Landfall Review Online

Messing with our expectations

March 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Lynley Edmeades

The Ice Shelf by Anne Kennedy (Victoria University Press, 2018), 320pp., $30; The Bed-Making Competition by Anna Jackson (Brio Books, 2018), 112 pp., $17.99

Anne Kennedy is a household name in New Zealand letters. She’s been publishing compelling work since the late 80s and doesn’t show any sign of letting up. Her poetry, screenplays, novels and short stories have fetched various awards on these shores and beyond, and her movement between and across genres shows her dexterity and proclivity towards experimentation. [Read more…]

The workings of memory

March 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Denis Harold

Memory Pieces by Maurice Gee (Victoria University Press, 2018), 336pp., $35

The title Memory Pieces in its starkness is ambiguous, suggesting both an offering of autobiographical fragments and an active process of piecing (or being pieced) together. Gee states on the first page: ‘In writing these pieces I’ve relied on memory, mine and other people’s, rather than research. Where the two conflict I’ve usually gone with memory.’ Memories can be raw and unchanging, but mostly are evolving and unreliable, necessary material for the stories that individuals and families feel compelled to make of their lives. [Read more…]

How to ease the realm of pain?

March 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Gerry Te Kapa Coates

Ko Taranaki te Maunga by Rachel Buchanan (BWB Texts, 2018) 152 pp., $14.99

In keeping with the concept of Bridget Williams Books (BWB) Texts as ‘short books on big subjects’, this book does not intend to be a comprehensive revisiting of the shameful – for Pākehā – Parihaka saga. Instead, Rachel Buchanan tells her deeply personal story of the effects on her family – and in particular her father – of the events leading up to the colonial government’s actions and subsequent denial of justice that was the Parihaka story. The book is both memoir and personal history – highlighting that the saying ‘the personal is political’ applies to decolonisation as well as feminism – sitting alongside factual information and analysis of the events and fallout from the Parihaka invasions, eventual Crown Treaty settlements and the many apologies to Taranaki iwi. I was reminded of Moana Jackson’s brilliant essay titled ‘Globalisation and the Colonising State of Mind’, in which he says, ‘Destroying the world-view and culture of indigenous peoples has always been as important as taking their lives, because the actual process of disempowerment, the key purpose of any colonisation, has to function at the spiritual and psychic level, as well as the physical and political.’¹ [Read more…]

Taking risks

March 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Ruth Brown

The Life of De’Ath by Majella Cullinane (Steele Roberts Aotearoa, 2018), 242pp., $34.99

If Mephistopheles has been making a comeback, it’s in new guises appropriate for societies that don’t believe in hell: in London’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse production of Doctor Faustus, she was a mischievously jolly best friend rather than the embodiment of evil. In Majella Cullinane’s multi-layered debut novel, he’s an amiable and reliable narrator, and somewhat dissatisfied with his other-worldly status: there’s a clever twist at the end to explain his real identity and motivation. [Read more…]

A startlingly rackety life

March 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Stephen Stratford

Life as a Novel: A biography of Maurice Shadbolt by Philip Temple (David Ling Publishing, 2018), 328pp., $44.99

Would anyone under 60 be interested in a two-volume life of Maurice Shadbolt? Should they be? One volume sufficed for Maurice Gee. On the other hand, the other Maurice led a startlingly rackety life, so there is much gossip. Between the sheets, and also two sheets to the wind.

I had thought my generation was pretty frisky but we were nothing like this lot – at it like knives, all of them. For example, ‘earlier in the year Maurice and [then girlfriend] Beverly Richards had witnessed [Dick] Scott in bed with his wife-to-be and with the relieved co-operation of her current husband’. What complicated lives they led. ‘Maurice,’ notes Temple, ‘was never short of sexual partners, temporary, medium or long-term.’ The Barbara Magner/Marilyn Duckworth overlap of 1969 is dizzying, with girlfriend Beverly and wife Gill still part of his life. [Read more…]