Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Leaping Lightly

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Breton Dukes

Aspiring by Damian Wilkins (Massey University Press, 2020), 200 pp., $22

During the winter school holidays I was with my infant son at the main playground in Alexandra. Fresh snow made a duvet on the Hawkduns as trucks, Wanaka and Queenstown bound, rolled by. Teens scrimmaged under the pines. One boy—short pastel shorts, a T-shirt, a tea-cosy-type woollen hat—broke to leap onto a picnic table.

‘Hey kids,’ he shouted, aiming his face at the playground, ‘we’re leaving!’

People looked, but nobody moved except a teenage girl who got up behind him and snatched his hat. He laughed like the Count on Sesame Street and jumped off. Who was he? Was he leading some sort of holiday programme? Wasn’t he freezing? [Read more…]

Truths and Lies That We Have to Live With 

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Cushla McKinney

Necessary Secrets by Greg McGee (Upstart Press, 2019), 298 pp., $37.99

As much as we might like to believe that our relationships are built on truth, in reality life abounds with secrets: those we tell others and those we tell ourselves; those we forget and those we choose not to know. Secrets can bind people in trust or complicity or be used as a weapon or a shield. But whether necessary or contingent, we all have knowledge we must hide for the sake of others and ourselves. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more true than within families, where the random assortment of genetics means that we may have more in common with our friends than our relations, and the conflicts and allegiances across and between generations are amplified by competition for limited material or emotional resources.  [Read more…]

My Brilliant Career

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Philip Temple

You Have a Lot to Lose: A memoir 1956–1986 by C.K. Stead (Auckland University Press, 2020), 403 pp., $49.99

Mark Twain first popularised the saying: ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’ Its origins may have derived from an earlier statement by an American judge who grouped witnesses into three classes: simple liars, damned liars and experts. The expert, he believed, did not state things he knew to be untrue, but through emphasis on certain parts of his narrative practised clever and effective evasion to present his version of the truth. This is germane to assessing any work of autobiography, in pursuit of understanding the realities of an author’s life and work, and what motives propel the narrative they want us to believe. [Read more…]

A Robot Stole My Economy

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Victor Billot 

Jobs, Robots and Us: Why the future of work in New Zealand is in our hands by Kinley Salmon (Bridget Williams Books, 2019), 304 pp., $39.95

My initial response to this book was one of relief that someone had finally bothered to write about automation from a New Zealand perspective. You would think that a technology shift like this would command strong interest in a small nation vulnerable to external shocks, but there seems to be a lack of accessible information on this topic for non-specialist readers, and this book fills a need.

Author Kinley Salmon is a bright young thinker, a Harvard graduate, an expat economist in Washington, DC, and a self-identified millennial. The cover features endorsements from international bigwigs. The style is conversational: his approach is humane, sensible, pragmatic, understated—relentlessly reasonable in that EnZed kind of way. [Read more…]

Tides of Risk, Memory and Emotion

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Helen Watson White

Moonlight Sonata by Eileen Merriman (Black Swan/Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2019) 283 pp., $38

The strength of Moonlight Sonata is that its fictional world seems ‘utterly real’, to use the words of Paula Green reviewing Pieces of You, Merriman’s debut novel, just a few years ago. This is the award-winning writer’s first adult novel, after successful young-adult stories Pieces of You, Catch Me When You Fall and Invisibly Breathing. Her fourth book in three years, Moonlight Sonata was also the second novel she published in a single year, 2019. [Read more…]