Stonefish

by Keri Hulme

Stonefish is a collection of short stories and poems by the only New Zealand writer to win the Pegasus Prize for Mäori Literature and the Booker Prize. '⦠The scallops arranged in the spider lambis were succulently decadent. A bottle of rare wine had been reduced to its essence and sprinkled over the raw bodies, and rough salt, and finely-chopped redware. The flush of the shell echoed visually the wine and the seaweed, and although there were but five scallops, they were truly sweet meat. The slices of mild green pepper were almost transparent, and they tangled artfully with shreds of young daikon, and pressure-steamed fragments of ti. Hot and crisp and oily-melting, a challenging blend. And the tea, as always, was Black Dragon tea, a hint of smoky coolness in the steam, and a consummation in the mouth. People died just to get it to these islands she had learned. She could think of many worse reasons to dieâ¦.'

Genres: Short Stories, Poetry, Fiction, Literary Fiction, Novels, Grad School, Science Fiction

239 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Hulme, Keri (1947–2021), novelist, short story writer and poet, gained international recognition with her award-winning The Bone People. Within New Zealand she has held writing fellowships at several universities, served on the Literary Fund Advisory Committee (1985–89) and the Indecent Publications Tribunal (1985–90), and in 1986–88 was appointed ‘cultural ambassador’ while travelling in connection with The Bone People.

Born and raised in Otautahi, Christchurch, Hulme is the eldest of six children. Her father, a carpenter and first-generation New Zealander whose parents came from Lancashire, died when Hulme was 11. Her mother came from Oamaru, of Orkney Scots and Maori descent (Käi Tahu, Käti Mämoe). Hulme was schooled at North New Brighton Primary School and Aranui HS (Christchurch). Her holidays were spent with her mother’s extended family at Moeraki, on the Otago East Coast, a landscape filled with the residue of its Maori past, which remains important for linking Hulme with her Maori ancestors: ‘I love it better than any place on Earth. It is my turangawaewae-ngakau, the standing-place of my heart.’

The Bone People (Spiral Collective, 1984) won the 1984 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction, and the prestigious international Booker Prize in 1985. 'Set on the harsh South Island beaches of New Zealand, bound in Maori myth and entwined with Christian symbols, Miss Hulme's provocative novel summons power with words, as a conjuror's spell. She casts her magic on three fiercely unique characters, but reminds us that we, like them, are 'nothing more than people', and that, in a sense, we are all cannibals, compelled to consume the gift of love with demands for perfection' (New York Times Book Review).

Source: Read NZ https://www.read-nz.org/writer/hulme-....

Reviews

[Loretta Riach · Rating 5 out of 5]

five stars even though it took me ages to get through (but not as many ages as the bone people, which i have been three-quarters through for two years). strange savoury briny shifting stories, some more affecting than others, some more full than others, but still very very good regardless. rough around the edges and all the better for it. also really yum food descriptions on every page, i wish i could have fish and chips with keri hulme

[Michelle Boyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stonefish has often been called an example of "exploratory writing," and in many ways there is truth to this. Many of the short stories explore various states of dream, which is quite different than what most of us consider "typical" writing. However, I am quick to point out that many of these experiments are full of Maori tradition, culture, oral stories, etc., that make them worthy of reading a few times as you try to find the point of each.

The title itself is rather telling. The stonefish (synanceia) is the most poisonous fish in the world. It is often dangerous and even deadly to humans that might accidentally step on it, taking in poison from its needle-like dorsal fins, which flare up when it gets scared or threatened. They are commonly called stonefish because they can camouflage themselves and look like large stone on the bottom of the Indo-Pacific floor in coastal regions. Just keep this literal fish in mind while reading.
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"Floating Worlds" gives some great examples of TEK or traditional ecological knowledge, mostly through the example of what individuals know about mushrooms in their community. There is also some good information here about storytellers: "Storytellers never stay in one place for long."

