Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

What Happens Next

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Lisa Samuels
Kingdom of Alt, Jack Ross (Titus Books, Auckland, 2010) 240 pp., $45.00


If Jack Ross has not read J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, someone should get it for him. Kingdom of Alt has some of the serial agonistic airs of that work, but it is  more dispersed: Kingdom of Alt is a collection of tales and takes involved with relations between real-life events and imaginary fictions that score the traumas of those real lives. The narrators include variously: a twenty-or-so female university student, a thirtyish divorcee taking evening poetry classes and making freakish death films from video fragments, a middle-aged man, Jack Ross himself as the speaking author, and other, both fragmentary and unified, human-ish points of view.
            The book opens with ‘Trauma’, a compelling short story that lampoons the difficult-subject liberal university course, the traumatised people who take it, and the suiciding student who seems to be the inevitable result of that equation. The story is largely presented as a series of journal entries including marginal edits from the narrator. These edits tend towards smoothing out her self-presentation, so that the student will come across as nicer than her first-thought compositional impulses might indicate. Thus ‘correcting’ the university journal or essay is associated with self-editing as making nice. By extension, smoothing out and correcting writing – making ‘good’, finished art – is presented as a making-nice of the painful equations of human culture. Kingdom of Alt does not want to make nice in that way. The fictive framing of this story, as with others in this collection, is multiple: real-life journalism, psychological theory, an embedded story, and the draft composition journal bracket each other, while the tale moves toward its ‘resolution’ of sorrow and sympathetic incomprehension.

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How to Layer an Ensemble

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Siobhan Harvey
From Under the Overcoat, Sue Orr (Vintage, 2011), 348 pp., $29.99

Clothes: whether it’s the beret worn by Anna Sergeevna in Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’, or the beige raincoat donned by the protagonist of Lorrie Moore’s ‘How to be an Other Woman’, or Nie Chuanqing’s ‘blue gown of lined silk’ in Eileen Chang’s ‘Love in a Fallen City’ (i), or the ‘dark mohair’ bristling at the nape of tragic heroine of Maurice Duggan’s ‘Blues for Miss Laverty’ (ii), the garb writers choose to dress their characters in not only offers the kind of detail that makes prose convincing and compelling, but resonates with thematic and symbolic effect.

Of course, like most literary motifs, clothes are binaries. Worn by characters to suggest inner emotions — their atmospheric and cerebral worlds — this clothing is also simultaneously put on by the writer each time he or she picks up a pen and begins to place words beside each other to flesh out, develop and refine the wearer. The notion of waning, venereal Flaubert donning Félicité’s dimity kerchief, red skirt, grey stockings and apron whilst penning his poignant short story ‘A Simple Heart’ in 1877, or love-struck but vilified Mikhail Bulgakov wearing the typist’s fil de Perse stockings in his satirical novel Heart of a Dog might amuse or appal, but figuratively speaking, during each text’s development, so it transpired.

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The Displaced Person

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Ian Wedde
Genji Monogatari, Mark Young (Rockhampton: Otoliths, 2010) 60 pp., $14.95.  At Trotsky’s Funeral, Mark Young (Dunedin: Kilmog Press, 2010) 44 pp., $45.00.  the allegrezza ficcione, Mark Young (Rockhampton: Otoliths, 2006, 2007, 2008) 80 pp., $14.95

I first heard rather than read Mark Young’s poetry in the 1960s at Barry Lett Galleries and at the Wynyard Tavern in Auckland, where I was a student and had aspirations to be a poet. What was immediately striking about his poems then, and remains so now, was a quality of displacement. There seemed to be three sources of this displacement. The voice I heard (and the texts I later read) had a deliberating, impersonal quality, in marked (so to speak) contrast to the jongleur or troubadour voice of Dave Mitchell, who often performed with Young. Then, the language itself, in its internal (pronouns, subject/object relations, point-of-view) and external (line endings and enjambement, syllabic weight, visual scoring) exercised a persistently sceptical and frugal sense of affect. And finally, the references, even when local in terms of a scenography, seemed most often to have been mediated by distant influences and references – LeRoi Jones (‘Gonna roll the bones’): Black / gamin / disdains all games / of chance, Robert Duncan (‘The Tigers’): Within the tiger / reels a turmoil / of desires, William Carlos Williams (‘The intention’) (i) The intention is / that I / refurbish / the room – French poets (Verlaine), artists (Magritte), and jazz musicians (most often Miles Davis).
            To these effects one might add Young’s enjoyment, and deployment, of arcane words and concepts; in one poem, whose title I will footnote because of its length, he riffs across the following: belvedere, syzygny, xiphoid, ylang ylang, widdershins, giaour, anthropophagi, lucubration, pleonastic, adespota – pretty much for the hell and pleasure of it (ii) However this, like a certain asperity in Young’s tone, is less a measure of displacement than a trace of aloof character, a kind of impersonal personality – a placement or presence marked by its adroit discretion.

