fiction – Page 3

Truths and Lies That We Have to Live With

September 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Cushla McKinney

Necessary Secrets by Greg McGee (Upstart Press, 2019), 298 pp., $37.99

As much as we might like to believe that our relationships are built on truth, in reality life abounds with secrets: those we tell others and those we tell ourselves; those we forget and those we choose not to know. Secrets can bind people in trust or complicity or be used as a weapon or a shield. But whether necessary or contingent, we all have knowledge we must hide for the sake of others and ourselves. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more true than within families, where the random assortment of genetics means that we may have more in common with our friends than our relations, and the conflicts and allegiances across and between generations are amplified by competition for limited material or emotional resources. [Read more…]

Tides of Risk, Memory and Emotion

September 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Helen Watson White

Moonlight Sonata by Eileen Merriman (Black Swan/Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2019) 283 pp., $38

The strength of Moonlight Sonata is that its fictional world seems ‘utterly real’, to use the words of Paula Green reviewing Pieces of You, Merriman’s debut novel, just a few years ago. This is the award-winning writer’s first adult novel, after successful young-adult stories Pieces of You, Catch Me When You Fall and Invisibly Breathing. Her fourth book in three years, Moonlight Sonata was also the second novel she published in a single year, 2019. [Read more…]

Equally Valid Ways of Knowing

September 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Emma Gattey

The Reed Warbler by Ian Wedde (Victoria University Press, 2020), 624 pp., $35

Beyond the daunting double whammy of The Reed Warbler’s intricate introductory family tree and the opening words of the blurb (‘Pregnant after rape …’), Ian Wedde breathes life into seven generations, their complex inter-relationships, and individual lives, observations and desires. Early on he gives a sympathetic nod to readers after slinging a welter of names our way following a family reunion, acknowledging the vertigo induced by complex, tangled family histories. Beth, the ‘girl-swot’ family historian, isn’t sick from her cousin Frank’s driving through the Kaitīeke Valley, but ‘rather felt a bit sick from the winding around of names’. Yet even with a complex opening, from this point onward there is no more motion sickness. The Reed Warbler is a finely crafted triptych of a novel: three parts composed of interwoven stitches in time. [Read more…]

Confidently His Own

August 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Vincent O’Sullivan

What Sort of Man by Breton Dukes (Victoria University Press, 2020), 239pp., $30

Eight of the nine stories in Breton Dukes’ new collection ‘confront’ their readers with the frank demand of a title that could easily slip to an aggressive question: ‘What sort of man?’ You cannot help but think of Primo Levi’s similar question with his memoir, If This is a Man, or Sarah Helm’s history of Ravensbrück camp, If This is a Woman. It is not a title that is meant mildly to intrigue you. You know you are about to be challenged in various ways. You are going to be as far from Frank Sargeson’s coded male world, or Barry Crump’s blokish romps, or admirable mature behaviour, as New Zealand writing has so far gone. For the most part, these stories are rough, brutal, mean as pigshit, yet written with an artistic finesse that is, in itself, a celebration. Dukes’ fictional world, at first so starkly black and white, breaks down to just how complex that simplicity may be when attended to so finely. He takes us into the intricacies of male competitiveness, its rare promptings to what elsewhere might be taken for tenderness, the ineptness of a certain kind of man to draw much from the women he relates to, or to absorb the errors of his past. A world with few winners, with multiple losers. [Read more…]

Devastating Losses and Creative Reparation

August 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Penelope Todd

Paper Nautilus: A trilogy by Michael Jackson (Otago University Press, 2019), 272pp., $35

‘I create so I can leave some trace of my existence.’ So wrote master watercolourist Xu Min. I open this review with a quotation from one of the author’s exemplars, since Michael Jackson argues that we are indistinct in ourselves, and more or less created from interactions with our ‘significant others’.

For an author with an avowedly nebulous sense of self, Michael Jackson has produced an impressively concrete body of work. An internationally renowned anthropologist, he has published more than thirty volumes of poetry, ethnography, fiction and memoir. With The Paper Nautilus he has wavered and created a threefold hybrid. The nautilus—paper-thin egg-case of the pelagic octopus—might represent the fragile self or the book covers themselves, inviting the question of whether the life or the pages can safeguard all they are asked to contain. The book, as Jackson writes, ‘begins discursively with … loosely connected essays and gradually morphs into a memoir of a marriage and a friendship, only to be reinvented as a work of fiction’ (p.12). [Read more…]