"The Eyes of the Moonfish See Moonfish Pain" is another interesting intersection that shows the dichotomies and parallels between traditional Maori lifestyles and contemporary lifestyles. This can be seen as a woman cleans fish--something that was once done with a bit more respect, as fish were culturally significant. But it seems that commercial fisheries care little about the fish and more about the profits. At the end, it seems that some people are better at separating their traditions from their jobs, but this is not the case for all. Nor should it be (imho). This is later picked up in "Midden Mine," which also shows some of the negative outcomes of commercialization of the fishing industry. The example of packages of fish sticks is quite comical, if also somewhat saddening because of how true it is. The fish have "happyhappy smiles" on their faces even though we are going to eat them--how does that seem correct?

If you want to read about colonization, I recommend "Storehouse for the Hungry Ghosts." In the section "Midden Mine" you also get some insights into the way in which academia and treasure hunters have altered the way in which we look at communities. Academia tends to like looking at dead communities--even though they might not be dead. Part of this is sifting through their materials (sacred or otherwise) so they can catalogue them, preserve them, keep them, etc.

Overall, the writing is indeed a bit experimental. But Hulme is pointing readers in all sorts of directions. You don't have to be a scholar to appreciate the novel, but looking up a few Maori facts here an there wouldn't hurt you either.

[Ilana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surreal and very poetic. I felt like I was completing a puzzle with every story, but it was well worth the work.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Utterly bonkers ... just like my dreams!

[Keri Te Amo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love her writing style. I like magical realism and I like words. I think she’s good with both.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I had to choose one set of words to describe this book, it would be, "neo-literary." This is not an easy read , and the faint of heart or casual reader should not pick up this book. If the constant use of Maori words does not get you, (she does have a useful glossary in the back), then be prepared for Hulme's esoteric style of leaving things half-said, using dashes, inserting poetry, and only sketching the scene. Reading Hulme is like looking at a Franz Kline painting.

This is the most difficult piece of literature I have read since college. It was exhilarating. Her prose contains poetry and self-reference and theses beautiful ah-ha moments where the story and the meaning come together. This did not happen for all of the stories, in part because I got lazy and didn't want to continue all that research, and in part because some stories were too esoteric. (With all the Maori, I spent a fair amount of time translating, which took me down the rabbit hole of learning about New Zealand.) My favorites included "Some Foods You Should Try Not to Encounter," "Hinekaro Goes on a Picnic and Blows up Another Obelisk," "The Eyes of the Moonfish," and "Getting It."

This is a book I will come back to -- probably sooner than I should.

[Ceallaigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

“‘Is - this - real?’ I ask the tūrehu.
‘As real as your life,’ it answers, ‘and as real as whatever you call reality. It is just that your kind can't stand very much reality. You much prefer your patterns and your stories and your noisy dirty tramplings over everything. However, you don't last forever and we almost do. We are going now. I would go quite soon too, if I were you,’ and it gives a small smile and, horrifyingly, winks. And the mist and Others weren't there any more.”
— from ‘Getting It’

TITLE—Stonefish
AUTHOR—Keri Hulme
PUBLISHED—2004
PUBLISHER—Huia Publishers NZ

GENRE—poetry, short literary fiction & prose poetry, speculative fiction
SETTING—Aotearoa
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—pounamu, ancestral legacy, indigenous sovereignty, mushroom foraging, climate change/crisis, post-apocalyptic/dystopian/alternate/futuristic worlds & possibilities, writing, grocery stores & poison, imperialist economies & capitalism, fishing, antipodean melting pot, fish-processing factory work, colonialist oppression, sumptuous descriptions of food, sacred memory, Māori mythology & story-heritage, tūrehu, maeroero, taniwha, death & grief, moths & butterflies, living in the present moment, joy, the Moriori, archaeology

“To be at a remove from my own history: to see it only as through lens or mic. To know my real history, I would forego any comfort I derive from what my mother told me and get right in there among the blood and tears. O I would—“
— from ‘Midden Mine’

Summary:
“…if we cast our lines out, if we dig and if we dream, who knows what we’ll find?”

