recent purchase 💸 i've been trying to slow down with my book buying this year (it's not going well), but ever since i saw 'the house on via gemito' on the international booker longlist, i knew i wanted to read it. especially because italy is one of the countries i'm focusing on this year for my "read around the world" challenge!!
This post is coming to your screens much after my intention! I had multiple set-backs, only one of which is interesting (A lovely two weeks in Thailand for my fianceé's late 30th birthday), but we are back in business and up on the horse, other metaphors etc.
I think we can all see that I got a little carried away. We needn't discuss it further.
Instead we can talk about curatorial choices in list-making, a clearly more interesting topic than my poor impulse control around assigning myself reading material!
Aotearoa is the name that the indigenous people, the Māori, want the country to be called, and I bow to their authority. It felt like a no brainer to me to use the proper name, and it has a handy side effect where I get to cover it sooner. If the mammoth stack of books didn't clue you in, I was pretty excited to explore Aotearoa.
since the Māori flag doesn't get the emoji I'll just throw it up here
Follow me under the cut for oh so many book reviews, some must-try recipes (including one not available anywhere else on the internet!), an in-depth discussion of a highly controversial film and novel, and a link to one of my favorite bands ever.
BOOKS READ:
Girl of New Zealand: Colonial Optics in Aotearoa - Michelle Erai (non-fiction) (not pictured)
Yeah that's right, I actually read MORE than were pictured above. I am an optimist and a fool. I read 23 books for this country, two of them were just due at the library too early to make the photo shoot because my library management fell apart for a while!
That's not about this book though, and this book deserves to be discussed on it's own merits and not in reference to my overachieving and various failures.
"...We are responsible for accurately recognizing what we are seeing, of refusing the delusion of an innocent eye."
I haven't read many proper academic books for this project so far, I read Women Who Become Men for Albania but have otherwise largely stuck with more accessibly written non-fiction. I'm glad to have dipped my toes back into scholarly work because this book stretched my brain in all the rights ways. This is a bite-sized book, and it's very much establishing a framework, not a definitive exploration, but the rhetoric it sets forth is such an insightful way to look at images. It’s a helpful tool to inform all my explorations, from this project to my actual college schoolwork. (You didn't think this project was all the needless studying I'm doing, didja?)
4 out of 5 mental asanas
The Bookseller at the End of the World - Ruth Shaw (memoir) (not pictured)
"It doesn't happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time."
I am usually very aware of trying to form thoughts while reading for this project. I am often thinking about what quotes I might want to pull, or what I should put in my notes. Reading this book though, I really did just get pulled along for the ride! Shaw is a gifted storyteller, and is able to discuss her own life with real clarity. This book could easily have been twee, but shes remarkably un-precious while describing her life and mostly avoids overwhelming the palette. It reminded me of reading Roald Dahl's Boy as a child, or having an interesting story told to you over tea. A really nice, fun read, but not a super substantive or provoking one.
3 out 5 books lent to just the right person
The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton (fiction)
"'No,' he said at last. 'I don't trust Anna. I don't trust her a straw. I don't even love her. But I wish I did. Isn't that a curious thing? I wish I did.'"
This is one of the longest books I'm reading for this country, weighing in at a Stephen Kingian 848 pages, and for the most part earns that heft. It's doing a kind of Victorian novel pastiche, not just set in the 19th century but written as if it was from the past itself. Anyone whose read fiction from the era will recognize the chapter summaries at the start (and how they lead the reader), the omniscient viewpoint, and the deep layers of social fabric on display here. It's described as a pastiche or even a parody in many of the reviews, but it is not taking the style as a meta-joke. Aside from the lack of didactic moralizing or narratorial racism, this could be a novel unearthed.
The other big thing worth addressing at the top is the intricate structuring device. There's an elaborate astronomical map that the novel is based around, with characters representing the motion of planets and stars, and the structure of the chapters themselves based in replicating a system that I will admit to not fully understanding. Whereas I think the 19th century styling is phenomenal, the formal structure derails the end of the book.
The last hundred or so pages of this book kneecap the plot and the conclusion of the mystery. You can feel the structural constraints eating the story like a mold. All the plates keep spinning, it's not like they come crashing down, but you're forced to watch them spin down individually in slow motion. After a novel that rewarded the reader's ability to pick up on detail and draw conclusions, suddenly every conversation and scene must be shown in lengthy and excruciating detail. If you really love astronomy and find joy in watching the cycle complete, this might be your thing, but it wasn't mine.
Despite my issues with the ending, there's really so much to love about this book. The social landscape, the class structure, the relationships and connections between characters are drawn SO well. Despite taking a 19th century tone it's able to discuss cultural misunderstandings between the Chinese, the Pākehā (Kiwis of European descent, white people), and the Māori with understandings of cultural frameworks and not with judgement of the cultures themselves. Characters are racist, of course, but the voice of the novel is not. The voice of characters is deftly expressed, and allows the vast majority of the information to be revealed naturally. The novel's depiction of survival sex work is equally considered, despite the character herself being a fairly mysterious figure.
