literature – Page 3

Engineers of a New Order

March 1, 2017 Leave a Comment

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…]

Big Barmy Conspiracy Caper

October 1, 2016 Leave a Comment

Emily Brookes

Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley by Danyl McLauchlan (Victoria University Press, 2016), 376 pp., $30

A few months ago, after nearly a decade overseas, my husband and I began preparing to bring our young family back to Wellington. But where in Wellington? You have Mt Victoria, with its Art Nouveau architecture and well-heeled populace; the sleepy seaside-village vibe of Island Bay; Kelburn and Northland and Karori, winding with a deceptive laziness up the hillside; you have the southern bays, houses teetering precariously on ragged and exposed cliff faces, all the better to catch the walloping force of a southerly storm.

It’s a big decision made all the more difficult by the space of nine years and the curious feeling of being a visitor in one’s own city, that despite a close familiarity we don’t really know it at all.

Interesting timing, then, that in the midst of this process, Danyl McLauchlan’s Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley, which plants a sinister underbelly in the most unlikely of Wellington settings, should happen upon my desk. [Read more…]

Exploring Layers of Truth

October 1, 2016 Leave a Comment

Nicholas Reid

Strait Men and other tales by Murray Edmond (Steele Roberts, 2015), 184 pp., $29.99

Somebody is talking about somebody else. Somebody is investigating somebody else’s life or deconstructing what somebody has written or claimed about himself. Somebody is being questioned about the accuracy of what he is saying. Somebody enters into dialogue with either archives or living human beings. So what is truth? as Pilate asked. Can we ever really know the truth of stories we hear about other people? We already know that nothing is ever reported impartially, because we are all human beings and not God. But even within the bounds of acceptable human communication, is what we hear even passably accurate? While we ponder that one, we can admire how layered human perceptions of reality are, how porous memory is, how unknowable other people and their motives are. ‘Rashomon’, we say. ‘Rosebud’, we say. If we like, we can talk about unreliable narrators, or we can go way beyond that, and say that all human communication is a form of theatrical display anyway. A species of acting out. [Read more…]

Blood and Guts in Wartime

April 14, 2016 Leave a Comment

David Eggleton

The Penguin Book of New Zealand War Writing, edited by Harry Ricketts and Gavin McLean (Penguin Random House, 2015), 602 pp., $65; Calls to Arms: New Zealand society and commitment to the Great War by Steven Loveridge (Victoria University Press, 2014), 336 pp., $40; How We Remember: New Zealanders and the First World War, edited by Charles Ferrall and Harry Ricketts (Victoria University Press, 2014), 289 pp., $40; The Anzacs: An inside view of New Zealanders at Gallipoli: Photographs from the Auckland War Museum, with essays by Damien Fenton and Shaun Higgins (Penguin Random House, 2015), 244 pp., $45; The Prison Diary of A.C. Barrington: Dissent and conformity in Wartime New Zealand by John Pratt (Otago University Press, 2016), 204 pp., $39.95

Our overfamiliarity with the bromides – war is futile, war is hell, every war is like every other war, no soldier returns the same from the battlefield – means it’s difficult for the genre of war literature to make it new, or to be pertinent as literature to anyone beyond the specialist or the obsessive. The Penguin Book of New Zealand War Writing is an anthology that gets around this to a certain extent by concentrating on one particular truism and using that as a thematic thread: namely, war is the forge of national identity. The selections, chosen by literary historian Harry Ricketts and cultural historian Gavin McLean, are mostly crisply edited and tightly focused. Theirs is a hefty tome: a semi-chronological echo chamber of war stories, reportage, reminiscences, documentation and latter-day analysis covering nearly 400 years. It is a book aimed at the general reader, with brief endnotes, a basic bibliography and a serviceable index. [Read more…]

A Net Stretched Taut Across a Court

August 1, 2015 Leave a Comment

John Horrocks

I, Clodia, and Other Portraits, by Anna Jackson (Auckland University Press, 2014), 70 pp., $24.99; Conversation by Owl-Light, by Alexandra Fraser (Steele Roberts, 2014), 72 pp., $19.99; Fallen Grace, by MaryJane Thomson, (The Night Press/HeadworX, 2014), 32 pp., $23

I Clodia, and Other Portraits centres around a novel response to the poems of Catullus. Anna Jackson imagines how Clodia Metelli, the lover that Catullus addresses as Lesbia, might have expressed her own feelings in poetry. A very academic project? Possibly, but other local poets have also gone back to Roman models to provide a frame for their current interests. Ian Wedde, for instance, found that Horace’s odes gave him a form which broke a drought in which he said he was unable to find a balance between ‘writing as small talk’ and the ‘grandiloquent’.

Much of the attraction of Horace and, in Jackson’s case, Catullus, appears to lie in that most intangible of attributes, tone. Catullus died in c. 54 BCE, but his Carmina has a contemporary flavour in the directness with which he expresses turbulent and sometimes violent moods. Karl Stead has had a long relationship with these poems and has domesticated them by referents such as Ahipara, a TV crew outside the house of Catullus, Air New Zealand and the noise of a chainsaw. In his poem ‘Catullus 65’, he chose to honour the memory of Allen Curnow by associating him with this great predecessor. [Read more…]