.T. Stead’s Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon. Debates raged over licensing, regulation and ‘instrumental rape’ – the latter referring to compulsory examination of women under the notorious Contagious Diseases Act (also introduced in New Zealand), which focused on women only while male clients went scot-free. But while much ink was split on the issue, prostitutes themselves were rarely given a voice: others spoke for them, whether anti-C.D. Act campaigners such as Josephine Butler, or those medical men who believed that venereal diseases could be better controlled through regulation. [Read more…]

Scatter Chatter and Lexical Glissades

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Vaughan Rapatahana

The Little Sublime Comedy by John Gallas (Carcanet Press, 2017), 184 pp., £11.69/$22.29; Coming to It by Sam Hunt (Potton & Burton, 2018), 208 pp., $29.99; That Derrida Whom I Derided Died by C.K. Stead (Auckland University Press, 2018), 128 pp., $29.99

Three collections of poetry, all distinctly different. Indeed, the only commonality I discern is that the poets are all older Pākehā men, even given that I have had some dealings with all three over my own reasonably lengthy lifetime.

Let’s look at the collections separately, starting with the youngest poet, John Gallas. The Little Sublime Comedy is sui generis. It parallels Dante’s Divine Comedy in terms of structure, namely a description of the hero’s moral progress through Hell on to Heaven, but here the parallel ends. Gallas sets his very clever and funny spoof/rip-off/pastiche imbroglio in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand, and the text is chock-full of solidly Kiwi expressions such as ‘buggered if I knew’, and of Kiwi kai such as bulk cheese and ham sandwiches and Minties. [Read more…]

A Conflict of Worlds

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Shirley Simmonds

Tane’s War by Brendaniel Weir (Cloudink Press, 2018), 352 pp., $29.95

From the outset I was intrigued by the title of this book: Tane’s War. The idea of Tāne, the atua of the forest and the realm of peace, seemed to conflict with the idea of war – the domain of Tūmatauenga. This was enough to spark my interest to open the enticing red cover of the debut novel by Brendaniel Weir.

Tane’s War spans two time periods and locations: the Great War in Europe, and rural Auckland in 1954. The consistent character across the two storylines is Tane. We follow him in his youth as he flees from family shame and the law, travels by ocean to Europe as a soldier, and there forms a bond with a British officer, a relationship that must be concealed in a setting where manliness and heroism are prized. [Read more…]

The Weight of War

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Christopher Moore

Province of Danger by Ray Grover (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2018), 448 pp., $34.99

Ray Grover’s latest excursion into narrative history poses an interesting conundrum. Does the reader approach Province of Danger as a work of historical fiction or a narrative history of New Zealand during World War Two? Does the book blend the two or is it merely a work in search of a clear identity?

After reading the sequel to Grover’s widely acclaimed story of World War One, March to the Sound of Guns, I am still undecided. Province of Danger rejects a defining label, especially when historical narrative has become a performance manipulated by the extroverted hands of David Starkey or Simon Schama. [Read more…]