If this book had ended better it would have been an easy 5/5, and since it won the Man Booker Prize maybe I'm the wrong one here! Maybe I just don't care enough about astrology, but this is my stupid project so I get to say that it's unsatisfactory.
4 out of 5 astrological movements
Baby - Annaleese Jochemes (fiction)
"Cynthia sees her properly then, and understands her own terror as a ripping, a new place being made in herself for love..."
There's a gloss of unreality over this whole story, because Cynthia, the perspective character, has a view on the world so skewed and idiosyncratic as to feel hallucinatory at times. A lot of the reviews compare her to the titular Mr. Ripley, but she's honestly even stranger than that. She's sociopathic in a way more reminiscent of children than it is of con men, but her detachment from reality is equally startling. A delicious tension builds up through the first two thirds that unfortunately doesn't really pay off, and the last third of the book is a bit of a a leaking balloon. The book ends up solidly Fine, but the potential of Cynthia as a character almost makes me wish this went in an Earthlings direction.
3.5 out of 5 polite but stern parental emails
The Garden Party and Other Stories - Katherine Mansfield (fiction, short stories)
“'Oh, these men!' said she, and she plunged the teapot into the bowl and held it under the water even after it had stopped bubbling, as if it too was a man and drowning was too good for them." - from At The Bay
Mansfield is the big name author I wanted to look into from Aotearoa. She is renowned there, she came up repeatedly in my other readings (most of all in the graphic novel I review directly below this, which is partially a Mansfield biography.) This book is actually in the public domain, if you're at all interested go check it out on Project Gutenberg!
Despite being 104 year old stories they feel undeniably fresh, her insight is still razor sharp and relevant. I feel like I bring up Shirley Jackson constantly but there's something undeniably Jacksonian going on here. The horrors of traditional marriage and motherhood, the horror of having to fulfill the gender roles assigned to you, and the horror of having to rely on the fundamental uncertainty of human connection are all laid bare here. These aren't horror stories, but they are stories about the banal evil of the every day.
The characters in these stories are living the "good life", they're comfortably monied and in the relationships society expects of them, but the hollowness at the center provides the tension. The constraints of society and gender roles are nooses around these characters throats.
I love this style of early 20th century fiction. If these had been more overtly horrifying this would be up there with my favorite works of Jackson's, but they are well worth reading regardless.
4 out of 5 uncertain connections to your spouse
Mansfield and Me - Sarah Laing (memoir, comic)
Laing is a cartoonist and novelist who shows up several times here, her book of autobio comics Let Me Be Frank is reviewed down below, and she's one of the editors of Three Words. I think that Mansfield and Me, her graphic memoir/Katherine Mansfield biography shows off her talents the best. She is able to make both perspectives feel equally personal, and the way Mansfield operates as her internal critic in the morphing outfit of whatever Laing most wants to be across her life is cleverly done. I wish that she explored more directly her anxieties around feeling trapped in her roles of mother and wife, since that was a major theme of Mansfield's work (and her life!)
4 out of 5 asides from sassy goth Katherine Mansfield
The Fox Boy: The Story of an Abducted Child - Peter Walker (non-fiction)
"Between any two lives, in other words, a shared pattern can be found; they will look similar or run on parallel tracks for a few minutes at the least or maybe even a year."
This book is beautifully written, and is earnestly intending to bring the life and plight of the titular boy to life, but I think it is a fundamentally flawed approach and ends up being an artifact of white entitlement and colonialism.
About halfway through this book Walker describes a conversation he had about his research with a Māori performer, and she expresses that he's another white person taking Māori stories as their own. He discards that handily, saying that actually no one gets to own stories, and frankly I think that's some white bullshit. He is the wrong teller for this story, and he is using his privilege as a Pākehā to literally dismiss the words of the Māori at the same time hes allegedly telling the story of one.
There are other questionable choices made in this book, there's a lot of scenes written more like historical fiction than a researched documentation of the life of a child stolen from his family. It felt odd even before he tried to make excuses for his ownership over the story. You can tell that he thinks he's bringing the story to life, making it more real for the reader, but it feels more like hes imposing narrative on a historical recounting that again, is about a real stolen child. He is literally putting words in a stolen Māori child’s mouth, furthering the way he was used as a tool by the white people who stole him in the first place.
I don't think Peter Walker set out to write a racist document. I honestly think he intended to bring attention to a great crime done to a Māori family. Regardless of his intention though, his inability to actually listen to the Māori themselves makes this book deeply frustrating and yeah, pretty fucking racist.
Ngataua Omahuru was stolen from his family for white people's glorification in his life, and it feels bad to see his story be taken from his people after his death. He deserves a better storyteller than this.
The only known picture of Ngataua Omahuru
1.5 out of 5 stars
A Madness of Sunshine - Nalini Singh (fiction)
Even I, your most verbose host, don't have something to say about EVERY book. This is a trashy thriller, which isn't really a ding against it. A trashy thriller can be a lot of fun! This is a pretty mid one though, no big twists and it didn't come together cleanly or cleverly.
