Te Kaihau/the Windeater

by Keri Hulme

Stories deal with dreams, a woman who accidently injures her son, sheep herders, whales, violence, and family life.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Poetry, Female Authors, Literary Fiction

239 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1987

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

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of short stories by Keri Hulme. Having enjoyed The Bone People I decided to try this collection and wasn’t disappointed. The stories are certainly experimental and at times could be described as having elements of magic realism. A wide variety of styles makes this feel like a collection by several writers. Hulme is part Maori and the culture and influence comes through. This collection has been criticised for being negative, violent and even horrific. Well guess what: this isn’t sanitised culture for the rugby field, it speaks of oppression and injustice and of the many Maoris at the edge of society in New Zealand. Hulme’s voice is strong and her feminism shines through as well:
“I remember the words and I remember the sting, and I still hate all that shit, men being tapu, and women being noa. Don’t eat here; don’t put your head there. Don’t hang your clothes higher than the men’s; never get up and talk on the marae. ‘Our women don’t talk out front,’ you said. ‘Arawa women speak only from behind their men.’ And you wonder why I went city?”
Themes of death, dying and maiming may seem bleak but there is a very strong and physical connection to the natural world which feels very much like a character in many of the stories.
Inevitably the writing has a strong poetic content as Hulme is also a poet:
“What can I say to you?
That is clean, new, untrammeled,
Free from smears and fresh from mother tongue?
and the rain is all around
a pin to skewer a cloak of flesh.
“solitary tall hills,
Sometimes walk, sometimes meet”
{Sacred knob/holy top/Puketapu}
And from ancient halls mounds vestibules
Spinning out of the golden past
Sommmetimes the resonance of words,
Naming”
Isolation and alienation are also important themes.
I may not seem to be selling this too well but these are remarkable and haunting stories which stand well with some of the greatest short story writers.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

I've run into my fair share of those who profess an interest in, bordering on a devotion to in some, experimental writing. It's hard to take any of them seriously when I'm the only one of my Goodreads circle to have added, read, and reviewed, in that order, this work. In the interest of thoroughness, the reviewers that usually head the lists of the standard definition of experimental (a paradox if there ever was one, but that hasn't stopped the worshipers of the demographically conforming), so unless some are buried in the bowels of a rather small number of overtly interested readers, the only conclusion to be made is that, somehow, this book by a Man Booker winner has passed everyone by. Same shit, different day, but Rome wasn't built in a single iteration of such.

Good luck trying to pin down what any of these are about, exactly. Here, you have poetry, a screen play, practically ubiquitous stream of consciousness, fantasy, sci fi (you could displace those last two into magical realism, but I prefer to think about them as a decentering of the Euro consciousness), bildungsroman, horror, mystery, horror mystery in the line of Hitchcock, all of it whirled together in some of the most carbuncularly dense yet deftly incisive prose I've read in a long time. The stories are more ghastly than anything else, what with their reoccuring themes of violence, disability, abject poverty, disintegration of the psyche once cut off from the natural world, the disintegration of the body when subjected to the natural world, animals being led to the slaughter, domestic abuse, suppression of the people's right to protest, settler state abuse, and any manner of way in which human beings are isolated via amputation. There's very little closure, even less social connection, and any motivation for plot usually births entirely from the single (?) first person narrator's slow devolution into rambling obsession and/or speedy succumbing to an overwhelming wave of something outside themselves: rarely human, never nice.

Those who've read The Bone People may be pleased to know that these pages contain a portion of the past of the character of the mysterious child. Others who have not yet but plan on reading the Booker win may think they should consequently avoid this in case of spoilers, but Hulme is not a writer I'll consider to concentrate most, if any of her authorial worth in the form of a few somewhat convoluted plot points. Yet a third group who has had no contact whatsoever with the much more decorated novel will be free to decide without bibliographical bias whether this admittedly monstrous yet equally powerful collection is worth chasing down. As I said before, abandon hope of narrowing anything down. A better grasp than mine on New Zealand and Māori in yet another iteration of the colonialist tradition would most assuredly help, especially with regards to the indigenous vocabulary that mixes into view as much as it did in TBP. Still, that doesn't solve the ever present confusion of what time, place, gender, age, and even species the first person narrator is operating from. You may make your assumptions, but beware: any determination necessarily limits your experience of the experimental, and we wouldn't want that, now would we.

