The book was written in 1950s Australia, and tells the story of a young Englishwoman, Jean Paget, who spent time working in Malaya during the war and was imprisoned for a while, but then decides, having received an unexpected inheritance after the war, to travel to Australia in search of a man who had been a prisoner with her. Once there, living in a small, budget town in the wop-wops, she pulls up her gumboots and begins to build up the economic strength of her neighbourhood — to make it more “like Alice” Springs, a thriving town not far off.

The story jumps back and forward between Jean’s two worlds, Malaya and Willstown, the Australian version of, I don’t know, Greymouth? It flashes back to her work in a small Malayan village where she first dipped her toes into the world of applied development studies, building a well for the village women to cut down on the time they spent walking to and from a local water source. The character of Jean is based on a real woman that the author once met while travelling in Sumatra in the 1940s, Carry Geysel, who had been taken prisoner by the Japanese army in the Dutch East Indies in 1942. This is pretty neat. Stories about astonishing women doing crazy things in wartime are always fascinating and beyond intimidating to me; I get truly paranoid that I would be a bit of a letdown in circumstances like that. But how great that I am a tragic anomaly, and that other women are real-life heroines.

The thing about this book is that it’s wonderfully nostalgic in a very specific way. It reminds me of the piles upon piles of old, musty novels that my Grandad had stored in the shed by his farmhouse, sitting on home-crafted shelves made of wooden planks and lived in by small, thin spiders and sparrows’ nests. They were from all the decades before the computer was invented, with leathery backs, ripped paper jackets, and pages the colour of sand at dusk. But they were books, and the magic of a book, if I can be emotional for a second, is that the story in it, if it is good, forgives everything else; in fact, transforms everything else into part of the happy experience, into part of the magic. A Town Like Alice is one of these books. Every copy you could find will probably be a little torn, and the font will remind you of segregation, and the cover illustration will be hand drawn. But it will be the story that gets to you, and then when you see those things somewhere else, you’ll be haunted by those delicious feelings.

So, as I close out this last Salient review for my tenure, I will leave you with this thought. People don’t love books because they are made of paper sheaves, or the typography is beautiful, or the pictures are captivating, or the price is low, or they pile up nicely for Instagram photos on a coffee table under lamp light. They love books because they carry a story, and the story is the magic. A person who loves books will love stories wherever they find them. They will be desperate for them, hungrily seeking out narrative and character and adventure in every corner of life. The story is the soul and the rest, mere flesh and blood.

The show The Handmaid’s Tale brings to extraordinary visual life something that is starkly depicted in print — a woman, all women, controlled and put by a patriarchal society in a limited number of roles that are designed to diminish and disempower them. When I read the book, I would leave it feeling incredibly on edge. There’s something disturbing about being in this dystopian world where the line between their horrifying situation and our real world is blurry.

It isn’t so much that politically there is still gender discrimination or ignorance or apathy. It’s more that the phrases the male characters use, the attitudes they adopt, are eerily familiar. There’s a sense in which a man who says, yeah, I agree, women in movies are depicted really stupidly, and then says, that’s just how men think though, is just a lite version of the male characters depicted in the novel — for example Fred, when he presents himself as a pseudo-friend, a sympathetic companion to Offred, someone who is trying to be as kind as he can be, while at the same time he’s living off the benefits of his society and has no interest in relinquishing any power.

Which is why I couldn’t bring myself to watch this show. Watching sexism portrayed on a screen, when everyday life isn’t free of its presence, is a hard thing to do. It’s difficult to see male characters acting in abhorrent ways, when wisps of their behaviour hang around me in reality in my friends and my family and in men in positions of authority. It’s tiring.

But having said all this, I have to still say, I highly recommend this book. It’s remarkable. Smartly written, witty and well-crafted, and like a jackhammer into an uneducated mind.

