Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Daring to Take the Leap into Clarity

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Bill Direen

Karl Wolfskehl: A poet in exile by Friedrich Voit (Cold Hub Press, 2019), 232pp, $40

To start at the end, the Epilogue tells us about the growth of international interest in Karl Wolfskehl over recent decades, and the handling, by his companion Margot Ruben, of his literary estate up until her death in 1980. Throughout the biography, Friedrich Voit gives us enough facts, without building her up unduly, to get a fair picture of the importance of Ruben in Wolfskehl’s work, and the intricacies of their relationship. The Wolfskehl–Ruben story is only one of many fascinating threads. [Read more…]

A Go-To Library of Images

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Mary Cresswell

Everything’s Something in Place by John Geraets (Titus Books, 2019), 326 pp., $42; Contents Under Pressure by Gail Ingram (Pūkeko Publications, 2019),86 pp., $25; Lay Studies by Steven Toussaint (Victoria University Press, 2019), 108 pp., $25

John Geraets’ Everything’s Something in Place: Writings 1980–2015 is in many ways a celebration of the survivor’s right to write history. He gives us what he would like to be professionally remembered by: literary criticism, poems, general essays, anecdotes that are part of New Zealand literary history.

It is not a scholarly biography, however. Geraets revises essays published over a period of some years, to the extent that much of the material floats unattached to any identifiable date. This is fine – he alerts us in informative introductions that may well be the most recently written content, though he doesn’t specify. He reveals his journey from being a ‘lapsing Catholic’ (sounds continuous) to a ‘direct engagement in Vipassana and Buddhist life principles’ (sounds staunch). His first encounter with Zen is written as a travel diary, doubly attractive to me for not mentioning Alan Watts. [Read more…]

The Biggest Raupatu

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Hannah Mettner

Attraction by Ruby Porter (Text Publishing, 2019), 288 pp., $37

When I saw Ruby Porter’s debut novel Attraction on the ‘recommended reads’ shelf at Unity, and browsed the blurb on the back, it appealed immediately. The idea of a plot based around three women who may be friends, lovers, or a bit of both, and are trying to figure that out, has the potential for the kind of sticky emotional writing that I’m always seeking out. But set and setting are everything; when I finally got around to the reading the book, the protests over the stolen land at Ihumātao had become a national news item, I’d flown home to Gisborne to say goodbye to my dying uncle, Jacinda had announced that New Zealand history would be taught in all New Zealand schools, and I was deep into a year-long te reo course. [Read more…]

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…]