Books

“I wanted life to be useful
like a piece of furniture that accurately
describes itself. I had this thought, you see,
and I wanted to write it down.”

Writing a short book review can become a procedural exercise if you let it. First, introducing the author – their name, accomplishments, previous works. Then, reducing the work to its qualities that interest you most, pasting some quotes in there to say, “see what I mean?”

Bill Manhire poses a significant threat to this order of things. Impossible to summarise in 350 words, Wow is not merely an infantile exclamation, but an appropriate reaction to the words that follow.

“They fell in love between the end of footie season
and the start of shearing. Sheep gazed, bewildered.
The paddocks stretched up into the hills,
mostly scrub and a few old stands of bush.
‘Now listen here,’ he said, and that was it really.”

Among other things, these poems are about the native bird, God, and the peculiar acts that define a regular existence. Manhire’s love for repetition and rhyme persists, and his treatment of the ordinary in Wow lends itself to the surreal. The pull of Manhire’s verse is forceful, as is the ensuing feeling that you too might be living in one of his poems. Bill Manhire is to New Zealand poetry what John Prine is to Chicago folk music.

“I like the cloud at the top of Shingle Road,
the way it makes my feelings settle.
Sheep can still find grass there,
grazing among a thousand stones.
Each stone was once the shadow of a bird.”

See what I mean?

Brazil was a country that cropped up for me when I first started digging deeper into blues music. Part of my research was about slavery after coming across an article that mentioned, in part, that Brazil had imported some four million slaves – or 40 percent of all slaves from Africa compared to America’s 600,000. What struck me, apart from the sheer numbers, was that Brazil has never developed a comparable blues music style. This can also be said of other slave territories in the Caribbean such as Cuba or Haiti.

Quite different from the Lonely Planet books about countries, which tend to look for the positives, this series, which has Japan and Greece in its catalogues, covers the scope of the subject with hard-hitting journalism within the pages.

Of interest to all is the despotic tyrant Jair Bolsonaro, who rules the country with much of the same intolerance that former President Trump displayed. Racist, misogynist, anti-gay, anti-environmentalists, the list goes on. Perhaps his most offensive remark was made to a female MP whom he described as being 'too ugly to rape'.  

The Passenger series’ stance is about exploding myths. An example is the rise of the feminist rap movement funkeiras, the objectivity of which seems to be body slamming anybody shaming overweight women. Their videos are shamelessly sexually provocative. It’s a long way from the Ipanema beach sound of samba and bossa nova.

This is not pretty reading, yet it is essential to understanding deforestation, gang wars, prison, drugs, armed conflict, and the killing or removal of Indigenous tribes. Even the building of the so-called fabled city of Brasilia is an example of city planning gone wrong. I checked out Brasilia on YouTube and was amazed by the brutalist architecture, monstrous concrete piazzas, and lack of trees. The promise of work in Brasilia caused a migration of the poor, leading to more slums.

The Passenger: Brazil should be read by every politician and anyone who cares about the planet.

The Disinvent Movement is a captivating novel following a disillusioned Kiwi woman anxiously navigating her way through life. Susanna Gendall explores a woman’s struggle with identity following the end of a violent relationship, the one thing she says she shares with her mother. This unique debut is segmented into 81 short stories, most only a couple of paragraphs long.

Each story follows the protagonist as she questions identity, societal norms, and expectations. It made perfect sense that the protagonist would start to question herself and her surroundings after surviving such a life-altering ordeal. Gendall writes: “Each morning I knew I was closer to leaving. This was not so much about walking out the door as it was about dismantling a whole system of belief.” Later she writes: “How had we all just gone along with this whole thing anyway? Why were we trying so hard to play by the rules?”

The book is riddled with deliberate, short sentences, crafted perfectly for my attention span. These stunted sentences made for easy reading and more importantly offered opportunities for the reader to pause and reflect on the writer’s meanings and intentions.

Initially, I was surprised when the protagonist painted the cars on her street as a form of climate activism. As I read on, I realised this was a fitting action from a woman grappling with how to execute her beliefs in a purposeful way. Life or relationships are not linear, and as we evolve, we naturally disconnect from certain people. Gendall describes this transience concisely when she writes: “Once I was out, I wanted to get in, and once I was in, I wanted out.”

The Dinsinvent Movement emphasises that life is not always a series of choices and we often face problems that call for strength and determination. Although I didn’t necessarily relate to all of the protagonist’s struggles, I am sure there will be women out there who will be comforted and inspired by her stories.

