Landfall Review Online: NZ Books in Review

Her Father’s Daughter

June 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Philip Temple

The Mirror Book: A memoir by Charlotte Grimshaw (Penguin, 2021), 320pp, $38

This memoir is from the daughter of someone who has been portrayed, especially in Auckland, as New Zealand’s greatest living writer. C.K. (Karl) Stead, prominent in the local literary world for 60 years, has been given the country’s greatest honour, membership of the Order of New Zealand, primarily for his fiction and poetry. But his uncompromising literary criticism and public disputes with other writers were the agencies that kept him mostly in the minds of the writing community, to the extent that a Metro article in 1990 was headed ‘Blaspheming against the Pieties: Why the literati hate C.K. Stead’. He was also accused of too often portraying himself and his intimates as characters in his fiction. In a 2019 interview for the Academy of NZ Literature, Stead responded with, ‘Stories are stories and create their own reality.’ In fiction, the ‘border between what really happened and what is invented is always open, and if the writer doesn’t put it on record, there’s no way of knowing when and where it is crossed’. [Read more…]

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…]

If You Could See Him Through Her Eyes

June 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Vincent O’Sullivan

More Miracle than Bird by Alice Miller (Tin House Books, 2020), 368pp., US$16.95

A couple of years ago I chanced on a book of poems by a New Zealander I had not heard of who lived in Europe. I was so struck by the collection’s range and emotional depth, by its formal poise, that I rightly guessed how, in the current whirlpool of New Zealand poetry, it was unlikely to catch the eye of our gatekeepers, or the judges of poetry prizes. In poem after poem, Alice Miller’s Nowhere Nearer took on forms and approaches of rare originality, and it stays with me as one of the books in recent years that I deeply admire. Among much else, Miller was a risk-taker. So it did not surprise me, when I saw her recent novel, that what she took on in prose was risk on a grand scale. [Read more…]

Heart of Darkness, plus fertility and global breakdown

June 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Emma Gattey

Ephemera by Tina Shaw (Cloud Ink Press, 2020), 285pp, $29.99

In this uncannily timed, eerily well-executed novel, Tina Shaw has rocked an antipodean remix of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, blending it with fertility, emotional depth, and a buxom archivist-librarian in place of a bristling, hero-worshipping Marlow. Before the virus, before the Crash, before any capitalised global disasters, Ephemera opens with a map charting the voyage south from Auckland to Huka Falls, just north of Taupō. There’s little but a boat icon and HoD epigraph to signal the hot journey ahead. Then, we enter an Aotearoa with no law, no electricity, no internet, no running water, no coffee. It has been seven years since the virus, the North Korea–US war, the Crash. The details are thin, but the extent of global catastrophe is slowly revealed. [Read more…]

The Challenge and Taste of Who We Are

June 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Siobhan Harvey

The Savage Coloniser Book by Tusiata Avia (Victoria University Press, 2021), 96pp, $25; Magnolia 木蘭 by Nina Mingya Powles (Seraph Press, 2021), 82pp, $30

Now that the glitz, commotion and hype of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards are over for another year, readers are left to the books themselves. By now we know those that made the longlist, those that made the shortlist and, undoubtedly meritorious also, those that didn’t. In this last category one might whisper—or, post-literary appraisal, can one say roar?—authors and titles such as Kay McKenzie Cooke’s uplifting third collection Upturned (The Cuba Press), Rata Gordon’s Second Person (Victoria University Press) and Oscar Upperton’s tremendous New Transgender Blockbusters (Victoria University Press). This, of course, is the nature of any prize-giving beast—subjectivity. It is also the nature of the review and the reviewer. The celebrations and commiserations roundly completed, it falls to me to bring my subjectivity to two books that made the illustrious shortlist category in the aforementioned awards: The Savage Coloniser Book by Tusiata Avia and Nina Mingya Powles’ much heralded (both nationally and internationally) Magnolia 木蘭. [Read more…]