TURNING PAGES
Ahead of the Auckland Writers Festival in May, Weekend asked New Zealand writers and international visitors what book, or books, might have changed their lives. . .
This year, an array of award-winning writers — from an equally varied range of genres — will land in Auckland to share stories both personal and political, picking over the micro and macro of our world. But what if they could turn back time and give their younger selves a book that might have made life just a little easier? Or fun. Or understandable.
CATHERINE CHIDGEY
I came to Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills late, reading it for the first time just a few years ago. There’s a moment towards the end when a stealthy shift in point of view jolts you into reassessing the whole disturbing narrative. It terrified me — so much so I declared between sobs that I couldn’t sleep with it next to the bed and I had to ask my husband to hide it under a cushion in the spare room. I’d give the novel to my 16-year-old self to read so she could learn about subtlety, suggestion and restraint and stop writing awful poetry (“Step outside yourself and see the turmoil of your mind”). Plus, it would get that histrionic and embarrassing little display out of the way at a slightly more acceptable age. of Dynamics and Richard Westfall’s Never at Rest: a Biography of Isaac Newton. When science is taught in an academic setting, teachers tend to start by giving the results — the laws and equations — without telling the story behind how those results were discovered. This can make it more difficult to learn and truly understand those principles. What’s frequently missing is the narrative: what problems the scientist was grappling with, where were the gaps in the existing science and how they worked their way round to a better understanding of reality. Science history can make science easier to learn and understand by telling those stories. heroics — not to mention variant sexuality and gender — that you/he/she/trans will find that you were authenticated like, way back. As for The Iliad, if you’re into the cinematic Marvel Universe — you know, Taika’s Thor Ragnarok, Wonder Woman, Wolverine, Iron Man, The Hulk and, yay, Black Panther — welcome to the original Greek Universe of Gods, mortals and monsters. Written in the 8th Century BC but describing events some four centuries earlier, Iliad covers only a few weeks during the Trojan War. However, like the Marvel Universe, the saga expands to cover the entire 10-year siege and the terrific ebb and flow of battle and of cause and consequences. And the characters: Agamemnon, Achilles and his companion Patroclus, Helen, Diomedes (often described as the most insane, over-the-top ass-kicker of the War), wow. In other words, I would want my younger farmboy self to grow up with a great whakapapa, with sublime stories and hugely rich worlds having within them philosophical reflections on why the human race is worth saving. Hopefully he will have healthier relationships with others and his environment — and be much better at sex. Then I would want him to start tapping away on the keyboard that comes with the iPad and start sharing his humanity with other millennials for, to be truthful, they are the only generation that matters.
SHARLENE TEO
Seventeen-year old me — enthralled by books yet frustrated by the lack of writers and/or characters that more closely reflected my sociocultural reality — would have adored Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart. The collection centres on Chinese girlhood, otherness and unbelonging in a way that undoes the staid, stuffy conventions of the traditional Asian immigrant family narrative. Sour Heart is a bawdy, neon shock to the system, destabilising and transgressive in the most urgent and contemporary of ways. Zhang’s stories are feral and obscene, idiosyncratically digressive and unabashedly disgusting and scatological, narrated by acidtongued, wisecracking Chinese American girls. Tenderness and violence, sex and innocence sit side by side, and paragraphs are often rambling and pages-long, reflecting an artful messiness that captures the breathlessness and exasperation of feeling constantly on the cusp between cultures and between childhood and adulthood. My favourite story in the collection is called The Evolution of My Brother and is a master class in combining humour with heartbreaking, fully convincing detail — just the kind of work a younger writer in Singapore would find
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