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Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

A Quiet Pooled Intelligence 

April 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Michelle Elvy

Selected Stories by Vincent O’Sullivan (Victoria University Press, 2019), 592 pp., $40

Grove’s face wasn’t injured, as far as you could tell, but it curved in on one side, so that his left temple and jaw were at least an inch further out than his left cheek. Whether he talked or smiled, his lips on that side stayed straight and together, and the right side of his face moved by itself. And there were two deep lines that ran from beside his nostrils almost to the end of his chin. He wasn’t scarred or hideous or funny. You didn’t want to laugh at his face and you didn’t want to say you felt sorry for him. But I can’t remember being in any company with him when people didn’t tend to look at him rather than at anyone else. They wouldn’t let on, but they were absorbed by his dent.

It’s the best possible opening for this collection, and perhaps the best way to frame a review of Vincent O’Sullivan’s Selected Stories. The opening paragraph of ‘Grove’ – a story taken from O’Sullivan’s 1978 collection, The Boy, The Bridge, The River – sets the tone and progression of this collection, which spans nearly forty years of short stories. It also tells us to pay attention to the obvious and not-so-obvious details of the characters we encounter – that each individual deserves a second, or third, or many-times-more look. Finally, this opening paragraph suggests that looking at characters might mean, also, looking closely at how they look at each other, how they are viewed by other characters. The art of observation highlights our flaws, our idiosyncrasies – also our connections, our warmth. We’re all in this story together, O’Sullivan seems to say.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, short stories

Short, Sharp Shocks

February 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Lawrence Patchett

Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Michelle Elvy, Frankie McMillan and James Norcliffe (Canterbury University Press, 2018), 293 pp., $39.99

There’s a feeling of currency about flash fiction right now. The editors of Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand seek to capture – and capitalise on – this excitement around the form. Flash fiction is ‘arguably the fastest growing literary form worldwide’, they say, pointing to strong journal and competition submissions as evidence of a related surge of interest here in New Zealand. But although editors Michelle Elvy, Frankie McMillan and James Norcliffe celebrate the form’s current energy, they don’t claim any special newness for its most recent iterations. Instead they acknowledge the ‘deep roots’ of the compressed form in New Zealand literature, reaching back to the work of Katherine Mansfield and Frank Sargeson, as well as the more recent short short-story anthologies edited by Graeme Lay and Stephen Stratford from 1997. The nod to Sargeson in particular seems important. Published more than eighty years ago, his very short stories like ‘A Piece of Yellow Soap’ still read with extraordinary urgency. But if, like me, you’re relatively new to the more recent variations on shorter forms, Bonsai provides an exciting entry point.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: short stories

River of Truths

August 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Rajorshi Chakraborti

False River by Paula Morris (Penguin Random House, 2017), 288 pp., $35

Among the many delights, for me, of reading Paula Morris’s wonderful, unclassifiable prose collection, False River, was the recurrent sensation of being reminded of other incredible writers, of feeling Roberto Bolaño suddenly close by, or Patricia Highsmith, or Joyce, or the names behind the great fairy tales, or Mansfield (although that story explicitly sets out to play with ‘The Garden Party’, and does so with delicious humour), and once, even Raymond Chandler in this memorable simile: ‘He kissed me like his mother had bribed him with five dollars when he really needed fifty.’ (81) [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, short stories

Turning Blue

April 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Breton Dukes

Low Life by Michael Botur (Createspace, 2017), 244 pp., $27.99; Fresh Ink by multiple authors (Cloud Ink Press, 2017), 224 pp., $28

It’s a tough time to be writing short stories in New Zealand. Anecdotally, we hear collections aren’t selling well. Competitions have disappeared or had prize money slashed (the Katherine Mansfield and the Sunday Star Times Short Story Awards). Magazines that once accepted single stories (the Listener) stopped taking them years ago. And many publishers state, if in not so many words, WARNING, SHORT STORIES NOT WELCOME. Other forms, such as creative non-fiction and poetry (particularly with the arrival of Hera Lindsay Bird and Ashleigh Young), have vaulted short stories in terms of profile and sales.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, short stories

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