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Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Strange Juxtapositions

February 1, 2012 1 Comment

Raewyn Alexander

Rangatira,by Paula Morris (Penguin, Auckland, 2011) 296 pp., $30.00
 
The title of Rangatira, or Chief, has such grand connotations that I expected a magnificent tale, and in many ways this novel satisfied that expectation. Ngati Wai Rangatira Paratene Te Manu mulls his past over while he sits for the painting of his portrait by the artist, Lindauer. The painter’s planned trip to England has jogged the chief’s prodigious memory. Elderly Paratene appears calm, but twenty years before, with fourteen northern rangatira he travelled to England, and their trials were many. We learn Paratene prefers quiet reflection to excessive socialising, or to arguments at the Native Land Court where proceedings have dragged on.
       Difficult events pile up against each other; strange juxtapositions occur. I empathised, wanted to somehow make things easier. The ridiculous get-up Paratene describes having to put on when a studio photographer prepares to take the Maori chief’s photograph serves to illustrate general misunderstandings between cultures. Then dubious agreements and arguments intrude in other ways: events go awry or are badly played out. The trials and tribulations experienced in England made me gasp: so many grubby and devious situations upset matters and offend against good manners and decency, let alone diplomacy and protocol, while these Maori are supposed to be honoured guests.

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Filed Under: fiction

Half-way House of the Soul

February 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Jodie Dalgleish
Travesty, by Mike Johnson with illustrations by Darren Sheehan (Titus Books, Auckland, 2010), 243 pp., $35.00
 
After finishing Mike Johnson’s Travesty, and re-reading his previous novels and poetry, I have come to the conclusion that, with it, he has achieved the epitome or culmination of something. He has achieved a kind of ‘worldmaking’ — to borrow American philosopher Nelson Goodman’s famous term  — that confirms his position as one of New Zealand’s most important fiction writers.
            Travesty is an unusual work of fiction. For 204 of its 244 pages Johnson creates an unknown world, the imaginative space of an unknown place. It is a world related to known concepts, and to literary genres such as science fiction and fantasy — and yet it is foreign. The writer’s characters are bizarre and involved in irrational quests. His material world is recognisable, but also thrown into some indeterminable time and place. Reading Travesty is like trying to make out a mirage that is always shifting before your eyes: you are unable to quite grasp it, but somehow you seem to know enough to read and understand it. This, I am certain, is the writer’s intention, and evidence of considerable skill.
            Johnson’s characters live in Travesty’s Rathouse, each engrossed in their broken yet richly personal lives. Over the course of the book, the writer takes each of them, including a baby rat, out into Travesty’s wider world to face or to make their fate. It is this seemingly-simple movement that shapes the work and allows the novelist to weave his characters’ realities around each other and thus create the dark, glistening and many-threaded world of Travesty. 

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Filed Under: fiction

Quiver and Stamp

February 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Sarah Jane Barnett
The Broken Book, by Fiona Farrell (Auckland University Press, 2011), 208 pp., $34.99.
Trace Fossils, by Mary Cresswell (Steele Roberts, 2011), 64 pp., $19.99.
 
Originally conceived as a travel book about walking, The Broken Book took an unexpected turn when the Christchurch earthquake, in Farrell’s words, ‘sent a jagged tear’ through the text. Well known for her fiction, poetry and plays, The Broken Book is Fiona Farrell’s captivating foray into autobiography. The book contains four essays about walking, which are interrupted by twenty one poems. You never know when a poem will arrive: they are tremors in her text.
            The essays follow Farrell to the Winter Palace in Menton, the Botanic Gardens in Dunedin, through the Cévennes in France, and finally onto the shaky ground of Christchurch. As with many walks, the destination is a convenient way to let the mind wander. For example, Farrell retraces Robert Louis Stevenson’s path through the Cévennes. Stevenson heavily loaded his ‘diminutive she-ass’ Modestine with supplies, and beat her raw when she stopped. He then composed the bestseller, Travels with a Donkey. While following his route, Farrell thinks sorrowfully about Modestine, which makes her think of autumn in New Zealand. This in turn leads to thoughts of young steers being taken from their mothers. And so Farrell meanders.
            Farrell’s tangents vary from the transfer of power, to divorce, resurrection, tuberculosis, love, literature, and crisis. This sounds heavy, but the book is balanced by her sharp wit and evocative prose. She has the poet’s deft hand for simile. There are also the wonderfully odd details, such as Stevenson dying of a brain hemorrhage while making mayonnaise with his wife (somehow making up for Modestine). Walking is in her blood, Farrell reveals. Her father worked as a meter reader after the war so he could work outside. Her great grandfather ‘pushed a barrow over the Kilmog to fetch sugar and flour from Dunedin’. She too admits to being restless in confined spaces.

