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Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

The Treachery of Words (and Images)

June 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Robyn Maree Pickens

This Is Not a Pipe by Tara Black (Victoria University Press, 2020), 160pp., $28; Timelights by Martin Edmond (Lasavia Publishing, 2020), 196pp., $37.86

Before I read This Is Not a Pipe by Pōneke-based comic-maker Tara Black and Timelights by Aotearoa-born, Sydney-based writer Martin Edmond, I was reading literary criticism/affect theory on how to ‘read’ texts. ‘Read’ in this context is best described as reading with the intent to critique, to interpret, to analyse. These texts on reading debate different methodological approaches to criticism, interpretation and analysis, such as suspicious or paranoid reading and reparative reading elaborated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003). In highly simplified terms, suspicious reading assumes a position of mastery, and reparative reading one of pleasure. The apparent binary between the two approaches, which Sedgwick nuanced to hold ambiguity, has nevertheless obtained in subsequent theoretical discussions as either ‘for’ or ‘against’ positions, or has been the subject of a recuperative oscillation between the two.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, graphic art, short stories

The Secret Life of Everyone

May 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Rachel O’Connor

Bug Week & Other Stories by Airini Beautrais, (Victoria University Press, 2020), 184pp, $30

The cover of Bug Week is a soft coral pink, faintly reminiscent of one’s grandmother’s fully unrestored bathroom. The hand-painted bugs that crawl among the letters of its title are similarly benign, referencing a gentler time when entomology was as much about fine art as science. Between the covers of the collection, however, lies a darker, more dangerous place, implicitly familiar in its mundane settings and populations, but made noxious by the insidious contaminants of human weakness, disillusionment and betrayal. In these thirteen short stories by Airini Beautrais, we are all subject to scrutiny under the microscope, and no one emerges looking good.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, short stories

He Whakarite Ataahua/A Beautiful Arrangement

March 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Gina Cole

Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand: An anthology edited by Michelle Elvy, Paula Morris and James Norcliffe with art editor David Eggleton (Otago University Press, 2020) 250pp, $39.95

In the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre of 15 March 2019 and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s declaration that ‘We are all New Zealanders’, the editors of this anthology called for creative work that responded to life in contemporary New Zealand. The response wonderfully displayed in this collection was wide ranging and diverse. And after all, portraying range and diversity is the job of anthologies. In an article from a 2020 issue of the New Yorker, writer Clare Bucknell states:

Etymologically, ‘anthology’ refers to a collection of flowers, varied species of blooms selected and arranged so that they look like they belong together. Since the term’s origins in the seventeenth century, multiplicity has always been the form’s selling point: the provision of very different voices and concerns that nonetheless have some kind of collective force.1 [Read more…]

Filed Under: art and photography, fiction, poetry, reviews and essays, short stories

Confidently His Own

August 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Vincent O’Sullivan

What Sort of Man by Breton Dukes (Victoria University Press, 2020), 239pp., $30

Eight of the nine stories in Breton Dukes’ new collection ‘confront’ their readers with the frank demand of a title that could easily slip to an aggressive question: ‘What sort of man?’ You cannot help but think of Primo Levi’s similar question with his memoir, If This is a Man, or Sarah Helm’s history of Ravensbrück camp, If This is a Woman. It is not a title that is meant mildly to intrigue you. You know you are about to be challenged in various ways. You are going to be as far from Frank Sargeson’s coded male world, or Barry Crump’s blokish romps, or admirable mature behaviour, as New Zealand writing has so far gone. For the most part, these stories are rough, brutal, mean as pigshit, yet written with an artistic finesse that is, in itself, a celebration. Dukes’ fictional world, at first so starkly black and white, breaks down to just how complex that simplicity may be when attended to so finely. He takes us into the intricacies of male competitiveness, its rare promptings to what elsewhere might be taken for tenderness, the ineptness of a certain kind of man to draw much from the women he relates to, or to absorb the errors of his past. A world with few winners, with multiple losers.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, short stories

A Woman and Her Time

August 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Karin Warnaar

In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot: Selected fiction by Greville Texidor (Victoria University Press, 2019), 304 pp., $30

There’s a story in this collection of short fiction by Greville Texidor called, simply, ‘Elegy’. That it’s set in an actual country churchyard appeals disproportionately to my sense of humour, as does the story itself, which is an arch observation of the bohemian left in mid-twentieth century New Zealand, with a possible whiff of Glover’s magpies. Another line from Thomas Gray’s poem could be applied to Texidor: the one about the flowers that blush unseen. Texidor’s literary bloom was brief and barely acknowledged at the time, but literature has a lot of one-hit wonders. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, short stories

Going All Houdini

May 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Diane Brown

The Father of Octopus Wrestling and Other Small Fictions by Frankie McMillan (Canterbury University Press, 2019), 146pp., $27.99

Reading Frankie McMillan’s The Father of Octopus Wrestling and Other Small Fictions is like taking part in a speed dating evening. You only have five minutes to meet the fifty-five applicants. All are equally fascinating and equally elusive. If only, you think to yourself, I could spend half an hour reading each one, delving deep to find out if any is a wife beater or an alcoholic. 

It was probably a mistake to read this book after rereading Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, and then, Olive Again. At first, I resisted the slickness of McMillan’s small fictions that never allowed such close encounters with character and background. But nothing is more annoying than the reviewer who says ‘Why didn’t the writer write it like this?’ or ‘It would have better if she’d done this.’ There is a world of difference between Stout’s connected short stories set in one small town, and McMillan’s fictions, which roam from unspecified locations to Rotorua, Lake Bunyonyi, Ireland, Amsterdam, Ukraine and a myriad of other places.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, short stories

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