Rita Bullwinkel: Headshot
The girl boxers impressing each other and the reader
What makes sports such an interesting literary or film theme are the people in the game — in this case, women fighters — bringing their lives, personal situations, and social backgrounds into the competition. Their fight is made of who they are.
Another often explored theme is underprivileged people on the margins, competing with their limited means of expression—their only value that the surrounding society often recognizes as an achievement. Headshot makes use of both of these aspects from the start. In that rough, competitive, survival mode is also a story close to an American reader.
There is another compellingly attractive, yet disturbing element in this writing, and that is violence. Despite the "friendly competition" and supposedly communal spirit of sports, the author does not elude the obvious aggression that underlies boxing, in this case of female teenagers. "The fact that they check [the gloves] every time makes Andi feel like she is capable of murder. She loves having an adult confirm that her fist could be a weapon." The fighting plays out in a supposedly safe sports environment with rules for protection, but one can see the opportunity and desire to disable the opponent in a socially acceptable game. My curiosity as a reader when starting the book and realizing the above was in the anticipated transcendence of the obvious attractiveness of the theme within both the style of writing and the story itself.
The style reflects boxing in short and direct fragments, as in fighting rounds or even shorter — the series of blows. Seemingly simplistic short sentences with repetitions induce tension and add a chunky feeling of heaviness. There is some harshness and a degree of judgment imposed on the girls and the extreme sport, but it is executed in a fairly neutral, spare way. "...her injury, these un-closable fists, will not be some battle relic, but, rather, a sorry, pathetic disability." This creates a tragic atmosphere: "They would only impress each other: other women who are trying to touch someone with their fists."
Something must be said about the way Rita Bullwinkel’s writing skillfully creates anticipation, making us guess about the winner of each match. She leads our sympathy toward one girl but makes the other win because of her persistent training and better possibilities in life. The boxing evolves against the background of their intimate lives and relationships, and it is that entanglement that makes the book an interesting read.
There is an agreeable matter-of-factness in storytelling that people in close contact with physical action possess. Sometimes the whole world (of despair) reveals itself within one bare statement: "Her father had died on the couch watching television." Most girls, at the time of the tournament, see their future in this sport if they manage to win. None of them, not even the winner, will actually make make it to professional boxing, which leaves us wondering about that alien and alienating time in their lives when everything in their teenage worlds evolved around fighting.
Pulling and admirably executed novel might miss something extra when building tension throughout the book, since most fights are interesting and intense, but there are seven of them. There is no clear catharsis, if one would expect it; the stories of individual young women after the short period of boxing develop unsurprisingly and even straight down unremarkable – the rest of their lives are told already in-between fighting. There is a certain (sport type?) austerity and strictness in the way the girl boxers are portrayed, which made me yearn for a bit of warmth. The last images of recurring new girl fighters in the future, also a very distant speculative future on different planets, and their connection with the animal world are imaginative and poetic, albeit short.
(Headshot is a Booker longlisted novel.)
Gerd Kvanvig: The Day That Didn't Happen
Of Innocence and Aggression
"I could have begun this by saying it was an accident. Self-defense. [...] But it’s the aggression I remember most of all, and what I recognize. [...] The furious pressure. The automatic reactions – as if I knew exactly what I was doing. The killing left a sense of calm [...] as if I had never done anything else."
The narrator of the story takes the unusual approach of connecting the act of killing with evolving weather changes; the heat of late August breaking into September chill. I find this sometimes ambiguous but also enchanting to the point of being seductive; the story is written in a direct and at the same time elusive style, using raw and dreamy poetic language to give a sense of reality which is different from the exclusively human world. The writing allows the environment, the climate to interfere and sometimes overshadow the first person storyteller, a young girl and an adult woman reflecting on her childhood; the weather bleeds into and fills the persona which is the aspect of the book I find most unusual and rewarding.
A twelve-year-old girl is threatened, cornered, fights back. She undergoes a trauma in a very isolated home environment, her closest person being a detached and somehow dysfunctional mother, who leaves her to her own solutions. There are a few firmer points in her life to which she can pinpoint her struggle, relations that emanate love through which she is able to survive: the time spent with her granddad; her new neighbor, the investigator of the crime with whom she falls in love.
The frame of the story is simple and the repetitions provide new views of what happened, similar to how the weather changes; the clouds, the light, the sun, the rain, and the clouds again help to propel the story, making it possible to evolve, even possible to tell what happened: "And yet it seems to be this nothing between me and the rhythm of light and wind and earth that can make the incident clear, and possible to talk about."
Each time the narrator gets closer to the night of the incident, she tells about the increasing late August heat; "the air was so bursting with growth that, if it hadn’t been for the drought and the almost imperceptible hint of chill at night, the world would have opened and withered like a plant. [...] And that’s how the world was balanced, just about. The growth was held back." Then she makes a spin, another cycle, avoids telling what was 'cut out' of the mind of the child for her to be able to survive, but which at the time also compromised all her interactions with the world.
Until the cycling, the circling, the repetitions, and all the love in between, grandfather's love, the investigator's love make it possible to tell and to remember, to remember what happened. "And it’s my hands after all. That’s how it was. It was me."