Essentially, the plot centres around Offred, a woman who has become a surrogate for a married couple, lives in their home, and is treated as a kind of servant. She doesn’t get to choose when or with whom she has sex. She isn’t seen as fully human — she is reduced to a birthing vessel. The society in which she lives is religiously twisted, authoritarian, and dystopian, only recently formed, and in this culture, women have come to be seen as suited for only a few predictable roles. Women here lack autonomy, rights, equality… even thinking about this is making me want to riot. To illustrate: the name “Offred” comes from the amalgamation of “of” and “Fred”, the husband in charge of the household in which Offred lives. She doesn’t get her own name. They define her by the man who rules over her. And of course, the cherry on top, there’s a whole load of brainwashing to maintain this status quo. Isn’t literature fun?

Atwood’s novel is highly complex, weaving together themes of gender, class, race, and politics. She has a deftness to her writing that leaves room for analysis and ambiguity. Please read this book if you don’t understand how it feels to be weighed down by the burden that another person has decided your gender is; and to be completely furious about the whole bloody situation. Maybe it will be enlightening. It will definitely be worthwhile.

I saw this movie with my brother called Rams. It’s set on an Icelandic sheep farm. Imagine an Otago sheep farm in the 1970s, and you would have the same movie set, down to the floral wallpaper, the fridge brand, the mugs, the jerseys.

It’s us, a million miles separated. We must be cousins.

Poet and author Dominic “Tourettes” Hoey has written a novel titled Iceland — an ambitious scope. I’ll save myself the time and let him explain it to you: “It [is] a story of trying to turn your passion into an escape plan, a story about drugs and sex and the drudgery of unemployment, a story about what happens when one day you wake up and you find yourself living in a memory, a story about the past and an empty future, a love story about the place I grew up in.”

I think it’s a very familiar story. It’s something almost all New Zealanders feel, their whole lives or just for a fleeting, confusing second. They realise they have to escape off the island and go as far away as possible, or else… the “or else” is unknown… we just have to get far enough away that we lose all context, and we can figure out what we are when it’s just us. Personally, I went to Canada.

Hoey and his Australian singer-songwriter friend “Skyscraper” Stanley Woodhouse (why the nicknames? I don’t know, let’s just embrace it) will be on tour in New Zealand in November, including in Wellington at Meow on November 11 as part of LitCrawl.

Vanity is a tricky criticism to throw at someone. It seems straight forward — stop being so up yourself. It’s a Kiwi classic. But it’s not something we really believe in most of the time, I think. We applaud the grandstander, the confident, the slayer, the money-maker. Then we work to one day stand in their shoes and be applauded ourselves.

Rebecca Sharp, the centre around which the chaos of Vanity Fair spins, epitomises everything we aspire to be. She’s got an answer for every question. She’s got everyone tied around her little finger. She plays the game, and she usually lands on her feet. She starts off with nothing and dedicates her life to amending this problem. What I mean is, she’s “winning”.

How is this vanity? Aren’t we supposed to dream big? What’s the harm in getting what we want?

Thackeray seems to think there’s a lot wrong with this argument. He’s a satirist at his core, and what he does best is poking at the splendour and the recklessness and the self-obsession of his characters until all the air comes out and we see them for the hollow costumes that they are. Becky Sharp is adept at getting what she wants, by pretending at friendship, and even love, and when Thackeray shows her off as so immensely talented, we can suddenly see how gross it all is. When George Osborne, the young, dashing love interest of Becky’s “best friend” Amelia, marries to rebel against his dad, spends all their money to impress their posh social circle, and flirts his way through the London theatres while his wife is at home, suddenly good looks, wealth, and charm don’t seem so obviously important anymore.

It’s easy today (and forgive me for all this unnecessary social commentary) to think that vanity is an outdated concept. It’s easy to think that it’s just another word to condemn people who are only trying to be themselves. And tall poppy syndrome has had some pretty awful side effects. But it’s also risky to think that just because New Zealanders are supposed to be humble, we actually are.

Vanity Fair will bring all these thoughts to the surface. I know this because I read the first chapter, and I was like, damn, I’m vain as hell. I saw myself in all the desperate characters Thackeray created. I spend more money on M&Ms than on services for helping homeless people in Wellington figure out a better way forward, because I’m self-obsessed as heck. Sometimes I read classical novels because I don’t want other people to think I’m not classy, even though the truth is I’m from Palmerston North.

