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Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Archives for July 2019

Charmingly Bizarre Off-Kilter Drifter

July 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Alison Wong

Lonely Asian Woman by Sharon Lam (Lawrence and Gibson, 2019) 183 pp., $29

When you read a book published by Lawrence and Gibson, you know you’re going to get something a little different. After all, on their website under 9 Fun Facts About Us, they describe themselves as ‘a collective that publishes literary fiction skewered towards the morose, satirical, verbose and thoughtful’; and each of the other facts is amusingly off-kilter.

I read the blurb on the back cover of Sharon Lam’s debut novel. The protagonist, Paula, is a young Asian woman. But Paula bucks the stereotype of the industrious, responsible and super-achieving Asian young person. She’s lazy and ‘mired in a rut’, and this ‘is not the story of a young woman coming to her responsibilities in the world’.

Or is it? [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction

Why Don’t You Leap In?

July 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Mark Broatch

Dead People I Have Known by Shayne Carter (Victoria University Press, 2019), 408pp, $40

Not many memoirs sit on my shelves because most people’s lives are boring. Shayne Carter’s life has not been boring.

Probably best known for Straitjacket Fits and Dimmer, Carter has also played and guested in so many other bands he’s deeply woven into the soundtrack of this nation. Dead People I Have Known, though, is much more than just an autobiography and an account of the alternative music scene. Sure, Shayne Carter, child and rock star, is front and centre as he should be. But the book is like a Venn diagram of insightful and often humorous personal revelation, an insider’s view of the Dunedin rock scene as the fast-beating young heart of New Zealand music, and of an upbringing in a household reeking with booze, domestic violence, psychiatric dismay – and love. [Read more…]

Filed Under: memoir, music

Deconstructing a Rotten State

July 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Ben Brown

Novel by Vaughan Rapatahana (Rangitawa Publishing, 2018), 320pp., $38

‘In our contemporary world of increasing electronic surveillance from hegemonic national administrations, several diverse characters struggle to survive and to resist in a variety of ways. At the same time the so-called established methods of writing fiction undergo deconstruction.’

The italics are mine but the quote is lifted from the back cover blurb of this, Vaughan Rapatahana’s second novel, an earlier version of which was long-listed for the inaugural Michael Gifkins Prize for an unpublished manuscript.

The assertion of deconstruction is intriguing. I have to confess, it’s one of those terms I’d always associated more with architecture and a desire to reinterpret a structure as fragmented rather than unified or symmetrical. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction

For the Record: Restoration and Archive

July 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Siobhan Harvey

Collected Poems by Fleur Adcock (Victoria University Press, 2019), 558pp., $50; Selected Poems by Brian Turner (Victoria University Press, 2019), 237pp., $40

A number of recent releases gather the extensive output of New Zealand’s most recognised poets. Cilla McQueen’s Poeta (Otago University Press); Night Burns with a White Fire: The essential Lauris Edmond (Steele Roberts): in these and elsewhere, substantial bodies of poetic work are brought together in easily accessible anthology form. Two new handsome volumes from Victoria University Press, Fleur Adcock’s Collected Poems and Brian Turner’s Selected Poems, continue the work of collecting the disparate oeuvre of our established poets into individual weighty tomes, thereby isolating and underscoring the importance of the authors concerned. [Read more…]

Filed Under: poetry

Impure First 

July 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Robyn Maree Pickens

Gretchen Albrecht: Between gesture and geometry by Luke Smythe (Massey University Press, 2019), 303pp., $80

Gretchen Albrecht: Between gesture and geometry has the heft and appearance of a monograph accompanying a major retrospective exhibition by an important senior artist. If such a retrospective at one of the country’s major public galleries is not in the planning stages, then this publication surely serves as a timely reminder of Albrecht’s significance as a New Zealand artist. [Read more…]

Filed Under: art and photography, arts and culture

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