For those obsessed with finding books to fulfill eclectic requirements for various reading challenges, Keri Hulme is Māori, asexual, and aromantic. I could pretend use one or all of these characteristics in tandem as paradigms for analysis, but eh. I'm more concerned with those out there who have a hard time seeing themselves in writing and even more so in literature. This is timely because Hulme, much like Roy, has been promising second/third (twinned works, apparently) novels for some time now. The fact that the latter has recently committed for a publication next year gives hope for the sooner rather than later output of this other unorthodox Man Booker winner.

[Juliet Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of experimental short stories from the New Zealand author of The Bone People. The stories are full of Hulme's sense of the beauty of New Zealand, along with her awareness of human alienation from the environment.
From the environmental point of view, the story that most stood out for me was:

One Whale Singing - a pregnant woman in a boat, a pregnant whale in the water. The woman argues with her pompous partner about whether humans are really superior to other creatures. She feels that our ability to make artifacts, rather than indicating superior intellectual abilities, in fact demonstrates our inferiority, our lack of a real ecological niche, our total alienation from nature. Meanwhile the whale is having a wonderful time, in total harmony with the waters around her.

All these stories are beautifully written, with real insight and awareness. They are also very thought provoking and refuse to give the reader the satisfaction of a real conclusion, which reflects life.

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An impressive collection of short stories that deserves to be far more widely known and read! I cannot claim to have understood all and enjoyed some more than others (inevitable in any collection) and there is quite a wonderful variety in tone, style, theme, even format. My favorites were ‘One Whale, Singing’ and ‘A Drift in Dream.’

[Ceallaigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

“When I open my eyes, having rested a little in the cool of this cave, I see there are swarms of mussels on the wall. Crusts of them, blueback and shiny as though varnished. There is the occasional stranger mussel in their midst, pale green, like a wraith of a mussel. Pallid, obvious, vulnerable. There is never another palegreen mussel closeby for company. The different, the abnormal, the alien, the malformed. Who—or what—selects a person for the torment of difference?” — from “Kiteflying Party at Doctors’ Point”

TITLE—Te Kaihau The Windeater
AUTHOR—Keri Hulme
PUBLISHED—1986

GENRE—poetry & literary fiction; “experimental” writing styles
SETTING—Aotearoa, mostly
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—Maori life/identity/culture/mythology, Aotearoa, neurodivergency, Nature, stories and storytelling

WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
CHARACTERS—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
PLOT—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
BONUS ELEMENT/S—This was the *perfect* summer read.
PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“But how do they know? she asks herself. About the passing on of knowledge among other species? They may do it in ways beyond our capacity to understand… that we are the only ones to make artefacts I’ll grant you, but that’s because us needy little adapts have such pathetic bodies, and no especial ecological niche. So hooks and hoes, and steel things that gouge and slay, we produce in plenty. And build a wasteland of drear ungainly hovels to shelter our vulnerable hides.” — from “One Whale, Singing”

This collection is an incredible compilation of poems and short stories that push the boundaries of style and structure in modern fiction. There was not a single piece that I didn’t enjoy or that didn’t make me think deeply about some topic or another from artistic expression to poverty to mythological realities to the sanctity of Nature. There were stories about shipwrecks and cicadas, love and mental illness, ghoulish fairy tales and murder mysteries, from “Kaibutsu-San”, which reads like a dark, creepy folktale, to “King Bait”, which reads like a modern mythology story, every piece in this book felt like something I was always meant to read.

