Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Private Admissions Between Friends

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David Herkt

Jay To Bee: Janet Frame’s letters to William Theophilus Brown, edited by Denis Harold (Counterpoint, Berkley, California, 2016), 464 pp., $45.20

All letters are performances. There is a writer and there is an audience. The relationship between the two is never static, but it turns in line with time and circumstance. Jay to Bee: Janet Frame’s letters to William Theophilius Brown is, very simply, a unique and continuous revelation. It is a correspondence which provides an intimate, extended perspective on Frame that exists nowhere else. There are opinions, descriptions, comments and perceptions that illuminate both her life and her work. [Read more…]

Mapping and Remapping a Literary Nation

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Lawrence Jones

A History of New Zealand Literature, edited by Mark Williams (Cambridge UP 2016), 417 pp., $225.95

Until the publication of this book in April 2016 there had been only one multi-author history of New Zealand literature – The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English (1991, second edn. 1998), although there had been single-author histories, most notably two by E.H. McCormick (1940, 1959) and Patrick Evans’s The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature (1990). By its general title and its Cambridge University Press origin this book seems to invite comparison to the Oxford History, but a comparison reveals they are really quite different kinds of histories.

The Oxford History is a very large book, topping 900 pages in the second edition, and had a large printing. Editor Terry Sturm, in his introductions to both editions, claimed it to be ‘a comprehensive work of literary reference, working on inclusive rather than selective principles’; inclusive partly because as the first full history in the field it engaged in ‘the mapping, simply, of what has been written in English, and largely lost to view, over nearly two centuries’. It was ‘addressed not simply to specialist readers but to the rapidly expanding body of educated general readers of New Zealand books in New Zealand and overseas’.  [Read more…]

The Steadland Protagonist

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Andrew Paul Wood

The Name on the Door is not Mine: Stories new and selected by C.K. Stead (Allen & Unwin, 2016), 304 pp., $39.99

New Zealand’s doyen of literary criticism, senior poet and writer of fiction, C.K. Stead, now in his eighth decade, needs very little introduction, though reviewing his books is not without a certain trepidation given his reputation. In my defence, I declare myself a provincial nobody. If Cheever is, as Elmore Leonard put it, ‘the Chekhov of the suburbs’, then Stead is the ex-pat Cheever of taking tea with Mrs Phlaccus and Professor Channing-Cheetah, not without the faint and fading cologne of cultural cringe. This will be served up with the sort of witty banter that we all aspire to but never quite pull off in real life, and a thick sauce of awkwardly showy quotes that even the most well-stocked gazofilacio will trip on. [Read more…]

Bringing Katherine Mansfield to Life

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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…]

Engineers of a New Order

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Grace Millar

Neoliberalism and Cultural Transition in New Zealand Literature, 1984–2008: Market fictions by Jennifer Lawn (Lexington Books, 2016), 251 pp., $96

In 2014 I tutored a first-year history paper about World War I. During a discussion about war and universities a student asked: ‘Did students pay fees in those days?’ She was born in 1996. For her, the past when students didn’t pay fees was as distant and murky as the battle for Gallipolli. The upheaval to New Zealand’s economy, culture and society created by politicians from both political parties in the 1980s and 1990s haven’t transitioned into public memory. There was a before and there’s a now, but the process is lost to those who didn’t live it. [Read more…]