memoir – Page 9

Clarity, the Sky Says

May 1, 2016 Leave a Comment

Jenny Powell

Boundaries, People and Places of Central Otago, by Brian Turner (Penguin Random House NZ, 2015), 351 pp., $45

Travelling into Turner territory is invariably breath-taking and thought-provoking. This new collection of prose, poetry and Steve Calveley’s photography does not disappoint, but these qualities are merely the surface shimmer on the long reach of a Central Otago river. Boundaries is an intense focus on the essence of place. In his introduction Turner raises considerations about how and why we end up in certain places and how we ‘look after’ them. While our sense of identity and belonging is frequently connected to ‘our place’, we don’t all have the freedom to choose where we want to be. This book, as Turner advises, is about making the best of what we’re faced with. [Read more…]

Mooning Around

April 1, 2016 Leave a Comment

Lindsay Rabbitt

The Dreaming Land by Martin Edmond (Bridget Williams Books, 2015), 164 pp., $39.99

‘The Dreaming Land,’ said Martin Edmond at the launch of this memoir at Wellington’s Unity Books, ‘had its genesis in a failed manuscript.’ He’d set out to write a book about his parents’ early years together, ‘But it hadn’t worked for the obvious reason,’ he says: ‘I wasn’t there.’

He did, however, salvage two sections from the manuscript that did work: one, ‘Barefoot Years’ (initially published as an excellent wee book in BWB Texts), opens The Dreaming Land, and the other, ‘What Instruments We Have Agree’, ends Histories of the Future (2015), a Tasmanian-published collection of Edmond’s inventive prose works illustrated with his partner Maggie Hall’s evocative black and white photographs, and lauded ‘a triumph of originality and daring’ by Peter Pierce in the Sydney Morning Herald. The piece imagines his mother, poet Lauris Edmond, dying alone, aged 75, on 28 January 2000 (the 61st anniversary of W.B. Yeats’ death) in her Oriental Parade home overlooking Wellington Harbour: ‘beyond is the green valley where she once lived with her husband and their children …’ [Read more…]

Things That Could Possibly Be True

October 1, 2015 Leave a Comment

Denis Harold

The Mermaid Boy by John Summers (Hue & Cry Press, 2015), 158 pp., $30

The Mermaid Boy is a story collection that purports to be non-fiction but reads like fiction. John, a not very roguish young man, writes of youthful adventures in New Zealand and Asia. While he fitfully travels, he gradually matures. The 13 stories/sections/chapters assembled in roughly chronological order generate a kind of picaresque bildungsroman. The author as putative main character has a voice that is humble, sometimes hesitant, unwilling to go beyond what he knows. This is a book not of ego, but definitely of the first person.

It is not a memoir, yet one could piece from it elements of a conventional memoir; not a random selection of autobiographic essays because chronological and narrative threads are loosely tied up; not a meditation on the idea of stories – but almost. [Read more…]

Number One with a Bullet

September 1, 2015 Leave a Comment

David Herkt

Greatest Hits, by David Cohen (Mākaro Press, 2014), 316 pp., $35

Language can be a weapon, as David Cohen, armed only with his words and phrases, very ably demonstrates in Greatest Hits, an anthology of pieces drawn from a quarter century of media-work. In a Listener review of 2006 he so thoroughly deflates the orange-tinted pretentions of U2 and Bono, the band’s frontman, that it becomes impossible to see the ‘great’ rocker’s performance except through Cohen’s vision of bloated corporate emptiness. In ‘Kingdom of the curdled-milk sheik’, written for the National Business Review in 2009, Cohen’s invitation from Saudi Arabia to participate in a press junket becomes the understated means whereby the freedom-loving proclamations of the kingdom are shown to be just as substantial as a mirage of dairy show-farms on desert sand dunes.

Cohen is a Wellington-based writer, a sometime Guardian and Listener columnist, a correspondent on media affairs for the NBR, a sometime satirist and, that old fashioned term, a mordant wit. If the column is one of the media-styles of our age, then Cohen excels at it, able to tease import from apparent trivia. He has often succeeded at that hardest task, gaining unique revelation from a well-practised interviewee. His idiosyncrasies usually play to his strengths. [Read more…]

All This is Yours

June 1, 2015 Leave a Comment

Simone Oettli

Māori Boy: A memoir of childhood by Witi Ihimaera (Vintage/Random House, 2014), 382 pp., $39.99

Even just a glance at the first tome of Witi Ihimaera’s projected three-volume memoir is sure to charm prospective readers. Visually, the book depicts the two things that are most dear to him during his childhood. The cover shows a hand-coloured photograph of his beloved grandmother, firmly grasping Witi by the wrist. He has just begun to walk and has a look of serious concentration on his face. She must be nearly 60 and is still beautiful. This is the woman, Teria Pere Halbert, who inspired the main character, Artemis Riripeti Mahana, of Ihimaera’s novel The Matriarch, and who also plays a powerful role in its sequel, The Dream Swimmer.

I find the typeface on the memoir’s cover in some ways rather gimmicky and misleading, having personally witnessed Ihimaera using an iPad for his writing. However, in imitating a typewriter’s, this lettering does serve as a reminder that the memoir deals essentially with the first 16 years of Ihimaera’s life, from 1944 to 1960, when portable computers were not yet invented and typewriters were the principal means of recording one’s creativity. [Read more…]