Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

I Am Here

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Shana Chandra 

Times Like These by Michelle Langstone (Allen & Unwin, 2021), 256pp, $36.99; The Commercial Hotel by John Summers (Victoria University of Wellington Press, 2021), 192pp, $30

I read to find my own hand in the pages of books. In the future, I want to keep holding books. To touch myself on each page saying, I am here, I am here, I am here. —Ocean Vuong

Just when I was trying to compose sentences to write about Michelle Langstone’s Times Like These and John Summers’ The Commercial Hotel, I happened upon this quote, from American poet Ocean Vuong. With words far better than mine, Vuong was able to encapsulate what it was like for me to read these two collections of non-fiction essays. Like him, in reading these authors’ words I too touched myself on their pages. Vuong reminded me of the exact alchemy of why we read and love books: it’s the magic of not finding ourselves alone. [Read more…]

History So Close It Wounds 

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This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 241

Helen Watson White

Te Papa to Berlin: The making of two museums by Ken Gorbey (Otago University Press, 2020), 245pp, $39.95

‘Storytelling is perhaps the most potent of humanising forces,’ writes Ken Gorbey, echoing the great Italian Jewish humanist Primo Levi. From a civic job in Hamilton merging the city’s art gallery and Waikato Museum into one building, and after heading Wellington’s project team for the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongawera, likewise a merger of New Zealand’s National Museum and National Art Gallery, Gorbey moved to Berlin to rescue the foundering Jewish Museum Berlin (JMB). While it already had a building of dramatic and unique design, there was no plan for projects to fill it. In all three places the focus became storytelling, with the development of the first two institutions strongly supported by Māori leaders and using foundational Māori concepts of identity and mana.  [Read more…]

Volumes for the Heart

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Jessica Thompson Carr

Colouring My Soul by Kat Maxwell (Mākaro Press, 2020), 142pp, $25; Gaps in the Light by Iona Winter (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2021), 110 pp, £11.99

In Kat Maxwell and Iona Winter we have two storytellers who draw on real experience as the source of their inspiration. Both writers share intimate perspectives drawn from their Māori culture, sharpened by their individuality as grown wāhine. While the writing styles are very different—Winter is fluid and dream-like while Maxwell has focused more on storytelling—the two works complement each other, when considered together, for their vulnerability and their mana. [Read more…]

Countering Commonplace Narratives 

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Giovanni Tiso

From Suffrage to a Seat in the House: The path to Parliament for New Zealand women by Jenny Coleman (Otago University Press, 2020), 338pp., $45; Crossing the Lines: The story of three homosexual New Zealand soldiers in World War II by Brent Coutts (Otago University Press, 2020), 336pp., $49.95

Two recent books counter commonplace narratives about Aotearoa’s social and political history. 

In From Suffrage to a Seat in the House: The path to Parliament for New Zealand women Jenny Coleman traces the stalling of the women’s franchise after the success of the suffrage petition and subsequent Electoral Bill of 1893. From that moment, it took an extraordinary twenty-six years for women to win the right to be elected to Parliament, and fourteen years after that for the first woman to actually win a seat—by which time the country we like to remind ourselves was trailblazing had been overtaken by a number of liberal democracies, including Britain. [Read more…]

‘The worst thing you can ever do’

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Sally Blundell 

Loss Adjustment by Linda Collins (Awa Press, 2020), 300pp., $40

‘I will commit the worst thing you can ever do to someone who loves you,’ writes 17-year-old Victoria. ‘Killing yourself. The scary thing is, I’m okay with that.’

Fifteen days later, and six pages into Loss Adjustment, that okay-ness shatters what should have been just another school day, when New Zealand journalist Linda Collins and her partner, photographer Malcolm McLeod, are driven the short distance from their Singapore apartment to find their daughter lying broken and lifeless on a concrete-tiled path. 

Their world stops; their lives slam into a wall of confusion, despair, irresolvable grief.  [Read more…]

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…]