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How to Live With Mammals | Regional News

How to Live With Mammals

Written by: Ash Davida Jane

Victoria University Press

Reviewed by: Alessia Belsito-Riera

A compelling and melancholic protest in the face of the climate crisis, Ash Davida Jane’s How to Live With Mammals is a must-read for our generation. Through extended metaphors, dramatic irony, and very intentional perspective, Jane clears the smoke, showing us our burning, yet still beautiful world.

Jane’s voice is tinged with urgency, anxiety, and fear, but her words also paint images of hope and inspiration. Where her poems confront the inevitable decay in the face of an unsustainable lifestyle, they also present a hopeful alternative. Each poem sets a scene in which the world blossoms in all its splendor and hope, only to decay into false dreams, destroyed by human greed and the empty promises of consumerist ideals.

Jane’s writings often pit opposites against one another. The abnormal and grotesque become normalised, as in the poem 2050 where a post-apocalyptic world soaked in air pollution and acid rain provides a home for playing children. In all the other animals are in their prime, Jane juxtaposes the natural against the artificial, placing animals within cities where they are dependent on human innovation, pondering the possibility that our human impact is so great we may not be able to reverse the damage we have done.

The collection recognises a disconnect between society’s God-complex and the delusion that notion is. pool party poignantly captures humanity’s unsustainability, sending humans into space in search of new homes just to destroy them and “[draw] up plans for a new planet without the design flaws of the last”. location, location turns Venus into suburbia, where we slowly watch our Earth fall apart and find “new ways to ruin our lives”.

How to Live With Mammals desperately asks us to recognise humanity’s dependency and vulnerability. It paints the beauty of our current world but with nostalgia, exposing humanity’s greed, denial, and delusion in an attempt to wake us before our world becomes the distant memory of Jane’s poems.

Reality, and Other Stories | Regional News

Reality, and Other Stories

Written by: John Lanchester

Faber & Faber

Reviewed by: Colin Morris

More The Twilight Zone than The Pit and the Pendulum, many of these eight short stories have been written for The New Yorker and collected here for the first time.

In a book that is designed to scare all who believe in the malevolence of social media, we are taken down paths of a haunted house (Signal) with a ghost that takes pleasure (or is it) in watching children absorbed by social media – be it the internet, PlayStation, or any gizmos that drive people who grew up with hula hoops, conkers, and hopscotch insane. You can hear these people inwardly scream, “In my day we all played outside!” But this is the now, a time when the hosts of a wedding at a posh mansion provide a special room for the children to indulge in their fantasies whilst the ceremony is going on.

In a society that finds itself increasingly unable to switch off the machine, these skeletal missives are the finger-pointing messages to be wary about what is real and what is not.

Most of the characters embedded between the lines are academics, scholars, professors – in short, those who you’d think would know better. They are better able to focus and analyse, yet still remain on the lower rungs when it comes to figuring out how to rage against the machine.

The same night that I read the story Coffin Liquor I was plagued by a horrendous dream in which myself and staff were working 24-hour shifts at a record store whilst surrounded by ‘suits’ babbling on in pseudo-speech about blamestorming, gig economy, clickbait, and offshoring. What the linguists call lexical innovation. This haunts the most dislikeable smarty-pants Professor Watkins
who is delivering a lecture in Romania. Using his translation earphones, he taps into audiobooks only to find that the storylines from both Charles Dickens and Richard Dawkins have been hacked (or were they?) to intrinsically sound the same. The point being made, once again, is about technology going AWOL. That is a fear untoward itself.

Eight tales of technophobia then.

Cook Eat Repeat | Regional News

Cook Eat Repeat

Written by: Nigella Lawson

Penguin Random House

Reviewed by: Jo Lucre

I’m not quite sure where Cook, Eat, Repeat stops being a cookbook and starts being a novel; it’s like a melting pot of literary and culinary offerings.

A little bit of Lawson’s heart and soul seems to accompany her recipes. Inside you will find ingredients, recipes, and stories with her memories entwined. There’s the wistful fondness she feels for her spiced bulgur wheat with roast vegetables, as it was the last meal she cooked for friends before lockdown. There’s the soupy rice with celeriac and chestnuts, which Lawson says is a favourite in her home and I know why. It was rich, warm, and nutty. Satisfying pre-winter fare.

