Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

How Alive Are You Willing to Be?

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Emma Gattey

Every morning, so far, I’m alive: A memoir by Wendy Parkins (Otago University Press, 2019), 216 pp., $35

Straddling the fraught realms of personal and familial history, diagnosis of mental illness and rehabilitation, restorative nature writing, travelogue and philosophy, this memoir doesn’t pick its battles. It tackles what might be the most consuming issue of human life: whether or not to continue at all. And it emerges triumphant. At its core, Wendy Parkins’ latest work is an act of self-help (and I use this term here in no pejorative sense), an epistemological performance, the living-through of philosophy. As readers, we join Parkins as she thinks through the meaning of life, answering the stark ultimatum posed by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus: ‘There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that.’ Camus is in fact one of the few famous suicide-philosophers whom Parkins does not cite or posthumously spar with or respond to. Nevertheless, this ur-question of philosophy looms large over this book. [Read more…]

Disturbing Thingship

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Penelope Todd

The Boyfriend by Laura Southgate (Victoria University Press, 2019), 273 pp., $30

When I started uni, one early friendship group included a girl who, in memory, was a kind of Marilyn Monroe. Blonded, made-up, grown-up and, although new to the city, already in a relationship with an urbane and much older married man. In fact, we could never really be friends with her because the world into which she’d fallen was not even adjacent to our own naïve and wide-eyed take on Year One. It was another galaxy. [Read more…]

Tasman Crossings

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Lucy Sussex

West Island: Five twentieth-century New Zealanders in Australia by Stephanie Johnson (Otago University Press, 2019), 284pp. $39.95

In the nineteenth century Australia and New Zealand were termed ‘the Seven Austral Colonies’. They comprised seven different entities, linked by geography and a common coloniser. Passage between them was frequent, with colonial book companies opening offices, say, in Dunedin, Hobart and Melbourne, and magazines like the Australian Journal having both New Zealand distribution and content. Travel might have taken longer, but the relationship was closer. [Read more…]

In Defiant Red

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Paula Green

Loving Sylvie by Elizabeth Smither (Allen & Unwin, 2019), 328 pp., AU$32.99

‘She loved what others didn’t. Things aslant and odd, glimpsed from the corner of her eye.’ – Isobel in Loving Sylvie

Elizabeth Smither has published eighteen poetry collections, five novels and five short story collections along with memoirs and journals. In 2004 she received an honorary Doctorate in Literature from the University of Auckland, and in 2008 was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievements in Poetry. Her most recent collection, Night Horse, won the Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. Her poems deliver an appealing mix of thought, feeling, economy and detail. I have found her fiction equally captivating: imbued with insight, layers, stillness and, conversely, intense movement. [Read more…]

Confronting the Dark Past

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Lachy Paterson

The New Zealand Wars: Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa by Vincent O’Malley (Bridget Williams Books, 2019), 272 pp., $39.99

Much of New Zealand history lies as yet untouched, and a topic once covered may sit for a generation before another historian picks through the archives again. New Zealand’s nineteenth-century colonial wars are a notable exception, with Vincent O’Malley’s The New Zealand Wars: Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa now added to a long list of titles, some of which are still in print. If, as suggested in the New Zealand Herald (6/12/2018), our ‘violent colonial past’ had been forgotten, this surely is hardly the fault of New Zealand historians. [Read more…]