My thoughts:
Another flawless collection from one of my favorite writers. I was so excited to find so many stories that resonate with my favorite literary themes and subjects including embodied spirits, indigenous belief systems, inherited trauma, and even archaeology.

This collection also emphasizes Hulme’s particularly original writing style. She makes her own rules, and while the result might take some effort in finding your sealegs to be able to navigate the oceanic undulations and emotional depths of her prose, the effect is always stunning and the experience always rewarding.

I would recommend this book to readers who love adventurous poetic writing styles with themes of our relationships with nature, each other, and ourselves. This book is best read seaside.

Final note: So excited to have finally been able to read this out-of-print collection! I now also have managed to add STRANDS, HOMEPLACES, and LOST POSSESSIONS to my shelves as well so aside from THE SILENCES BETWEEN which is veryyy out of print, I now have all of her published works. 🙌🏻 A bit sad that she only wrote these six(/seven) books but luckily they are the kind that will benefit from umpteenth rereads. 🫶🏻

“Casually say to yourself these three sentences; one: everything that is, is interconnected; two: everything you can think of, exists, and everything you can't think of, does too; three: you are what you eat. Now, go away and sort out which one, if any, was the lie.”
— from ‘The Pluperfect Pā-wā’

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Season: late winter / early spring

CW // colonialism, environmental destruction & desecration, terminal illness & mental degeneration, domestic violence (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Further Reading—
- TE KAIHAU THE WINDEATER by Keri Hulme
- THE BONE PEOPLE by Keri Hulme
- STRANDS by Keri Hulme—TBR
- WHAI by Nicole Titihuia Hawkins—TBR
- THE WHALE RIDER by Witi Ihimaera
- Haunani-Kay Trask
- No’u Revilla
- THE WORLD KEEPS ENDING, AND THE WORLD GOES ON by Franny Choi
- DYKE (GEOLOGY) by Sabrina Imbler
- THE SENTENCE by Louise Erdrich

Favorite Quotes—
from Floating Words:
“I amble along the strip, seemingly aimlessly. When I first went gathering, I would mistake driftwood and pallid stones and old gnawed bits of sheepbone for mushrooms, because I made the mistake of looking for them. That was years ago; now I have my eye in.”

“I sigh: Change, change, change. Where is solidity? Where is the rock?”

“In the misty distance is a shy retreating figure, a grey shadow in the drizzle. Though there are so few of us left, it makes no move towards me. That is understandable. Mushroom-pickers are solitary creatures, and don't like other mushroom-pickers too close.”

“I grab my last bottle of Lindauer's finest. Ultra Brut Cuvee Sans Dosage. That’s about as mean, and lean, a champagne as you'll get, anywhere. I can already see, despite disbelief—it’s like reality has sneezed, and split—it is going to be one of those occasions where sober straight forward action will get me nowhere. The winter moon that night was very pale. ‘A pale moon doth rain.’”

“‘When you are drowning, the depth of the water is of last concern.' The essential requirement of a whakataukī-waina is that it seems to make sense—it does make sense, a kind of sense, but that sense is edgy and changeable, and if you think too much not about it, you step into mental quicksand, skiddy and sinking all at once. That's why they're wine proverbs, not too much use or good anywhen else… There I was, drowning in unreality, and the depth of the wine the last concern.”

“Our worlds are drifting further
apart. The tide has reached my front fence… Ah wind, blow the mists away…”

“Where are you going? I don't know. Wherever the inward and ingoing tides take me. To stop temporarily wherever I strand. Storytellers never stay in one place for long.”

“Once upon a time, We were a community here… Now, here is wherever you find me, and nowhere is where I’ll be.”

from The Pluperfect Pā-wā:
“You don't know me. You won't know me after this either. Don't worry about it.”

from The Eyes of the Moonfish See Moonfish Pain:
“She is deft and fast enough to make the rank of Able Hand first class, but she chooses to hide her speed, her skill. Outstanding nails get hammered down, says her father, tall poppies get chopped.”

