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Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Far Flung and Furthermore

March 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Robert McLean

Towards Compostela: Walking the Camino de Santiago by Catharina van Bohemen (The Cuba Press, 2020), pp., $38; Prague in My Bones by Jindra Tichy (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021), 344pp., $45

Travel books work best for me when the narrator, the reader’s guide or travel companion, is the kind of personality with whom one would like to travel in the real. Robert Byron, through whose Road to Oxiana I have wandered many times in the company of its wry, bewildered, self-deprecating author, is one such fellow traveller. A strain of empathy deriving from mutual misunderstanding—a generous and good-humoured accommodation of difference—is the hallmark of Byron’s encounters with people of all stripes, often in the most discommodious locales. So, too, one never gets the sense that he is appropriative or selective in his passages through Elsewhere; rather, he is at once discerning and appreciative. And what I need from a travel companion I need from a literary one, too. [Read more…]

Filed Under: memoir

A Danger to Herself and Others

March 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Catherine Robertson

Toto Among the Murderers by Sally Morgan (Hachette, 2020), 344pp, $34.99

The 1970s was a bumper decade for serial killers. Despatching people with regularity were, in the US, the Hillside Strangler, Son of Sam, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy; and in Britain, Peter Sutcliffe, Harold Shipman, Dennis Nilsen, Trevor Hardy and Fred and Rosemary West. Five out of those last six were operating in the North of England. In calling her debut novel Toto Among the Murderers, Sally Morgan can hardly be accused of hyperbole. There were plenty to go around.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction

A Quiet Joy

March 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 242

Jacinta Ruru

From the Centre: A writer’s life by Patricia Grace (Penguin, 2021), 304pp, $40

I knew I would adore this book even before I first held it. I am not an impartial reviewer. Patricia Grace has loomed large in my life since my high school English teacher first shared some of Grace’s writing with us. This was my lightbulb moment growing up. It was the first time I had read Māori stories about Māori families, and they motivated me to learn more about the resilience of Māori in the face of colonisation and racism. [Read more…]

Filed Under: memoir

Alice in Wellington

February 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Wendy Parkins

She’s a Killer by Kirsten McDougall (Victoria University Press, 2021), 399pp, $35

The hardest thing is to know oneself, said Simp.

I picked up Anna Karenina.

‘Go away, I’m reading,’ I said.

How do we write the now? What can novels do—for us, to us—in a time of crisis? What can they tell us about ourselves in crisis? [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction

The Enchantments of Uncertainty

February 1, 2022 1 Comment

Emma Gattey

Tranquillity and Ruin by Danyl McLauchlan (Victoria University Press, 2020), 176pp., $30; Love America: On the trail of writers & artists in New Mexico by Jenny Robin Jones (Calico Publishing, 2020), 211pp., $36.95

Having read Danyl McLauchlan’s Tranquillity and Ruin, I more completely understand why Kim Hill is such a fan; he’s erudite (verging on the polymathic), darkly hilarious, self-deprecating, supremely uncertain—and willing to excavate the depths of those uncertainties. These winning traits feature not only in his frequent Saturday Morning appearances, but also in his comic noir novels and now this essay collection. He’s a superb thinker and writer. [Read more…]

Filed Under: history, politics, reviews and essays, social sciences

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