Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

In Pursuit of Something He Is Never Sure He Deserves

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Chris Else

Now When It Rains by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman (Steele Roberts, 2018), 286 pp., $34.99

I sometimes wonder about the viability of literary memoir. Why people write them seems obvious enough – there comes a time in the lives of some of us when our pasts demand to be examined – but why anyone should read them is more problematic. Three reasons come to mind. First, a fascination with a writer’s work might lead readers to seek exegetical insight from the circumstances of the life. Second, the mystique that surrounds the business of writing might result in a search for inspiration and illumination of the creative process. Third, we might assume that because writers can express themselves they will provide incisive psychological observations of a more general kind even when working with biographical material that, in other hands, might be unutterably dull. All these expectations might be satisfied by a good literary biography but, with a memoir, they would seem to set up an inevitable mismatch with the writer’s intention. The creation of any work moves from a state of potential to one of the actual, a process that is inevitably one of limitation. The result is always a version of what might have been written. In most genres this scarcely matters but with memoir there might seem to be an unresolvable paradox. If my aim is to realise certain things about myself, how can I be satisfied with a mere version? And if I am not engaged in realisation, what am I about? Looking for affirmation or attention? Trying to manage my public image? Providing an object lesson? Indulging myself? [Read more…]

Trapped Behind Walls of Glass

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Tina Shaw

The Sound of Breaking Glass by Kirsten Warner (Mākaro Press, 2018), 290 pp., $35

In a Spinoff article (21 November 2018), writer Kirsten Warner, referencing the Holocaust, has commented, ‘It was a surprise to me that there were other people who saw the barbed wire behind the eyelids. My father hadn’t been in a camp, but I still had the horrors.’ She goes on to say: ‘I wanted to write a story from the next generation’s point of view, to stay there and not be diverted into the big, overshadowing parental one.’

In her debut novel Warner explores this concept through Christel, the daughter of Holocaust survivor Conrad and his wife Stella – although the parental story, looming large, still shapes and informs much of the work. [Read more…]

Honour and Honesty 

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Helen Watson White

Gallipoli to the Somme: Recollections of a New Zealand infantryman by Alexander Aitken (Auckland University Press, 2018), 264 pp., $39.99; The Anzac Violin: Alexander Aitken’s story by Jennifer Beck and Robyn Belton (Scholastic, 2018), 36 pp., $27.99

For the ordinary infantryman in World War I, a period of ‘active service’ was lived in two modes: you were either engaged in fighting at close range, or you were waiting. In waiting mode you could be travelling to a battle site, the location of which was a mystery, or you had arrived, and remained mystified. This is the much-repeated scenario in Alexander Aitken’s memoir, Gallipoli to the Somme: Recollections of a New Zealand infantryman, first published in 1963 and now re-issued with an introduction, chronology, notes and commentary by Alex Calder. [Read more…]

Mythlexia

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Siobhan Harvey

Dancing with Dragons by Ila Selwyn (Westridge Publishing, 2018), 112 pp., $20; Tongue Burglar by Jane Blaikie (Steele Roberts, 2018), 69 pp., $24.99; Poeta: Selected and new poems by Cilla McQueen (Otago University Press, 2018), 296 pp., $39.95

Once women were the subjects, not originators, of myths. Aphrodite, Pandora, Medusa, Baba Yaga, the Ice Maiden: the litany of women portrayed in fables as deceitful, shameful, manipulative and destructive is unfortunately extensive. Women, such depictions told us, must either conform or risk censure, perhaps even death.

It took a long time before women could control the creation of narrative. Since doing so, we’ve reshaped not just the voice and the subject of storytelling, but also its style and significance. In this, the ancient art of mythmaking isn’t dead, but rather is prevalent and, with each new set of storytellers, refreshed. In three recent poetry collections – Ila Selwyn’s Dancing with Dragons, Jane Blaikie’s Tongue Burglary and Cilla McQueen’s Poeta: Selected and new poems – there is evidence of contemporary women authors who both take back the practice of mythmaking and – as instigators and controllers of narrative – bring fresh meaning to the traditional use of story as a medium of social and personal message. [Read more…]

They Fuck You Up, Your Mum and Dad

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Rajorshi Chakraborti
The Crazed Wind by Nod Ghosh (Truth Serum Press, 2018), 140 pp., $12.00; Swim by Avi Duckor-Jones (Seizure by Brio Books, 2018), 172 pp., $20

In an essay from his 1995 collection Testaments Betrayed, Milan Kundera dreams eloquently about novelists freeing themselves from orthodox expectations of plotting, scene-setting and chronology:

That is what delighted me about [Rabelais] and … about other early novelists: they talk about what fascinates them and they stop when the fascination stops. Their freedom of composition set me dreaming: of writing without fabricating suspense, without constructing a plot and working up its plausibility, of writing without describing a period, a milieu, a city; of abandoning all that and holding on to only the essential; that is to say: creating a work in which … the novelist would never be forced – for the sake of form and its dictates – to stray by even a single line from what [she] cares about, what fascinates [her]. (Kundera, 157–58) [Read more…]