The innocence of a child in this story takes from the weather; the skies, winds, rain, and heat are more than her connection with the world, they fill her up; a human being transparent toward the dark sky, nothing more than the blueness of the sky, the yellow of the sun, or of that thin, worn-out dress she wore that summer. A child and her grandfather taking in what surrounds them. Innocence is not good or bad, it is empty, and it can at times be filled with aggression or its close companion – passion. This reminds me of Ted Hughes' The Crow where evil is considered to be the counterpart of good, how they are always interconnected, one not existing without the other.
What can feel like a long spin within the repetitiveness of the events and climate in this basically short novel is also a pace and space given to a reader to reflect on the notion of self, innocence, isolation, violence, and the sprouts of love. On memory; and coming to terms with the killing that was erased so it would not take over the whole being, but which eventually needs to be told. "The feeling that he and she were one and the same. It was a clear and all-pervasive feeling that when she stabbed him, she stabbed herself."
The Day That Didn't Happen is a meditation about the forming of self; it cannot forever stay empty, with a free flow from the outer to inner world; the self eventually needs another being to relate to. It's the kind of writing that could feel as cold or self-absorbed if there wasn't so much struggle in it; if it didn't ultimately tell about love and safety; and how the world is.
(Translated by Wendy H. Gabrielson, Naked Eye Publishing, 2022)
Pip Adam: The New Animals
The unprotected immediacy of life without words
I would describe the atmosphere of this book as dark, authentic, and raw. There is a struggle present all the way, from the microcosmos of employees in the fashion industry towards human-to-animal, or better said, animal-to-animal relationship, and finally, a solitary woman being splashed and surrounded by Earth's perhaps most alien environment: water, the vast sea surface of the planet. Everything in this writing seems to be the opposite of warmth, home, safety, and I was amazed and pulled into the final tearing away from the human world in the last part of the book, knowing also as a writer how difficult it is to wade into the wild but still talk about the weather, sky, sea, animals in a language that does not belong to those elements.
Maybe just the fact that a story, this fine web of words, can sometimes reach so deep into the wordless sphere of being, can be a truthful indicator of good writing? However subjective this might be. Words and reactions in our minds, ideas and their echoes in a deep mass that is us, the silent us, our inner world. All my favorite books touch the wordless part of me, that is a part of the magic that is still drawing us back to books.
I lack the whole picture, but there seems to be some strangeness, fresh roughness, humor, and alienation present in the fiction I've read from New Zealand. All humans in touch with the wild carry a specific feeling of solitude, maybe just because being close to something outside of human language and the extensions of human technology. I like reading something so literally from the opposite part of the globe that it surprises me; a text less in touch with Western literary traditions.
First things I've noticed with The New Animals was the importance of reciprocal feelings and reactions within friendships. These are observed and analyzed closely and into detail. Carla and Duey are friends since their twenties, their relationship is close, complicated, relaxed, but not without ambiguity and dark spots. For the large part, this is a book about the complexity of friendships. Two, three women – also Sharona, their peer – are described with admirable imperfection. I am attracted to a story that stretches beyond a polished symmetrical reciprocity into unpredictability of vast, uncontrollable mass – which life is – but still manages not to drown us in confusion. There are parts of this book that feel less balanced and grounded in the overall story than others.
When the threesome is presented in contact with Tommy and Elodie, decades younger people, the second focus of the novel is revealed: intergenerational conflicts and gaps. The narrator swiftly changes views according to each person telling the story.
There is something incomprehensible and rough about the third focal point: nature, which is also the title theme. It is first represented in Dugh, Carla's neglected pitbull gone wild, and as the story unfolds, it quickly becomes clear there is no easy solution for Dugh's life. Like most dogs, she is too dependent on human and changed by human society to be a part of the wild. We can only hope that Dugh will not end as many uncared-for dogs in real life do. There is nothing very rational or clear about Carla's relationship with Dough or Elodie's relation with sea animals when she enters the sea as her new living environment. That's where the story is headed: towards entering the nonhuman world of other animals, wilderness, and the water element – so different from the land and air to which we are adapted.
The moment Elodie swims away and stays off the land until the end of the book – the writing also changes: even if still thoughtfully crafted and articulated with great attention and style, it all the time reaches towards something beyond words in a similar way as being alone in the wilderness is an experience beyond words that can only partly and inadequately be described by language. Same as in Zen or Buddhist tradition, being and consciousness (of human and nonhuman animals) cannot be described, only lived.
There is something deeply disturbing and even scary in this articulated wilderness: the wordless Doug, his rage, isolation, and complete noncompliance, the vastness of the sea, the variety of incomprehensible creatures in its depths, the exchange of inhospitality, the clearly recognizable unfriendliness of the sharks, the whales, even the octopus companion. As Elodie swims away and slips off the language into immediacy of experience, she is also engulfed not only by the salty aquatic element but also confronted by and entangled into new relationships. Maybe it is this nonhuman element – while most of us are used to being surrounded almost exclusively by humans – the scariest thing, although it ought not to be. And the presence of death in this unprotected immediacy.