(Download) "Doing What One Likes': The Fiction of 1993." by JNZL: Journal of New Zealand Literature " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Doing What One Likes': The Fiction of 1993.
- Author : JNZL: Journal of New Zealand Literature
- Release Date : January 01, 1996
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 185 KB
Description
How long will it be before as many as five New Zealand novels appear again in a twelvemonth?' Charles Brasch wondered late in 1958, exulting over fully five novels ('Notes', Landfall, 48 (December 1958), p. 299). And indeed it must have seemed a lot, at the end of an infertile decade of which one year--1953--had produced nothing at all. 1993 saw 28 works of long and short fiction appear: in the thirty-five years since Brasch's annus mirabilis, the rules have changed, New Zealand literature having gone through two significant revolutions, both of the 'seventies, one of which saw an increase in women's writing prompted fairly directly by the International Year of the Woman in 1975, the other, more slowly and subtly and in response to growing militancy in the same period, an increase in Maori writing in English. These developments were and still are based on the relatively large readership created in the generation born during the 1940s that was so liberally and widely educated over the following two decades: it is upon those of us who belong to the so-called 'baby boom' that the publishers of today base their calculations when deciding what goes. When assessing the outcome of these particular decisions for a particular year, as I am going to do now, one feels a certain responsibility, if very indirectly, for the products of these decisions. What is it we have persuaded the publishers that we want to read? Or, as someone said upon the invention of the telephone, 'What hath God wrought?'. It is interesting, though, to begin with someone not created by God, in the sense that he has fashioned his clay himself and without a helpful prod from the publisher. Ken Gunn's novel Evenshiels bears all the marks of a part-time writer's obsession: published, one assumes, by its accountant author (a suburban Auckland address is given for Phantom), it follows its own rules. That there are rules, and that they are so engrained that we are not aware of them as we read, is laid bare by a book like this. It spans over 3000 years to the 1880s, and moves from the primitive north of Scotland to the primitive South Island of New Zealand, ploughing on the way through century after century, tracing the effect of a single originary false move on following generations. One can imagine the groans of a succession of publishers on receiving a typescript full of this: no consistently-developed central character, no local setting, and a Celtic mumbo-jumbo of lost amulets and figures manifesting out of thin air. But in fact it is readable stuff, and not least because of its individuality.