Naomi Mitch ison
The only book I read for pleasure rather than work or a misplaced sense of duty in the early part of the year was Edward Blishen' s Shaky Relations (Hamish Hamilton) and oh, how I enjoyed it, rationing myself to a chapter a day: one giggles about his family or his Africa, his delicately searing comments, like gossip with a favourite friend! Since then, between hospital and convalescence, I've done little but read. It had to be immediately good and gripping to get past the pain barrier. Two paperbacks. One was Living in the Maniatoto by Janet Frame. I hadn't guessed at today's New Zealand throwing up a stylist of her calibre. She snapped me into her field of vision in which extraordinary things happen ordinarily and inevitably: an apparently normal situation that her kaleidoscope turns inside out. The other, China Men, where again I was in a totally other world, as alien as science fiction, but real as stones and blood: China, California, Vietnam from underneath or sideways: so convincing that the reader sees things as Maxine Hong Kingston does, spinning two civilisations with equal agility and technical skill.
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