The Scoop Review of Books is taking a break until mid January. Happy summer reading and please feel free to send in reviews of any good books you read over the summer break.
Reviews can be sent to: jeremy@scoop.co.nz
Happy New Year.
Joe Sacco’s latest book, Footnotes in Gaza, is attracting some very positive reviews, none more so than this one by Patrick Cockburn in the New York Times.
Sacco pioneered comic art as journalism in his book Palestine and then continued to develop the genre in his books on Sarajevo.
Amy Brown talks with Damien Wilkins about his latest novel, Somebody Loves Us All, and his year writing it in Menton, France.
Paddy Thompson, a successful speech therapist with a newspaper column, ‘Speech Marks’, is troubled by two silences. One is the absence of a phone call; Tony Gorzo, whose son Paddy cured several years earlier, usually leaves a message in response to ‘Speech Marks’. The other is Sam Covenay, a 14-year-old who refuses to speak and resists Paddy’s methods. On top of these minor discouragements, Paddy’s wife, manager of a language school, is constantly working in preparation for an inspection, so provides little consolation. Paddy’s new recreation, cycling, is not the stress-reliever he’d imagined it to be either, as each competitive ride with his colleague Lant becomes a metaphor for their sometimes exhausting friendship. Most distressing, though, is Paddy’s mother, Teresa, who wakes up one morning with a French accent. Teresa’s (now Thérèse’s) illness, Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS), compels Paddy to communicate with his family more honestly and precisely than ever before.
By Jeremy Rose
What’s an atheist to make of Christmas? I’ve been thinking that it could be re-named International Day Against the Death Penalty. After all if there was no crucifiction there would’ve been no Crusades, no Inquisition and no annual orgy of consumerism. As good an argument against making martyrs of political activists as I’ve ever heard. (Ironically, the Chinese Government chose Christmas Day 2009 to lock up one of the country’s leading human rights activists in the hope the world’s media wouldn’t notice.)
On the other hand there would be no Caganers (the wonderful Catalan Christmas Crappers pictured above) or Caga Tios (the equally weird and wonderful Catalan shit logs.)
By C K Stead (Re-published with the kind permission of the author and the New Zealand Book Council’s Booknotes)
I was in the UK in May of this year, mainly to launch the Carcanet edition of my Collected Poems 1951–2006. A mini-tour had been organised by the publisher, the first reading to the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere. I had not been in the Lake District for almost half a century, and it revived fond memories of my time as a post-graduate student in the UK . I read with a young South African poet, Katharine Kilalea, in the church where Wordsworth and his wife are buried, the reading followed by the usual interchange with an audience and then a dinner at the hotel. In the new, beautifully designed (grey stone, merging into the landscape) Research Library, books annotated by Wordsworth and Coleridge had been brought out for me. The hotel was lovely, the landscape wet and redolent of Romantic literature, and Dove Cottage just as I remembered it, with even the ‘port’ (small suitcase) on display, inside the lid of which Wordsworth had written his name, not leaving space for the final letter, which he had added above with a caret-mark.
It’s that time of year when newspapers and magazines the world over publish their best of lists. So the Scoop Review of Books has decided to end the year with a best of the best of books list for 2009.
The New York Times isn’t satisfied with just one best books list, it has: the 10 best books of 2009;100 notable books;, Best illustrated children’s books; Best graphic novels, and a host of other categories.
For those with plenty of time on their hands or planning out their retirement reading the Guardian helpfully compiled a list of the 1000 Best Novels. And equally ambitious is its Books that Defined the Noughties. And then there’s the best food books of the decade.
The following essay by Dunedin writer Pauline Dawson appears in the recently released Barry Brickell, Six Spiromorphs Kilmog Press, 2009. The edition is limited to just 45 copies and is only available at Parsons Bookshop in Auckland.
How to write of a man that defies and even rejects definition? As some home-grown New Zealand version of Vulcan, god of fire and craftsmanship, Barry Brickell could be variously described as railway and steam enthusiast, engineer, obsessive, writer, eccentric, conservationist, master potter, craftsman, artisan, and also very much an artist. He is a man that has created his own way and from his search for original forms has sprung undoubtedly elemental art; a literal product of the land.
Born in 1935, Brickell grew up in Devonport, Auckland. He had an early passion for fire, steam and clay and these interests were eventually channelled into a science degree at Auckland University. The late 1950s in Auckland was a time of a great creative ferment. The relatively small scale of the artistic community brought together key figures of the time. Brickell took painting lessons with Colin McCahon, was mentored by Len Castle and lived for a time among the artistic milieu that trailed through his bohemian flats with Keith Patterson, Hamish Keith and others. All the while Brickell continued making his great warty stoneware pots. While many ceramic artists of the time had an oriental influence, Keith describes Brickell’s aesthetic as hovering “somewhere miraculously between New Guinea Sepik River and a 13th Century European rubbish tip”[1].
The 2009 issue of online literary journal Turbine (www.vuw.ac.nz/turbine) is now live, featuring the best and freshest in New Zealand writing.
Turbine 09 includes the title essay from Can You Tolerate This? the personal essay collection by newly-announced Adam Foundation Prize winner Ashleigh Young, alongside work by 2009 Montana Best First Book of Poetry recipient, Sam Sampson, award-winning ex-pat New Zealand writer Kirsty Gunn and leading UK poet Christopher Reid.
New Publishing Award Announced
The New Zealand Society of Authors (PEN NZ Inc.), in association with Pindar NZ, Whitcoulls, Astra Print Group, the New Zealand Herald and Creative New Zealand are proud to announce the launch of the “NZSA Pindar Publishing Prize”.
This competition offers budding New Zealand authors the opportunity to be professionally edited, produced, marketed and distributed throughout New Zealand. The total package is worth around $35,000 to a talented new author. Full details and application forms are available on www.authors.org.nz
Media Release
The Michael King Writers’ Centre is calling for applications for the first Maori writer’s residency at the centre in 2010.
The residency is being offered with the support of Te Waka Toi, the Maori Arts Board of Creative New Zealand.
The residency is for eight weeks from 14 May next year. The selected author will have free accommodation at the writers’ centre in Devonport, use of its writing studio and will receive a stipend of $8,000.
It is the first time the centre has been able to offer a residency especially for a Maori writer. It has had 10 writers in residence since it was established in 2005. Next year, it will have two short residencies and a six-month residency, as well as the residency especially for a Maori writer.
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