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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

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…]

Filed Under: fiction, graphic art, short stories

The Air Up Here

August 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Sally Blundell

High Wire by Lloyd Jones and Euan Macleod (Massey University Press, 2020), 96pp., $45

The air up here is clear. High above the clamour of the city and the rush and roar of the ocean, above the islands, the headlands and the setting sun, a solitary figure slouches towards Australia on the single drawn line of a high-wire cable. 

In James Marsh’s 2008 documentary Man on Wire, a New York bystander, anchored to the footpath by a heavy coat and bags of shopping, wept as she watched the impossibly frail figure of French high-wire artist Philippe Petit walk, kneel and wheel on a cable drawn 411 metres above ground between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. [Read more…]

Filed Under: biography, graphic art

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…]

Filed Under: biography, graphic art, literature

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