I especially loved One Whale, Singing, which is a tale about the primacy and sanctity of Nature and one of the most if not the most beautifully written story I’ve ever read. It also had a bit of a The Yellow Wallpaper feel to it too so that was a cool touch. I also *really* resonated with Kiteflying Party at Doctors’ Point. And The Cicadas of Summer. ❤️

It is clear that there are multiple layers of meaning, mythology, history, and philosophy in all of these stories—they are not to be dug easily out on a single reading, but that’s ok because I think this is going to be a yearly reread tradition for me anyway—it’s *perfect* for summertime reading too!

Side note: I’m not 100% sure what ppl mean exactly when they say something is written in an “experimental style” but I’ve now seen that comment made about a BUNCH of my favorite authors (Keri Hulme, Helen Oyeyemi, and Scarlett Thomas) so I guess that’s my thing. Experimental writing styles. 😂🤷🏻‍♀️

“I don’t like thinking that today is the high crest of humanity; tomorrow, we all fall down.” — from “Te Kaihau The Windeater”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

TW // [Please feel free to message me privately to ask about specifics regarding any of these or other TWs in this book!] suicide, animal death, poverty, car accident, alcoholism

Further Reading—
- The Bone People, by Keri Hulme
- Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi
- The Business of Fancydancing, by Sherman Alexie
- What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, by Helen Oyeyemi


Favorite Quotes…

from “tara [the other wing]”:
“Here in the afternoon sun, the lesser shafts
stealing through a barrier of window/outside
thistlehead demons with bright devil faces
blowing on the silent wind/ and inside

still, the stridulation of cicadas gossiping
clicking scandal from powerpole to tree
to holy hilltop rings in my head.”

from “King Bait”:
“…and the eyes, the great silver eyes, intensely circled black centres, burnished globes on the inward side of his head. They reflect neither intelligence nor love, nor malignity, but show forth pure being. Summation. A complete benign magnificence.”

from “One Whale, Singing”:
“But how do they know? she asks herself. About the passing on of knowledge among other species? They may do it in ways beyond our capacity to understand… that we are the only ones to make artefacts I’ll grant you, but that’s because us needy little adapts have such pathetic bodies, and no especial ecological niche. So hooks and hoes, and steel things that gouge and slay, we produce in plenty. And build a wasteland of drear ungainly hovels to shelter our vulnerable hides.”

“The things one could create if one made technology servant to a humble and creative imagination…”

“What would a whale do with an artefact, who is so perfectly adapted to the sea? Their conception of culture, of civilisation, must be so alien that we’d never recognise it, even if we were to stumble on its traces daily.”

“Thinking, as for us passing on our knowledge, hah! We rarely learn from the past or the present, and what we pass on for future humanity is a mere jumble of momentarily true facts, and odd snipers of surprised self-discoveries. That’s not knowledge…”

“That we may be on the bottom of the pile, not the top. It may be that other creatures are aware of their place and purpose in the world, have no need to delve and paw a meaning out. Justify themselves. That they accept all that happens, the beautiful, the terrible, the sickening, as part of the dance, as the joy or pain of the joke. Other species may somehow be equipped to know fully and consciously what truth is, whereas we humans must struggle, must struggle blindly to the end.”

from “Planetesimal”:
“I have wondered. If you sat among heartless strangers, with a universe within your reach, would you stay, wallflower at the party?”

from “While My Guitar Gently Sings”:
“Because I swear to this day you spoke without opening your mouth. As though the thought that was always in your heart had grown to loudness out of the depths of your pool of peace and quiet.”

from “A Nightsong for the Shining Cuckoo”:
“Beneath the cage of ribs there’s a bare scarred heart. My old life is smashed. I want a new way so different I won’t have to think about what I was… There’s no future when your body has betrayed you.”