2 out of 5 stars
Patched: The History of Gangs in New Zealand - Jarrod Gilbert (non-fiction)
This is an impressive work of scholarship, with an unfortunately common misstep that keeps it from being a great work of scholarship. Gilbert positions gangs as a fully male community, despite the fact that women are there. It's the constant misogynistic oversight, thinking of women as a specialty population that can be discarded for broad discussion. By asserting that the "basic" history is only about men, he side-steps having to consider the women who are and have always been involved.
It's especially disappointing since this is such a well-written book! He's able to cover a lot of ground with a lot of moving parts and keeping it a pretty easy read. It's not bogged down with detail despite being detailed down to the level of tracking individual people. This had the potential to be a near-perfect work of study if Gilbert hadn't decided that women weren't an elective topic in the communities they live in.
2.5 out of 5 unwashed sets of biker clothing
Hiakai: Modern Māori Cuisine - Monique Fiso (cookbook)
One of my dishes from this country came from this! More on that later. This is a modernist cookbook with a focus on traditional Māori ingredients. The first sections of the book are in-depth discussions of Māori beliefs and a breakdown of all the traditional ingredients, which is super cool.
I have to put this book in a category I like to call "aspirational cookbooks", cookbooks I love to have around and look at but not really books I am making dinner out of. (There's another aspirational cookbook coming up in my Australia post!)
This book is hyper-focused on regional ingredients that are inaccessible to me in America, as well as hyper technical modernist techniques that are beyond my skillset. It did remind me of one of my favorite cooking projects ever, Allen Hemberger's Alinea Project. (Which funnily enough, he started when he lived in Aotearoa) I've read that entire blog front to back at least a dozen times, I really can't recommend it enough, this kind of break-down of process and hunting down hard to find ingredients has been massively inspirational to me. It was a direct influence when I started to think about doing THIS big project.
Anyway, back to Haikai. This is a gorgeous, impressive, and inspirational book, but I do find myself wishing it was just a hair more approachable.
The recipe I made from this book, "Grilled Bluff Oysters, Piri Piri, Lardons," isn't available anywhere online, but I'll write it out in the DISHES COOKED section along with my Hembergernian discussion of parsing a recipe not meant for a layman and what ingredients I used.
4.5 out of 5 native leaves and berries
Kurangaituku - Whiti Hereaka (fiction)
“I could have killed him then, slit his throat at that moment, but I hesitated and let him speak just one word. He named me Kurangaituku. And I was undone.”
This is a gorgeous novel, written in ways that often feel more like oral storytelling or even chanting, retelling the story of Kurangaituku, a Māori bird-woman. I really barely took notes, I was so wrapped up in the story. There’s been a few novels of this basic genre in the last couple of years, feminist retellings of stories from the perspective of the villain or monster, but this one is uniquely able to inhabit the view of it’s subject. It’s so detached from human perspective, and so richly imagined. It uses even the physical structure of the book to communicate ideas. The book is two-sided, with a white side and a black side splitting the story into before and after, connecting at the center with the same story told in alternating pages.
I think theoretically you’re able to start from either side of the story, but in practice I think if I had started with the black/after section I would’ve been pretty confused and not able to engage as well. The after section in general hits a little off for me though, so maybe if I’d started with it I would have enjoyed it more. It’s not bad by any means, I just can’t express the extent to which I loved the white/before section, which makes anything less enjoyed feel like a step down. My only major complaint about this novel is that there’s an important character in the black/after section who has a phonetically transcribed voice from a scarred face, and it is extremely difficult to read. I hate phonetic accents in general, but this was especially difficult to understand.
4 out of 5 instances of names shaping their subject
Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All - Christina Thompson (non-fiction, memoir)
“I feel for my children a kind of survivors guilt. For myself I feel something of the guilt of the perpetrator.”
This book is frustrating. Thompson writes a history of white peoples interactions with the Māori, using her own interracial marriage to a Māori man as a frame. The structure of the book makes her husband, Seven, a stand in for his people. He is iconic, in the literal sense. She says surprisingly little about him, maintaining a bizarre academic detachment while discussing her husband of 20 years and the father of her 3 sons. Since she is the narrator and half of this book is a memoir, the same doesn’t go for her. She never discusses Seven’s emotions or thoughts, he’s a stoic figure, but she also never discusses her own feelings toward him. She discusses at length her emotions about the ways he interacts with others in her life, but never even says what she likes about him. It’s a really odd effect, and fairly dehumanizing. In the lens of the story, she is a person. In the lens of the story, he is a Māori.
2.5 out of 5 moves across the equator
Hicksville - Dylan Horrocks (fiction, comic)
I apparently read this eleven years ago, but since I have absolutely no recollection of it I’m officially declaring it Not Cheating according to the arbitrary rules I made up for the project I designed.
I’ve always loved the idea of a thing’s thing. A writer’s novelist, a chef’s chef. I like thinking about these things that aren’t broadly popular, but are deeply renowned by the people who care about them the most. Hicksville is absolutely a comic-lovers comic.
“The official history of comics is a history of frustration. Of unrealized potential. Of artists who never got a chance to do that magnum opus. Of stories that never got told - or were bowdlerized by small minded editors. A medium locked into a ghetto and ignored by countless people who could’ve made it sing.”