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Filed Under: biography, poetry

Touch and Go

February 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Tony Beyer
The movie may be slightly different, Vincent O’Sullivan (Victoria University Press, 2011) 150 pp., $30.00;
Shift, Rhian Gallagher (Auckland University Press, 2011) 74 pp., $24.99
 
If ever a title was deliberately misleading, here it is. This movie is still running, there is no way in which it could be any different (it’s already different enough), and the same script writer, director, star, producer and editor reappears in a dazzling array of get-ups. The voice that oversees the performance in many guises — rhymed aphorism, yarn, parable, philosophical speculation, or Vinnie O the Godfather laying down the literary lore — is unerringly that of a confident, accomplished poet who certainly doesn’t see why he can’t have a go at anything he chooses. It’s so refreshing that Vincent O’Sullivan seems open to all sorts of poems, seeing each as worth writing in itself, not just as part of a scheme (after all, he is the scheme).
            The focus on making one’s own movie or meaning emerges early in the book with such poems as ‘Channel X’ and the deftly rhymed ‘The case against …’. The latter also introduces the parallel idea that while you may be telling your own story, everyone else’s may be different, or contradictory, or not a story at all. If at times the avuncular ebullience is a bit much, we can return to the hard-earned compassion of  ‘Late morning, call it’ and ‘Between the lines’, or the genuinely complex but unpretentious cultural awareness of ‘When’, or ‘Evening with friends’. There is also poignant, perhaps initially unresolved memory in ‘On the same road you can’t help thinking’ and ‘Once, as a student’. Memory ruminated into present wisdom, without nostalgia.

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Filed Under: poetry

Struggling Out of a European Crucible

February 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Tasha Haines
Dark Arts, by Leo Bensemann, edited by Peter Simpson (Holloway Press, Auckland) Edition of 100. $300.
 
Dark Arts is a collection of mostly unpublished essays given as talks by Leo Bensemann circa the 1950s on the subjects of the history of printing, typography, book illustration, graphic arts, the Caxton Press, and The Group. Peter Simpson uncovered the essays during his research for his book Fantastica: The World of Leo Bensemann (Auckland University Press, 2011). Leo Bensemann (1912–1986) was remarkably a printmaker/illustrator, typographer, printer, and painter. He was born in Takaka, New Zealand of German and Anglo-Irish ancestry. Bensemann didn’t do well at school, which in no way hampered his later success. Peter Simpson calls him an ‘autodidact’ who ‘took to printing like a duck to water.’ Bensemann was involved at the inception of Christchurch’s Caxton Press in 1935 under Denis Glover. He was also a member of a group of artists working in Christchurch from 1927 known as The Group and including (at various times) the likes of Rita Angus, Colin McCahon, Doris Lusk, and Toss Woollaston.
            Simpson says in the introduction to Dark Arts that the book is ‘not an original contribution to history or theory’. He suggests that it is rather more intimate than that, as a notebook or journal might be. It is a ‘place where original ideas can be seen first hand.’ Both Fantastica and Dark Arts reveal the character and contribution of Leo Bensemann, but they do it in different ways; where Fantastica is a judiciously illustrated ‘coffee table book’ that carefully explains the key works and biographical details of Bensemann’s career, Dark Arts shows the man himself ‘talking’ about his topics in his articulate and rousing manner; it is a book for the initiated, right down to its manifesto-style cover inscribed with Bensemann’s occult-ish heraldic crest. The hefty price of $300 for the book also requires a certain degree of commitment on the behalf of the buyer-reader.

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Filed Under: arts and culture

Appassionato

December 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Helen Watson White
The Violinist: Clare Galambos Winter, Holocaust Survivor, by Sarah Gaitanos (Victoria University Press, 2011) 280 pp., $40.00.

