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Absolutely fabulous, Thom Conroy

The Absolute Book
Elizabeth Knox
Victoria University Press, $35.00,
ISBN 9781776562305

The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox is a Ronsardian ode to worldbuilding. Who creates worlds? What connects them? Who controls them? These questions shape the novel’s plot, subject and theme over the 650 pages of Knox’s latest. In a work of this length, the opportunities for spoilers are legion. With that in mind, I’ll need to violate the usual prohibition against them in what follows, although I do pledge not to reveal major surprises from the last 300 pages. This genre-buster tells the story of Taryn Cornick of the Northovers (aka Valravn, Hero of Understanding) and her struggle to overcome demoniac possession and assist a demigod known as Shift (aka Little god of the marshlands, fate foresworn princeling) in recrafting realms of being while struggling to redeem her own imperiled soul.

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

The life and the work, Martin Edmond

In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say A Lot: Selected Fiction
Greville Texidor, (Kendrick Smithyman ed)
Victoria University Press, $30.00,
ISBN 9781776562268

All The Juicy Pastures: Greville Texidor And New Zealand
Margot Schwass
Victoria University Press, $40.00,
ISBN 9781776562251

In April 1970 I moved, with two other 18-year-olds, into a house at 6 Margaret Street, Ponsonby. One of us, Andrew McCartney, met a woman called Rosa and subsequently we were invited around to her place, in nearby St Mary’s Bay, to meet her father, Werner. That visit initiated a series of Tuesday night meetings during which we would sit on the floor in the front room, literally at his feet, while Werner, from an armchair in the corner, instructed us in the principles of anarchism and the methods of resistance and activism we should, as students, be using to make changes in what was then still called society. This was Werner Droescher, who fought in the Spanish Civil War, the third husband of Rosamunda’s mother, the writer Greville Texidor, who also fought in that war.

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Posted in Biography, Fiction, Literature, Non-fiction, Review

In the hybrid zones, Airini Beautrais

How To Live
Helen Rickerby
Auckland University Press, $25.00,
ISBN 9781869409050

Ransack
essa may ranapiri
Victoria University Press, $25.00,
ISBN 9781776562374

Conventional Weapons
Tracey Slaughter
Victoria University Press, $25.00,
ISBN 9781776562206

In a literary sense, genre is problematic. While it’s convenient to categorise texts for the purposes of libraries, book awards and so on, drawing a line between poetry and fiction, fiction and non-fiction, or poetry and essay is evidently reductive and arguably somewhat pointless. Given that poetry and fiction stem from root words meaning “to make” and “to form”, historical distinctions have been primarily formal, linked to the emergence of these modes at different points in the history of writing. After 60-odd years of poetry being dominated by free verse, in which formal divisions are based on visual more than aural units, and given the perennial ubiquity of prose poetry (something of a dubious term itself), these distinctions appear narrower and less relevant.

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

“Unlicked selves”, Hugh Roberts

Collected Poems
Fleur Adcock
Victoria University Press, $50.00,
ISBN 9781776562091

“Fleur Adcock is a New Zealand poet, editor and translator who resides in Britain” – so says, blandly, the inside back flap of the dust-jacket of Victoria University Press’s imposing new Collected Poems. There’s a long, complicated history – one whose sometimes painful struggles are at times suppressed in and at others directly addressed by Adcock’s poetry – lying behind that apparently matter-of-fact description.

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

Searching for the whole truth, Bill Hastings 

Shirley Smith: An Examined Life
Sarah Gaitanos
Victoria University Press, $40.00,
ISBN 9781776562176

In Wellington, it is difficult to find a lawyer, judge, or even a member of the Mongrel Mob of a certain age, who does not have a Shirley Smith story. The stories are good and bad. Many are insignificant, but they offer insight into her character. I was told about her understandable hostility to a junior lawyer, who was sent to the Smith house in Brooklyn to retrieve and organise some of her husband Bill Sutch’s papers. Smith stuck to her like lichen each day for a fortnight while she did her job and never offered her a cup of tea. I was told that Smith struck up conversations with people she did not know, who had come to visit their own relatives at the rest home in which she lived at the end of her life. One of these people told me about her delight at meeting a friendly, highly intelligent old lady, who said she studied the classics at Oxford University. Those who attended her funeral at St Andrew’s still talk about the powerful haka that echoed up and down the Terrace.

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Posted in Biography, Non-fiction, Review

Challenging, touching, persuading, Janet Hughes

How I Get Ready
Ashleigh Young
Victoria University Press, $25.00,
ISBN 978176562367

The Dangerous Country Of Love And Marriage
Amy Leigh Wicks
Auckland University Press, $25.00,
ISBN 9781869408978

To The Occupant
Emma Neale
Otago University Press, $28.00,
ISBN 9781988531687

Judging a book by its cover would not be a cliché or a hazard, if so much design talent did not go into trying to make us do exactly that. Who, faced with a display of new books, has not followed the urging of the eye, probably at the expense of worthy competitors?

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

Believing you are a star, Nick Bollinger

Dead People I Have Known
Shayne Carter
Victoria University Press, $40.00,
ISBN 9781776562213

Rock odysseys can start in obscure places. Shayne Carter’s began in Brockville, a state-housing suburb of Dunedin, a city at the southern end of a country that to most of the world is little known, even more so in the 1970s when Carter was starting out. But whereas rock heroes normally wind up somewhere very different from where they began, Carter returned to Dunedin to write this memoir and, throughout the book, Dunedin never feels all that far away, even after its protagonist has been swept up into the mythical world of rock stardom. There is a late passage in which he finds himself again “stranded in Dunedin, where I signed up to the dole only weeks after being driven in a limousine to the Conan O’Brien show in Manhattan.”

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Posted in Autobiography, Music, Non-fiction, Review

Blank spaces, Tim Grgec

The Farewell Tourist Alison Glenny Otago University Press, $27.50, ISBN 978198853129 All of Us Adrienne Jansen and Carina Gallegos Landing Press, $22.00, ISBN 9780473451684 Louder Kerrin P Sharpe Victoria University Press, $25.00, ISBN 9781776561964 Alison Glenny’s Kathleen Grattan Poetry award-winning

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Heroic lives, Bruce Babington

Whatever it Takes: Pacific Films and John O’Shea 1948-2000
John Reid
Victoria University Press, $60.00,
ISBN 9781776562114

Many years ago, I was invited by the New Zealand Film Archive to try to order the mass of material in its John O’Shea/Pacific Films collection. The plan fell through, but I often wondered whether the project would be resurrected. That question has now been unequivocally answered by John Reid’s monumental book which follows the company’s more than 50-year history in expansive detail.

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Posted in Art, History, Non-fiction, Review

Human error, Stephanie Johnson

A Mistake
Carl Shuker
Victoria University Press, $30.00,
ISBN 9781776562145

Carl Shuker is a writer who is not afraid to take risks. His previous four novels were all hailed for their innovation in form and espousal of post-modernism. He is, as far as any definition of genre can be trusted, a truly literary writer.

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
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