But I’m not trying to extol the virtues of self-flagellation. I just want to say that there’s a lot to be learned from a book like this, written over a hundred years ago, that is directly applicable to us now, because human beings don’t change. We were hilariously dumb then, and we’re hilariously dumb now.

So, even though it really is super long, consider reading this book. Read it if you want to be enraged by the 1%. (Remember that phrase? Do people use that anymore?) Read if you don’t really “get” satire, and just like period pieces with horses and carriages and dramatic romance. Or read it if you thought you were too insecure to be vain — it’s a shock to the system, I can tell you.

Classical figures serve their purpose as personified ideas to study and comprehend more clearly. So Medea isn’t just a devastated mother driven to infanticide. She’s also the idea that we could be driven to anything if we were backed into a corner. Don’t think yourself immune to madness, you don’t know what’s coming.

This story uses its central figure, the “I”, to personify a particular tension between the need to run away and the need to be at home. We want to fly off on an adventure, to a new world, but we can’t escape the pull of our roots, buried in tight, and we’re afraid to pull too hard.

“I”, or she, does run away, and wherever she goes she encounters the women of ancient Greece. Again, I wish I could understand better what they each mean. It would probably clear things up. I’m sure I’ve missed a lot of intentional symbolism. No one speaks except in italics — what if, what if, what if —because instead of telling, they show. They show her how they’re pulled in two directions as well, and somehow, they bring her to terms with her turmoil.

It’s not a straightforward story. It’s a lot of suggestion and sensual description, more like poetry than strict prose. The classical juts up against the modern. Medea attacks her with a knife on an airplane, to give one example. She has strange dreams in the story, but it’s hard to argue that the whole thing isn’t a dream.

The author is from New Zealand, which you can tell by the choice of language: carefully simple, slightly detached, but weirdly lush. I’m glad to see New Zealand writers use sophisticated references. Sometimes we’re scared into only using the things directly around us, to prove that we’re from New Zealand, I guess, or to pander to critics who want us to talk about sheds and small towns and alcoholism.

I’ve got to be critical myself, though. Despite the high end classical references, the prose had loud notes of self-indulgence, and this inevitably made the sentences ring false, like perfectly rounded pearl beads on a necklace. And I would have appreciated a plot, or at least some sort of physical contextualisation for the dreamy sequences.

But now some nice criticism. It’s an atmospheric journey. She doesn’t use over-flowery language, and this makes the environment that surrounds her characters quickly and effectively felt. “Blue, blue sky and the rush of white marble.” And maybe this was because I was also listening to SoKo when I read this, but the emotion could be felt too. “All the memories disappear, even the warm ones that I kept safe when I thought no one was watching.” Observations like that about loss of love, ones that come from the writer’s own experiences, are the most potent ones.

Read this short story — did I mention it was thirteen pages long? I never manage to mention the important things. If you can understand classical Greek references and then please explain them to me. Read it if sometimes your heart feels like it’s being softly tugged into two bits. Read it if you’ve ever been to the Mediterranean and when the author says, “I have never seen so many stars in my life. They reflect off the ocean around me. There are no signs of civilisation for kilometres and kilometres,” you know just what she’s talking about.

The Colour of Magic (1983) is Pratchett’s first Discworld novel. The Discworld is what it sounds like: a world shaped like a disc, instead of a globe (and carried on the back of four elephants and a giant star turtle). This world contains a whole lot of magic. Rincewind, the main character, dreams of a world that makes sense, and is hugely disappointed when he discovers the world’s first camera is not, as he vaguely suspects, a device that captures light on a chemically-treated paper, but is the home of a small pixie with an easel and paintbrush.

That’s the most obvious thing about Pratchett’s writing, actually. It’s funny. Constantly, irreverently, unpredictably funny. I was too serious, or too sincere, as a child to like it. I thought it was crass and ignoble. Which it is, but I’ve only recently grown cynical enough to take it as the joke it was meant to be.