“'Sweet dreams,' she whispers to her hidden mother, her gone father, her quiet and satiate self.”

“says her father,
Who cares what the day brings?
The night will always come.”

from Hinekaro Goes on a Picnic and Blows Up Another Obelisk:
“There's an old saying: The more you look, the more you see. It is a misquotation. It should be, The more you look, the more there is to see.”

“today be umber
eat water
plant rumours
fish for kraken
think: a whisper dies on her lips”

from Getting It:
“I can see the smile too. Someone who smiles like that would slice your belly open to check what you had for breakfast, quite playfully and just in the interests of learning. Then they'd tie your intestines in a bow—“

“We were here first. We have never left. We own our homelands.
We prefer to be in the shadows. We roam the lands at night.
We were on the Almost-island before you came, it has always
been ours.
We will remain there, in company with the first arrivals.
We share with them but not with humans. Go away. Leave
us alone.”

“Gran had never said much about them, unlike her stories about the bush fairies whom she dearly loved, but I dimly recall it was all terrifying. A clever and vindictive seafolk, who killed humans much more often than humans killed them (although our stories didn't exactly emphasise this).
Note: ponaturi nails are long, strong-looking, and savagely pointed.”

“We came because we thought seeing us clearly might cause wonder, make you realise there is much more than you think you know about our world. We thought our very presence might open minds and change present attitudes. All of us heard most minds snap shut minutes ago.”

“They are creatures of mist and rain and aloneness
says my gran
they play water and sadness into our world
she said.
They are people of cunning and malice, and sunshine and music and stillness
says my gran
they bring together all of the Others, the ancient unborn, the young and the old
she said.
And never forget the dwellers-in-water, shape-shifters, changers
says my gran
and that all of them hate us strangers, who came from the Abyssal Void
yes, I do remember what she said.
And I thought it was just one of Gran's little songs. Now I teach it to our children.”

from Storehouse for the Hungry Ghosts:
“But the books never told me what he truly was. It takes dreams to tell you that.”

“‘The People of the Sun' was an early christening, but they just called themselves tchakat henu, people of the land. We still do that, all of us here—tangata whenua, Earth people. And yet, we're islanders, habitants of the sea as much as the good earth. Maybe it's because we hope our bones will rest easy in the ground, rather than in the belly of a shark?”

“There's pain and cruelty in everything… Do I not tell you this story, giving you images you don't necessarily want, griefs that are old, old, and irremediable?”

“The good feeling of having grown and harvested your own food; the better feeling to have shared it; the best feeling, to eat to repletion with your family.”

“For years, to live was to despair.”

“heavy with memories of placid surfeit
he tipped the scales into the grave.
‘I am rich with good things and the poor ghosts
shall not be sent
empty away’”

“‘Nothing human is alien to me', but when anything comes that close to home, the ghosts begin to stir and work like yeast in your dreams.”

from Hatchlings:
“We are not lovely beings, she decides, watching the imperceptibly slow unfurling of the wings.”

from Kissing It As It Flies:
“You see, we can live in our memories or live in our hopes and fears. Or, we can live in this moment, you and me, talking, the sun there, the river here… remembering another time and other people, for sure, but also hearing the ripples rippling like a plenum of giggles, and watching the lekking flies... Because it's the only time we can be sure of, the only time we really have. Now.”

from The Trouble with A. Chen Li:
“…if we encounter technology beyond the reach of our imagination, we will think it magic.”

from Midden Mine:
”A dark night and seafog thickening.
I think
all we find
is what we're looking for”

“The oystercatchers are crying Keria keria! so a storm is coming despite this languid fog. Replace the tarpaulin and head for bed. Tomorrow is another year.”

“'You should know better than to pick up pieces of people!’”

“He was the best kind of teacher, a person of passion who shared what he knew.”