“…he knew that some blows kill, and you can be killed piecemeal. He hadn’t so much braced himself, I realised after, as armoured himself, frozen himself, against what was coming. If you don’t move, you won’t seem alive. If you don’t move, it’ll pass over you. So Charlie played and sang to stillness. Pipi pipi manu e. I hadn’t felt the dead half of me so heavy before. Pipiwharauroa, The break between living and dead parts ached. E pi pi pi ana e I wanted a knife of fire, to sever me, to free. Mo papa, mama wharauroa, But only my lungs hurt, taut and strained because I wasn’t breathing. Mo papa, mama wharauroa.”
- this part reminded me of Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater and Dear Senthuran.

from “The Cicadas of Summer”:
“Francis, I’ve found these. Exuviae.”
“What?”
“It’s a good word eh? These.”
He looks. He doesn’t see them.
“That’s nice.”
“The singers come out of them. It must be like dying, coming out of your skin.”
“What?”
“It’s their skins, these exuviae. You know, the cicadas?”
“Yes. Gwen, take this plate back to Mrs Riley.”
“But Francis.”
He has put his head down again.

“She has a half a chocolate box full of the crackly skins. Tombstones on the way to noisy life…”

“The dreamers are white-eyed, but their eyes change to coral as the time draws near for them to dig to light. To die in the light. To live a singer. All that changing, from egg to nymph, to pupating dreamer; from the long cool silence underground, to the screeching bright sun.”

“But o god there is so much waste in life. There is too much strangeness.”

from “Kiteflying Party at Doctors’ Point”:
“The road twists, unreels in strange ways. There is a peculiar feel to it, as though it had only just decided to turn here itself and is surprised by the direction.”
- *exactly* what driving the Coromandel feels like too 😂

“I am tired of trying to give the lie to my face, to the mask Nature made of my face. I surge with torment inside, but to view? Calmness. Composure. Plumply pallidly placid. Do my eyes ever show again? Life, even? The dark is everywhere inside, the chase of shadows. Nobody can see it by looking at me.”

“I am tired of living a lie, the lie that is my life. Though it is better to appear dully normal. Better to be considered old fashioned and slightly eccentric because of my sane normality. Let them be amused. Let them laugh. Let them sneer behind my back and smile falsely to my face. It is far better that they do this than get a glimpse of the chaos within. But I am tired of lying.”

“For my own part, I think all deformed monsters should be painlessly destroyed at birth. The pain they cause to those who are closest to them is unbelievable.”
- the context for this quote is that the speaker identifies as such a “deformed monster”

“If I could shush the voices, shush the sounds, the last whimper, the talk and recriminations and my own drawnout anguish, still the noise of the badgering living, the crying of the dead; if I could make a cathedral of peace, a retreat in my head… But I am aware that withdrawal is madness. You don’t have to tell me that.”

“When I open my eyes, having rested a little in the cool of this cave, I see there are swarms of mussels on the wall. Crusts of them, blueback and shiny as though varnished. There is the occasional stranger mussel in their midst, pale green, like a wraith of a mussel. Pallid, obvious, vulnerable. There is never another palegreen mussel closeby for company. The different, the abnormal, the alien, the malformed. Who—or what—selects a person for the torment of difference?”

from “Unnamed Islands in the Unknown Sea”:
“Don’t be afraid. We are all islands but the sea connects us, everyone. Swim.”

from “A Window Drunken in the Brain”:
“I bathe my tongue in champagne. I bathe my palate in chablis. I bathe my oesophagus in claret. I have run out of seas.”

from “Te Kaihau The Windeater”:
“I thought I’d begin like this rather than by saying, I was born and now I’m dying. That’s so commonplace, and we know everybody does it. What I want to do is lay before you the unusual and irrational bits from my life because they may make a pattern in retrospect and, besides, they are the only bits that make sense to me right now.”

“But the person in the mirror isn’t me as I know me. Many people have this feeling. If you look in mirrors, reflections is all you see… true, but my feeling carries beyond mirrors.”

“Seeing is not necessarily believing: seeing is a matter of faith in sight.”

“Incidentally, ‘unthinking’ is the only word I know to describe that state of atavistic knowing, but ‘moonshickered’ fits pretty well what happened next.”

“It all boils down to this: there are things quite outside humanity and we can’t do battle with them. We have to leave it to their own kind to bring them to heel.”

