Arihia Latham

The Wild Card by Renée (The Cuba Press, 2019) 246pp., $35

I have a sister who was adopted. It was this unspoken thing, mostly. It was a fact that shimmered behind her eyes. The way she looked at me, our younger brother and our dad, the way she would shut down and simmer with feelings I couldn’t fathom. I went with her to meet her birth father when I was fourteen and she was nineteen. It was pretty tough. I think we had both hoped it would ease the tension in her bones but it didn’t. Something between us unravelled after that; I felt a disconnect in my sister, a resignation that floored the family house with hardwood. Reading The Wild Card by the matriarch of New Zealand literature, Renée, is like being let under the floorboards of genealogical trauma, crawling through brambles of history till we come out into the uncomfortable glare of the opening-night lights of the present. [Read more…]

Zahid Gamieldien

Sado by Mikaela Nyman (Victoria University Press, 2020), 304pp., $30

When I saw the title of this novel, my mind conjured expectations of de Sade and Pasolini. But a glance at the novel’s front flap (mostly) disabused me of this expectation: sado, a dictionary extract reveals, is a Bislama word meaning ‘shadow’, ‘reflection’, or ‘humiliation, dishonour’. That turns out to be an apposite title for Mikaela Nyman’s novel, which is set in both the aftermath of Tropical Cyclone Pam and the umbra of colonialism, male violence, kastom (custom) and notions of belonging.  [Read more…]

Nicholas Reid

2000ft Above Worry Level by Eamonn Marra (Victoria University Press, 2020), 192 pp., $30

Eamonn Marra’s 2000ft Above Worry Level begins with a punch in the face. ‘I used to spend a lot of time on the sad part of the internet,’ says the unnamed narrator in his first sentence, and rapidly proves the point by showing what a saddo he is. The first segment of 2000ft Above Worry Level is about ‘cam sex’. In the narrator’s case, this means hooking up with a woman online and then masturbating in front of his laptop as she removes her clothes or otherwise visually stimulates him. Apparently this is the most meaningful sort of connection he can make with another human being. [Read more…]

Craig Cliff

Drongo by Ian Richards (Atuanui Press, 2019), 384 pp., $38

It’s 1977. Andy Ingle has finished at Palmerston North Boys’ High School and wants to be a writer. With his trusty portable typewriter, Half-Arse, and his girlfriend Chloe, Andy travels to the outskirts of Masterton to visit a school friend, Phillip, who’s living with his dad. After a failed attempt to lose his virginity, Andy absconds with a bankteller, Penny, who’s heading to Wellington. After another near-miss at losing his virginity (‘my sex life was turning out to be a lot more complicated than I’d planned’), Andy ghosts Penny and takes the ferry south by himself. The pattern holds for the rest of the novel: Andy latches onto someone, enters their world, stumbles at a sexual hurdle and then lights out for the next territory.  [Read more…]