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books, books, books
Feb. 27th, 2010 12:05 pmIt has been almost a week since I finished Patricia Grace's Potiki, and I still haven't posted a proper review. I found it a flawed but very fascinating book--fascinating at least in part because of its flaws.
The book is loosely structured, with different chapters told from the perspectives of different characters, and lots of switching between first and third person. The main plot concerns a conflict over land use between a Maori tribe and a group of developers who want to build a resort, but this plot actually takes up relatively little space in the book; Grace spends a lot of time on the backstories of her Maori characters, and their daily lives as they try to rebuild a traditional existence for themselves.
Grace's prose is really quite beautiful at times, and her story is interesting--I'm no expert, certainly, but it seems to me that the story of a native people who have gotten tired of playing along with assimilation efforts and are struggling to return to the dimly-remembered lifestyle of their parents and grandparents is one that doesn't get told often. And once the conflict with the developers gets going Grace creates a powerful feeling of terrible inevitability; the book just vibrates with the awareness that awful things have been set in motion, and no one cane stop them.
But at other moments Grace's story-telling slips into didacticism, and the struggle between noble Maori and evil developers lacks nuance. She uses a lot of untranslated Maori words (sometimes whole sentences, and once or twice even paragraphs)--I vacillated between thinking that this worked as an assertion of all that is untranslatable between cultures and simply being frustrated at my inability to figure out what was being said. In a way, this sums up my response to the book as a whole. Grace's interest in oral culture is obvious throughout the book (her characters make repeated reference to the power of stories as tools for understanding and shaping the world), and my objections all seem to stem from the ways in which her novel doesn't conform to my print culture-based literary expectations. So perhaps the flaws are not with Grace as a writer at all, but rather with me as a reader. Or most likely they are some mix of the two.
As far as explorations of conflicted contemporary Maori culture go, I think The Bone People is probably the better novel, but Potiki is certainly worth reading as well. Grace's perspective is so different from Keri Hulme's, and there's value in seeming this diversity. Now I only have to read about a million more books before I can make this kind of comparison with any kind of authority. Alas, vita brevis!
I do have a bit more New Zealand literature on my immediate horizon (Janet Frame's Owls Do Cry is sitting on my coffee table right now), but I decided to spend some time in more familiar landscapes first: Ireland and the Adirondacks. I'm currently reading both At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien, and Contested Terrain: a New History of Nature and People in the Adirondacks by Philip G. Terrie. It's two early in both of them to say much, but thus far Flann O'Brien mostly makes me laugh, and Philip Terrie seems like an excellent follow up to Paul Schneider.
The book is loosely structured, with different chapters told from the perspectives of different characters, and lots of switching between first and third person. The main plot concerns a conflict over land use between a Maori tribe and a group of developers who want to build a resort, but this plot actually takes up relatively little space in the book; Grace spends a lot of time on the backstories of her Maori characters, and their daily lives as they try to rebuild a traditional existence for themselves.
Grace's prose is really quite beautiful at times, and her story is interesting--I'm no expert, certainly, but it seems to me that the story of a native people who have gotten tired of playing along with assimilation efforts and are struggling to return to the dimly-remembered lifestyle of their parents and grandparents is one that doesn't get told often. And once the conflict with the developers gets going Grace creates a powerful feeling of terrible inevitability; the book just vibrates with the awareness that awful things have been set in motion, and no one cane stop them.
But at other moments Grace's story-telling slips into didacticism, and the struggle between noble Maori and evil developers lacks nuance. She uses a lot of untranslated Maori words (sometimes whole sentences, and once or twice even paragraphs)--I vacillated between thinking that this worked as an assertion of all that is untranslatable between cultures and simply being frustrated at my inability to figure out what was being said. In a way, this sums up my response to the book as a whole. Grace's interest in oral culture is obvious throughout the book (her characters make repeated reference to the power of stories as tools for understanding and shaping the world), and my objections all seem to stem from the ways in which her novel doesn't conform to my print culture-based literary expectations. So perhaps the flaws are not with Grace as a writer at all, but rather with me as a reader. Or most likely they are some mix of the two.
As far as explorations of conflicted contemporary Maori culture go, I think The Bone People is probably the better novel, but Potiki is certainly worth reading as well. Grace's perspective is so different from Keri Hulme's, and there's value in seeming this diversity. Now I only have to read about a million more books before I can make this kind of comparison with any kind of authority. Alas, vita brevis!
I do have a bit more New Zealand literature on my immediate horizon (Janet Frame's Owls Do Cry is sitting on my coffee table right now), but I decided to spend some time in more familiar landscapes first: Ireland and the Adirondacks. I'm currently reading both At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien, and Contested Terrain: a New History of Nature and People in the Adirondacks by Philip G. Terrie. It's two early in both of them to say much, but thus far Flann O'Brien mostly makes me laugh, and Philip Terrie seems like an excellent follow up to Paul Schneider.