Every detail in this story (the Rarebit Fiend cafe, the interspaced pages of an Aotearoan version of Tales of The Black Freighter) are a love letter to comics from someone who really loves them. And just like in real life, the people that love you best are the ones who can see your flaws the clearest.
This comic’s story, wrestling with the ideas of “what if comics were mainstream and comics fame was REAL fame” and “who actually does the work that big names get famous for” feels insanely prescient. This book came out in 1998, and reading it from the present, where multi-billion dollar Marvel movies are long past saturation, editors and publishers rake in clout and millions of dollars from their reputations as big names in comics, and the creators of the characters struggle to afford medical care feels like discovering a lost Nostradamus prediction about what you did at work yesterday. There’s literally a Stan Lee cameo in this! Either the writing has been on the wall for comics for longer than I realized, or Dylan Horrocks is a time traveler.
I love comics. The Rarebit Fiend reference stood out to me because a few years ago I cried in an art museum because there was an original Windsor McCay strip on display. I love comics, so much, and so close to my heart, but rarely do I feel as seen as I did while reading this. It’s like sharing an inside joke with a close friend, but still getting to talk in depth about the things you love.
4.5 out of 5 Finnish indie comics
The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke - Tina Makereti (fiction)
"Listen, miracle of the future. You strange possibility, my descendant."
There's a somewhat constant refrain I've noticed throughout these reviews. "The ending didn't live up to the rest of the story/ The ending didn't wrap up well/ I wish it had ended as well as it began."
This is fair of me, I think, but it's fair of the authors as well. Endings are really important, but endings are really difficult. There's a reason "sticking the landing" is an idiom. If it was easy to finish things we wouldn't be talking about it.
But, like I said, it's fair of me too. Endings are important. A good ending can be the difference between feeling like you wasted your time at the end of your reading or feeling transformed, between frustration and transcendence.
I'm tempted to say that stories are only as good as their endings, but anyone whose ever had adult brain space taken up by the way unsatisfying epilogue of a children's series should've ACTUALLY ended knows that's not true. There is a sticky edge to a story with "great ideas but a weak last act," that can't be denied, just as we can't deny how often a deflating balloon in the rear third can suck away the affection you had for the first two.
All this to say, I think the ending of this book sucks.
It's revealed in the acknowledgments that the story was inspired by a short segment of reporting from an old newspaper, which is a fine way to start a story, but it also helps us diagnose what went wrong here. The parts of the story that Makereti created outside of the short framework are more interesting and better written, but she clearly feels wedded to including all the information from the news clipping without seeming to have the space or energy to explore them. The first two thirds of the story aren't slow, but they are developing at a pace that lets you really explore the developing story. The last third is so choppy and short it starts to just feel like a list. It ends up becoming as blunt and shallow as the news article that inspired it.
2.5 out of 5 jolly fellow curiosities
Ghosts of Gondwana: A History of Life in New Zealand - George Gibbs (non-fiction)
Merryn @black-mountain-radio, a friend from a discord server I'm in and a Kiwi, was extremely helpful in selecting my main dish and answered a ton of questions about NZ food and literature for me. HUGE thank you to Merryn!! This book was suggested by her.
"'Explain New Zealand, and the rest of the world falls into place.'"
Another book I didn't take a ton of notes on, but the notes I did take are mostly small exclamations like "Giant carnivorous land snails!" or "Flightless wrens! (I wish I could tell Harpy.)"
Ghosts of Gondwana is genuinely fascinating, and following a hard brief as it tries to both be accessible to a laymen as well as useful scientific writing. I feel like this kind of science writing is most often done for children, and this is a fantastic touchstone for the way science writing about the unique landscapes and cool creatures of the world can be brought up to an adult level without becoming dry.
I didn't have the greatest time reading this, it was a bit too science-y for my very Liberal Arts brain, but it was interesting and I did feel like I learned a lot.
3.5 out of 5 GIANT CARNIVOROUS LAND SNAILS!!!!!
Let Me Be Frank - Sarah Laing (memoir, comic)
As I've mentioned before, one of the things I duckduckgo is "country+comics". A thing I haven't mentioned is that I give a little YIPPEE whenever I find a graphic memoir (see Laing's other work Mansfield and Me above) or especially a 💜 diary comic 💜. I don't know what it is about diary comics, but I'm obsessed with them. I love reading about the minutiae of strangers lives in a panel grid. I've read the American Elf collections repeatedly, as well as Sam Spina's (mostly out of print, unfortunately!!) Spinadoodles. Most of my own comics work is diary comics! I try to avoid buying too many books for this project, but I splurged and grabbed both Let Me Be Frank and the next entry Three Words when I wasn't able to get them through inter-library loan.
These comics are mostly an unexceptional example of the genre, but I have just such a soft spot for this style that I had a grand ole time reading them. I have ONE major complaint because of course I do: it's SO embarrassing to be writing a comic fangirling over Morrissey in 2010-2019 (the years covered by this volume). I get it, I listen to The Queen is Dead at LEAST once a week, but he's a rightwing cunt now. He's not cool!!
