Out of the Vaipe, the Deadwater: A Writer's Early Life

Description

Albert Wendt crosses into new and deeply personal territory in this stirring BWB Text. Returning to his boyhood in the Vaipe, a suburb of Apia in Samoa, sees Wendt confront elemental questions: Is the Vaipe he has created in his stories, poetry and novels really the Vaipe that existed and exists in real life? Or is it real only in his books? Is there a difference between the two? And does it matter? The responses form a vivid narrative that draws on a life of award-winning writing, and returns full circle to the symbolic world of the Deadwater.

Maualaivao Albert Wendt has for many years been regarded as one of the Pacific's leading writers and a major influence on Pacific literature. His novels include Leaves of the Banyan Tree (which won the fiction section of the New Zealand Book Awards in 1980), Ola (which won the Commonwealth Book Prize for South-East Asia and the Pacific in 1991), The Mango's Kiss and Sons for the Return Home. He is also a widely published poet. Albert Wendt recently retired as Professor of English at the University of Auckland.

`The uncertainty of the truth to this account didn't diminish my enjoyment for Wendt's story; I love a good life story, even if I don't see the whole picture. There is so much heart thrown in to the pages, and every reader will take something away from such a well-written and informative tale.' Kimaya McIntosh, Booksellers NZ, 13 November 2015; `A very touching, likeable memoir that explains what his writing means. Works on lots of levels, and adds incredibly to your understanding of his previous work, and to the narrative of that work as a whole.' Louise O'Brien, New Zealand Books, on Radio New Zealand, Nine to Noon; `... a reader-friendly and revealing book. Wendt's policy throughout - a wise one worth contemplating if you plan to write a memoir - is to scrutinise his own shortcomings with ruthless candour while turning a kindly eye on everyone else he names ... He is eloquent on the contradictions of the divided self, gazing outwards from the rifts in his own thinking to the split thinking of all Samoans.' Iain Sharp, NZ Listener, 3 October 2015; 'Unbearable sorrow, unbearable dislocation, unbearable beauty; these emerge as themes of this intimate memoir about Albert Wendt's early life. They are also the prevailing themes in Wendt's formidable body of work. But this volume takes us into a landscape he has not before explored in such death.' Michalia Arathimos, Landfall Review Online, March 1 2017.