“I don’t like thinking that today is the high crest of humanity; tomorrow, we all fall down.”

from “[Afterword] Headnote to a Maui Tale”:
[last lines]
“It all depends
on what story
you hear”

[Lissa Notreallywolf · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm a well trained reader, but these stories were a struggle for me, which I mostly did not win. I wanted to love them, because I had so loved The Bone People. Instead I found myself too often perplexed by whose voice I was hearing, sort of like eavesdropping on a windy beach where the words were snatched away by the wind. Another thing which perplexed me was the focus on amputation in many of the stories, which I will not enumerate the titles thereof because it would mean rereading them, or even their introductory paragraphs. There is a deep sense of colonized hopelessness here, something I encounter in Silko, Erdrich. Language that gets stopped up behind clenched teeth until it is released in spurts. And then there is the intrusion of cinematography, the modern notion that somewhere there is a machine watching and recording all the nuances of lives. The distressing part of this in the stories is the use of television speak about close ups and pans and what have you, distressing because it is yet another linguistic barrier for this reader who does not sit with grips, best boys or whathaveyous. NZ English, words in Maori, unfamiliar fauna and flora and the mind begins to balk, my mental capacity straining in uphill comprehension. I read a Tally of the Souls of Lost Sheep, definitely a horror film, written as a cinematic script, and I am horrified. I read One Whale Singing where a woman is relieved to have been thrown into the ocean rather than have her overly solicitous husband silence her one more time. Planetesimal reminded me of Peter S. Beagle, and drugscapes of a former era. hooks and Feelers was the most notable story about amputation, obvious a hand was sacrificed. I am not sure how the mother being a potter fit in because the story leaves one feeling as if something was cut off. Effective and unpleasant, sort of like the hook. The next story, title in Maori which I dare not transcribe is one of the few that are hopeful, where singing from a hearts desire is sometimes more important than technical performance. A Nightsong for the Shining Cuckoo also involves amputation, and I can't say I understood it. The Cicadas of Summer is another kind of horror story, a sense of dread like insects song throughout. A sense of exhaustion set in by the final stories and I am not sure that I can pull myself through the title piece, a swimmer exhausted by a rip tide of confusing currents.

[Michelle Boyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Te Kaihau is a group of short stories, prose, and poems by author Keri Hulme, who is probably best known for The Bone People. First and foremost, this is nothing like The Bone People and it would be unwise to pick this group of stories up and expect the same thing. The writing here is mostly experimental. Often times there are under-developed thoughts, sentence fragments, moments where things are unclear, and it is often impossible to fully engage with or connect to the characters. Although it is a medium sized collection (234-ish pages), I also believe that most readers may only like three or four of the stories it contains. And that isn't a problem because I feel as if the text is asking readers to think and form opinions, which can include disliking some of what is written.

I particularly enjoyed "One Whale, Singing" due to its discussion of science versus art, as well as some of its commentary and thoughts on humanity. It also seemed to fit in with Maori themes that I have seen in other readers because the whale is so linked with the Maori cosmology. While a shorter piece, it is one that I find to be a stand out from the group.

"While My Guitar Gently Sings" was not one of my 'favorite' pieces but was one of the pieces that offered a lot of cultural insight--includes health issues, taboos, a sense of Maori tradition, a strong connection to place and identity, as well as presented some insights into how a person may/may not feel a part of a community.

The titular story "The Windeater" was also interesting. I think I will leave you with one of the last lines:

It all depends
on what story
you hear

[Sue · Rating 2 out of 5]

after reading the bone people, with its themes of drunkeness and violence, i was disappointed to find the same themes in all of these short stories. i really like the writing style, but too much sadness.

[Erik Dabel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoy Keri Hulme's style of writing, although I do think it works better in novel form. Her style of mysterious, visceral, spiritual prose requires I bit more time to really understand what is going on. In my opinion, at least. But still, some wonderful stories in here.

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

She's great. I mean Faulkner/Joyce/Woolf great.

[Ryan Mishap · Rating 2 out of 5]

Surreal, tragic collection of short stories with tremendous word/grammar play.