The other thing is that it’s commentary. Nothing better than a children’s book of wizards and heroes to also be a severe tract on social ills, right? But fantasy novels at the time were known for clichéd writing, presenting within their many, many, many pages a long stream of arrogant heroes, limp-wristed heroines with remarkably sensual yet virginal beauty, overtly sexualised witches who were evil seductresses and somehow also easily thwarted, old, wise white men and not-white pagan savages in need of civilisation (I didn’t do this on purpose, but isn’t that Game of Thrones?). Anyway, Pratchett provides a healthy dose of sense and humour to this pile of boring. Heroes are thugs and illiterates, the main character is a cowardly criminal, wizards are violent and self-aggrandising, and women can be patricidal dragon-tamers. It’s great.

So why would anyone choose to lose themselves in this irrational fantasy instead of pulling up their boots and getting to work fixing the world? It’s a good question for a student to ask (except the English majors — those guys are away with the clouds at all hours). Well, because fantasy creates worlds unlike our own. It imagines things differently, impossibly. It demands that we accept dragons alongside the equality of humankind, and when we believe in dragons we learn to believe in equality. Sometimes it does the opposite, and we learn judgement and revenge. But these things are lodged in our minds and they affect how we see reality. So when you read a good fantasy book, you’re taking the first step for practical change. You’re teaching yourself that change is possible.

Mind you, I don’t agree philosophically with everything that Pratchett wrote. But when I read his books, I build empathy for people who do. And I remember how much I used to adore fantasy novels when I was twelve, and how deeply I would fall into them. And again, it’s really funny. The many-legged Luggage runs around and eats people. How is that a sentence I can write?

I’m already reading the second Discworld novel as we speak — The Light Fantastic. It has programmer priests and a candy house in the woods and Death learns how to play bridge with Famine and War. It couldn’t be further from the real world right now. But I don’t think of it as escapism. It’s just taking the long way round towards reality instead of marching straight there. Read this series if you never did because you thought the name Terry was gross, or if you feel under pressure and need space to breathe, or if you would rather believe in dragons than in guns.

Our conversation didn’t want to be confined to a conventional interview structure. She was a writer, I was a writer — we were something like Green Gables’ Anne and Diana, kindred spirits. It was a great kind of relief to talk to someone who understood the weird, specific oddities of writing books; the oddities that my mum doesn’t 100% relate to, even though she enjoys my rants. Pip inspired me. She made me think that I might not be delusionally ambitious after all. She was amazingly happy that I wrote, and I could see the teacher in her.

I know as many New Zealand authors as I have limbs. I have all my limbs, but no more than that. She could list them for days, names that meant nothing to me, but to her they were the lifeblood of New Zealand literary culture. It was nice to see this, because I think New Zealand writers have a complicated reputation in that they often don’t have any reputation. She had a contrasting opinion that was much more optimistic and excited for them.

In a lot of reviews, especially of young celebrities, the reviewers will describe their surroundings in effervescent language — the light caresses her softly blushing skin with transcendent lightness, like the streaming sunlight through the windows of the Louvre follows the white curves of the Venus de Milo… We drank steaming mugs of leafy tea, just two human beings alive for a moment in a quiet bubble of serenity as the L.A. Traffic screamed past the window, as if to cry, how dare you be at peace?

So, I don’t want to do that.

But we did have drinks, and she spilled hers and was apologetic, called it an ocean’s tide when it began to slowly flow down the tilted table top towards me.

That was her: polite and impassioned. We discussed postmodernism, how David Foster Wallace blew her away with his non-fiction and then stressed her with his novels, but she still loved him. She loved the struggle of writers, the tearing away at the innards to get at the truth. She loved the poetry of language. She had dropped out of high school at a young age, she wasn’t a typical bookworm, but she’d fallen for this writing thing and it was a source of joy.

