Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady: such an adolescent cliché, you could say, not to mention a literary one. Spirited young thing falls in thrall to a superficially sophisticated older man, and ruins her life. The Victorians were apparently…
The High Jump: A New Zealand Childhood Elizabeth Knox Victoria University Press, $24.95, ISBN 0864733372 Anyone who grew up in New Zealand in the 1960s and ’70s can bask in the nostalgia of Elizabeth Knox’s trilogy The High Jump…
laminations Murray Edmond Auckland University Press, $19.95, ISBN 1869402227 In the poem “Can that Mango” from Murray Edmond’s latest book, the following lines are spoken (or so a note informs us) by one of two angels who are discussing a…
The Curative Charlotte Randall Penguin, $24.95, ISBN 0140297537 This is an amazing and amazingly good novel. The second novel is supposed to be the hardest but any reader coming to this one “blind” would judge it to be the work…
The Cassino Legacy Michael Wall Penguin, $19.95, ISBN 0140288368 Cardinal Sins Michael Wall HarperCollins, $19.95, ISBN 1869503619 Michael Wall wants to see his name on the airport bookshelves of the world. He is making serious and professional efforts to write,…
The Book of Fame Lloyd Jones Penguin, $29.95, ISBN 0140296948 New Zealanders love sport. The truth of this frequently-heard comment is daily demonstrated by the amount of space our newspapers allocate to sporting activities. Success on the cricket pitch, putting…
Hello to Berlin, Cilla McQueen
New Zealand writers abroad A German visitor to the Berlin Colloquium held in Wellington in August mentioned that she felt so “far away” that the New Zealand television news seemed to have little relevance. Far away from where? I wondered,…
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