‘On the morning of Sunday 19 March 1944, Klari was at an orchestra rehearsal in the Heavy Metalworkers’ Trades Hall when a man burst in with an urgent message for the conductor. Obviously shaken, the conductor informed the players that Germany had occupied Hungary, the army had entered Budapest and its tanks were rolling down the main boulevard. As the extreme left wing Trades Hall would be an early target, they must pack up their instruments and leave immediately, taking different routes. “Go, go, go!” he urged the stunned, mostly Jewish musicians.’
          ‘Klari’ is longtime Wellington resident Clare Galambos Winter, who, having lost most of her family in the Holocaust, survived to reach New Zealand in 1949 and make a new life in which music figured centrally.
           Sarah Gaitanos has read and journeyed widely in order to understand and present a complex historical context for what is also a very personal story. Nolar Millar, her first biography, about legendary Wellington theatre director the late Nola Millar, published in 2006, was similarly thorough, running to 408 packed pages. The Violinist, which like Nola Millar, contains an index, copious notes and a full bibliography, is more rather than less interesting for the many different research tracks she goes down. In addition to book and journal sources, a list of websites — such as www.jewishvirtuallibrary — gives readers an entrée into the extensive Holocaust literature, encompassing official records, photographs and oral history recorded over sixty-five postwar years.