It’s interesting that this book starts in 1986, just four years after the release of the CD. Why is this important? Well, for some it was the start of the decline of music per se. This is nonsense of course – technology, as good as it is, never stifled creativity. The decline of vinyl over the next few years is crucial. Though never mentioned here, it was a pivotal moment when the album was described as having sides A and B. We no longer think in those terms, but for the author, O’Hagan, splitting the book into two halves means a wander down nostalgic paths before confronting the stark realities of growing up, changing music habits, losing friends, taking jobs that you never thought you would, and the inevitability of death.

Each generation thinks the protests he makes will impact the future. For these close-knit friends from Glasgow, the enemy is Thatcher, the decentralising of government, and the closing of the mines. More importantly to them, it’s the music of the times that keeps them going. The chance to get down to Manchester to see The Smiths, New Order, Happy Mondays, and The Stone Roses is not passed up. Needless to say, it’s a weekend lost in the fog of booze and drugs and fleeting memories of one-night stands and half-remembered acts.

Cut to the second half of the book. The year is 2017. Tully, best friend of the narrator Jimmy, also known as Noodles, declares he’s dying. The caveat is that Jimmy must help with an assisted dying pact which opens a Pandora’s box of ethical questions.

Openly opposed to this is Tully’s girlfriend, soon to be wife. But a pact is a pact.

As the months pass, the reflection between laughter and tears grows closer. It’s maudlin and funny in turns. Mayflies is about the baggage you take with you through life. We see Tully’s mask slip as he thinks back to the father he hated whilst seeing something of his father in himself. You will laugh, you will cry. An important book.

As a reader and bookshop-goer, you will most likely fall under one (or multiple) of Shaun Bythell’s many categories in his taxonomy. And it’s a fun game trying to place yourself into one of the many Genus and Species within Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops.

Though extremely caustic, satirical, and undoubtedly wry, Bythell’s book is not for the easily offended bookshop visitor, as he certainly does not hesitate to expose every habit or attribute of even the most benign customer. Nevertheless Blythell somehow manages to endear both himself and his fraught characters to the reader. Perhaps because though detestable and despite some truly laughable behavior, each and every one (well most of them) still shares a love for books.

Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops is very fun and frankly quite an easy read. It’s not difficult to pick the book up and after many fits of laughter and just as many internal cringes as you see yourself reflected in the pages, you’ll realise you’ve already reached the end of the book. I for one found myself wanting more. His classification system (though Blythell vocally regrets his decision) lends itself well to the flow, making each character clearly defined and distinct from the others. The prose is very witty, imbued with sarcasm and even a sense of pretention, yet you can’t help but empathise with Blythell as he recounts various anecdotes of his experience as a bookshop owner.

Though at times he loses himself in his own digressions, Blythell always seems to find his way back to the character, by which time you so enjoyed the journey getting there you don’t even mind the detour of biting commentary. “Loath as [he is] to quote the creator of Game of Thrones”, Blythell agrees that “a reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one”; and our sardonic author can’t help but love every booklover that enters his store.

For as long as anyone can remember, sailing has been synonymous with the New Zealand lifestyle. The fact that we have a city (Auckland) unofficially named after the sport is a testament to that. With the Wind Behind Us is a collection of small anecdotes that tell the story of our country’s love of the ocean and the strides we’ve made ever since getting that first taste for sailing in the early 19^th century.

While I have to admit to never being much of a seadog or having sea legs in general, I really enjoyed reading about our boating culture and the stories behind New Zealand’s maritime history. There have been people in the past who’ve called yachting a so-called ‘rich man’s game’. Such a generalisation is a bit of an insult since our connection with the water and boating goes way deeper than that. It’s a rich tapestry that is something to be very proud of, even if you’re not into sailing.

It’s clear that writing this book has been a labour of love for Matt Elliott, and it shows with the amount of information and detail that he’s poured into it. His style’s extremely down to earth, and his stories – sometimes funny, sometimes informative – are always well put together.  One of my favourites would have to be the one titled Snow White and the Seven Sailors, where a group of seamen survives being shipwrecked at sea for several days before eventually being rescued. 

The only real problem is that we’re not all born sailors, so I can definitely see With the Wind Behind Us not being everyone’s cup of tea. That’s an incredible shame since With the Wind Behind Us represents a slice of history that we should really try to learn more about. But for those of you willing to give it a go, Elliott’s book is an excellent place to start.

Late last year I reviewed my first poetry book, Magnetic Field by Simon Armitage, and like the great cliché “you wait for one bus, then two come along”, another must-read poetry book arrives. The Fire of Joy is Clive James’ last book before passing away in 2019. It’s a wonderful tribute to a word scholar who prized language above anything else.