3.5 out of 5 beautifully drawn toddlers
Three Words: An Anthology of Aotearoa/NZ Women's Comics - edited by Rae Joyce, Sarah Laing, and Indira Neville (anthology, comics)
To finish up the Sarah Laing takeover of my reading, a volume of women's comics that she helped edit.
This is a strange and fairly stilted anthology, unfortunately! Three major points:
1: This is inexplicably arranged like a rolodex of cartoonists or the catalog of an art exhibit, which isn't a great reading experience and doesn't allow most artists to publish a completed piece, just excerpts. Some of them don't even feel like comics, just art samples.
2: The physical size of this anthology is quite small, and several of the comics are legitimately difficult to read. It feels like a needless error!
3: The "three words" conceit (every artist picks three words to...represent their work? Make work about? Describe their interests?) is completely auxiliary. Most of the cartoonists didn't even select the words for themselves, so they end up being just terms vaguely related to their submitted works. I think they should've dropped it entirely and just come up with a better name.
This isn't a hopeless anthology. There's some phenomenal work in here, Renée Jones's Dish as well as Sarah Lund's papercraft(!) comics and Mirranda Burton's shape comics are all wonderful. I'm still happy to have spent the money to bring this volume home, but I can't recommend anyone who doesn't collect comic anthologies purchase it. Just ask, I'll lend you mine.
3 out of 5 words (is that my weakest rating joke? I feel a Fozzie bear-like wocka wocka coming on)
Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa - edited by Chris Tse and Emma Barnes (anthology, short stories, essays, poetry)
So, I made a tactical error here. I (mostly jokingly) refer to myself as a "poetry hater", and this is a very poetry stacked anthology. (Most queer anthologies are, it's really my own fault for not thinking.) I was so excited about about a queer anthology to add to my reading!
"for you, I would set myself on fire in a smoke detector factory
for you, I would ride through the mall on a Segway knocking juices out of the
hands of thirsty real estate agents" - from I AM SO IN LOVE WITH YOU I WANT TO LIE DOWN IN THE MIDDLE OF A MAJOR PUBLIC INTERSECTION AND CRY by Hera Lindsay Bird
Alas, alas. Between the sheer amount of poetry and the general way that anthologies work (some are great, some are meh), this wasn't a great read for me. I can admit that's my failing though, and not the anthology itself.
3.5 out of 5 stars
Greta & Valdin - Rebecca K Reilly (fiction)
This might be my longest pull-quote so far, but man, I just really liked this book!! Very few books earn the dubious glory of the "same brain" tag on my goodreads account, but this book was in from the first pages. My first note was actually "uh oh! Too relatable OCD!" A bad sign for the mental health of the protagonists, but great fun for me!
"‘You mum’s so proud of you,’ Elliot says. ‘She showed me and Greta your degree certificate the other night, you know.’
Rashmika freezes. ‘No, she didn’t.’
‘Yeah, she did,’ I say, mixing my peach ice mash juice with my straw.
‘She showed us your degree certificate and then told us not to buy you any Rupi Kaur books for your birthday because you do not like her. And then she gave us two glasses of water, each. Which we drank in silence while you recorded your provocative raps in the background.’"
I think the humor of this book won't work for everyone, but I adored it. The frenetic energy and tongue twisting anxiety are MUCH too familiar.
5 out of 5 excruciating conversations with your lovely dad
Better the Blood - Michael Bennett (fiction)
I do love a trashy thriller, but this one has delusions of profundity in a way that annoyed me. It also really wants me to feel bad for Māori cops "just following orders" doing violence against their people, and I just... don't. This is an ACAB blog and bloggess, and don't you forget it.
The only real point in favor of this book is that it sets up a narrative where the only ethical choice is the main character quitting her job in the police force, and it does follow through with that, but it's undercut by how much it buys into the necessity of policing and the fallacy of the "good cop."
2.5 out of 5 stars
The Dharma Punks - Ant Sang (fiction, comics)
Stories about aimless teenage frustration are easy to make feel whiny and self indulgent, but this really doesn't. It's shades of Love and Rockets, but with a Buddhist heart. It feels so earnest in it's search for meaning, it's deep care for it's characters. I kind of can't believe I've never read this before. A gorgeous comic, and an absolute stone cold banger.
5 out of 5 maladjusted youths
THE ONCE WERE WARRIORS BLOCK (2 BOOKS AND A MOVIE):
Once Were Warriors is one of Aotearoa's most famous works of literature, and it was adapted into an even more popular movie in 1994. With my established penchant for overachieving, it felt like a great idea to add a new subsection to my already bloated project and explore all three. I seem to end up creating tiny research projects inside my larger project. Sworn virgins for Albania, Once Were Warriors for Aotearoa.
Even more than previously, I'll be discussing issues of Māori representation, and I am not Māori. I welcome any thoughts from people more knowledgeable than I am! Throughout all of this project, I would love feedback/corrections/discussion in general. My askbox is open!
