Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review
Alan Roddick
A Month at the Back of My Brain: A third memoir by Kevin Ireland (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2022), 174pp, $39.99
Kevin Ireland died in May 2023, just a few weeks short of his ninetieth birthday. By my count, A Month at the Back of My Brain was Ireland’s forty-first book in sixty years as a writer—all of them hard copy, paper-and-ink books: what I still think of as real books. [Read more…]
Nod Ghosh
Tales from the Wood’s Edge: A memoir by Wilma Laryn (Wilma Laryn, 2022), 378pp, $36; So Far, For Now by Fiona Kidman (Penguin Random House, 2022), 272pp, $38
These memoirs are by two exceptional Aotearoa women. Wilma Laryn’s Tales from the Wood’s Edge is her first book. Fiona Kidman’s So Far, For Now joins a catalogue of over thirty publications that includes non-fiction, novels, short story and poetry collections. Both books cover events from the authors’ lives connected by underlying themes. Laryn’s book explores the process of making a new place become home. Kidman’s essays are underpinned by a major life change: the loss of her husband of almost six decades. [Read more…]
Lawrence Patchett
Under a Big Sky: Facing the elements on a New Zealand farm by Tim Saunders (Allen & Unwin, 2022), 288pp, $34.99
Early in Under a Big Sky: Facing the elements on a New Zealand farm, Tim Saunders signals the twin issues that will preoccupy his narrative. The first relates to the elements. ‘Take any decision on the farm,’ the narrator says, ‘strip it back and you will find the weather’. The rain gauge is among the most discussed tools on the Glen Oroua farm, and in 2020 a searing drought makes it more important than ever. When the sun is ‘being a bastard’ day after day, and the seasons no longer behave the way they used to, it’s even more inevitable that your thoughts circle on the elements. Thus Under a Big Sky takes its structure from them, moving through sections themed on fire, air, water and earth. [Read more…]
Shana Chandra
Small Bodies of Water by Nina Mingya Powles (Canongate Books, 2022), 272pp, $25; Sign Language for the Death of Reason by Linda Collins (Moth Paper Press, 2021), 141pp, $37.99; Island Notes: Finding my place on Aotea Great Barrier Island by Tim Highman (Cuba Press, 2021), 156pp, $38
The notion of home is both fragile and tenacious. It is an indication of our need for stability throughout the constant change that is life. We think of homes as solid: a house sturdy on the ground, our parents immortal, our country never changing. But all is eroded slowly by ravages of time or in an instant. A house is never as big as it was in our childhood eyes; our parents fade with age until they disappear. Our countries become smaller, too, as we travel away from them and look back; shores are washed-away; earthquake fault lines bring down towns; a war declares that a country is no longer ours. We often think of home as outside ourselves, not within us, despite it being something we hold precious in our mind—which may be why the notion of home seems so elusive. Each of the Aotearoa authors in this review either directly references or subtly hints at different notions of what home might be: they search for it, commemorate it, comment on it, or try to remember it, sometimes all at once. [Read more…]
Helen Watson White
To Be Fair: Confessions of a District Court Judge by Rosemary Riddell (Upstart Press, 2021), 229pp, $39.99
‘What if we could be honest about our pain?’ asks film/theatre director and lawyer Rosemary Riddell in her memoir To Be Fair: Confessions of a District Court Judge. Not perhaps the question you’d expect from a judge, considering the usual preconceptions of the role. [Read more…]
Wendy Parkins
Notes on Womanhood by Sarah Jane Barnett (Otago University Press, 2022), 169pp, $30; You Probably Think This Song is About You by Kate Camp (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 223pp, $35
These two books, written from the vantage point of midlife, adopt different approaches to tell their stories. Sarah Jane Barnett’s Notes on Womanhood is the first in a new series from Otago University Press, Ka Haea Te Ata, that aims to cast light on issues of importance in Aotearoa today. It interweaves Barnett’s own experiences with a wide range of secondary research in order to bring the deeply personal into dialogue with broader cultural concerns and the structural inequities that shape women’s lives. Kate Camp’s book, by contrast, takes the form of linked essays, an increasingly popular mode in memoir writing, perhaps because it allows a writer the freedom to present relatively self-contained episodes from life, without the need to fill all the gaps that a single linear narrative might require. In both cases, though, the difficulties of growing up female are approached with candour, allowing readers the space to recognise or reflect on their own experiences. [Read more…]