Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Stories to Outlive Us

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Emma Espiner 

Ngā Kete Mātauranga: Māori scholars at the research interface by Jacinta Ruru & Linda Waimarie Nikora (eds) (Otago University Press, 2021), 340pp., $60

Ngā Kete Mātauranga, a collection of stories from twenty-four leading Māori researchers, creates a virtual community for tauira, academics and whānau to experience whakawhanaungatanga with a constellation of scholars who speak to us in their own words. Edited by Jacinta Ruru and Linda Waimarie Nikora, this repository of knowledge is the result of a partnership initiative between Ngā Pae o te Maramatanga and the Royal Society Te Apārangi and was published this year by the Otago University Press.

It is moving to encounter so many Māori researchers in one place. Indigenous scholars are thinly spread, often isolated in institutions with little support or recognition, and the contributors to this book relate their personal experience of this lonely reality. In the kōrero whakamutunga which closes the book, the editors remark: ‘We would confidently guess that most university departments today employ maybe one fully tenured Māori academic staff member at best.’ We know from the published work of researchers Tara McAllister, Sereana Naepi, Joanna Kidman, Reremoana Theodore and Olivia Rowley that Māori make up only five percent of academics in our universities.  [Read more…]

Fish out of water

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Wendy Parkins

The Swimmers by Chloe Lane (Victoria University Press, 2020), 218 pp., $30; Victory Park by Rachel Kerr (Mākaro Press, 2020), 246 pp, $35

The Swimmers by Chloe Lane and Victory Park by Rachel Kerr are both debut novels longlisted in this year’s Ockham awards (Victory Park went on to win the prize for best first novel), but this is not the only thing these books have in common. They are both also about women living precariously.

Erin, the protagonist of The Swimmers, is a postgraduate student in Auckland working part time in an art gallery. Her tenuous hold on things is not due simply to limited employment prospects, nor to her tendency to self-sabotage—perhaps best represented by her dubious relationship choices. Lane’s novel deftly describes the existential uncertainties and mis-steps of early adulthood more generally, when the strong pull towards freedom and independence strains against the emotional bonds—and baggage—connecting us to our family of origin. [Read more…]

Countering Commonplace Narratives 

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Giovanni Tiso

From Suffrage to a Seat in the House: The path to Parliament for New Zealand women by Jenny Coleman (Otago University Press, 2020), 338pp., $45; Crossing the Lines: The story of three homosexual New Zealand soldiers in World War II by Brent Coutts (Otago University Press, 2020), 336pp., $49.95

Two recent books counter commonplace narratives about Aotearoa’s social and political history. 

In From Suffrage to a Seat in the House: The path to Parliament for New Zealand women Jenny Coleman traces the stalling of the women’s franchise after the success of the suffrage petition and subsequent Electoral Bill of 1893. From that moment, it took an extraordinary twenty-six years for women to win the right to be elected to Parliament, and fourteen years after that for the first woman to actually win a seat—by which time the country we like to remind ourselves was trailblazing had been overtaken by a number of liberal democracies, including Britain. [Read more…]

‘The worst thing you can ever do’

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Sally Blundell 

Loss Adjustment by Linda Collins (Awa Press, 2020), 300pp., $40

‘I will commit the worst thing you can ever do to someone who loves you,’ writes 17-year-old Victoria. ‘Killing yourself. The scary thing is, I’m okay with that.’

Fifteen days later, and six pages into Loss Adjustment, that okay-ness shatters what should have been just another school day, when New Zealand journalist Linda Collins and her partner, photographer Malcolm McLeod, are driven the short distance from their Singapore apartment to find their daughter lying broken and lifeless on a concrete-tiled path. 

Their world stops; their lives slam into a wall of confusion, despair, irresolvable grief.  [Read more…]

Her Father’s Daughter

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Philip Temple

The Mirror Book: A memoir by Charlotte Grimshaw (Penguin, 2021), 320pp, $38

This memoir is from the daughter of someone who has been portrayed, especially in Auckland, as New Zealand’s greatest living writer. C.K. (Karl) Stead, prominent in the local literary world for 60 years, has been given the country’s greatest honour, membership of the Order of New Zealand, primarily for his fiction and poetry. But his uncompromising literary criticism and public disputes with other writers were the agencies that kept him mostly in the minds of the writing community, to the extent that a Metro article in 1990 was headed ‘Blaspheming against the Pieties: Why the literati hate C.K. Stead’. He was also accused of too often portraying himself and his intimates as characters in his fiction. In a 2019 interview for the Academy of NZ Literature, Stead responded with, ‘Stories are stories and create their own reality.’ In fiction, the ‘border between what really happened and what is invented is always open, and if the writer doesn’t put it on record, there’s no way of knowing when and where it is crossed’. [Read more…]

The Treachery of Words (and Images)

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Robyn Maree Pickens

This Is Not a Pipe by Tara Black (Victoria University Press, 2020), 160pp., $28; Timelights by Martin Edmond (Lasavia Publishing, 2020), 196pp., $37.86

Before I read This Is Not a Pipe by Pōneke-based comic-maker Tara Black and Timelights by Aotearoa-born, Sydney-based writer Martin Edmond, I was reading literary criticism/affect theory on how to ‘read’ texts. ‘Read’ in this context is best described as reading with the intent to critique, to interpret, to analyse. These texts on reading debate different methodological approaches to criticism, interpretation and analysis, such as suspicious or paranoid reading and reparative reading elaborated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003). In highly simplified terms, suspicious reading assumes a position of mastery, and reparative reading one of pleasure. The apparent binary between the two approaches, which Sedgwick nuanced to hold ambiguity, has nevertheless obtained in subsequent theoretical discussions as either ‘for’ or ‘against’ positions, or has been the subject of a recuperative oscillation between the two.  [Read more…]