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Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Sisyphus in Sāmoa

May 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Shana Chandra 

Both Feet in Paradise by Andy Southall (The Cuba Press, 2021), 350pp, $37

Andy Southall’s Both Feet in Paradise is a disorientating read, in turn travelogue, mystery and suspense thriller. But by the time we close the book’s covers, we realise that this disorientation is precisely the point. Divided into three sections, each named after a character within the novel and told from their perspective, it begins with Naomi, a young woman listlessly waiting for her parents to arrive at the airport. We never get to see them walk through the gates as Naomi’s narrative is truncated by Adam’s. We’re with Naomi drinking beers under the heaving fluorescent lights of a sterile airport bar, then we are plunged into the bright light of the tropical idyl of Sāmoa with Adam. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, literature

The Physics of Fiction

April 1, 2022 1 Comment

Chris Else

Entanglement by Bryan Walpert (Mākaro Press, 2021), 268pp, $35

When I was fifteen I discovered the joys of mathematics. The experience was a Damascene moment that confirmed me on a path to study science despite my love of language and story. I found, however, that when I got to university all my friends were arts students. Many of them felt that science was an arcane business somehow inimical to the things they cared about. How could I want to write poetry and short stories while at the same time attending lectures in maths and physics? For my part, I was mystified by their mystification. The pleasure I found in an elegant piece of logic was aesthetic and the ideas of science seemed a fertile field of metaphor. For example, the paradoxical square root of minus one, represented by the symbol i and the basis for the system of imaginary numbers, called to my mind the I of personal consciousness and identity, which seemed equally strange and inexplicable.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, literature

The Outrageous and the Everyday

April 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Kerry Lane

The Pink Jumpsuit: Short fictions, tall truths by Emma Neale (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021), 134pp, $35 

The Pink Jumpsuit is the latest book by Emma Neale, one of the best-known writers working in Aotearoa today. Neale’s previous work includes six novels and six collections of poetry, and too many awards and honours to list here. Her flash and short fiction has also been widely published and acclaimed, but this is the first time these small pieces—short fictions and tall truths, as the subtitle describes them—have been gathered into a collection.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, literature, short stories

Between the Long and the Short of It

April 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Sally Blundell 

Middle Distance: Long Stories of Aotearoa New Zealand, ed. Craig Gamble (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2021), 478pp, $35

‘Maybe I could sew my legs together,’ Loretta muses, wishing for a tail. Penned-on lines or her own rashy, eczematic skin could pass for scales. Sniffing, dripping, allergy-ridden Jeremy is a likely candidate for the required slimy hagfish; a sickening Mrs Wilberforce (a nod to Maurice Gee’s Under the Mountain) is Loretta’s longed-for mermaid kindred spirit. This is the alarming, yet vividly drawn cast of ‘Scales, Tails and Hagfish’, Octavia Cade’s story of an insistent, angry, self-proclaimed mermaid that sets the pace for this collection of fourteen long short stories with unflagging brio.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, literature, sci fi fantasy, short stories

Allusions to the Apocalypse

March 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Chris Else

I Laugh Me Broken by Bridget van der Zijpp (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2021) 261pp, $30; Driftdead by Mike Johnson (99% Press, 2020), 498pp, $35

In recent years, New Zealand writing has developed a strong relationship with Germany, and Berlin in particular. The Creative New Zealand Berlin Writer’s Residency is partly responsible for this. A biennial programme established in 2000, it has taken half a dozen writers, including Lloyd Jones, Hinemoana Baker and Philip Temple, for sojourns of up to eleven months in the German capital. Some, such as Sarah Quigley, seem never to have returned. Others, like Catherine Chidgey and the late Nigel Cox, have written about Berlin outside of the residency. The latest of these is Bridget van der Zijpp, whose novel Laugh Me Broken is mostly set in the city. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction

A Danger to Herself and Others

March 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Catherine Robertson

Toto Among the Murderers by Sally Morgan (Hachette, 2020), 344pp, $34.99

The 1970s was a bumper decade for serial killers. Despatching people with regularity were, in the US, the Hillside Strangler, Son of Sam, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy; and in Britain, Peter Sutcliffe, Harold Shipman, Dennis Nilsen, Trevor Hardy and Fred and Rosemary West. Five out of those last six were operating in the North of England. In calling her debut novel Toto Among the Murderers, Sally Morgan can hardly be accused of hyperbole. There were plenty to go around.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction

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