[Emily Silva · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not hugely into fantasy or other-worldly-type books but really enjoyed these short stories toeing the line of this world and another as something whisperingly sinister in each protagonists life. Each book made me think about human morals and purpose for different failings by each protagonist. I think my only qualm was that in being a book of segregated short stories, I often found myself having to re-read passages to remember that the other-world from the previous story was not quite the same as this one. I think that murky swirling confusion of mine though was partly intentional by the author. It left me feeling a bit confused at times, much like Keri Hulme's protagonists.

I loved the Māori roots of the book as well - it was an unfamiliar culture to me that I felt brought the entirety of the setting for the book itself. I'm looking forward to reading Bone People by Hulme next as I really enjoyed her writing.

[Joslyn Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review from https://chronicbibliophilia.wordpress...

“…[A]s for us passing on our knowledge, hah! We rarely learn from the past or the present, and what we pass on for future humanity is a mere jumble of momentarily true facts, and odd snippets of surprised self-discoveries. That’s not knowledge…”

In the late 1970s and 80s, Keri Hulme fought her way onto the literary stage, working as a writer in residence and publishing short stories in relative anonymity. In 1985 her first and only novel, “The Bone People”, stunned by winning the Booker Prize, making Hulme the first New Zealander to win.

Hulme’s writing style is unadorned, unafraid, and unmistakably her own. Having thoroughly enjoyed “The Bone People” years ago, I was eager to include another of her works in the Year of Reading Women. “The Windeater” was Hulme’s second published work and first collection of short stories. Her stories are striking in their uniqueness, in their variety of voice and subject and even form. One will be written in verse, while another is laid out with set direction in the margins, and still others are traditional in their form if not their content. Hulme’s writing is almost expressionist; snippets of realistic imagery are woven together to create an unfamiliar tapestry.

Her point of view is well worth the effort her stories demand. As a self-described asexual, as a feminist, and as a minority (Hulme is part Maori), her voice is one rarely heard and one finely honed and full of strength and beauty.

“I remember the words and I remember the sting, and I still hate all that shit, men being tapu, and women being noa. Don’t eat here; don’t put your head there. Don’t hang your clothes higher than the men’s; never get up and talk on the marae. ‘Our women don’t talk out front,’ you said. ‘Arawa women speak only from behind their men.’ And you wonder why I went city?”

A few of the stories in this collection were nearly inscrutable, though I am uncertain if the limitations were the author’s or my own. Many of her stories did resonate, however, and for these I was grateful for another chance to listen to Hulme’s thoughts, to peer at the world through her eyes. Hulme’s bibliography goes oddly quiet for nearly two decades, until the publication of “Stonefish” in 2004. I can’t help but wonder how her voice faired those years of silence.

[Matthew Zhang · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short collection of stories that often read more like poetry than prose. Which could be good or bad, depending on your taste. For me, while I enjoyed the rhythmic fluidity of Hulme's language (I love the way she meshes words together, like 'blueblack' and 'seanoise') in the context of her novels, I felt that in these stories, it left most of the narrative struggling to stay coherent. I could see glimpses of the themes of family and Maori tradition that appeared before in The Bone People, but without the space to develop interesting, complex characters to ground language to an engaging narrative, they became less compelling. Not to say that this was a bad book - the screenplay about the creepy vacation to the beach was pretty fun to read, and so were a couple of the other stories - but it just wasn't as good as The Bone People.

[Orione · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love short stories and I love story telling in general. This is - to me - the best of the best. Every story creates a magical new universe that you never want to leave, yet at the same time you kinda wish you never set foot in it. The stories stay with you too. I sometimes ask a friend or a family member: "Hey, do you remember that time when we met that girl with the tattoo that...nevermind." or "This reminds me of the night when the fish...oh wait." It feels like these stories have happened to me.
Highly recommended, but be prepared to be severely spell bound and freaked out simultanously.

[BookLovingLady (deceased Jan. 25, 2023...) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I read an English edition, the book has also been translated into Dutch; De windeter = Te Kaihau. For a review in Dutch, see message 67 of the Netherlands & Flanders group Spring Challenge 2014.

