Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Her Father’s Daughter

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Philip Temple

The Mirror Book: A memoir by Charlotte Grimshaw (Penguin, 2021), 320pp, $38

This memoir is from the daughter of someone who has been portrayed, especially in Auckland, as New Zealand’s greatest living writer. C.K. (Karl) Stead, prominent in the local literary world for 60 years, has been given the country’s greatest honour, membership of the Order of New Zealand, primarily for his fiction and poetry. But his uncompromising literary criticism and public disputes with other writers were the agencies that kept him mostly in the minds of the writing community, to the extent that a Metro article in 1990 was headed ‘Blaspheming against the Pieties: Why the literati hate C.K. Stead’. He was also accused of too often portraying himself and his intimates as characters in his fiction. In a 2019 interview for the Academy of NZ Literature, Stead responded with, ‘Stories are stories and create their own reality.’ In fiction, the ‘border between what really happened and what is invented is always open, and if the writer doesn’t put it on record, there’s no way of knowing when and where it is crossed’. [Read more…]

Cartography for the Soul

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Tim Saunders

Map for the Heart: Ida Valley essays by Jillian Sullivan (Otago University Press, 2020), 280pp., $35

The last time I visited the Ida Valley in Central Otago I stopped on the road beside the Idaburn, the river that cuts diagonally across the plains between mountain ranges. The sun was slung low in the sky and the moon was already rising, as if caught in some cosmic game of chase across the heavens. It would soon be dark, and I still had an hour’s drive to where I wanted to be.

I watched a hawk slice the thick evening air as water flowed over river-smooth stones, its dark shape flicking over sheep scattered across brown grass. Magpies sat upright in trees, turning their backs to the sun to catch the last of the warmth. As I looked at these creatures that had made a home here, among the tussock and in the shadows of hills, I had the sudden desire to stay just where I was. There was something there in that limitless landscape that beckoned me to put down roots. [Read more…]

Flaxroots Theatre Made By All 

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David Eggleton 

Bus Stops on the Moon: Red Mole days 1974–1980 by Martin Edmond (Otago University Press, 2020), 274pp, $39.95

On the book’s cover they have the stance of a rock band; they bristle like hip young gunslingers tuned into the New Wave zeitgeist. They are the Red Mole theatre troupe, the magnificent inner core of seven, photographed in black and white at Coney Island, New York, during an 18-month sojourn performing overseas towards the end of the 1970s. In Bus Stops on the Moon, Martin Edmond remembers, celebrates and eulogises a generation, an era, a mood—and in the main chronicles a few hectic years, the glory days, to tell us what it was like to be part of New Zealand’s foremost avant-garde theatre group that was itself the product of a particular historic moment. [Read more…]

Dick’s Pics

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Andrew Paul Wood

Me, According to the History of Art by Dick Frizzell (Massey University Press, 2021), 312pp, $65

It goes without saying that Dick Frizzell is a very clever man with an idiosyncratic view of the world. Somehow, he has also survived half a century or so’s worth of New Zealand art-world vicissitudes, so inevitably his thoughts about art are going to be interesting. He is also (and this is not intended as an insult) a narcissist. You would have to have the balls to write your own history of world art, playing at being Kenneth Clark. You also must be a bit of a celebrity for a publisher to let you do it. Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas. Behold: Me, According to the History of Art. Frizzell does to art history what Tom Scott did to Charles Upham. [Read more…]

Broken Threads

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Wendy Parkins

This Pākehā Life: An unsettled memoir by Alison Jones (Bridget Williams Books, 2020), 240pp, $39.99

Home is where we start from, to borrow a phrase from the British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, who in turn adapted it from T.S. Eliot’s ‘East Coker’. According to Winnicott, we develop our sense of self in relation to others from earliest infancy. We seek connection, intimacy and reciprocity, and whether we find those vital qualities at home or not plays a determining role in the kind of self that begins there.1 For Eliot, by contrast, home is where we start from, a fixed point of departure. Like the past, home is something we must leave behind, for good or ill, as we inevitably move into an unfamiliar and complicated world to discover ourselves out there. The ambivalence of that departure—a heroic striving or an expulsion?—haunts Eliot’s poem of beginnings and ends, past and present, gains and losses. [Read more…]