Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

If These Walls Could Talk

Leave a Comment

Sally Blundell

Home Theatre by Anthony Lapwood (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2021), 240 pp, $30

In the thirteen short stories that make up Home Theatre by Wellington writer Anthony Lapwood, the walls of the cold, rat- and ant-infested Repertory Apartments really do talk. Over time and genre, the overlapping lives of the residents in this former theatre turned radio factory turned apartment block tell stories of hurt and hope, marriage breakups, anxious parents, close friendships, straitened circumstances, and glitches in the imperfect art of time travel. Like a slow drive-by in an Edward Hopper painting, Lapwood catches glimpses of his characters’ lives through windows, tracing the backstories of those who call this dingy, recognisably Wellington block of flats home. The result is a beautifully crafted and empathetic debut collection. [Read more…]

Trying to Read Standing Up

Leave a Comment

Alan Roddick

House & Contents by Gregory O’Brien (Auckland University Press, 2022), 112pp, $29.99; Museum by Frances Samuel (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 88pp, $25; Farce by Murray Edmond (Compound Press, 2022), 98pp, $25

Gregory O’Brien’s latest book is a real treat, with its three dozen poems accompanied by twenty-three of his paintings in full colour: O’Brien the curator, putting on his own show. The paintings are not ‘illustrations’ but talk with the poems as if on equal terms, as some of their titles demonstrate: ‘Ode to a water molecule and five Canterbury rivers’, for example, or the Wordsworthian ‘Lines composed a few metres above high water, Meretoto’. ‘The uses of fondness’ is an exception, being a poem in a painting, or a painting of a poem. [Read more…]

Architectures of Absence

Leave a Comment

Kerry Lane

Come Back to Mona Vale: Life and death in a Christchurch mansion, by Alexander McKinnon (Otago University Press, 2021), 335pp, $40 

In film, one of the most effective ways to build tension is to frame a shot around something that is not there. In a two-shot with only one person, the eye is drawn relentlessly to the yawning space next to them, which cries out for balance. The root of horror is in this absence, in the certainty that there should be something with no further explanation. The more developed the structure in which the absence is embedded, the more viscerally it will be felt. 

Come Back to Mona Vale is a story about absence, told in absences. It is the first book by Alexander McKinnon, winner of the 2020 Landfall essay competition. The book relates the author’s journey to assemble a narrative of his own family, beginning with his great-grandfather, the last private owner of the Christchurch estate Mona Vale. Written over seven years, it charts the author’s exploration of his mother’s family history, from the legal and financial complexities left behind by his great-grandfather, to the personal lives of multiple generations now dead. [Read more…]

Standing Strong

Leave a Comment

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

Tina Shaw

Sista, Stanap Strong! A Vanuatu women’s anthology, edited by Mikaela Nyman and Rebecca Tobo Olul-Hossen (Victoria University Press, 2021), 192pp, $30

If ever one has viewed Vanuatu as an idyllic paradise where life is easy, Sista, Stanap Strong! will soon dispel the myth. This anthology of writing by Vanuatu women—the first of its kind—shines a light on women’s lives in the archipelago. In poems, non-fiction pieces, stories and song, themes emerge of violence towards women, a misogynistic and patriarchal society, colonialism, the importance of education, and concern for the kind of world children will one day inherit. [Read more…]

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

Leave a Comment

Sally Blundell 

A Good Winter by Gigi Fenster (Text Publishing, 2021), 272 pp, $38

By the end of the first paragraph of Gigi Fenster’s gripping novel, we know something is amiss. ‘It was a good winter’, her narrator, Olga, tells us. ‘For me it was a good winter. For Lara even. I don’t care what anyone says. The facts spoke for themselves.’ But as with Dickens, after the memorable opening of A Tale of Two Cities, the spring of hope turns into a winter of, if not despair, then foolishness and darkness. Relentlessly, inexorably, the tension implicit in this first defensive statement builds into a portrait of obsessive neediness (‘I’m not needy’, Olga says repeatedly) that drives the plot to its horrific ending on the very last page. That Fenster never slackens the pace or signposts exactly who will pay the price for her narrator’s deranged thinking is a credit to the author’s hold on the storyline and an indication of her unflagging allegiance to the manipulative, delusional and utterly awful nature of her main character.  [Read more…]

On Not Judging Books by Their Covers

Leave a Comment

Vaughan Rapatahana

Goddess Muscle by Karlo Mila (Huia Publishers, 2020), 220pp, $35; The Surgeon’s Brain by Oscar Upperton (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 96pp, $25; Home Base by Keith Westwater (The Cuba Press, 2021), 184pp, $25

On first inspection, including reading the cover blurbs, I saw that these were three very different books. Indeed, the only common thread seemed that all were published by separate Wellington-based publishers. Each one is particular in its own way. Two are poetry collections, while the third—Westwater’s—has more prose and realia than poetry crammed regimentally inside and deals solely with his army cadet years of 1964–1966. Upperton’s intriguing rich runnel of poetry never touches on Aotearoa New Zealand, contemporary or otherwise. Mila’s longer collection spans her mahi internationally from over a decade, across a variety of sectioned topoi.  [Read more…]