Cook, Eat, Repeat is not a quit sugar, ditch the cheese, and lose the dessert type cookbook. Instead there’s a whole chapter dedicated to pleasures and in classic Nigella fashion a whole narrative on the joy she celebrates in food. It’s just pleasures, no guilty involved. Food like pasta with clams and bottarga is to be enjoyed. There’s something here for all palates. There’s the black pudding meatballs, which for all intents and purposes look delicious but not enough to ever consume. For the brave and unsqueamish, they may just be a culinary delight. Oxtail bourguignon makes an appearance too, though again not on my table.

There’s pairings like pappardelle with cavolo nero and ‘Nduja. Lawson eloquently describes it as a “gorgeous and wintry, rib-sticker of a dish just right to bolster and brighten, where skies are dark and the air is chill”. There’s a little bit of poetry here and even a vegan lemon polenta cake that will not disappoint.

Cook, Eat, Repeat is exactly what you would expect from an author invested in food and the joy that comes with it. It seems on occasion Lawson’s voice leaps from the page as she shares her thoughts, inspirations, and kitchen temptations – like eating flapjacks before they are cold, unabashedly without a care for them falling apart.

Tranquility and Ruin | Regional News

Tranquility and Ruin

Written by: Danyl McLauchlan

Victoria University Press

Reviewed by: Ayla Akin

At some point, many of us are confronted with questions that seek to define the nature of our existence. Questions that ask – what is our consciousness? How do we find our purpose? What is purpose? In the novel Tranquility and Ruin, Danyl McLauchlan is on a quest to beat his long-term mental health problems. His journey takes him on a path of self-discovery where he explores the answers to life’s tough questions in a bid to relieve himself of his troubles. He writes first of his experience meditating in Buddhist monasteries and follows with his time at a retreat by the New Zealand branch of Effective Altruism.

Effective altruism is a movement that I had never heard of. Their objective is to challenge human morality and the outcome is endless interesting discussions. One such discussion involved the infamous question posed by the philosophical teacher Peter Singer, who asks, “if you could save a child that was drowning right in front of you, would you?” People’s first reaction is to be shocked and say “of course”, but as Singer points out, there are children dying all over the world, so why are we not trying to save them?

I have visited many of the kinds of places described in the book. You experience crazy things when you are in a meditative state and whilst many choose to decide that there are angels, spirits, or a higher self involved, I am (and it seems McLauchlan is too) far more cynical. I do not have enough word count to explain the crazy events that happen during these retreats, but things get pretty wild and it’s easy to lose perspective.

I love books about spirituality, but I am also a social science student who is obsessed with facts and research. McLauchlan’s journey is not simply a personal experience, but one supported with studies and evidence. This was one of those rare times I read a book that discusses topics and themes in a way that I do in my personal life. I loved it and have already recommended it to so many of my friends!

Wow | Regional News

Wow

Written by: Bill Manhire

Victoria University Press

Reviewed by: Ollie Kavanagh Penno

“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?

The Passenger: Brazil  | Regional News

The Passenger: Brazil

Europa Editions

Reviewed by: Colin Morris

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  | Regional News

The Disinvent Movement

Written by: Susanna Gendall

Victoria University Press

Reviewed by: Ayla Akin

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.

Mayflies | Regional News

Mayflies

Written by: Andrew O’Hagan

Faber and Faber

Reviewed by: Colin Morris

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.

Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops | Regional News

Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

Written by: Shaun Bythell

Profile Books

Reviewed by: Alessia Belsito-Riera

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.

With the Wind Behind Us | Regional News

With the Wind Behind Us

Written by: Matt Elliott

HarperCollins

Reviewed by: Kerry Lee

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 19th 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.

The Fire of Joy | Regional News

The Fire of Joy

Written by: Clive James

Picador

Reviewed by: Colin Morris

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.

Rat King Landlord | Regional News

Rat King Landlord

Written by: Murdoch Stephens

Lawrence & Gibson

Reviewed by: Ollie Kavanagh Penno

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.