This final chapter celebrates the poets and poems that had guided him through life. It also comes with the instructions to speak these poems out loud, something I attempted. Twirling spectacles in one hand and the book at arm’s length I strode manfully up and down the living room, five paces up, turn, repeat.

Not unlike the idea of Alan Bennett’s Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin (2014), James introduces us to over 80 poems with the neat trick of dissecting each of them in his own unique way. It might have been prescient to see the forthcoming suicide of Sylvia Plath in Cut, James muses.

Philip Larkin’s An Arundel Tomb is essentially about an earl and his countess. I’ve always felt it’s about death. The ossuary where the couple lie is adorned by a carving. James notices, in the poem, one hand from the earl has slipped from his gauntlet and holds tight the hand of his beloved. Suddenly, Larkin’s last line, “What will survive us is love” is at once prophetic as well as succinct.

James is not above caustic remarks. He notes that E. E. Cummings had nothing but scorn for capitalism but lived on a trust fund. Dorothy Parker’s One Perfect Rose displayed her famous wit before James informs us that Parker became a hopeless drunk. Likewise, Wallace Stevens was spoiled by bourgeois dependability. I’m sure James wanted them all starving in a garret somewhere.

The short pithy essays explain the structure, and the story behind such seminal works from so many poets is a welcome tool for beginners and scholars alike. Simply put, this is a book that should be in every school library and home.

Until recently, we were the unfortunate harbourers of a rat in our shed – a detail our professional property manager failed to mention before we moved into the flat just one week earlier. Set in a Wellington not dissimilar to ours, Murdoch Stephens’ first novel is about a housing crisis. It is also about your landlord, your rat, and the rat that is your landlord.

The disposition of Murdoch Stephens’ unnamed narrator strikes a subtle balance; too concerned with classism to be self-effacing – a sad fact in itself – yet wholly uninteresting enough to allow the author’s satire to be the focal point of the book. Like many of us, the narrator feels like the kind of young man that listens to podcasts about Das Kapital without ever having read its opening paragraph.

“Landlords I can understand, bastards that they are. Bricks and mortar seem a safe investment. But people who manage houses professionally without owning them? How could I feel anything but disdain for professional enforcers of our new feudal class? Nah, bro, back into the sea with them.”

This novel is about class and gender as targets; it’s about how land ownership and the enforcement of property laws is responsible for substandard housing and the ensuing revolution; it’s about how an individual’s revolutionary ideals can be quelled by comfortability within the very strictures they detest.

“The mobs became organised and the city came to know itself as existing under a state of siege. Armed groups marauder through neighbourhoods painting different coloured crosses on different houses: renters, owner-occupiers or landlords. The first people caught painting over their designation had their kneecaps shattered with a blast of a shotgun. A splash of red paint indicated a landlord. Blue meant owner occupier. Yellow meant renter. And on top of it all, a lurid daub of black meant rat infested. Our house had one of these daubings.”

This is a marvellous debut, one that is simultaneously surreal and all too real.

It seems that I always finish a James Lee Burke book in bed in the wee small hours, unable to let that last chapter go unread. When finished, I feel grubby. Yes, grubby will do. But, at that time of the morning I’m not getting up for a shower. Alas, once again I’ve let Burke’s characters get under my skin. There is the dark alluvial soil of the Deep South under my fingernails, the New Orleans night means it’s too hot to sleep, yet the eyelids droop with fatigue, the mind races with the horrors of what men can do. I’m sure it’s not unlike what Burke’s hero Dave Robicheaux feels. This alcoholic sees the evil of what the men can do in his hometown of the Big Sleazy and, in the ever-present storms that lie just off the gulf are the manifestations and portents of what darkness is to come.

Robicheaux is a good, but deeply flawed man. His only sanctity is in the church, yet he has difficulty separating the devil from god, seeing man as having the right to choose between good and evil.

Robicheaux is a man one step behind the perps, the low lives that revel in child porn, prostitution, slave trafficking, drugs, and murder. He fights the demons that saw him lose two wives, one to the mob and another to cancer and his dependency on booze. And nobody writes better than Burke when it comes to the night shakes and
the nightmares of lying in a gutter and trying to fight a wave of righteous anger.

Then we have to contend with Clete Purcel, Dave’s best friend but also a man out of control. The fact that he puts four people in hospital in the first 60 pages gives you an idea of what tours of Vietnam can do to a man’s soul. As Burke describes Purcell, “He recognises virtue in others but does not see it in himself”.

Every Burke book is better than the rest. Trust me, I’ve read them all.

