Blog Archives

A gentle caress and a slap in the face, Veronica Maughan

Sodden Downstream
Brannavan Gnanalingam
Lawrence and Gibson, $29.00,
ISBN 9780473410292

She walked in the hope that the tracks would lift her up, like the travelator that she marvelled at the airport, and carry her to Wellington. But there was no magic around. The bushes next to the tracks looked as if they would eat Sita up. The overhead wires looked as if they were glued on to rusty pylons. She saw smashed green beer bottles and junk mail strewn on the grass. She decided to walk on the other side of the road. If a train went past, at least she could wait half an hour for the next one. The longer she took, the less money she’d earn, but she was going to get there unless a wall of water was in the way.

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Writing the self, again, John McCrystal

Mazarine
Charlotte Grimshaw
Penguin Random House, $38.00,
ISBN 9780143771821

“Long ago”, the central character of Mazarine, Charlotte Grimshaw’s latest novel, writes, “I’d had an idea for a series of books in which the narratives were linked in the shape of a flower, with a central point and petals growing off it, because stories aren’t necessarily linear …”

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Breath-taking, Feya Durkin

Oxygen
William Trubridge
HarperCollins, $40.00,
ISBN 9781775541134

Oxygen, by William Trubridge, is a breath-taking story about one man’s quest to push his body and mind to the absolute limits. Trubridge is a professional New Zealand freediver, and Oxygen tells the story of his early days, his discovery of freediving, his ride to success, and his quest to dive 100 meters below the surface of the ocean, equipped with nothing but a single breath (and a really tight wetsuit).

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Posted in Literature, Review, Young adults

The chase of the thrill, David Hill

Baby
Annaleese Jochems 
Victoria University Press, $30.00,
ISBN 9781776561667

The Man Who Would Not See
Rajorshi Chakraborti
Penguin Random House, $38.00,
ISBN 9780143771784

Money in the Morgue
Ngaio Marsh and Stella Duffy
HarperCollins, $30.00,
ISBN 9780008207113

“I hear you like a good thriller, David,” said New Zealand Books’s courteous email. “Is that right?”

I responded with the dignified aloofness that marks all my exchanges with editors and publishers. “Oh yes. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

Actually, the resident thriller expert is my wife. Beth has shelves solid with crime classics: Christie, James (P D, not Henry), Rex Stout, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Anthony Price. She’s numbered their spines according to publication dates. She can discourse about Allingham’s aristocratic scion Albert Campion developing as books pass, whereas Price’s MI6 agent and middle-class fellow David Audley doesn’t. She and her friend since high school, Elizabeth Smither (name-dropper? moi?), talk about how Poirot’s patent-leather shoes mean he has to operate cerebrally rather than physically; how traumatic it was to see Nero Wolfe shedding weight to elude an assassin; how Agatha Christie’s other narrators, Tommy and Tuppence, need a good smack.

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

In memoriam, Jeremy Elwood 

A Pleasure to Be Here: The Best of Clarke and Dawe 1989-2017
John Clarke and Bryan Dawe
Text, $37.00,
ISBN 9781925603200

Tinkering: The Complete Book of John Clarke
John Clarke
Text, $42.00,
ISBN 9781925603194

When John Clarke passed away last April, aged 68, the announcement of his death sent shockwaves through both Australia and New Zealand. Tributes flowed from the writers, comedians, actors and filmmakers who had either worked with, or been influenced by, him, and even the politicians he so wickedly skewered in much of his writing chimed in, including the prime ministers of both nations. For those less familiar with those writings, or in need of a refresher course, two new collections should help explain why.

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Posted in Non-fiction, Review

On a global stage

Peter Dowling, president of the Publishers Association of New Zealand (PANZ), reports back from the recent Bologna Children’s Book Fair.

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Posted in Comment

The Alexander Turnbull Library turns 100

Sarah Knox (Assistant Chief Librarian) and Fiona Oliver (Curator New Zealand and Pacific Publications) of the Alexander Turnbull Library | National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa commemorate a most generous gift.

The library came into being when Alexander Turnbull – Wellington merchant, yachtsman, golfer, collector, confirmed bachelor and handsome dandy – bequeathed his library to the nation in 1918. Two years later, in 1920, the doors of the library opened to the public for the first time.

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The deep discomfort of remembering, Ann Beaglehole

All This by Chance
Vincent O’Sullivan
Victoria University Press, $35.00,
ISBN 9781776561797

All This by Chance is not a Holocaust novel nor a Jewish one, according to author Vincent O’Sullivan. It is a Kiwi story. But the book is most likely to be seen as a Holocaust novel: “about the legacy of the Holocaust” for three generations of Jewish women, as the promotion states.

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Entangled histories, Megan Dunn

Strangers Arrive: Emigrés and the Arts in New Zealand 1930-1980
Leonard Bell
Auckland University Press, $75.00,
ISBN 9781869408732

Did you realise that artist Theo Schoon, best known for his modernist photographs of rippling mud pools, also performed Balinese dance? Have you heard of the Prague-born architect Imric Porsolt, once the art critic for the Auckland Star, his writing so biting and insightful that Colin McCahon declared: “Before Mr Porsolt there was no art criticism in New Zealand”? And what of the smoking dame on the cover of Strangers Arrive: Emigrés and the Arts in New Zealand, 1930-1980, her right hand tilted just so, the smoke spooling in a plume by her lit profile; her stare snaps back at the photographer as if to say “Stranger to whom?”

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Posted in Art, Non-fiction, Review

Tracing trauma, Jane Westaway

Driving to Treblinka: A Long Search for a Lost Father
Diana Wichtel
Awa Press, $45.00,
ISBN 9781927249406

How do human beings survive horror? The answer seems to be that they do and they don’t. Some part of them is crushed and never recovers; other parts move on, around and away from the trauma, carrying on to the best of any remaining ability. This is certainly so for Diana Wichtel’s father, the subject of her memoir Driving to Treblinka. Its subtitle echoes throughout the book: A Long Search for a Lost Father. A man who was lost to his daughter, her siblings and their wider family, to the grim forces of history, and to himself.

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Posted in Memoir, Non-fiction, Review
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