Posts by Jolisa
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Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to giovanni tiso,
True -- I'm observing what I hope is a phase. And it's useful to hear from similarly motivated readers that they are feeling the same way. The strong nostalgia in this thread for a particular sort of social novel might be useful to writers. Or perhaps not. I don't know where the stories come from; perhaps it is beyond their control entirely.
I wonder too if, building on Rob's observation, we simply cathect more to novels read at a certain stage of life? Is it like music? In that, what you listen to at a certain point (or during certain events) burrows into your soul, but after that, the rest is noise?
The short story, on the other hand, is alive and well and interesting, and was ever thus. On my must-read list at the moment: Tina Makereti, Pip Adam. On my to-read list: Anna Taylor, Alice Tawhai. And there are plenty of others - suggestions welcome!
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Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to Emma Hart,
Belatedly, for Emma (and in a further attempt to restore Fergus's equilibrium) some library ladders to fantasise about.
Also, a secret library door, and the ultimate bibliophile's staircase.
ETA: place protective drool-resistant cover over keyboard before clicking above links.
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That's somewhat cheering, Rob. Native plantings is a nice way to think of it. And our native plants can be temperamental, seasonal, fickle; the cabbage-tree bug that looked like an epidemic before we figured it out; the kauri cones that contain so many seeds, and yet how many grow into a new tree?
On the other hand, we do need the kereru to chew on the seeds and, ahem, distribute them here and there, to ensure continued vitality of our forests.
Not sure where your humble book reviewer fits into this metaphorical scheme :-)
To help cheer Fergus up, too, I suspect the people who are reading and enjoying local literature are far too busy doing so to even bother glancing at this thread. Aren't they?
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I was so absorbed in clicking through the Okarito photos, that even though I was standing right next to the stove, I burned a batch of chocolate chip bickies. (I'm not complaining; my compliments to the photographer!). Those are real houses; we don't often see people in their domestic contexts like that, without a vast amount of staging.
And that one glimpse of the beach beyond? Wow.
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Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to giovanni tiso,
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Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to Islander,
Aha, thank you - the Okarito Village Project pictures are, of all places, on Facebook.
And there you are, surrounded by books! (Is it silly that I feel like waving?)
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Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to Sue,
"Doctor, it hurts when I do this." "Well, don't do that then."
A very sane approach! But the patriotic force is strong. And there is such good stuff out there, it's worth panning for gold...
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Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to Cecelia,
Decades ago I read Albert Wendt’s Under the Banyan Tree and can remember nothing about it except that I wanted a Maori village to be given the same novelistic treatment.
You know, that's what I sort of hoped one of our leading novelists would do with his retirement from the university: go back to the source, with sharpened pencil and decades of worldly wisdom. But, whatever, song cycles based on poems, sure. Who am I to say what people should write??
And on a completely different note. The Last Werewolf reviewed in last week’s Listener sounds like a must-read.
Yes, doesn't it? Will put it on the list with Islander's promised the were people (!!) and also Hamish Clayton's Wulf, which I have only read the opening pages of but which is blowing my mind in multiple, exciting ways. It's literary and it leaps off the page and it's strange. Great stuff.
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Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to Cecelia,
Why do we all love the 10 PM Question so much? Is it because of its warmth? Its gradually revealed psychological truth? The way we can definitely relate to the main character?
I reckon the reviewer for the Herald (John McCrystal? Cannot find the link, alas) was right to observe that Frankie and Gigs seem much more likely to appeal to the parents of pre-teen boys (in fact, I think he specified mothers), than to those boys themselves. In that sense, it might be a wishful/wistful novel about young adults as much as a realist novel for young adults.
But still: yes, very warm, humane, and buttressed by the gradual accumulation of psychological truth. Here's how I argued it in my Landfall review ...
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What is the audience for young adult novels? It’s an elastic category, embracing both those on the cusp of adulthood and adults who recall being young. Also, crucially, people in both groups who simply enjoy the YA vibe: numinous, nostalgic avant-la-lettre, yet gritty and subliminally threatening. It helps to have a stomach for whimsy and a head for archetype. The genre deploys elements from myth and fairytale with cheerful abandon, and borrows liberally from its own well-furnished canon.Viz.: the fey, slightly out-of-it dad. The benevolent, marauding pet, a friendly daemon to our protagonist. A secret language. The trio of wise aunties (played in the movie version, in my head at least, by Margaret Mahy, Joy Cowley, and Keri Hulme). And of course, the aunties’ marvelous old house, an enchanted “children’s paradise” complete with garden, where Frankie seeks refuge when his fiercely guarded inner keep begins to crumble.
Out of these familiar tropes, de Goldi has smelted something original and gleaming. If the action takes a while to get started, it doesn’t matter, since we get to pass the time with characters who are charmingly persuasive in their relations with each other and their world. The rituals that Frankie and Gigs perform on their daily walk to the bus are hilarious. Equally, the portrayal of how a family carefully shapes itself around one member’s trauma is careful and convincing.
As Frankie’s painful yet graceful quest for self-knowledge wound towards its climax, I began to feel that gratifying goose-bumpy sensation of inevitability. Sure enough, the final pages were at once shattering and soothing, high-stakes and perfectly low-key: Frankie broke through his own frozen inner sea, and my critical spectacles steamed right up. Ice-axe in one hand and thermos in the other, de Goldi shows us how it’s done.
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Related to this thread: William Deresiewicz serves up on a platter Marjorie Garber's academic-o-centric ideas about the use-value of literature.
NB I haven't read Garber's book, but as a recovering academic (and one who still harbours some sympathy for what goes on in literary anatomy classes, all of us scrubbed-up and working ghoulishly but hopefully over the cadaver of yet another classic, looking for signs of life, yearning to capture and weigh the escaping soul of the piece as it flees the room), I found the review refreshing and to the point.
Here's a nice bit:
The answer to the use-pleasure conundrum is not neither, but both. What is more, they are the same thing. "Use" does not mean instruction, as it did to Horace or the Victorians, the inculcation of virtue through the presentation of moral exempla. It means awareness. Literature is "useful" because it wakes us up from the sleepwalk of self-involvement—of plans, anxieties, resentments, habits, the fog that clings to our eyes as we stumble through the day, stumble through our lives—and shows us the world, shows us ourselves, shows us life and experience and the reality of other people, and forces us to think about them all. The pleasure of serious literature is not escape or fantasy, it is this very shiver of consciousness, this troubling exhilaration. Reading is thinking and feeling, both at once and both together, simultaneous and identical. Pleasure is use, use pleasure.