NEW ZEALAND

 

READ

Oh, my. I don’t even know where to begin with the book I read for New Zealand. The Bone People, by Maori author Keri Hulme, took a lot out of me. It’s a book about broken people and shattered families; heart-melting tenderness and unspeakable brutality; hitting rock bottom and seeking redemption.

The book centers around three people: a woman named Kerewin Holmes, who is mostly European but a little bit Maori; a man named Joe Gillayley, who is mostly Maori but a little bit European; and a young boy named Simon Gillayley, Joe’s foster son, who is all European. They form a bond so tight that each one feels incomplete without the other two. At one point, Kerewin, an artist who has been struggling with her ability to create, sculpts a tricephalos with the back of each of their heads melded together, their faces turned outward. When Joe sneaks a look at it, he thinks, “She saw us as a whole, as a set.”

There is so much darkness and pain within each of them, though. Kerewin is wealthy, at least by local standards, and has built a tower with a spiral staircase for her residence. But she is estranged from her family, has no friends, and is struggling with her inability to make art the way she used to do. She comes home one day and discovers Simon in her tower, and her life takes a completely different turn.

Simon is very young – probably somewhere between six and eight years old. He was aboard a ship that was wrecked, killing everyone onboard but tossing him toward the shore, where Joe found him. Joe brought him home, and Joe and his wife Hana became his foster parents. Simon doesn’t speak, although there doesn’t seem to be any physical reason why he can’t. Things go well until Joe loses both Hana and their infant Timote to the flu.

Joe and Kerewin meet when he goes to her tower after she finds Simon there. Simon is precocious and finds ways to communicate without speaking. He is not a docile child, and frequently does things he’s not supposed to do – skipping out on school, stealing, lashing out, and going places he shouldn’t. And this brings me to the biggest problem I had in reading the book: child abuse that ranged from horrific to sickening.

At one point, it was so bad that I almost gave up. I thought I’d start over with a different book from New Zealand instead. But I stuck with it. After all, the author won a Booker Prize for this novel, as well as the Pegasus Prize for Literature. The cover of the book has a quote by Pulitzer-prize-winning author Alice Walker that says, “This book is just amazingly, wondrously great.” The New York Times called it “unforgettably rich and pungent,” and the Washington Post said it was “an original, overwhelming, near-great work of literature.”

So, what was great about it? For starters, the three main characters are multidimensional and mostly sympathetic. There are things to love about each of them, but they also have some truly deplorable traits. When one suffers, they all suffer, even in the cases where one or two of them are responsible for the suffering of another. The plot is rich with Maori language, culture, and mythology. The last few chapters, especially, draw on Maori folklore to help bring a hopeful resolution to what would otherwise be an untenable situation for all concerned. I’m glad I didn’t stop reading at the worst part or I wouldn’t have had the satisfaction of knowing how everything turned out.

But am I glad I read the book at all? I don’t know. I’m sure The Bone People will haunt me for a long time.

COOK

There were many food references in The Bone People, but none that were helpful for purposes of this blog. I did a little web surfing and found a recipe for New Zealand Kiwi Bread on the Food.com website. And yes, it’s called that because the main ingredient is chopped kiwis, not because Kiwi is a nickname for people from New Zealand. The only substitution I needed in order to make it vegan was to use JUST Egg in place of the egg. It was very easy to make, and it had a nice tang, both from the kiwis in the bread and the lemon juice in the icing.

GIVE

A project from an organization called WAI Wānaka caught my eye on the GlobalGiving website. This organization is focused on protecting local waterways to ensure that the water stays healthy for both humans and the ecosystem. According to the project description, donations will be used to “increase our community’s capability and capacity to deliver on the ground environmental action by co-ordinating our own volunteer activities with local environmental groups to expand the effectiveness of volunteer efforts in our region.” More information about this project is available at: Help 50 volunteers take environmental action in NZ - GlobalGiving.

 

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