“By two, there's general agreement about throwing in the trowel.”

“You have to know the stories.”

“Maybe it's because we bury our noses in the remnants of human lives, human hopes, human endeavours—we're right down there in the bone dust and fragments of all the hard—hated or happy—work—but I don't know many joyful, or religious, archaeologists.”

“It's interesting, well at least to this me, how both diaries and field notebooks and, indeed, every kind of written (sometimes spoken or other) record, are started off with great detail and beady-eyed elaboration and almost literary explication, a hiss and a roar—and then they taper off and die.”

“A large amount of archaeology is—despite the attempted science of our endeavour—Why? And Why? is a question science doesn't pretend to answer... it is unanswerable except in very small scale very specific circumstances anyway. Everything larger is chaotic.”

“For us apes it's what you believe heartdeep, not what actually is—“

“Listen: Listen
between the sight of a word
and the sound of a word
is silence—
see?”

“We are stories eh? Well, no human story ever had a good ending, and all the endings are basically the same. We always wind up dead. Finished, pau, kaput, pakaru'd. End of story.”

from Telling How The Stonefish Swims:
“And older than humans of our kind, this fish swam
unimaginable waters crowded with nightmares of teeth
and tentacles: survived them all to sink at last
in final sleep…”

[Madelynp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Keri Hulme's writing is so delightfully weird and irreverent and perfect. After trying to track down additional works beyond The Bone People, but meeting with NO success, I went the ILL route. This book was worth the effort and the wait, though. Hulme considers climate change, race, identity, and nature through a mix of short stories and poetry. She uses a variety of genres, from historical fiction to horror, and creates vivid impressions through her use of imagery.

If anyone is heading to New Zealand in the near future and manages to get their hands on a copy of this book, I urge you to do so. It's currently out-of-print and it makes me really sad to think that works like Hulme's may be lost through time because of a lack of interest.

[Octavia Cade · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surreal, fractured, often fantastic and set like stones into their environment, this collection of shorts (plus the odd poem) is like a collection of little puzzles. It's certainly interesting to read - rising to fascinating in some cases.

Though as with any short story collection, some of the included tales are better than others. My particular favourites were the truly excellent "Floating Words" and "The Eyes of the Moonfish".

[Mariana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two or three gems among these postmodern short stories,

[Ingo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful collection of short stories with magic elements from the New Zealand Maori culture.

[Kendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting.
I didn't expect to actually like short stories, at least I like Hulmes a lot.

[Tamsin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Where have we come from and where are we going? These are the questions Keri Hulme asks in this collection, which opens with a story of an imagined future - eerily accurate for those coastal dwellers in Aotearoa New Zealand and other island regions watching sea levels rise today. Many of the stories play around with aspects of New Zealand's pre- and post-colonial past, as well as futuristic imaginings, peppered with Hulme's signature wordplay and transitional prose-poetry. The collection finishes with reflections on Aotearoa's past. The sea and it's life forms are at the centre of many of these stories, as they were to Hulme's life, and she seems to be suggesting that the sea is where this island nation arose from, and to the sea it will return. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this work, so clever and playful, and wish Hulme was still around to give us more.

[RobdawgReads · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly, the "exploratory writing style" is not my jam. I really struggled to get through this book. I found it jumpy and abstract. Maybe it's a bit too artsy for my taste. I recommend giving it a try and if it speaks to you, that's great!

It reminds me of Bones & Murder by Margaret Atwood which was also not one of my favorites but some people loved it...

[Clarke · Rating 1 out of 5]

Started to read and gave up after 30 pages, as I could not interpret the messages she was trying to convey.

[Tessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ugh, someone once said about Jia Tolentino, and I feel this way about Keri Hulme: I would read her shopping lists if she let me.

[Eddy Grant · Rating 5 out of 5]

lovely (if not confusing) read. Agree with another review that each piece feels like a puzzle. Doesn’t really matter if you get it or not though, the writing is beautiful enough!