I was sent the blurb of her book before the interview:

Carla, Sharon, and Duey have worked in fashion for longer than they care to remember. For them, there’s nothing new under the sun. They’re Generation X: tired, cynical, and sick of being used.

Tommy, Cal, and Kurt are millennials. They’ve come from nowhere, but with their monied families behind them they’re ready to remake fashion. They represent the new sincere, the anti-irony. Both generations are searching for a way out, an alternative to their messed-up reality.

Pip Adam’s new novel walks the streets of Auckland city now, examining the fashion scene, intergenerational tension, and modern life with an unflinching eye. From the wreckage and waste of the 21st century, new animals must emerge.

Pip said to me that it was funny how when you publish, people will suddenly rush to explain to you exactly what your book is about. I can only hope that it will happen to me someday.

Thank you to Pip for being gracious enough to agree to speak with me. It was a delight. To everybody else, either read this book or please, don’t be afraid to write your own.

Writers are biased critics. Critics will over-extend when they attempt to write. And university reviewers can make definitive statements six ways from Sunday, but honestly they’re flying by the seat of their pants.

Opinions about literature aren’t as cool as they used to be. People don’t read books anymore, they fidget spin (What are those?).

But this is university. The beating heart of a free society. This is where ideas put down in writing start to matter, because now you have the freedom to try them out. Which is why you have to be careful you don’t inhale too much fake news, or else you’ll pass out and wake up in The Hunger Games (I thought we had more time!).

Instead, read more, read widely, and read critically.

In recognition of this issue’s theme of “Opinion”, here are a number of hilarious and incisive critiques from writers and critics alike:

“This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.”

— Virginia Woolf

“The current memoir craze has fostered the belief that confession is therapeutic, that therapy is redemptive and that redemption equals art, and it has encouraged the delusion that candor, daring, and shamelessness are substitutes for craft, that the exposed life is the same thing as an examined one.”

— Michiko Kakutani

“This wasn’t just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it.”

— Dorothy Parker

“A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, what human nature is, what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.”

— Susan Sontag

“What do we mean — it is a common term of praise — when we say that a book is ‘original’? Not, usually, that the writer has invented something without precedent, but that she has made us ‘perceive’ what we already, in a conceptual sense, ‘know’, by deviating from the conventional, habitual ways of representing reality. Defamiliarisation, in short, is another word for ‘originality’. I shall have to recourse to it again in these glances at the art of fiction.”

— David Lodge

“Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“I think of writing a poem as putting oneself in the moment, at the moment — an action more comprehensive, intuitive, and mysterious than mere thinking…”

— C.K. Stead

“A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.”

— Azar Nafisi

“We wouldn’t know that we are a multicultural society by looking at our literature. Māori writing has gained much more focus than it had previously, but there is still a lot missing. There is a lot missing from people of other backgrounds too. I think it would be good to be more proactive about encouraging writers from all sorts of backgrounds as New Zealanders, because until that happens, our literature is not whole, it is not showing fully who we are in this country.”

— Patricia Grace

The author of this review wishes also to acknowledge that the entirety of this review is not necessary to read. Only the very last paragraph will be of any practical use in a reader’s ongoing existence. The preceding paragraphs will merely be blatantly egoistic and indulgent exercises in post-modern literary craft. They will additionally be somewhat sad, or joyful. The author is undecided in an annoying sort of way.

My parents are both still alive. But they could have died at any moment throughout my childhood. That they didn’t was an act of perverse sabotage to remove the possibility of my, or my siblings’, lives being at all “chosen,” “special,” or “tragically glamourous.” I am furious. I have spent the last two decades trying to scramble bits and pieces of glamour and unique purpose out of a mundane, stable existence. It is only slightly working.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is not that. But it is perfectly good enough. It is a memoir of sorts, detailing in a swirl of edited facts and renamed heroes the confusing life of Dave Eggers himself. His parents did die, sadly. He wrote this book as a scourge upon his own skin, aiming for total catharsis. His writerly gift makes this bearable to read. As a note of interest, he also wrote The Circle, which has Emma Watson in it.