Sunday 22

Sunday 22 is an anthology of winners of the Sunday Star-Times short story competition.

A review in New Zealand Books by US writer Jenny DeBell made the following comments about my story, 'The Sea as Past':

In a recent New York Times Book Review essay, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami observed that there are only a finite number of words, making it vitally important that when we as writers choose a word we really mean it, and in that way the word itself, as well as the meaning surrounding it, takes on a whole new meaning. Murakami, a jazz enthusiast, takes his meaning from a quote by jazz pianist Thelonius Monk. According to Murakami: 'When someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: It can't be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different...

The Best New Zealand Fiction 3, edited by Fiona Kidman, and Sunday 22, introduced by Owen Marshall, are both strong collections, but with the exceptions of recurring references to the All Blacks, certain unmistakeable vocabulary, and descriptions of tropical scenery, there is little that makes these stories recognisably New Zealand. Bernard Steeds' 'The Sea as Past' in Sunday 22 is the exception.

This lyrical story about the death of a diver bears out Murakami's recommendation to really mean the words we choose. As Jacob, the diver, swims beyond rubbish and treasure and into the past itself, floating 'down towards the beginning of time, past grapevines and apple trees drifting in the depths, past television sets flickering silently in the mass of light, past wrecks of fishing boats, past a mall with a lotto shop', he disappears entirely, and the sea itself becomes the story's central character.

Read more about Sunday 22 on the Random House NZ website(click on 'fiction' and search for the title).

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