Once Were Warriors - Alan Duff (fiction)
"Because he (I) was their light, their hope burns eternal flame (who else they got to do this kinda thing forem?) he could see what they were thinking, they were thinking: Punch his lights out, Jake the Muss. For us, Jake, punch his fuckin lights out."
It's easy to see why this story caused so much controversy. It's an almost relentlessly negative tale, it's showing a marginalized group in a deeply critical light, and it's unflinchingly brutal. It is a remarkably important piece of Aotearoan literature.... and I kind of hate it.
I know this is my review, but I am juggling the weight of this not feeling like my place to speak. I'm not Māori, and this is a book that should be an inter-community conversation. What I think leaves a space is that this book is very clearly not intended as inter-community conversation. It's almost a call-out post for the authors own people, tattling to the colonizers to inspire his people to "better themselves". (At the same time, how much like Peter Walker, author of The Fox Boy, does this make me?)
The stylization of the writing makes the characters feel flat, and in a narrative like this it makes them feel REALLY flat. I resent when a book feels preachy, and this is whole book is a lesson in what not to do.
This isn't a book without some upsides. The language is often beautiful, and it is representing a perspective that had been largely ignored. It's a snapshot of a real social world, but it's one that's been carefully framed to make everyone in it look cruel and stupid.
2.5 out of 5 stars
Once Were Warriors: The Aftermath - Emiel Martens (non-fiction)
It was somewhat comforting to see that I wasn't the only one who struggled with this book, and that the whole thing had enough controversy to fill a whole other book.
I was however hoping to get some insight from specifically Māori voices, and this is very much not that. Emiel Martens is a Dutch academic, and while he is explicit and overt about how he is not an insider in this discussion, it's still not what I wanted. I think the most useful thing I got out of this was the backstory I got about Duff and the writing of the novel. I appreciate having some evidence for my feeling that he was kind of a tool who looks down on his own people, which does seem to be the case.
Honestly my main take-away from this book wasn't about the story, novel, or movie, but how interesting it is to consider movies like this from a "post-representation" perspective. Yes this is a novel (and movie) entirely filled with Māori faces and voices, written by a Māori man, but what is it actually saying about those identities? What should we be trying to take away from these stories? Should we be looking for "good representation" or do these stories have value outside of that framework?
I thought a lot about the folk horror film Clearcut while reading this. That's a movie that (spoilers!) I enjoyed a lot more than Once Were Warriors, and that I think is a much better film overall, but that I had a lot of similar friction with the representation of indigenous people in, and similar friction with my own thoughts about representation as a metric.
That's not really about the book though. Sorry.
3.5 out of 5 strange textbook insets
Once Were Warriors (1994)
One of the things that comes up first in discussion around this movie is how intense the scenes of domestic violence are, and that's absolutely justified. This movie actually does a lot of softening to the subject matter (especially Rena Owen's depiction of the mother, Beth Heke), but it's blunt depiction of her being beaten is uniquely harsh and difficult to watch. I watched this movie on an iPad on a DEN -> LAX flight, and felt like I should hide the screen with how intense it is. I think seeing it in a theater would've been overwhelming.
As I mentioned, a lot of this movie is fairly softened from the book, Beth Heke especially. In the book she is thoughtful about her circumstances, but ultimately making choices. She's complicit in the abuse and neglect of her children. Movie Beth is much more of a total victim. She loses some of her complexity to make her more likeable, and I think it's a pity.
It's a painfully 90s movie, but it's decently watchable. It's a solid-
3 out of 5 stars
DISHES COOKED:
I made three lovely dishes for Aotearoa! This was actually kind of an interesting selection process, because with all the previous countries I felt like interesting dishes to choose from were easily accessible, but the books required more research. Aotearoa was kind of the opposite! Not that they have no cultural foods, obviously they do, but a lot of it was based on ingredients (pāua (a variety of abalone), kūmara (NZ sweet potato), pūhā (a green vegetable)) that are simply not accessible outside of NZ, or were dishes shared across multiple cultures which is generally not what I'm looking for. I wanted something that was more self evidently Aotearoan.
Mussel Fritters
There are many ways to make mussel fritters but the one I like best uses this simple ...
I was originally going to go and get Aotearoa's famous green lipped mussels, but I realized that if I was chopping them into a fritter that was probably an unwise expense. This was definitely the right choice, since it was actually a HUGE hassle to get enough mussel meat for this. I bought a pound of mussels from the grocery store, shelled them raw (which is very difficult btw!), and ended up with slightly less than 125g of mussel meat. The recipe says to use 12 mussels for 250 grams of raw mussel meat, so I have to assume green lip mussels are ENORMOUS. I made a half batch, since it was just me and Morgan, and they were lovely and mussel-y. It's hard to fuck up a fritter, they're an ideal food imho.
I feel like I have typed the word "mussel" one hundred times.
"Grilled Bluff Oysters, Piri Piri, Lardons" from Hiakai: Modern Māori Cuisine
Since this is already an extremely long post, I've written out this recipe in it's own post.
