• Home
  • About
  • Landfall
  • Subscribe
  • Essay competition
  • Kathleen Grattan Award

Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

A Language of Subterfuge

December 1, 2017 Leave a Comment

Nicholas Reid

Hard Frost: Structures of feeling in New Zealand literature, 1908–1945 by John Newton (Victoria University Press, 2017), 368 pp., $40

After Stuart Murray’s Never a Soul at Home (VUP 1998), Lawrence Jones’ Picking Up the Traces (VUP 2003) and numerous other texts of literary revisionism, it is hard to imagine that anything new can be said about New Zealand’s mid-century literary nationalism. Another book covering this territory must have at least a new angle of vision. Fortunately John Newton’s Hard Frost does have such an angle, although many of Newton’s observations inevitably overlap with those of previous literary historians.

Hard Frost is the first volume of a proposed trilogy, which will eventually take Newton up to the 1970s. Its ‘Afterword’ is like a preview of coming attractions as it fades out on Charles Brasch and Denis Glover setting up Landfall in 1947 and looks forward to a new sort of New Zealand literary production in the 1950s.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: literature

Private Admissions Between Friends

June 1, 2017 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: arts and culture, history, literature

Mapping and Remapping a Literary Nation

May 2, 2017 1 Comment

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…]

Filed Under: literature

The Steadland Protagonist

May 2, 2017 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: fiction, literature

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

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • …
  • 7
  • Next Page »

Recent reviews

  • Flaxroots Theatre Made By All 
    David Eggleton on Bus Stops on the Moon by Martin Edmond
  • The Fragility of Being
    Catherine Robertson on The Strength of Eggshells by Kirsty Powell and Sprigs by Brannavan Gnanalingam
  • Garden of Unearthly Delights
    Tim Jones on Monsters in the Garden, eds Elizabeth Knox and David Larsen
  • A Beautiful World Has Gone 
    Robert McLean on Letters of Denis Glover, ed Sarah Shieff
  • Kaleidoscopic Ethnography
    Emma Gattey on Refocusing Ethnographic Museums Through Oceanic Lenses by Philipp Schorch et al

Subscribe to Landfall Review Online via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to Landfall Review Online and receive notifications of new reviews by email.

Review archive

Reviews by genre

© 2018 Otago University Press. All Rights Reserved. Website by Arts Net