What this added up to could be described as negative romanticism: subjectivity identified by being uninterested in winning sympathy or affection; meaning declaring itself to be uninterested in conclusions, especially transcendent ones; a presence revealed in its preference for distorted mirror-images over face-to-face disclosure; an honest preference for sleight-of-hand over ‘honesty’; and, most importantly, the poet’s liking for fictions, unreliable science, a certain droll impassivity, a relish of coat-trailing narrative, a love of the playfully esoteric.

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Reflections in a Golden Eye

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Paul Sharrad
Quinine, Kelly Ana Morey (Huia Publishers, 2010) 315 pp., NZ$35.00.

When I was a teenager living in Port Moresby, my parents decided we would take our allotted leave in New Zealand. Full of touristic bonhomie, we chatted to a taxi driver who asked where we were from. ‘Papua’, we replied breezily. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Is that North Island or South?’ Once we realised what he was on about, we explained. ‘Oh yairs,’ came the rejoinder, ‘I knew you was from the tropics; you’ve got the yeller look about yer.’ So our sense of being part of a broad Pacific community was stripped away by parochial focus and our healthy suntans reduced to a medical routine of fighting off malaria with jaundice-inducing pills. These two elements frame the recent novel Quinine.
            Once Papua New Guinea gained its independence in 1975 it began to fade from the consciousness of Australians and others who made a living there as missionaries, planters, international advisers on everything and colonial administrators. The number of non-indigenous writers producing fiction set there also dwindled. Ex-colonials like Randolph Stow (Visitants, 1979) produced some good novels — after the usual slather of colonial romance twaddle, although that influence persisted in works like Louis Nowra’s postcolonial dystopian Palu (1987). Australian freelance traveller Trevor Shearston turned a critical eye on colonial officers and missionaries in Something in the Blood (1979) and White Lies (1986). Other sojourners have turned out books based on their experience there — for example Inez Baranay with her Rascal Rain (1994) — but overseas audiences have largely lost interest in the region, unless some crisis in the news, such as the Bougainville secessionist conflict or intertribal warfare in the Solomons, gives a novel topical appeal — as with Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip.
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Renaissance Man

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Andrew Paul Wood
Fantastica: The World of Leo Bensemann, Peter Simpson (Auckland University Press, 2011), 232 pp., $75.00

If you could physically sense an author’s passion and thoroughness, Peter Simpson’s books would glow like fresh bread. His timely and lavishly illustrated Fantastica: The World of Leo Bensemann positively radiates, and yet again shows Auckland University Press to be New Zealand’s pre-eminent art book publisher.
            Artist and illustrator Bensemann was the descendent of North German immigrants from Bruchhausen-Vilsen south of Bremen, settling at Moutere, and was born in Takaka in 1912. His family moved to Nelson in the early 1920s, and that dramatic karst landscape was to become a reoccurring feature in his rich oeuvre. The German influence was also strong, manifesting in a rich vein of Romanticism in his work, embracing Holbein and Dürer, and various Medieval, folk, and expressionist sources, to complement the vivid orientalism of his drawings and landscapes.

            Outside of Canterbury Bensemann has not been well known beyond the influential Ilam mafia and the occasional reproduction in magazines in the 1940s and 1950s, though his portraits were reproduced annually in the New Zealand Arts Year Books from 1946 until 1949, and during his lifetime one article in Landfall in 1953, and a memorial in Art New Zealand shortly after his death in 1986. Since then, there have been two publications by Bensemann’s daughter Caroline Otto and at least two significant exhibitions curated by Simpson.
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