Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Devastating Losses and Creative Reparation

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Penelope Todd

Paper Nautilus: A trilogy by Michael Jackson (Otago University Press, 2019), 272pp., $35

‘I create so I can leave some trace of my existence.’ So wrote master watercolourist Xu Min. I open this review with a quotation from one of the author’s exemplars, since Michael Jackson argues that we are indistinct in ourselves, and more or less created from interactions with our ‘significant others’.

For an author with an avowedly nebulous sense of self, Michael Jackson has produced an impressively concrete body of work. An internationally renowned anthropologist, he has published more than thirty volumes of poetry, ethnography, fiction and memoir. With The Paper Nautilus he has wavered and created a threefold hybrid. The nautilus—paper-thin egg-case of the pelagic octopus—might represent the fragile self or the book covers themselves, inviting the question of whether the life or the pages can safeguard all they are asked to contain. The book, as Jackson writes, ‘begins discursively with … loosely connected essays and gradually morphs into a memoir of a marriage and a friendship, only to be reinvented as a work of fiction’ (p.12). [Read more…]

A Woman and Her Time

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Karin Warnaar

In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot: Selected fiction by Greville Texidor (Victoria University Press, 2019), 304 pp., $30

There’s a story in this collection of short fiction by Greville Texidor called, simply, ‘Elegy’. That it’s set in an actual country churchyard appeals disproportionately to my sense of humour, as does the story itself, which is an arch observation of the bohemian left in mid-twentieth century New Zealand, with a possible whiff of Glover’s magpies. Another line from Thomas Gray’s poem could be applied to Texidor: the one about the flowers that blush unseen. Texidor’s literary bloom was brief and barely acknowledged at the time, but literature has a lot of one-hit wonders. [Read more…]

Crawling Through Brambles of History

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Arihia Latham

The Wild Card by Renée (The Cuba Press, 2019) 246pp., $35

I have a sister who was adopted. It was this unspoken thing, mostly. It was a fact that shimmered behind her eyes. The way she looked at me, our younger brother and our dad, the way she would shut down and simmer with feelings I couldn’t fathom. I went with her to meet her birth father when I was fourteen and she was nineteen. It was pretty tough. I think we had both hoped it would ease the tension in her bones but it didn’t. Something between us unravelled after that; I felt a disconnect in my sister, a resignation that floored the family house with hardwood. Reading The Wild Card by the matriarch of New Zealand literature, Renée, is like being let under the floorboards of genealogical trauma, crawling through brambles of history till we come out into the uncomfortable glare of the opening-night lights of the present. [Read more…]

Dystopia in a Time of Dystopia

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Gina Cole

Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy: Volume 1 edited by Marie Hodgkinson (Paper Road Press, 2019), 194pp., $30

An unabashed Queer Pasifika Indiginerd geek, I am sitting in alert-level four lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic and reviewing a science fiction/fantasy anthology. The irony is that fate has placed me within a narrative found in dystopian fiction as I read dystopian fiction. I keep picturing the meme doing the social-media rounds, of a ginger cat sitting on an empty bookshelf in a bookstore, the caption: ‘Postapocalyptic books have been moved to current affairs.’ This riff on our real-world rupture speaks to the ever-shifting nature of speculative fiction categories, while the cat is the epitome of a smug opportunist sitting in the little warm footprints left behind by migrating books. [Read more…]

Cerebral Punch

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Siobhan Harvey

Friday Prayers by Tony Beyer (Cold Hub Press, 2019), 40pp., $19.50; By the Lapels by Wes Lee (Steele Roberts, 2019), 76pp., $25; Neon Daze by Amy Brown (Victoria University Press, 2019), 143pp., $25; Moral Sloth by Nick Ascroft (Victoria University Press, 2019), 80pp., $25

Tony Beyer’s Friday Prayers proves the truth of that old adage: big things come in small packages. A chapbook, forty pages and five poems long perhaps, but therein lies such mastery of concept, language, form and evocation that it seems larger and longer, packing more cerebral punch than the sum of its parts.

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