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…]