💬 0 🔁 0 ❤️ 0 · "Grilled Bluff Oysters, Piri Piri, Lardons" from Hiakai: Modern Māori Cuisine · This is a recipe I made in my Aotearoa post
I was pretty delighted to find anything I could actually cook from this book, which is so lovely and interesting but so inaccessible to me. This recipe has a pretty short ingredients list, but I had to make a few interesting choices right off the bat! The first one was accepting that Bluff oysters weren't accessible to me, and since these are heavily seasoned I don't feel bad about it. Maybe I should change the header though. "Grilled Bluff Oysters, Piri Piri, Lardons".
The second thing I had to work through was that this recipe calls for "piripiri paste". Just "piripiri paste". I am pretty familiar with ingredients, generally, even international ingredients, but I was not sure what I was looking for here. Googling "piripiri paste" and "new zealand piripiri paste" didn't clarify much. Lots of bottles of various seasonings and sauces, a website that I want to buy jam from, and some information about the history of an African/Portugese sauce, but not a clear answer on what I was looking for to season these oysters. What I did know for sure, was that I had this bottle of Nando's brand peri-peri sauce that's been cluttering up my cabinet untasted for several years. Peri-peri and piri-piri/piripiri are multiple spellings of the same thing.
Was this the intended ingredient? Almost certainly not. Was it close? I have no way of knowing. One of my motivating factors into starting this project was to use up some ingredients from my pantry and I only needed a tablespoon, so I decided to roll the dice.
I think it worked out for the best, because this was so tasty. I have what I like to call "chronic baby mouth", and really don't enjoy spicy food basically at all. These oysters were so delicious that I kept wishing I had more at the same time I was going "owie my mouth :(". I'm glad I only made 4 (2 for me, 2 for Mo) or I might've burned my taste buds to a crisp.
Butter Chicken Pie
This was a dish that I learned about through Merryn! I found out that pies are really common and beloved there, and that this is a uniquely Aotearoan combination despite it being essentially British-Indian fusion.
I used this recipe to help me figure out the construction and measurements, but I didn't use it for the filling.
This super easy, DELICIOUS New Zealand style butter chicken takes just 20 minutes to make. It uses store cupboard staples - including a secr
I made this recipe for the filling, and I'll be honest, I was skeptical! I've made butter chicken many times, my go-to recipe is the Glebe Kitchen "Indian restaurant style", One of my culinary party tricks used to be spinning up simultaneous batches of butter chicken and butter paneer. I feel like I've got a good handle on what should be in a butter chicken recipe, and my internal calculus doesn't include KETCHUP.
Y'all, I have never been so happy to be wrong. This is an unbelievably delicious recipe. It's unctuous. It's savory. It made one hell of a pie. I wish I had more of it right this moment.
I would eat a butter chicken pie every day for the rest of my life until the lactose intolerance killed me.
BONUS CONTENT: BAND AND LOCATIONS
Usually I like to make playlists, but it turns out I find that way less satisfying when it's an English speaking country!
Instead, Aotearoa is home to one of my favorite bands (who I've been lucky enough to see live during the tour for their last album), so you're getting a link to the music of the wonderful band THE BETHS
Their second most recent album Expert In A Dying Field is a great place to start, but my personal vote for their best track is "Happy Unhappy".
LOCATION:
Aotearoa is a beautiful county, filled with fascinating places to visit from the ever-popular Hobbiton to the headquarters(?) of steampunk, and at least two beautiful statues to honor beloved cats.
I was dead torn between five options, and let myself pick two to feature just so I didn't go crazy trying to pick. (Runners-up, which I do desperately want to visit, are the glowworm caves, this giant slide, and this fascinating museum.)
First up, Te Papa, the national museum, has the ONLY colossal squid specimen ANYWHERE.
photo from this article
Who can turn down looking at a nearly mythical sea creature. Not I, that's for damn sure.
And my second location choice is the charmingly named Demolition World, a whole village of structures made from scrap. They're filled with figures and you can just walk on through and explore!
photos from ExploringLife on tripadvisor
This place reminds me a LOT of my favorite place that I went in Reykjavik last year, the Recycled House. Demolition World seems like an essential spot for me and Morgan to visit if we're lucky enough to get down to Aotearoa.
PHEW.
This post was as colossal as that squid. I hope you enjoyed reading this absolute torrent of words, and hopefully my next entry will be swift on the heels of this!
Onyeka has always been uncomfortable with her hair, people always stare and whisper behind her back, until her best friend nearly drowns and her hair comes to life and saves her.
Her mother reveals a shocking truth Onyeka’s psycho-kinetic powers make her a Solari, one of a secret group of people with super powers unique to Nigeria, where she’s sent to train, however she’ll soon have to put her powers to the test against a battle between truth and lies.
Noor by Nnedi Okorafor
AO has never really felt...natural, and that's putting it lightly. Her parents spent most of the days before she was born praying for her peaceful passing because even in-utero she was "wrong". But she lived. Then came the car accident years later that crippled her even further. Yet instead of viewing her strange body the way the world views it, as freakish, unnatural, even the work of the devil, AO embraces all that she is: A woman with a ton of major and necessary body augmentations. And then one day she goes to her local market and everything goes wrong.
