As an aspiring writer, I'm interested in what Airini Beautrais and David Coventry have to say about narrative threads. The two authors share a common theme of travel through the world and through life, in their new books, The Beautiful Afternoon and Performance.
Airini Beautrais was the winner of the Jann Medlicott Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in 2021, for her short story collection, Bug Week and Other Stories. A science teacher, her work is often funny with a sense of the profound: in the way she puts people under the microscope inserting her mind into different characters' experiences and bringing life to inanimate objects.
'At a certain age I began to think less about sex and more about tableware.'
The title story of Bug Week had me laughing from the opening sentence - Beautrais gives life to a house where nothing is perfect: pipes sing, the linen cupboard whispers, her bookshelves groan. I can relate. There's sexual tension in sliding a knife into its block and book covers are 'closely pressed together', water longing to trickle into the bath and chair legs that bend 'back in perfect submission'. Beautrais' writing is thoroughly enjoyable.
The Beautiful Afternoon is collection of essays that question patriarchy with Beautrais' insights on everything from Star Wars (Kylo Ren dies at the end) to the times between ice ages (High-Cut Holocene Wayfarer), consumerism and Sea hags to name a few. No topic is safe from her sharp wit and inquisitive mind, seeking answers to how we define ourselves in the modern world.
An MA graduate from the International Institute of Modern Letters, David Coventry is a local, living in Banks Peninsula. He won the Hubert Church Award for Best First Book at the 2016 Ockhams with The Invisible Mile, which was published worldwide, and has been translated into many languages. Coventry was the 2022 Ursula Bethel Writer in Residence at the University of Canterbury.
His new book, Performance, is the product of David's doctorate study, looking at the dichotomy of the almost impossible task of being a writer and living with ME (Myalgic encephalomyelitis - otherwise known as chronic fatigue syndrome). It's a book that transcends the author's double life of being a creative and being unwell. It's also a book that defies description, being part memoir, part novel, in which the central character is David himself.
In Performance Coventry recounts many journeys, taking the reader back through David's life in the Rangitikei, Wellington and places we know and love in Canterbury, including a disastrous traverse of 'The Watcher' Tapuae o Uenuku, in the Kaikoura Ranges. I can see this maunga from New Brighton Beach too.
He reveals a personal journey through living with ME and how it's affected his life: drawing a comparison between ME and Long Covid and describing how he went from a teen who was intuitively good at academics and an ace at sports, to someone who found it hard to think, eat, or even leave the house.
Incredibly, he expresses himself on the page with profundity:
'I knew something my teachers didn't...I left school and sought out the meaning of punk rock, which presented itself to me ...as a healing music, a form of physical assaulting balm after the hurt of the illness and my discovered sense of aloneness.'
Airini Beautrais and David Coventry will be speaking with Alex Casey, senior writer from The Spinoff, on Saturday 31 August, 2:30 at Tautoru/TSB Space, Hapori|Community, Level One, at Tūranga.
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