Landfall Review Online

A Professional Spectacle

May 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Paula Morris

The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke by Tina Makereti (Vintage, 2018), 304pp., $38

For a novel that travels the world, there’s a quiet intimacy to the beginning of Tina Makereti’s second novel. Its protagonist is a young Māori man called many names, who experiences a series of devastating, dramatic adventures. When the novel opens he’s a feverish invalid confined to bed, ‘in the shadows’ and alert to ‘the brokenness of the world’. Hemi is one of his names and he’s in London, we learn, for a second visit. It’s almost a decade into Queen Victoria’s reign, and Hemi is tended through what he suspects may be a final illness. How did he get here, and why is he so haunted by apparitions from the past? [Read more…]

The Grit that Makes the Pearl

May 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Tasha Haines

The Writing Life: Twelve New Zealand authors by Deborah Shepard (Massey University Press, 2018), 463 pp., $49.99

In her introduction to The Writing Life, Deborah Shepard highlights the determination and passion of the twelve writers she interviews and curates into this collection. Shepard has selected a diverse group covering many genres: from writing for children, to many approaches to the novel, poetry and non-fiction. The writers are Joy Cowley, Marilyn Duckworth, Tessa Duder, Chris Else, Patricia Grace, David Hill, Witi Ihimaera, Fiona Kidman, Owen Marshall, Vincent O’Sullivan, Philip Temple and Albert Wendt. [Read more…]

In Pursuit of Something He Is Never Sure He Deserves

May 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Chris Else

Now When It Rains by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman (Steele Roberts, 2018), 286 pp., $34.99

I sometimes wonder about the viability of literary memoir. Why people write them seems obvious enough – there comes a time in the lives of some of us when our pasts demand to be examined – but why anyone should read them is more problematic. Three reasons come to mind. First, a fascination with a writer’s work might lead readers to seek exegetical insight from the circumstances of the life. Second, the mystique that surrounds the business of writing might result in a search for inspiration and illumination of the creative process. Third, we might assume that because writers can express themselves they will provide incisive psychological observations of a more general kind even when working with biographical material that, in other hands, might be unutterably dull. All these expectations might be satisfied by a good literary biography but, with a memoir, they would seem to set up an inevitable mismatch with the writer’s intention. The creation of any work moves from a state of potential to one of the actual, a process that is inevitably one of limitation. The result is always a version of what might have been written. In most genres this scarcely matters but with memoir there might seem to be an unresolvable paradox. If my aim is to realise certain things about myself, how can I be satisfied with a mere version? And if I am not engaged in realisation, what am I about? Looking for affirmation or attention? Trying to manage my public image? Providing an object lesson? Indulging myself? [Read more…]

Trapped Behind Walls of Glass

May 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Tina Shaw

The Sound of Breaking Glass by Kirsten Warner (Mākaro Press, 2018), 290 pp., $35

In a Spinoff article (21 November 2018), writer Kirsten Warner, referencing the Holocaust, has commented, ‘It was a surprise to me that there were other people who saw the barbed wire behind the eyelids. My father hadn’t been in a camp, but I still had the horrors.’ She goes on to say: ‘I wanted to write a story from the next generation’s point of view, to stay there and not be diverted into the big, overshadowing parental one.’

In her debut novel Warner explores this concept through Christel, the daughter of Holocaust survivor Conrad and his wife Stella – although the parental story, looming large, still shapes and informs much of the work. [Read more…]

Honour and Honesty

May 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Helen Watson White

Gallipoli to the Somme: Recollections of a New Zealand infantryman by Alexander Aitken (Auckland University Press, 2018), 264 pp., $39.99; The Anzac Violin: Alexander Aitken’s story by Jennifer Beck and Robyn Belton (Scholastic, 2018), 36 pp., $27.99

For the ordinary infantryman in World War I, a period of ‘active service’ was lived in two modes: you were either engaged in fighting at close range, or you were waiting. In waiting mode you could be travelling to a battle site, the location of which was a mystery, or you had arrived, and remained mystified. This is the much-repeated scenario in Alexander Aitken’s memoir, Gallipoli to the Somme: Recollections of a New Zealand infantryman, first published in 1963 and now re-issued with an introduction, chronology, notes and commentary by Alex Calder. [Read more…]