biography – Page 4

Bringing Katherine Mansfield to Life

April 1, 2017 Leave a Comment

Claire Mabey

Mansfield & Me: A graphic memoir by Sarah Laing (Victoria University Press, 2016), 336pp, $35

There is something to be said for judging a book by its cover. Particularly a book within which the images are as important, as lively and revealing, as the text. The cover of Sarah Laing’s graphic memoir Mansfield & Me is striking in its intensity. At each glance, it is alive with the skill of the artist: the hand-coloured faces of Laing and Mansfield face off. Mansfield’s brown eyes and Laing’s blue are locked, while the vivid geometry of the wallpaper behind them is concealed by smokey smudges or shadows. Katherine’s stare is challenging and bold, while Laing’s is less certain, almost pleading. This cover is at once crisp and present, ambiguous and dreamlike – a perfectly concise indication of the life stories and the relationship to come. [Read more…]

Otara Millionaires Club and the Flying Nun Sound

October 1, 2016 Leave a Comment

James Dignan

How Bizarre: Pauly Fuemana and the song that stormed the world by Simon Grigg (Awa Press, 2015), 255 pp., $38; In Love with These Times: My life with Flying Nun Records by Roger Shepherd (Harper Collins, 2016), 295 pp., $36.99

Two fine new books from insiders at the heart of two important chapters in the history of New Zealand popular music that will grace the bookshelves of lovers of home-grown musical talent. It would be only too easy to make facile comparisons between the works, and indeed there are many parallels. Both Simon Grigg and Roger Shepherd had their hands – albeit only nominally at times – on the helm of New Zealand music gold. In both cases, mistakes were made, lessons were learned, and the authors made it out alive, albeit barely, after changing the face of the local music industry and running headlong into the grey bureaucracy of corporate music. Both books tell the story of taking a provincial scene and propelling it to world status. Most importantly, both stories are compelling reads, and both are among the best books on the inside story of the New Zealand music scene ever written. But these parallels only tell a small part of the largely unconnected episodes which lie at the heart of the books, and indeed it shows the strength of New Zealand music that these two tales can co-exist largely without interacting with each other in as small a musical sphere as ours. [Read more…]

The German Wrestler and the Nazis

September 1, 2016 Leave a Comment

Brian Clearkin

Seelenbinder: The Olympian who defied Hitler by James McNeish (Steele Roberts, 2016), 242 pp., $34.95

The first question for any book purchaser is ‘Why should I buy this book?’ For a biography, the answer may well be ‘to learn more of some person I admire, like, despise, etc’. For a novel, it could well be because you enjoyed previous works by the author, or something in the cover illustration, title, or précis attracted your attention. Here we have a biographic novel of an individual that few will be aware of with a simple monochrome cover – enough ingredients for easy rejection. However, for those who know James McNeish, the author, and make the purchase, their trust will be amply rewarded. [Read more…]

Kinetic Experience

May 1, 2016 2 Comments

Andrew Paul Wood

Zizz! The life and art of Len Lye, in His Own Words, by Len Lye with Roger Horrocks (Awa Press, 2015), 208 pp., $30

The Len Lye phenomenon has become almost cult-like in recent years, culminating in July 2015 with the launch of the mirror-finish, fingerprint-prone $11.5 million Len Lye Centre in New Plymouth (and entered through the gift shop). There have been documentaries, even an opera, and from the official mythology you could be forgiven for failing to grasp that with the exception of a handful of believers – Hamish Keith, Peter Tomory and Bob Ballard, the sometime director of the Govett-Brewster – in the 1960s and 1970s Lye was largely ignored. [Read more…]

The Path from the Henderson Creek

December 1, 2015 Leave a Comment

Patricia McLean

Maurice Gee: Life and work, by Rachel Barrowman (Victoria University Press, 2015), 543 pp., $60

The biographer’s job is not an easy one. For a literary biographer it’s even harder. He or she is expected not only to dish up the dirt, but to see into the mind of the artist, to illuminate the magical process by which the imagination is transformed into a literary artefact. By carefully relating his early life and his struggle to live and work as a writer, Rachel Barrowman’s Maurice Gee: Life and Work nearly achieves this. Her biography succeeds in both casting light on his fictional world and revealing, behind his well-documented reserve, Gee’s heroic perseverance and self-belief. We discover that Gee was not a precocious talent – and never claimed to be – but a late-blooming craftsman who held onto his dream resolutely.

In his review of Barrowman’s biography in the magazine North and South, Paul Little states, ‘… those undercurrents in [Gee’s] fiction are not so much his artistic vision as the way the world is’. This statement is at odds with the biography, which shows instead that Gee’s literary world is his world, written – often directly – from experience and personal observation. Little’s assertion – this is the way the world is – reflects the claustrophobic closed-circuit in mainstream New Zealand literary culture, whereby white middle-class post-Protestant critics write about white middle-class post-Protestant writers who write about white middle-class post-Protestants. A vision that is necessarily narrow has become normative; a specific experience in a particular part of the world has become universal for being a ‘New Zealander’. And while Barrowman’s biography exposes the extent to which Gee draws on personal experience for his material, its location in this persistent cycle of author/critic/national identity is a fundamental problem. Despite this, the book deftly recounts Gee’s path from the Henderson ‘creek and kitchen’, to an unhappy and confused early adulthood, to finding love and security and taking his place as one of New Zealand’s best known and most admired authors. [Read more…]