          The main difference with The Violinist is that Gaitanos was able to develop a relationship with her living subject, Clare. This allowed the recording of invaluable oral interviews and full access to Clare’s own memoirs, letters, as well as a large collection of photographs — not only of her Hungarian relatives, but also of her ‘new family’ of New Zealand friends.
          Born in 1923, Clare Galambos Winter was descended from Jewish immigrants who became ‘passionately’ committed to Hungary, after emancipation in 1867, helping form the core of the country’s professional elite. Andor Galambos, her father, had also served in Hungary’s army on the side of Germany in World War I; like the many German Jews who fought for the Kaiser, he felt betrayed by his country when the Hungarian government brought in anti-Jewish laws.
          As Clare was growing up between the wars, it was with her mother’s extended family, ‘liberal, well-educated and non-religious’, that she most strongly identified, especially when they gathered for summer holidays. ‘With its parkland and forest,’ writes Gaitanos, ‘the family estate at Nemeskolta belongs to Clare’s dreamtime memories of an enchanted childhood’, with ‘a big annual hunt, wonderful harvest festivals, tennis parties, gypsy music, colourful costumes, dances and concerts. Klari’s father sang and everyone played the piano.’
Music was at the heart of this pre-war life. Klari’s grandmother introduced her to the classics, playing piano music of Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms; her great-aunt was a student of Liszt in Vienna. Klari, who sang regularly in the synagogue choir, learnt to play the piano first, and then — what became a lifelong commitment — the violin. As a teenager, she found ‘a beautiful meshing together of people’ in a local orchestra.
          Shocking stories started to reach the fourteen-year-old Klari — of Germany’s invasion of Austria, and of ‘people they knew being arrested and not heard of again.’ (Since 1922, the Galambos family had lived in Szombathely, close to the Austrian border.) Hitler — popularly called the ‘mad dog’ — was not, however, considered a threat to ‘civilized’ Hungary. Besides, wrote Clare in her three-part memoir, ‘there seemed to be more important things to think about, such as school, music, violin, boys …’.
          Gaitanos makes a very good job of knitting together the parallel rise of fascist powers in Germany and Hungary, with legislation denying Jews’ rights to travel, trade or work other than forced labour, and finally to any kind of citizenship at all. She also describes how personal reports of atrocities in Poland were at first thought not to be credible, since they were so extreme. Elie Wiesel himself did not, she discovered, believe the deportations and slaughter described by one witness who had escaped execution in 1942.
          In that year Klari was studying violin, music history, theory and orchestral practice in Budapest at the Fodor, a private music academy. Athough the rumours in her girls’ hostel were ‘terrifying’, few knew of the Nazis’ Wannsee meeting of January 1942, in which agreement was reached on the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’. In 1943, even when informed of the many death camps in full operation, Hungary’s Jewish leaders shut their ears and ignored the implications. The subsequent German occupation of Hungary in March 1944 stunned them, along with the whole country.
          Gaitanos could not have invented a more shocking and dramatic turning-point to her story. Klari hurriedly prepares to return home to her family, but at the station — wearing a ‘very smart’ blue coat with yellow fox-fur and carrying violin, handbag and hatbox — she is shoved into a concrete room to stand for three nights, crammed in tightly with thirty other women whose only crime is that they’re Jews. In a matter of weeks the recently built ghetto in her town is being emptied out by the first transports of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, in ‘the largest and fastest deportation operation of the Holocaust’.
          Maps, diagrams and photos of the complex and of the inmates at Auschwitz-Birkenau help make real an experience that Clare can only dimly recall: ‘I stepped out of myself and anything that happened there … was so far from what I was. I never even thought of my violin. I never thought of anything.’ The chance of surviving was, however, greater ‘if you had someone’, and for Klari that was her aunt Rozsi, who ‘slept, sat, stood to be counted, queued for food, cared for’ her through five weeks at Birkenau and seven months at Allendorf, where the pair worked at a munitions factory over a winter that was ‘exceptionally harsh’.
          After liberation in 1945, aunt and niece returned home, expecting to be re-united with family members — a hope that proved hollow. Only one cousin remained to welcome them; Clare wrote in her memoir: ‘It was beyond ordinary grief. It was utter nihil.’ There was another cousin, though, who had gone to New Zealand before the war, who offered to help them emigrate here. After two years of intense difficulty in an environment ‘morally, socially, politically and economically bankrupt’, Klari and Rozsi left Europe on a steamship from Marseilles.
          At this point (Chapter 7), a second biography begins: the life of 25-year-old violinist Clare, living with her Aunt Rosie in a two-storey art-deco house in Lower Hutt, and artistically ‘adopted’ by a Wellington family, the McKenzies. Because the cousin’s family who helped their immigration did not want to publish their own Jewishness, Clare was at first cut off from Wellington’s Hungarian community, who were mostly Jews. Clare found another community among Wellington’s musicians, when she auditioned for an orchestra within weeks of arrival. There were Jews in this community too, among refugee musicians of the pre-war diaspora, and later among the many distinguished musical visitors to the city.
          The book’s final four chapters, or ‘movements’ – Appassionato, Resoluto, Doloroso, Grazioso – follow Clare’s 32-year career with the National Orchestra under different conductors and names, rehearsing, travelling and performing all over the country — and overseas; her ‘joyous and bohemian’ life with Swedish cellist and bandsman Karl Kallhagen, whom she later married; her learning to become a New Zealander, taking citizenship in 1955 and buying a house in Mt Victoria; Rosie’s death in 1965 and Karl’s in 1977; her close friendship with Carol McKenzie and Carol’s illness and death; love and marriage with her doctor, Otto Winter, with whom she returned to the synagogue, and his death in 1990.
Many lives, indeed: not just one, even in two halves.
          Music was always important to Clare as representing, beyond language and circumstance, a shared humanity. It was her solace in Allendorf when the officers gave her a violin to play so that they could dance; later, in Wellington, when events like the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann ‘stirred the pot’ uncomfortably, she took to the music with a passion that blew away everything but the playing. It may be said that the Holocaust ‘defined her’; then again it was music which both recalled her suffering, says Gaitanos, and transcended it. Clare herself describes the ‘shattering’ music of Shostakovich as ‘like flying into some absolutely rarefied air’.
          This, however, is a biography which is essentially down-to-earth and faithful in the telling of a life-story. However, just as the Nola Millar biography gave a detailed sense of Wellington’s interconnected theatre life in the 1950s and 1960s, and of the development of Toi Whakaari, the New Zealand Drama School, so The Violinist: Clare Galambos Winter, Holocaust Survivor offers, together with its many other strands, a richly interesting take on the development of classical music performance locally, along with an account of the rise of what has become a world-class musical institution: the National Orchestra — now known as the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.



HELEN WATSON WHITE has degrees in English and theology from the University of Otago, and for five years was sole editor at University of Otago Press. She is a freelance editor, writer and arts reviewer.

-45.8787605170.5027976

Filed Under: biography, history

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