Nothing Brasch about it
Welcome recognition for a writer who moulded a distinctive view of this country.
For the younger generation, Charles Brasch might be merely an enigmatic name in New Zealand’s cultural history. He revealed little about himself and would have possibly approved of the relative anonymity. But he deserves to be recognised and celebrated as a major personality in the evolution of this country’s 20th-century literature, art and intellectual life. The recently released second volume of Brasch’s Journals 1945-1957
(Otago University Press, $59. 95) does both as we follow his life from his return to New Zealand from Europe in 1945 through to 1957. Selected and eloquently introduced by Peter Simpson, the essays cover his role in the establishment and editorship of Landfall; his contact with a widening circle of writers, artists and intellectuals; his complex relationships with family and friends; and, perhaps most importantly, his involvement in the moulding of a distinctive New Zealand view of the world. An important and rewarding book.
In Astride a Fierce Wind (Makaro Press, $38),
Huberta Hellendoorn gathers together the threads of a life that has taken her from the reassuring familiarity of a small Dutch town to the challenges of a new beginning in Dunedin. It’s a richly Proustian voyage in which, to quote Proust himself, memory suddenly reveals itself. There have been similar books but rarely ones written with such a vivid sense of time, place and people. Hellendoorn’s solid Dutch pragmatism and lack of cloying sentiment are tempered by a deep awareness of the human experience. She can describe episodes that linger in the mind – frightened families huddling in a cellar while their homes above are violently liberated from the German occupiers; leaving the Netherlands in 1960; and the frequently confusing experiences of a new home and country. But it’s the fierce sense of belonging to a place, to a family and to an individual and collective past that makes her book so memorable.
Shelagh Duckham Cox became a “Ten Pound Pom” in 1960 when she migrated from Oxford’s dreaming spires to smalltown Levin. The family’s move wasn’t so much culture shock as a struggle to bridge a daunting cultural chasm. But as her memoir, The Ventricle of Memory (Mary Egan
Publishing, $30), demonstrates, Duckham Cox is not a woman to wilt under pressure. Born into an upper-middle-class British family with more than its share of interesting personalities, she spent her childhood in Washington DC (where her father was British agricultural attaché), then post-war Britain and, eventually, Levin, with her husband and three children. The book is marked by a sly wit and an engaging candour as the future Massey University sociologist and writer surveys a life inhabited by memorable characters.
The arrival in 1871 of a small group of Dominican sisters in Dunedin marked the start of an extraordinary journey that continues into the 21st century. Isolated but undismayed, those first nuns launched a network of schools throughout New Zealand, establishing a presence that transcended the hushed environment within the convent walls. In Windows on a Women’s World (Otago
University Press, $49.95), Susannah Grant gives us the eloquent, inspiring story of how the Dominican sisters evolved from an enclosed order of religious teachers into a congregation of individuals actively engaged in education, social justice, pastoral care and spiritual awakening within the wider community. Drawing on the order’s archives, Grant provides insights into the joys – and rigours – of lives in one of the Catholic Church’s oldest religious communities. There are moments in this book when historical detail is enriched by something deeply human and profoundly moving.