fiction

The Treachery of Words (and Images)

June 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Robyn Maree Pickens

This Is Not a Pipe by Tara Black (Victoria University Press, 2020), 160pp., $28; Timelights by Martin Edmond (Lasavia Publishing, 2020), 196pp., $37.86

Before I read This Is Not a Pipe by Pōneke-based comic-maker Tara Black and Timelights by Aotearoa-born, Sydney-based writer Martin Edmond, I was reading literary criticism/affect theory on how to ‘read’ texts. ‘Read’ in this context is best described as reading with the intent to critique, to interpret, to analyse. These texts on reading debate different methodological approaches to criticism, interpretation and analysis, such as suspicious or paranoid reading and reparative reading elaborated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003). In highly simplified terms, suspicious reading assumes a position of mastery, and reparative reading one of pleasure. The apparent binary between the two approaches, which Sedgwick nuanced to hold ambiguity, has nevertheless obtained in subsequent theoretical discussions as either ‘for’ or ‘against’ positions, or has been the subject of a recuperative oscillation between the two. [Read more…]

If You Could See Him Through Her Eyes

June 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Vincent O’Sullivan

More Miracle than Bird by Alice Miller (Tin House Books, 2020), 368pp., US$16.95

A couple of years ago I chanced on a book of poems by a New Zealander I had not heard of who lived in Europe. I was so struck by the collection’s range and emotional depth, by its formal poise, that I rightly guessed how, in the current whirlpool of New Zealand poetry, it was unlikely to catch the eye of our gatekeepers, or the judges of poetry prizes. In poem after poem, Alice Miller’s Nowhere Nearer took on forms and approaches of rare originality, and it stays with me as one of the books in recent years that I deeply admire. Among much else, Miller was a risk-taker. So it did not surprise me, when I saw her recent novel, that what she took on in prose was risk on a grand scale. [Read more…]

Heart of Darkness, plus fertility and global breakdown

June 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Emma Gattey

Ephemera by Tina Shaw (Cloud Ink Press, 2020), 285pp, $29.99

In this uncannily timed, eerily well-executed novel, Tina Shaw has rocked an antipodean remix of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, blending it with fertility, emotional depth, and a buxom archivist-librarian in place of a bristling, hero-worshipping Marlow. Before the virus, before the Crash, before any capitalised global disasters, Ephemera opens with a map charting the voyage south from Auckland to Huka Falls, just north of Taupō. There’s little but a boat icon and HoD epigraph to signal the hot journey ahead. Then, we enter an Aotearoa with no law, no electricity, no internet, no running water, no coffee. It has been seven years since the virus, the North Korea–US war, the Crash. The details are thin, but the extent of global catastrophe is slowly revealed. [Read more…]

The Secret Life of Everyone

May 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Rachel O’Connor

Bug Week & Other Stories by Airini Beautrais, (Victoria University Press, 2020), 184pp, $30

The cover of Bug Week is a soft coral pink, faintly reminiscent of one’s grandmother’s fully unrestored bathroom. The hand-painted bugs that crawl among the letters of its title are similarly benign, referencing a gentler time when entomology was as much about fine art as science. Between the covers of the collection, however, lies a darker, more dangerous place, implicitly familiar in its mundane settings and populations, but made noxious by the insidious contaminants of human weakness, disillusionment and betrayal. In these thirteen short stories by Airini Beautrais, we are all subject to scrutiny under the microscope, and no one emerges looking good. [Read more…]

The Fragility of Being

April 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Catherine Robertson

The Strength of Eggshells by Kirsty Powell (Cloud Ink Press, 2019), 320pp. $29.99; Sprigs by Brannavan Gnanalingam (Lawrence & Gibson, 2020), 438pp, $30

The thread that binds these two novels is one of gender expectations within New Zealand society, and the dark side of conforming to the narrowest definitions of the roles of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. Both novels show that going against these expectations is never easy because they are most often enforced by peers, friends and family. It is one thing to be rejected by a wider faceless society, and quite another to be shunned by those you love and look up to. [Read more…]