A Vase and a Vast Sea is a selection of work from some of New Zealand’s most accomplished poets. They all bring something different to the table, a unique experience or perspective.

You can tell that this collection is a labour of love from everyone involved; every poem seems to focus on small personal, intimate moments that the writers are allowing us a glimpse into.

Good poetry is meant to make you stop and think about what the poets are trying to say, and A Vase and a Vast Sea does that without any pretension. There were more than a few times when I had to stop, go back, and re-read a part of the book to figure out 100 percent what the author was saying.

What separates this book from its competition is its prose; each poem has a strong narrative that allows people who might not be familiar with poetry the chance to understand and appreciate it more. Not everyone ‘gets’ poetry, and some of us need that narrative to get into the author’s perspective. I think it has something to do with the concept of left-brained versus right-brained people; the idea that a person has certain characteristics based on which side of the brain is more dominant. A right-brained person is more creative, emotional, and spontaneous, while those who are left-brained are more ordered and logical.

While I’m not sure how much stock to put into that theory, I would say I definitely fall into the latter, so really appreciated A Vase and a Vast Sea’s narrative. I would have been lost without it, and while I could have muddled through, it probably wouldn’t have made the same impact on me that it did.

While poetry’s not my go-to genre, A Vase and a Vast Sea made me sit up and take notice, thinking and re-thinking about what was in front of me.

Laura Borrowdale is most well-known as the creator of Aotearotica, New Zealand’s preeminent erotic literary journal exploring sex, sexuality, and gender expression. Her latest work, Sex, With Animals, is an exceptional collection of prose coupled with original art by Michael Bergt, an artist who has had solo exhibitions in Santa Fe, New York, and San Francisco.

The title of this book has already caused a stir; a complaint claiming a breach of public decency was made to the Department of Internal Affairs and Borrowdale has not been allowed to advertise Sex, With Animals on Facebook. Aside from the fact that Sex, With Animals is a self-aware play on punctuation, it has an entirely different meaning than what those who have been offended by it have inferred.

The representation of sex is a common thread that links these stories, but so too is Borrowdale’s exploration of human beings as members of the animal kingdom through metaphor. So, while sex is certainly at the centre of these stories, that’s not what these
stories are about. They are about sexuality, exploring the mythological and our own personal histories. They deal with sensuality, humans, men. These stories are about the experience of inhabiting a female body.

“Julia is here because there was a moment when she was thinking of one lover, of the way his dark hair is blue under the skin when he shaves it away, of how he stands in a dancer’s pose, of how he holds her body as though it is both robust and breakable, while the lover she had just left contorted and twisted himself into something demonic on the sidewalk in front of her house. Julia never thought this would be possible for her. And yet, here she is.”

Borrowdale writes with a direct power. No matter their length, her sentences are sharp, her vocabulary and use of grammar both precise and nuanced. Borrowdale is one of the most exciting writers of prose in New Zealand today.

Tom Sainsbury’s new book, New Zealanders: The Field Guide is inspired by people and their stereotypes. It’s a fitting theme for Sainsbury, who rose to fame through his character impersonations on social media. Although the book is coined as a ‘New Zealanders’ field guide, the characters described are typical of people found almost anywhere in the world. Disappointingly, there was nothing specifically Kiwi about many of the stereotypes, which include The Shy Girl and The Gamer.

Having said that, The Bad Conversationalist made me laugh out loud as it was the first observation I had made (sorry Kiwis!) when my husband and I moved over from the UK. Coming from a large, chatty family it was a real culture shock when I realised that whilst very friendly, Kiwis prefer to keep the chat to a minimum! Sainsbury describes this character type by recounting the painfully awkward road trip he endured with his friend’s brother. Following a succession of abrupt responses to his questions, Sainsbury finally asks, “what are your thoughts on Syria?” to which he responds, “who’s she?” Stories of The Know-It-All Dad and The Flat Mate were also firm favourites. Sainsbury has a genuine, easy manner of telling stories and I really enjoyed these moments. However, I wished there had been more focus on the funny anecdotes. Instead, there was a lot of unnecessary jargon, with phrases like “you feel me?” filling the pages. I was not sure if Sainsbury was trying to build a conversational tone or if he was simply out of content?

We are shaped as individual characters through a web of social and cultural factors.

Stereotypes can reveal so much about our lives and communities, and whilst Sainsbury attempts to mention this in the conclusion, it is too little too late. There is a sea of depth and hilarity that could have been explored. As a Brit who loves New Zealand, I was disappointed in the missed opportunities for some authentic but smart, Kiwi-inspired comedy.