Blog Archives

Unearthing skeletons, John McCrystal

Daughters of Messene
Maggie Rainey-Smith
Makaro Press, $35.00, ISBN 9780994117267

Something Else
David Parkyn (Sally Griffin illus)
Piedog Press, $38.00, ISBN 9780473321505

“There are only two or three human stories,” as Willa Cather once said, “and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” It is as true in literature as it is in life, which is why, for all the apparently endless ingenuity of storytellers, most narratives end up fitting a mere handful of genres.

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Love and war, Murray Bramwell

Love as a Stranger
Owen Marshall
Vintage, $38.00, ISBN 9781775538578

The Antipodeans
Greg McGee
Upstart Press, $38.00, ISBN 9781927262030

In his captivating new novel, Love as a Stranger, Owen Marshall immediately greets the reader with portents. The epigraph quotes the 17th-century dramatist and poet, Pedro Calderon de la Barca: “When love is not madness, it is not love.” And the opening sentence in the opening chapter, set in the present,  but located in a 19th-century Auckland cemetery, establishes with a limpid calm a story that is both pleasingly, disarmingly familiar and subtly marbled with a sinister unease:

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Walking in the real world, Owen Marshall

Dad Art  
Damien Wilkins
Victoria University Press, $30.00,
ISBN 9781776560561

Acoustic engineer Michael Stirling is divorced, in contact through a dating site with apparently grieving Chrissie, tending a father in a dementia unit, living in Wellington’s Sanctum Apartments having lost his house, coping with a minor surgical procedure, learning te reo Māori and providing temporary accommodation for his daughter Samantha who has arrived from Auckland roped to a young Māori man as an artistic experiment. Enough to be going on with. The mid-life crisis is a well-worn theme in modern fiction, but Damien Wilkins gives it a welcome and spirited outing.

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

The Sharp end of the stick, Catherine Robertson

Novelist and reviewer Catherine Robertson takes the pulse of local book reviewing

“Tame, dull, lazy, cowardly and predictable” is how Iain Sharp described New Zealand’s book reviewers in an opinion piece for website The Spinoff (March 23). He called for us to be less “gutless”, more “mean-spirited”, and to stop “talking tactfully through our rear ends”. He singled out round-up reviews and certain blogs as especially pointless, and called for an end to the bland and saccharine “Age of the Timid”.

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Posted in Comment

Poem – Fiona Roberton

Dad When I go to visit him at 4:30 on a Friday he thinks Sunday and looks into my eyes as if I might know. I don’t. I don’t even know when his dinner time is. We occupy different worlds

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Posted in Poem

Hero worship, Gyles Beckford

A Few Hares to Chase: The Life and Economics of Bill Phillips
Alan Bollard
Auckland University Press, $40.00
ISBN 9781869408299

The sages have long counselled that you should never meet your heroes. Should that be extended to writing about them? Alan Bollard has indulged his hero worship in this hagiography of the largely unknown, outside of economic circles, Bill Phillips. “You don’t meet geniuses many times in your life,” Bollard said in a recent RNZ National interview.

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Posted in Biography, Non-fiction, Review

Changed, changed utterly, Diane Comer

Earthquakes & Butterflies Kathleen Gallagher Wickcandle Books, $35.00, ISBN 9780473332327 Kathleen Gallagher’s Earthquakes & Butterflies is a work of profound beauty and healing for all of us who experienced the Christchurch earthquakes, however near or far we were from the

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Consecrated ground, Ian Lochhead

Historic Churches: A Guide to Over 60 Early New Zealand Churches
Linda Burgess (Robert Burgess photographer)
Random House, $50.00, ISBN 9781775537335

Worship: A History of New Zealand Church Design
Bill McKay (Jane Ussher photographer)
Godwit, $85.00, ISBN 9781775538363

One of the inexplicable paradoxes of the human condition is the way in which the religious impulse leads, irresistibly, to the creation of beauty, but also, with seemingly equal passion, to its destruction. Throughout history, buildings and works of art have been created to serve religion, only to be destroyed by reforming zealots who see such works as inimical to worship. The iconoclastic purges of the early Christian churches, the destruction of images and the demolition of monastic buildings during the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century and, in our own day, the dynamiting of monumental Buddha figures by the Taliban in Afghanistan, all testify to these contradictory urges.

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Posted in Architecture, Non-fiction, Review

Of one kind and another, Simon Hay

The Pounamu Prophecy
Cindy Williams
Rhiza Press, $28.50 ISBN 9781925139457

The Seer’s Wolf
Barbara Petrie
Bridgidada Press, $33.00 ISBN 9780473318154

Waitapu
Helen Margaret Waaka
Escalator Press, $30.00 ISBN 9780994118615

Cindy Williams’s romance The Pounamu Prophecy is the story of Helene and James finding their way back to each other after the spark has gone from their marriage.

As a romance, it’s not a book which asks readers to do much work. The characters are largely stereotypes, events require minimal interpretation, and life has clearly visible meaning. (Plot spoilers follow.) The book’s gender politics are likewise a product of the genre: it is Helene rather than James who needs to learn and change, and what she needs to learn is not to put her career ahead of his.

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Tipping points, S. T.

First Lady – From Boyhood to Womanhood: The Incredible Story of New Zealand’s Sex-change Pioneer 
Liz Roberts with Alison Mau
Upstart Press, $40.00, ISBN 9781927262375

Sexual Cultures in Aotearoa New Zealand Education
Alexandra C Gunn and Lee A Smith (eds)
Otago University Press, $45.00,
ISBN 9781877578687

2014 was the transgender tipping point. At least that’s what Time Magazine declared, with its front cover featuring the transgender actress Laverne Cox poised mid-step, svelte and powerful, beside the subheading “Men cannot become women. Women cannot become men”. This heading  – possibly perplexing to those unfamiliar with transgender issues – is part of the media’s growing sensitivity towards trans identities: if someone born male wants to be a woman, then they always were a woman; it is society that categorised them as a man.

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Posted in Gender, Non-fiction, Review, Sociology
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