Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

A celebration of solidarity

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Alice Tawhai

A Change of Key by Adrienne Jansen (Escalator Press, 2018), 252 pp., $28

I love all the musics, but classical is my least familiar, so I wondered how I might go with Adrienne Jansen’s new novel, A Change of Key. I wasn’t even that fussed on the title, which seemed a little mundane. But music is joy, and Adrienne does good joy. Life mightn’t be flawless, but there’s music.

Using the perfect strategy of setting her story in a block of flats, Adrienne is able to show us rather than tell us (as the rules wisely decree) the lives of people who, like migratory birds, have somehow blown off course and found themselves in a cage with an open door, here at the end of the world. Their lives are rich in terms of lived experience rather than money, and political, financial and personal wind currents may prevent them from ever returning to their original place of departure. The narrative is told through the carefully plotted unfolding of the characters’ conversations and thoughts, and each short chapter is an opportunity to lay out more of the story, sometimes with a smidgeon of plot action. [Read more…]

Short, Sharp Shocks

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Lawrence Patchett

Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Michelle Elvy, Frankie McMillan and James Norcliffe (Canterbury University Press, 2018), 293 pp., $39.99

There’s a feeling of currency about flash fiction right now. The editors of Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand seek to capture – and capitalise on – this excitement around the form. Flash fiction is ‘arguably the fastest growing literary form worldwide’, they say, pointing to strong journal and competition submissions as evidence of a related surge of interest here in New Zealand. But although editors Michelle Elvy, Frankie McMillan and James Norcliffe celebrate the form’s current energy, they don’t claim any special newness for its most recent iterations. Instead they acknowledge the ‘deep roots’ of the compressed form in New Zealand literature, reaching back to the work of Katherine Mansfield and Frank Sargeson, as well as the more recent short short-story anthologies edited by Graeme Lay and Stephen Stratford from 1997. The nod to Sargeson in particular seems important. Published more than eighty years ago, his very short stories like ‘A Piece of Yellow Soap’ still read with extraordinary urgency. But if, like me, you’re relatively new to the more recent variations on shorter forms, Bonsai provides an exciting entry point.  [Read more…]

Rootful Cosmopolitans

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Lucy Sussex

The Expatriate Myth: New Zealand writers and the colonial world by Helen Bones (Otago University Press, 2018), 248pp., $35

In New Zealand it is common to talk about ‘OE’: Overseas Experience. Living in what is termed the antipodes, far from the centres of finance, population and power, fosters an attitude where travel is a rite of passage for the young. For those working in the arts it has been presented as imperative: how else would the aspiring find an audience and sufficient remuneration to survive while pursuing their calling? The siren call of London, Paris etc. began with white settlement, and it has persisted ever since. [Read more…]

Put Yourself in My Place

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Chris Tse

Summer Grass by Ginny Sullivan (Steele Roberts, 2017), 72 pp., $19.99; Edgeland and Other Poems by David Eggleton (Otago University Press, 2018), 112 pp., $27.50; View from the South by Owen Marshall with photographs by Grahame Sydney (Vintage, 2018), 208 pp., $40

It feels somewhat reductive in 2019 to be framing a review of three New Zealand poetry books with the poets’ shared exploration of place and landscape, but here we are. However, that is not to say that these three books are themselves reductive in any sense. So much of our country’s art is rooted in the land – I can still hear my university lecturers exalting the pivotal role that our celebrated landscape has played in the development of our national literature and film history. And if it’s not our own land then it’s the far-flung places we Kiwis end up in, a shared wanderlust pushing us to escape the confines of our island nation, our isolation. [Read more…]

In Vivid Colour

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Robyn Maree Pickens 

Colours of a Life: The life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid by Anna Cahill (Mary Egan Publishing in association with MacDiarmid Arts Trust, 2018), 444 pp., $80

Before I settle in to a book I like to examine its paratextual material: features such as foreword, acknowledgments and endorsements. By examining the way in which a book is framed I get a sense of how its author, subject and producers would like the book to be received. Every book embodies an agenda, and I like to see how this intersects with my reading experience. With this in mind it is worth noting that the artist Douglas MacDiarmid – the subject of Colours of a Life – is Anna Cahill’s uncle. This familial investment is underscored by the publishing relationship between Mary Egan Publishing ‘in association with MacDiarmid Arts Trust’. In other words, the book is not an independent or disinterested production. It is undoubtedly a tribute to kin by kin. This bond between subject and author has the distinct advantage of providing Cahill exceptional closeness to her subject, and has resulted in a highly detailed, intimate and warm biography of MacDiarmid. After a brief glimpse of MacDiarmid as a struggling artist in an actual garret (!) in Paris, 1953, the book assumes a chronological trajectory from the artist’s birth in Taihape, 1922, to the recent present of his long-lived life in Paris, 2017. (At the time of writing this review MacDiarmid is approaching his 96th birthday.)  [Read more…]