War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi
In a war torn futuristic Nigeria ravaged by climate change and nuclear disasters, where the lucky ones have left the planet and those left survive using mechs, bionic limbs and artificial organs to protect against the harsh environment.
Two sisters dream of more, peace, hope and a future together, and they willing to fight an entire war to get there.
Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor
Twelve-year-old Sunny lives in Nigeria, but she was born American. Her features are African, but she's albino. She's a terrific athlete, but can't go out into the sun to play soccer. There seems to be no place where she fits in.
And then she discovers something amazing--she is a free agent with latent magical power. Soon she's part of a quartet of magic students, studying the visible and invisible, learning to change reality. But will it be enough to help them when they are asked to catch a career criminal who knows magic too?
Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor
When a massive object crashes into the coast of Lagos, 3 peoples life are intertwined, Adaora the marine biologist, Anthony a rapper famous through Africa and Agu a troubled solider.
In a race against time to save a country they love and the world itself.
why are all the "read around the world" books in every such list literary fiction? it has its place but where are the fantasies with local mythology, the action packed scifis, the cute romances set in various cities, the mystery novels featuring homes with rich cultures without exoticising them? in a world of millions of books surely they exist?
Review: "The Dangers of Smoking in Bed" by Mariana Enriquez
Rating: ★★★★☆ || Genre: Horror Short Stories
"The Danger of Smoking in Bed" is a collection of horror stories by the Argentinian author Mariana Enriquez and was published in 2022. In it, there are 12 short stories that all take place in Buenos Aires, Argentina—except for one that is set in Barcelona, Spain. Overall, I liked the stories, with "Where Are You, Dear Heart?" and "Meat" standing out to me. Though this assessment of course comes from somebody who's utterly new to the genre of horror and hasn't read much to compare this book to. I thought that most of the stories are more atmospheric and creepy than they are suspenseful, which I, as a certified scaredy cat that is set off even at the smallest jump scare, could appreciate. This way, I could enjoy (if that is the right word to use in this instance) the darker, sometimes creepy themes of the stories without my heart beating out of my chest.
One thing I noticed was how there often weren't any monsters in the traditional sense. Sometimes there were ghosts, or (un)dead children (why does it always have to be children?) coming back, but even then, they weren't going on any killing sprees. They were just ... sort of there, being creepy. Rather, if there were any bad things happening, it was more often than not due to the "depravity" and amoral behavior of regular human beings—despite the constant presence of supernatural elements. I thought this was interesting and gave the stories a sort of chillingly realistic feeling: it's not the stereotypical monsters we necessarily have to be afraid of, but other humans.
Also, I noticed the often rather crass language. I'm used to more fluffy/sexy language from my many romance books, so sometimes the (I believe purposefully) misogynistic descriptions of women or the violent descriptions of sexual practices (especially masturbation) caught me off guard. They were fitting for the stories being told, and a variety of women's perspectives were definitely centered, but they still stood out to me.
I do think I would recommend this book for anybody interested in atmospheric horror and overall creepy vibes, but who also doesn't need much action or suspense. I would just advise to check any triggers, as some stories deal with heavier topics such as depression or imply CSA/pedophilia.
Also...
While I didn't read this book specifically for the Read Around the World-Challenge, I can nonetheless tick Argentina off the list because Mariana Enriquez is from Argentina and most of the book is set there.
"Perhaps they had grasped that the doors could not be closed, and new doors would continue to open, and they had understood that the denial of coexistence would have required one party to cease to exist, and the extinguishing party too would have been transformed in the process, and too many native parents would not after have been able to look their children in the eye, to speak with head held high of what their generation had done." - Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
Art based on the Migration Compassion Badge, as described in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West.
I don't think I'll be able to finish any more books this year to add to my little project, in which I try to read at least one book from every country in the world. This year, I covered 16 countries:
Oceania:
Fiji - Jacinta Tonga, A remarkable Rotuman Woman
South America:
Uruguay - Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America,
Chile - Pedro Lemebel, My Tender Matador,
Argentina - Sylvia Malloy, Dislocations,
Peru - Gabriela Wiener, Sexographies
North America:
USA - Sigrid Nunez, For Rouenna
Asia:
Oman - Jokha al-Harthi, Celestial Bodies,
Palestine - Adania Shibli, Minor Detail,
Iran - Mahnaz Afkhami, The Other Side of Silence: A Memoir of Exile, Iran, and the Global Women's Movement
Europe:
Spain - Paul B. Preciado, An Apartment on Uranus,
France - Annie Ernaux, The Years,
Finland - Siri Kolu, Kesän jälkeen kaikki on toisin,
Norway - Kjersti Anfinnsen, Øyeblikk for evigheten,
Ukraine - Margaryta Yakovenko, Desencajada,
Czechia - Ota Pavel, Death of the Beautiful Roebucks,
Germany - Katharina Volckmer, The Appointment
I thought that I'd be extremely limited by being able to comfortably read only in 2 languages and that Polish would be more useless than English. Surprisingly, there are many books published in Polish that are unavailable in English. hell yeah for small Polish publishers!