[keith koenigsberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

Her novel The Bone People was one of the best things I've ever read. This book of short stories is not. It is obviously intended to show me the magic of life and the interconnectedness of all things, but it falls down on over preciousness. It reads like the scribblings of a pretentious high-school girl. Skip it and read her masterpiece instead.

[Mariana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the first stories weren't that good, some of the later ones were quite good.

[Josephine Ensign · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A Drift in Dream" is my favorite in this collection of short stories. Perhaps because it is the precursor/back story of The Bone People.

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Terribly disappointing after The Bone People. In fact, these stories accomplished the worst possible thing: they made me doubt that The Bone People was as good as I remembered it being.

[Ra 🌼 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Phoooeee! Not an easy read, but incredibly worth it. Typical kind of twisted themes short stories often have, definitely not light bedtime reading. Some are written in super confusing and experimental ways, where I wish I could have further elaboration, but I felt like I got a grip on the way she writes better by the time I’d gotten through a few hehe. Worth it for the few gems mixed in and for the journey. Confronting in the way it presents issues of colonisation and the reality of life for many Māori, but a good reminder for when you slip too complacently into the stories and descriptions that make you idealise your memories of Aotearoa. Highly recommend reading if you’ve been out of the country a while!!!

[Spiegel · Rating 2 out of 5]

It'll be no surprise that I liked the stories the more supernatural they sounded; on the other hand the stream-of-consciousness first-person style isn't one I prefer. There were also recurrent themes of drunkeness and of disability as a burden that I don't particularly like to wallow in.
(The whitebait story gave me such a sense of deja vu that I wonder if I've read it before. It was one of my favorites, along with the one about the family and the sheep).

[Jordan Holmes · Rating 4 out of 5]

A deft tapestry that invokes sun-bleached slopes and carnivorous appetites and alienation and eerie miles of uniform bleating and the rumbling languor of summer in nz. Adored One Whale Singing, and the dull golden glint of blank fish-stares that proliferated in piles across the collection. So much i didn't quite understand. I feel that as I age and become more comfortable with the intricacies of te ao Māori, Hulme and her work will be revisited, frequently and fondly.

[coco's reading]

DNF @ pg. 173.

I won't lie: the only reason I got this was to read the story connected to The Bone People. And I didn't end up doing that, merely skimmed it. What I appreciated about the stories I did read was that each one felt totally unique, from the writing style to the structure to the characters, and yet there was something connective between them. Not much else to say though; I'll stick with Hulme's novel.

[Matteo · Rating 3 out of 5]

A difficult, at times rewarding, collection of short stories.
Hulme can create a tense atmosphere of frustration and violence that makes the reader uncomfortable, but sometimes her writing gets too experimental and it's hard to understand who's speaking, what they are referring to, etc.
I highly recommend reading the story titled "While my guitar gently sings", a very moving piece of writing.

[Mandy Partridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

No wonder Keri Hulme is an asexual person. The short stories in 'Te Kaihau/ the Wind-eater' show us grinding poverty, violence, sexism amongst Maori and coloniser peoples, racism, alcoholism and drug abuse. I'd probably opt out of relationships with people, if I'd lived their life and seen the things they've seen. Powerful.

[LibraryKath · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to give this one up. It's so full of bleakness, sorrow, pain, death, loss, anger... maybe I'm just not in the brain space to read it right now, maybe it's just not my kind of subject matter, but it was too much for me. The language is beautiful and evocative but it just makes me feel like I'm drowning in every chapter.

[Bridie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We can't see each other's tears in the dark. We can only feel them, swelling out of our hearts." – p.105

Stunning. So eerie and loving and lonely. I haven't read any Hulme since studying 'the bone people' in my first year of undergrad, but I'm now desperate to reread it. Will be recommending this to everybody and anybody who asks!!

[Jyoti]

This book was not for me.

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mixed bag. Some brilliant stories. Some felt a little like this collection had been cobbled together to capitalise on the success of the bone people