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…]

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…]

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…]

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…]

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…]